• Rich Barlow

    Senior Writer

    Photo: Headshot of Rich Barlow, an older white man with dark grey hair and wearing a grey shirt and grey-blue blazer, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey backdrop.

    Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former Boston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

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There are 4 comments on Genius Is One Percent Innovation

  1. She cheerfully concedes the subjectivity involved in the experiment; another professor might have graded differently—and “isn’t that what we might expect?”

    My comment: and grades measure what? The instructor’s subjectivity, at least in this model. Is that what we want?

  2. On conforming lectures to video games: First, let’s all follow the lead of a first year grad student who finds all lectures boring.

    Next, let’s assume all our students are basic pubescent males, directly subject to Pavlovian visual stimuli-respond-reward. Why not use instant feedback “clickers” as well, to keep score?

    Third, let’s assume they are permanent children, incapable of rising to adult levels of conversation about the non-superficial.

    No thank you. I, for one, shall continue in my courses on the history of war to reach students at an adult level with informed commentary on issues of lasting import. How? Through the use of imaginative language, imagery, facts and arguments of intrinsic interest, and now and then a little poetry kneeded into the dull prose dough of my lectures. CJN

  3. I think you’re taking this so-called conformation a bit too literally. Step back and maybe it will become more clear that DiDonato is not asking professors to surrender to the whims of “basic pubescent males” in their curricula; he is merely suggesting innovation, a different way to communicate the same ideas as initially intended. He did not suggest creating a visual interface or anything remotely approaching superficial in basis or value. If anything, he seems to be promoting a professor’s active engagement with his or her class as well as the students’. Your innovative language, imagery, facts and arguments of intrinsic interest, and occasional poetry would not be lost in DiDonato’s model.

    And, for the record, video games are not exclusively for children and adolescents.

  4. In response to the “she cheerfully concedes” comment… all grades, except for those that have a clear right/wrong answer in subjects such as math and science are all determined with a bit of teacher subjectivity. While most teachers strive to be as objective as possible in their grading, if the topic of a paper is given and left to the students to interpret, there will be varying degrees of “right” and “wrong” in each paper and therefore most instructors will be forced at some point to abandon purely objective thinking in favor of subjective to determine the grade. Otherwise there would be no such thing as partial credit and all grades B-D would be irrelevant as everything would have to be either “right” or “wrong” therefore essentially be either “pass” or “fail” or “A” or “F”

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