“But measuring what students learn is of limited use if our goal is to improve their future performance.It is akin to taking a person’s temperature.You may learn the individual has a fever but the measurement produces no insight into the cause.”

In this article,I share several conflict resolution strategies and principles that I’ve used both as a department and division chair, including seek to understand the problem before responding,use the principle of“least energy,”change the channel,think of all communication as conflict prevention,and develop a vision for resolution.

“Another challenging situation is that of the monopolizing student. Students talk too much for a variety of reasons,including genuine excitement about a topic, insensitivity, nerves, and problems with impulse control.Generally,a good approach to dealing with both the excessively talkative or quiet student is to meet one-on-one outside class to talk …

The Tomorrow’s Professor eNewsletter will be taking its annual postings break for the Northern Hemisphere summer.This break will allow us,among other things, to replenish our bank of potential postings.The next posting will appear on SEPTEMBER 1,2009.
“As many college-educated parents are well aware,getting into an elite university doesn’t begin in high …

WordPress 2.8.1 fixes many bugs and tightens security for plugin administration pages. Core Security Technologies notified us that admin pages added by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users, resulting in information being leaked. Not all plugins are vulnerable to this problem, but we advise upgrading to 2.8.1 to …

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit …

We’ve recently made some changes to help improve the communication between plugin authors and plugin users about the changes that are made between versions.
We feel that all software should have a changelog that details, at a high level, what changes have been made in each version so that the user …

The WordPress team had initially committed to maintaining the WordPress 2.0.x legacy branch until 2010. Unfortunately, we bit off more than we could chew—the 2.0.x branch is now retired and deprecated, a few months shy of 2010.
Many of the security improvements to the new versions of WordPress in the last …

Every now and then I see someone ask in the dev channel how they can meet up with other local WordPress developers. We’re thinking about ways to make WordPress.org more of a resource to facilitate local connections, but in the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to publicize some …

Unfortunately, I missed some places when fixing the privilege escalation issues for 2.8.1. Luckily, the entire WordPress community has our backs. Several folks in the community dug deeper and discovered areas that were overlooked. With their help, the remaining issues are fixed in 2.8.3. Since this …