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Nils Peterson

News & Broadcast - World Bank Frees Up Development Data - 0 views

web.worldbank.org/...:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html

open data Hans Rosling World Bank

shared by Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • April 20, 2010—The World Bank Group said today it will offer free access to more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been available only to paying subscribers.
  • Hans Rosling, Gapminder Foundation co-founder and vigorous advocate of open data at the World Bank, said, “It’s the right thing to do, because it will foster innovation. That is the most important thing.”He said he hoped the move would inspire more tools for visualizing data and set an example for other international institutions.
  • The new website at data.worldbank.org offers full access to data from 209 countries, with some of the data going back 50 years. Users will be able to download entire datasets for a particular country or indicator, quickly access raw data, click a button to comment on the data, email and share data with social media sites, says Neil Fantom, a senior statistician at the World Bank.
Theron DesRosier

Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide | Video on TED.com - 2 views

www.ted.com/..._open_data_went_worldwide.html

berners web2.0 data open open data TED

shared by Theron DesRosier on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 11 Mar 10
     
    "At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up."
Corinna Lo

The End in Mind » An Open (Institutional) Learning Network - 0 views

www.jonmott.com/blog

wsuctlt ALT

shared by Corinna Lo on 15 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 15 Apr 09
     
    Jon said "I wrote a post last year exploring the spider-starfish tension between Personal Learning Environments and institutionally run CMSs. This is a fundamental challenge that institutions of higher learning need to resolve. On the one hand, we should promote open, flexible, learner-centric activities and tools that support them. On the other hand, legal, ethical and business constraints prevent us from opening up student information systems, online assessment tools, and online gradebooks. These tools have to be secure and, at least from a data management and integration perspective, proprietary. So what would an open learning network look like if facilitated and orchestrated by an institution? Is it possible to create a hybrid spider-starfish learning environment for faculty and students?"
Corinna Lo

YouTube - Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

www

shared by Corinna Lo on 14 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 14 Mar 09
     
    Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.
Joshua Yeidel

Visual Studio Magazine Online | Data Driver: Bring On The Open Source Alternatives To S... - 0 views

visualstudiomagazine.com/...weblog.aspx

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 11 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 11 Apr 09
     
    Some alternatives focus on web content management (Nuxeo), others on collaborative application frameworks (MindTouch).
  • Joshua Yeidel on 11 Apr 09
     
    As Alfresco Software Inc. continues to emerge as the leading provider of open source software enterprise collaboration software, rival open source vendors are stepping up their efforts.
Gary Brown

2 Efforts to Provide Data on Colleges to Consumers Fall Short, Report Says - Administra... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...64433

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 02 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Higher education will have to be more accountable for its performance and more open to consumers about the actual cost of attending a college, and help people make easier comparisons among institutions, in order to succeed as the nation's economic engine, says a new report from two nonprofit think tanks here.
  • too little information to make informed choices about where they will get the most from their tuition dollars, say researchers at the two organizations, the libertarian-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and Education Sector, which is a proponent of reforming higher education
  • And without a more thorough and open form of accountability, institutions will not have any incentive to make the changes that will improve students' success,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "If existing flaws are not resolved, the nation runs the risk of ending up in the worst of all worlds: the appearance of higher education accountability without the reality," the authors say.
  • The two voluntary systems criticized in the study are the University and College Accountability Network, begun in September 2007 by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities to provide information about private colleges, and the Voluntary System of Accountability,
  • it does not obligate institutions to gather or reveal any data that are not already available elsewhere,"
  • associations are beginning to offer workshops and other opportunities for system participants to learn how to use the data they're collecting to improve the college experience for students, she said
  • VSA has the testing lobby written all over it
  • We may all appreciate the cultural context inhibiting public accountability but it is also important to understand that this same accountability is lacking internally where it effectively thwarts attempts to manage the institution rationally; i.e., informed with a continuous flow of mission-critical performance information. With the scant objective information at their command, college presidents and their associates must perform as shamans, reading the tea leaves of opinion and passion among stakeholders.
  • On balance, America's institutions of higher education function in a managerial vacuum.
  • Gary Brown on 02 Mar 10
     
    More of the same and the discussion is familiar--our challenge is to bring this topic to the attention of our points.
Nils Peterson

