I just attended the 2008 Lilly Conference on College Teaching where the theme was “Millenial Learning: Teaching in the 21st Century.” I enjoyed some of the keynote presentations, especially Erica McWilliam’s presentation, “Is Creativity Teachable? Conceptualizing the Creativity/Pedagogy Relationship in Higher Education.” In the presentation, McWilliam noted that creativity is not only vital in the arts, but is also in scientific disciplines where creative thinking leads to key breakthroughs.

Acronyms are introduced regularly in many contexts, not only to facilitate repeated reference to certain terms but also to imply wide acceptance of and add an air of importance to proposed ideas, processes, or methodologies. Instructional design loves acronyms. The buzz-cronyms of the hour include BD, PBL, TBL, and LCI (or LCT) (clues below).

Contributing to this long list, and in many ways consolidating it, I propose ADCL or Assessment-Driven Collaborative Learning. Details will be published in one of the 2009 volumes of Symposium, the journal of the College Music Society. In the meantime, here is a teaser:

When I began my undergrad in 2002, I was a fairly shy kid and had moved to a college two states away where I didn’t know anyone. I never would have thought that in three years I’d have been a founding member of an environmental club, vice president of a literary magazine, and the organizer of a writer’s group.

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to a New York Times article written by Stanley Fish on the Power of Passive Campaigning. Being a nonnative speaker and not born to the Christian culture, I found a number of the terms and references Dr. Fish used unfamiliar. So I tried to learn the definition of these words through my usual method: highlight the word, copy it, open Answers.com, and paste the word into the search field. However, this time when I highlighted a word, a little question mark icon showed up at the upper right corner. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the icon, and guess what I found—a pop-up window with an Answers.com page giving me everything I wanted to know about the word! A closer look at the header of the pop-up window told me that this was a New York Times reference search powered by Answers.com. The word “powered” is used very appropriately here, because the function did serve to empower this online newspaper by offering users like me an easy way to access the meaning of every single word in an article.