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Related to this blog post, there is an active tug of war going on in classrooms between the utility of learning information in and of itself and learning what to do with it. We have insufficient time to cover the breadth of subjects already. Where do you strike the balance between teaching content and encouraging information literacy and critical thinking?

Is it wrong to shift classroom emphasis towards information literacy at the expense of facts?

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I completely agree with what you do in class. Students who memorize facts are no better off than when they started the class. The benefit of knowing something about a subject is how to apply it outside of the classroom. If they want to just learn facts for recital, they should spend their time doing something other than going to college and watch Jeopardy at night.

Where I went to school, we were expected to know more than just the facts. The courses where I had to work the hardest to meet the professor's expectation of how to understand it and apply it are the ones which I can still remember information from today. I pity the students who don't have to do this as I learned easily 100 times more than I would have if this wasn't the case.

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