Change Magazine - The New Guys in Assessment Town - 0 views

www.changemag.org/...full-assessment-town.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 May 09 - Cached
  • if one of the institution’s general education goals is critical thinking, the system makes it possible to call up all the courses and programs that assess student performance on that outcome.
  • bringing together student learning outcomes data at the level of the institution, program, course, and throughout student support services so that “the data flows between and among these levels”
  • Like its competitors, eLumen maps outcomes vertically across courses and programs, but its distinctiveness lies in its capacity to capture what goes on in the classroom. Student names are entered into the system, and faculty use a rubric-like template to record assessment results for every student on every goal. The result is a running record for each student available only to the course instructor (and in a some cases to the students themselves, who can go to the system to  get feedback on recent assessments).
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      sounds like harvesting gradebook. assess student work and roll up
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      This system has some potential for formative use at the per-student leve.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “I’m a little wary.  It seems as if, in addition to the assessment feedback we are already giving to students, we might soon be asked to add a data-entry step of filling in boxes in a centralized database for all the student learning outcomes. This is worrisome to those of us already struggling under the weight of all that commenting and essay grading.”
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      its either double work, or not being understood that the grading and the assessment can be the same activity. i suspect the former -- grading is being done with different metrics
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      I am in the unusual position of seeing many papers _after_ they have been graded by a wide variety of teachers. Many of these contain little "assessment feedback" -- many teachers focus on "correcting" the papers and finding some letter or number to assign as a value.
  • “This is where we see many institutions struggling,” Galvin says. “Faculty simply don’t have the time for a deeper involvement in the mechanics of assessment.” Many have never seen a rubric or worked with one, “so generating accurate, objective data for analysis is a challenge.”  
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      Rather than faculty using the community to help with assessment, they are outsourcing to a paid assessor -- this is the result of undertaking this thinking while also remaining in the institution-centric end of the spectrum we developed
  • I asked about faculty pushback. “Not so much,” Galvin says, “not after faculty understand that the process is not intended to evaluate their work.”
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      red flag
  • the annual reports required by this process were producing “heaps of paper” while failing to track trends and developments over time. “It’s like our departments were starting anew every year,” Chaplot says. “We wanted to find a way to house the data that gave us access to what was done in the past,” which meant moving from discrete paper reports to an electronic database.
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      It's not clear whether the "database" is housing measurements, narratives and reflections, or all of the above.
  • Can eLumen represent student learning in language? No, but it can quantify the number of boxes checked against number of boxes not checked.”
  • developing a national repository of resources, rubrics, outcomes statements, and the like that can be reviewed and downloaded by users
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      in building our repository we could well open-source these tools, no need to lock them up
  • “These solutions cement the idea that assessment is an administrative rather than an educational enterprise, focused largely on accountability. They increasingly remove assessment decision making from the everyday rhythm of teaching and learning and the realm of the faculty.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 06 May 09
       
      Over the wall assessment, see Transformative Assessment rubric for more detail
Nils Peterson

Reasons Facebook Beat MySpace | HASTAC - 0 views

www.hastac.org/...reasons-facebook-beat-myspace

shared by Nils Peterson on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • To prove her point, Oshiro offers a couple of nice graphs that show a strong correlation between the introduction of Facebook Connect and a rapid migration from MySpace to Facebook. A closer look at the charts, however, suggests that while the API likely did hasten the shift, it was one that was already taking place. One notable conclusion we can draw from this data, however, is that Facebook's decision to open up user data to third parties did, indeed, have a strong measurable effect on popularity. As more applications became available that could integrate with Facebook, the site became more useful to users. Oshiro writes, "Facebook moved from being a College forum site to a full scale lifestyle platform. Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system."
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 15 Sep 09
       
      Pointing to the open API of Facebook as an aid to its popularity is interesting, but its a technical consideration to interoperate with other systems. My question is, does increased interoperation facilitate more collaboration and open the potential for collaboration by difference. What if Geo Hotz had used Twitter & FB rather than Blogger. Could he? Would it have made a difference? I am finding that having my blog linked to FB is getting me a little (very little) more attention and commenting than without it. But my friends only comment on things I say about Health Care; they don't seem interested in explorations of rubric-based assessment of learning.
Nils Peterson

Google for Government? Broad Representations of Large N DataSets | Computational Legal ... - 0 views

computationallegalstudies.com/...tions-of-large-amounts-of-data

shared by Nils Peterson on 11 Apr 09 - Cached
  • We are just two graduate students working on a shoestring budget.
  • S Spaeth on 11 Apr 09
     
