The Clute Institute for Academic Research
2008 Teaching and Learning Conference
San Juan, Puerto Rico
March 17-20, 2008
The Clute Institute for Academic Research Conferences take place in the United States and in exotic foreign locations. Puerto Rico was the destination for this teaching and learning conference this year. In general, this conference was very loosely organized with no opening or closing plenary sessions. The panels were combined with the IABR Business Conference and I found this organization quite confusing because participants interested in teaching and learning were forced to listen to business presentations. There were generally five to six panelist for each session and presentations were always rushed and had to be truncated. This structuring was very distracting and counter productive. Presentations such as “Rubrics: The Key to Fairness in Performance Based Assessments” by Carol Shepherd from National University was very basic adding nothing new to the literature and repeating what is generally considered to be standard fare in education. “Critical Thinking Made Blooming Easy: Using Blooms Taxonomy to Encourage Critical Thinking” by Amy Macpherson and Jennifer Mansfield was also very basic and common knowledge to all formally educated teachers. Critical thinking is inherent in Bloom’s Taxonomy. These presenters, however, did focus on the higher levels of the taxonomy: analysis, synthesis and evaluation and applied it to literature in the classroom demonstrating how the children’s story “The Empty Pot” by Demi Ping could be used to develop higher levels of thinking. This portion of the presentation was interesting. Other sessions that I attended—“Post-Secondary Education’s Role in Creating Global citizens by Jade G. Winn,” “Peer Assessment: Students Helping Students Learn by Melissa Marty, Jolen M. Henning and John T. Willse were very weak, and in my opinion, unscholarly. In general, I would not recommend this conference for participants who are seriously interested in teaching and learning. The destinations, however, are marvelous.
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2 comments:
wow.. really? i'm planning to present my paper in this conference this year. i have no idea whether this is a reliable organization for education conference. i attended education conference in spain, and it was good since i met people around the world who are working in technology and education. reading your post, i should think more if i should present my paper in this conf.
Not sure why you would doubt them; I had a great experience at this conference two years ago, and met lots of willing collaborators (yes, from other countries too, and who sometimes received better research training than me at a R1 institution!). I was most grateful for the many targeted, useful, and critically complex critiques which I received from other attendees. It is not like some of the bigger name conferences where they trash you in public. I learned a lot from those I met and am planning to go again since I am guaranteed that it is time well spent to increase my productivity.
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