Yesterday I received the sweetest gift of all:  two of my deans wrote me a formal letter of "heartfelt appreciation," with cc's to my department chair and my DUS, letting me know that my teaching evaluations from last spring's "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," were among the "top 5% of all undergraduate instructors at Duke."  That blew me away.   For about a minute.  And then I began to wonder (and put this in my letter back to my deans), what does it mean that a prof who has become infamous for a blog about "how to crowdsource grading" is beaming with joy that she got a great grade?   Methinks it's time for a blog!

Back eons ago (i.e. on Thurs in NC, today is Sat in La Jolla), at the CHAT Festival at UNC, John McGowan and I had a dialogue with a ferociously interesting audience on "The Future of Learning Institutions."  We made a radical decision before our panel to not have prepared papers or even prepared remarks and to not use any other form of technology either.  Nada.  Unscripted.  Unplugged.

I'm fascinated by experimental psychology experiments that reveal that we know almost nothing about ourselves--or that our "selves" reveal far more about "us" than we ever imagined in our rationalist paradigms.  The West has been clinging, against odds, to the mind v. body dualism for thousands of years, gave it a few booster shots in the Enlightenment, and now requires psychologists with cagey experiments to trick us into seeing that the mind and body are, in fact, not opposites but all part of the same thing.

I was asked what skills I would want to assess if I were to reform "standards-based" education.   David Gibson, who will be one of our participants in a MacArthur Peer-to-Peer Pedgagogy HASTAC Scholars Workshop next fall, posed this question.  Here are the skills I think are important and that I'd love to be able to assess in a meaningful way.

Inside Higher Ed has also picked up the "How to Crowdsource Grading" blog and featuers a very nice and thoughtful follow-up by the always thoughtful Scott Jaschik:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/03/grading.