    We agree with both President Obama and Senator Coburn that universal accessibility of such information is worthwhile goal. However, we believe this is only a first step. In a deep sense, our prior post is designed to serve as a demonstration project. We are just two graduate students working on a shoestring budget. With the resources of the federal government, however, it would certainly be possible to create a series of simple interfaces designed to broadly represent of large amounts of information. While these interfaces should rely upon the best available analytical methods, such methods could probably be built-in behind the scenes. At a minimum, government agencies should follow the suggestion of David G. Robinson and his co-authors who argue the federal government "should require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large."
  • Nils Peterson on 12 Apr 09
     
    an interesting example of work with large data sets, but also, a research group that is working "off-shore" from their campus and in a blog in ways that seem to parallel WSUCTLT
Joshua Yeidel

Silverlight & WPF Chart - 0 views

visifire.com

assessment visualization silverlight

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 23 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 23 Feb 09
     
    Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components - powered by Microsoft® Silverlight™ & WPF...Visifire can also be embedded in any webpage as a standalone Silverlight App. Visifire is independent of server side technology. It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML. No radar charts, but for some things, this might be useful.
Corinna Lo

Blackboard Outcomes Assessment Webcast - Moving Beyond Accreditation: Using Institution... - 0 views

blackboard.webex.com/...RS1HQQfLs7v4ndZPvVw!-948077879

outcomes_assessment blackboard

shared by Corinna Lo on 14 Aug 09 - No Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 14 Aug 09
     
    The first 12 minutes of the webcast is worth watching. He opened up with a story of the investigation of cholera outbreak during Victorian era in London, and brought that into how it related to student success. He then summarized what the key methods of measurement were, and some lessons Learned: An "interdisciplinary" led to unconventional, yet innovative methods of investigation. The researchers relied on multiple forms of measurement to come to their conclusion. The visualization of their data was important to proving their case to others.
Joshua Yeidel

Video: Can Web Tools Replace Blackboard? - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...brightcove

lms lms_alternative higher_education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 08 Jul 09 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 08 Jul 09
     
    In this 4-minute video, Jim Groom articulates the "LMS is out-of-date" argument, and suggests that the future of online education depends on re-imagining the "form". He points to issues like openness of code and owndership of data.
Gary Brown

International Group Announces Audit of University Rankings - International - The Chroni... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124882

ranking colleges

shared by Gary Brown on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • the organizer unveiled a project that would effectively rank the rankers.
  • As rankings proliferate around the world, they are increasingly having a direct impact on the decisions of students, academic staff, institutions, and policy makers, but each of those groups differs in its use of rankings and the sophistication it brings to evaluating them.
  • IREG's principles, which emphasize clarity and openness in the purposes and goals of rankings, the design and weighting of indicators, the collection and processing of data, and the presentation of results.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Whether the audit will actually work remains to be seen. Many of the people who attended the meeting expressed deep skepticism and unease about how effectively a rigorous and independent audit procedure could be applied.
  • rankings have become an intensely competitive business, and that any audit procedures would need to be clear and open enough to ensure that competitors were not pronouncing on one another's work.
  • Gary Brown on 11 Oct 10
     
    Sheesh
Gary Brown

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching - Curriculum - The Chroni... - 4 views

chronicle.com/...63718

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • "Without an unrelenting focus on quality—on defining and measuring and ensuring the learning outcomes of students—any effort to increase college-completion rates would be a hollow effort indeed."
  • If colleges are going to provide high-quality educations to millions of additional students, they said, the institutions will need to develop measures of student learning than can assure parents, employers, and taxpayers that no one's time and money are being wasted.
  • "Effective assessment is critical to ensure that our colleges and universities are delivering the kinds of educational experiences that we believe we actually provide for students," said Ronald A. Crutcher, president of Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, during the opening plenary. "That data is also vital to addressing the skepticism that society has about the value of a liberal education."
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But many speakers insisted that colleges should go ahead and take drastic steps to improve the quality of their instruction, without using rigid faculty-incentive structures or the fiscal crisis as excuses for inaction.
  • Handing out "teacher of the year" awards may not do much for a college
  • W.E. Deming argued, quality has to be designed into the entire system and supported by top management (that is, every decision made by CEOs and Presidents, and support systems as well as operations) rather than being made the responsibility solely of those delivering 'at the coal face'.
  • I see as a certain cluelessness among those who think one can create substantial change based on volunteerism
  • Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods.
  • The approach that makes sense to me is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in a discussion of the future and the implications of the future for their field, their college, their students, and themselves. You are invited to join an ongoing discussion of this issue at http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/addressing-the-problem-of
  • Putting pressure on professors to improve teaching will not result in better education. The primary reason is that they do not know how to make real improvements. The problem is that in many fields of education there is either not enough research, or they do not have good ways of evaluationg the results of their teaching.
  • Then there needs to be a research based assessment that can be used by individual professors, NOT by the administration.
  • Humanities educatiors either have to learn enough statistics and cognitive science so they can make valid scientific comparisons of different strategies, or they have to work with cognitive scientists and statisticians
  • good teaching takes time
  • On the measurement side, about half of the assessments constructed by faculty fail to meet reasonable minimum standards for validity. (Interestingly, these failures leave the door open to a class action lawsuit. Physicians are successfully sued for failing to apply scientific findings correctly; commerce is replete with lawsuits based on measurement errors.)
  • The elephant in the corner of the room --still-- is that we refuse to measure learning outcomes and impact, especially proficiencies generalized to one's life outside the classroom.
  • until universities stop playing games to make themselves look better because they want to maintain their comfortable positions and actually look at what they can do to improve nothing is going to change.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jan 10
     
