Another week come and gone–here are some ILYBYGTH-themes headlines you might have missed:
Should colleges ban the laptop?
Trump Trump Trump! More news this week from the land of Lord Dampnut:
- Trump kills conservatism, in The Week.
- What does Trumpist anti-Islamism look like in schools? At The Nation, Michelle Chen bemoans the sitch in California.
- What should schools look like in Trump’s America? Look South, young man…
Reza Aslan and Lawrence Krauss go head to head: Is religion a good thing?
Could the Museum of the Bible have thwarted Roy Moore-philia? George Weigel connects the dots at National Review.
Why do school reformers charge in without thinking first? Curmudgucrat Peter Greene offers an explanation.
If Roy Moore wins his election, he still won’t be the worst senator Alabama has ever sent to Washington.
Let’s segregate our schools better, from Rann Miller at Salon.
Is this a “Sputnik moment” for civics education? Robert Pondiscio and Andrew Tripodo make the case at Flypaper.
- The ILYBYGTH take: This is one thing we SHOULD be freaking out about…
How did we get the bajillion-dollar Bible Museum? At IHE, Scott McLemee reviews Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby.
From the Creation-Museum-watching Trollingers: How does the Bible relate to creationism and vice versa?
I Love You but You're Going to Hell 
Neil Rickert
/ December 4, 2017Re: “Should colleges ban the laptop?” — should boring lecturers be banned from the classroom?
Adam Laats
/ December 4, 2017That was my take, too. I am 100% confident that students were distracted even without laptops. The central questions should be about the entire point of having an in-person lecture class in the first place.
Dan Knauss
/ December 4, 2017“Lecture” has become a bad word in the US — not so much in Canada and probably the UK. It can be done well, and so can other formats. It’s a matter of setting expectations, meeting them, and creating a culture that most participants buy into. Lecture and anti-lecture formats tend to be about two totally different models — one where the student is mostly responsible for their learning and another where the teacher is more responsible for the students’ learning. Whether learning benefits from being entertaining through performance and spectacle or gamification is another question. Effective models for group work and peer evaluation is another. It is probably easier to do the traditional lecture format adequately than the newer alternatives, and if the academic labor is poorly supported and compensated, the lecture is the simple default or fallback option for pedagogy.