Quote of the day: on higher education :)

clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice

Awesome sentence in this Chronicle report on "instructors who cling to outdated practices may be holding back sorely needed teaching innovations."  Actually that is not the only quotable phrase; how about this one:

Every semester a lot of professors' lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.

I know quite a few colleagues who preach the same content term after term.  Yes, preach, for I have rarely heard anything but their voices bellowing out of their classrooms.  In a smart classroom that professor might be, but ne'er have I seen the smartness of the technology being tapped into.
Oh well .... one of them wrote the following in an email sent to a large group:

It is not that I want to sound like Scrooge with a Bah! Humbug! remark, but everytime one more classroom becomes "smart" those of us who prefer to teach our classes without the rhetorical crutch of PowerPoint are restricted to an ever decreasing number of marginal classrooms.  I am sick and tired of being treated like a second class citizen with this practice.  How about leaving some classrooms for people who like to use eye contact with students instead of with overhead screens?