    our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.
  • Matthew Tedder on 26 Jan 10
     
    How about using examples of highly motivational lecture and teaching techniques like the Richard Dawkins video I presented on this forum, recently. Even if teacher's do not consciously try to adopt good working techniques, there is at least a strong subconscious human tendency to mimic behaviors. I think that if teachers see more effective techniques, they will automatically begin to adopt adopt them.
Gary Brown

Learning Assessments: Let the Faculty Lead the Way - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...26779

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The barriers to faculty involvement in assessment have been extensively catalogued over the years. Promotion and tenure systems do not reward such work. Time is short and other agendas loom larger. Most faculty members have no formal training in assessment—or, for that matter, in teaching and course design. Given developments in K-12, there are concerns, too, about the misuse of data, and skepticism about whether assessment brings real benefits to learners.
  • Moreover, as Robin Wilson points out, some campuses have found ways to open up the assessment conversation, shifting the focus away from external reporting, and inviting faculty members to examine their own students’ learning in ways that lead to improvement.
  • Does engagement with assessment’s questions change the way a faculty member thinks about her students and their learning? How and under what conditions does it change what he does in his classroom—and are those changes improvements for learners? How does evidence—which can be messy, ambiguous, discouraging, or just plain wrong—actually get translated into pedagogical action? What effects—good, bad, or uncertain—might engagement in assessment have on a faculty member’s scholarship, career trajectory, or sense of professional identity?
  • Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10
     
    Hutchings is a critical leader in our work--good links to have available, too.
Joshua Yeidel

The Tower and The Cloud | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...133998

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 06 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 06 Nov 08
     
    "The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual -- or consumerization -- is reducing the individual's reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones. Second, ubiquitous access to high-speed networks along with network standards, open standards and content, and techniques for virtualizing hardware, software, and services is making it possible to leverage scale economies in unprecedented ways. What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing -- a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network bandwidth, data storage and protection, and services. Consumerization and industrialization beg the question "Is this the end of the middle?"; that is, what will be the role of "enterprise" IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 03 Dec 08
     
    Consumerization and industrialization beg the question "Is this the end of the middle?"; that is, what will be the role of "enterprise" IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education.
Gary Brown

Discussion: American Evaluation Association | LinkedIn - 1 views

www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers

visual thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Feb 10 - No Cached
  • The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods gives examples and categorizes each of approximately 100 ways to express data visually http://ow.ly/v9RI
  • Gary Brown on 23 Feb 10
     
    interesting resource
Theron DesRosier

The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy - The Conversation - H... - 3 views

blogs.hbr.org/...is_to_info_as_info_is_not.html

datainformationknowledgewisdom learning

shared by Theron DesRosier on 05 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Feb 10
     
    "But knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound. We get to knowledge - especially "actionable" knowledge - by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles."
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Feb 10
     
    An interresting take on assumptions about knowledge.
  • Kimberly Green on 08 Feb 10
     
    Really interesting quote, Theron. I wonder if it's a chunk that could be used as a prompt for a faculty discussion, to open up the dialogue about what is learning. And then how does a program design a curriculum and syllabi / assignments to teach and assess, towards a much broader understanding of knowledge (and skills)?
Nils Peterson

Walmart's Growth: An Awesome Visualization Of The Retailer's Rapid Expansion (INFOGRAPHIC) - 3 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...growth-an-awesom_n_529037.html

walmart visualization

shared by Nils Peterson on 08 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Beginning with the first Walmart store, which opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, this incredible visualization -- put together by FlowingData, a data visualization website run by UCLA statistics doctoral student Nathan Yau -- traces the expansion of the seemingly omnipresent discount chain across America
  • Nils Peterson on 08 Apr 10
     
    an interesting visualization in its own right, perhaps another tool set we might use at "FlowingData"
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