Jason Albertson

I think most of us are used to thinking of Christian worldview in education as something that affects class content. For example, if I’m teaching a high school science class, I might take time to talk about what creation reveals about God, and I might think of that as Christian worldview integration.  Those content-level connections often end up feeling—and being —squashed in where they aren’t actually helpful. When that happens, it cheapens the way we and our students think about the truth, because it’s a misuse of the truth. That kind of mis-integration can lead us to think of a Christian worldview as a habit of tipping our cap toward God at the end of every conversation. If we only ever portray God’s perspective as an obligatory afterthought, I would argue that that’s actually a subversion of a Christian worldview. There’s a deeper level of Christian worldview integration available, and I think it’s actually a more helpful level. What if we could apply Christian teaching not jus...

In his recent book, The Life We’re Looking For , Andy Crouch describes the way marketers talk about new tech products: Now you can … Now you don’t have to … Crouch argues that there are two more ways we need to look at new tech to get a good read on whether it’s worth using: Now you can’t … Now you have to … I like to think of these four statements as related like this in a grid of possibilities: Can we? Must we? Yes 1. Now you can ... 4. Now you have to ... No 3. Now you can't ... 2. Now you don't have to ... Consider the interstate highway system. Because it exists,  Now we can travel or transport goods a lot more quickly and cheaply over greater distances. Now we don’t have to develop towns and cities that permit non-automobile traffic. But now you can’t access a lot of places without an automobile; and Now we have to design cities and towns to accommodate auto traffic and parking, usually at the expense of ...

College classes are video games in most of the ways that matter.  The developer controls the challenges and rewards for the user. Unlike the student's social or spiritual life, everything that happens in their academic life is within a constructed environment. Architect: you, within the boundaries set by accrediting agencies and the institution you work for. Engagement is voluntary.  You might try a computer game because your friend said it was good, but you probably won’t stick around for your friend’s sake. Similarly, some students may come to college classes because influential people in their lives said they should, but that isn’t what will make them stay. Both distort the passage of time to accelerate skill acquisition.  Video games often do this by making skill acquisition take a lot less time than it would in real life.  College does this by forcing students to read, write, remember and practice more in a semester than they typically would in a year (or five)....

This month, Wiley published an infographic with survey results from college students and teachers about how the shift online for COVID19 affected learning. You can find it here: Emergency Remote Learning Satisfaction for Students and Instructors . A couple of key takeaways stuck out to me, especially because they lined up with some professional development reading and webinars I did this past summer. Students think lecture videos are better than online readings. This was the case before the pandemic, too. Assessment stats actually don't back it up, but pretty consistently, students think videos are better than readings ( source ). Student perception connects to student motivation, so it's probably worth recording lectures. Even if you already have a handout on the material, give students the option of watching and/or reading. Standard best practices for video lectures apply, of course: brief (<10 minutes), tight (1-2 topics) and personable videos are the most watchable. Prod...