Robert Talbert

PSA: Effective immediately I will no longer be active on this account. The account will stay open, but I will not be logging in, posting, or responding to replies or DMs at this website. You will still be able to interact with me on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks.

Chalk needs to die off. Sorry/not sorry

If AI tools had been put into development five years earlier, so that in 2020 they would have been at 2025 levels in terms of power and features, how would education during the pandemic have played out differently?

Educational technology exists because of the urge to solve learning problems.

The authors of this paper are either ed-tech bros, or are being paid by them, or just woke up one morning and said "YOLO" then decided to come right out of the gates with debatable assumptions.

Just read a paper from 2020, pre-pandemic, that talked a lot about "21st century skills". Pretty startling to think how that concept has changed in five years. The 21st century didn't follow our blueprint it turns out.

Journals that make authors include key artifacts from their research studies in an "online supplement", but then do not post a link to the supplement in the article or on the journal website, can also go frak themselves

My POV chasing down papers to read for the literature review for my flipped learning book, about half the time

It's always cool to find yourself cited in a research paper. Less cool when your name is misspelled. Between this and having "G. Valley" listed as a co-author I'm starting to feel like I get no respect 😂

Feedback, revisions, and the writing process Tracking growth across drafts in an undergraduate research course

New at Grading For Growth: Jane Wageman shares strategies for tracking growth through the revision process in a university writing class.

Went to a home football game last night and had to meet up with my wife outside out of the classroom buildings on campus. She gave me the name and I simply could not recall where it was. I think that means my sabbatical is going well.

The close relationship between constructivism and the pedagogical concept of flipped learning is expressed primarily in the fact that the latter creates an optimal structure for the effective application of active learning methods, making learning based on constructivist principles possible. However, flipped learning does not exclude traditional ways of acquiring knowledge. In terms of its structure, a flipped lesson consists of two components, the first of which is individual and involves independent learning with the help of computer technology, which includes a lecture component. As a result, the two opposing approaches to cognition within the framework of flipped learning are not mutually exclusive but complement each other, allowing for a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to the cognition of complex objects and phenomena in educational reality.

I like this observation about flipped learning (made by Russian scholar Irina Gnutova) very much. Flipped learning doesn't take sides in the "lecture v. active learning" wars. Instead it tries to get both approaches to coexist harmoniously and play to the strengths of each.

Oh, the irony that every single one of the research papers I'd found that deal with flipped learning and student equity and access, are behind paywalls.

A friend asked me last night, as a trivia question, what is the smallest number whose spelling has the letters in alphabetical order. My answer: e.

According to dancer Martha Graham (1998), practice involves “times of complete frustration ... daily small deaths”

This quote from a research paper I am reading right now hits hard.
#practice

Proposed definition for active learning: Activities done by students in an organized group setting that instantiate deliberate practice.

Didn't expect this to come up in my JSTOR search for papers about flipped instruction. Sadly, it didn't make it through my exclusion criteria. #badminton

Reminder that there is no such thing as "college algebra".

Reading through papers on flipped learning, I found this citation to one of my early publications -- with my esteemed co-author "G. Valley". 😂

A Grand Unified Theory of academic email Filling in the missing links in the Clarify process

Today at Intentional Academia: I realized that the Clarify process for email was missing a big piece, and I think I know how to fix it -- giving us a Grand Unified Theory of Academic Email.
intentionalacademia.substack.com/p/a-grand-un...

‘Every faculty member should go on campus tours’ When one university professor went undercover to find out how different colleges welcome prospective students and their parents, he found out what institutions should, and should not, do in their visi...

New piece from me at @timeshighered.bsky.social on a little different subject: What I learned from going on six different campus visits with my college-bound kids.

www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/every...

Journals that charge you to access articles that are 10+ years old can go frak themselves

Reviewing flipped learning research from 10 years ago, one of the main criticisms was that students didn't have a way to ask questions about pre-class assignments while outside of class. AI has definitely changed that up a little, hasn't it?

I think so. The Zotero Integration plugin needs a lot of TLC to work. But now I can import annotations to Obsidian with more or less the right data, formatting, and tagging. But only "more or less".

I was hoping to have 15-20 interviews to include, covering a wide range of applications. Now it looks like I'm going to have a hard time choosing! Very grateful for that, and for those who submitted these interviews. You're going to really like the second edition of this book I think. (4/4)

- ~1/4 of them have class sizes of 100 or more, with 3 of them at 300+.
- Includes graduate level classes, and an undergrad class taught by a grad student.
- Roughly 1/4 of them do not use video in a significant role in the course. Many use alt grading along with the flipped structure. (3/4)

- 27 interviews submitted (so far; "deadline" is Monday)
- Includes all areas of STEM plus finance, sociology, poli sci, TESOL, linguistics, psychology, and gen-ed humanities courses.
- All kinds of institutions represented, from SLACs to R1 universities and a handful outside the USA. (2/4)

This morning I completed an initial read-through of the case study interviews submitted for the second edition of _Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty_. I'm absolutely stoked by what I've received. Some fun facts: (1/4)

I just spent the better part of yesterday trying to get Obsidian to play nice with Zotero. AMA

The Law of the Whole Person An underlying axiom for intentionality

New at Intentional Academia: Who says you have the right to have purpose, productivity, and meaning in higher education? Today I present and argue for a principle that goes to the heart of it, that I call the Law of the Whole Person.

Slightly diminish a band:
Just-OK Funk Railroad