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Nils Peterson

Daniel Rosenberg - Early Modern Information Overload - Journal of the History of Ideas ... - 1 views

muse.jhu.edu/...64.1rosenberg.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 17 Mar 10 - Cached
  • During the early modern period, and especially during the years 1550-1750, Europe experienced a kind of "information explosion." I emphasize the word "experience" as this is an essential element to the arguments presented here. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that during this period, the production, circulation, and dissemination of scientific and scholarly texts accelerated tremendously. In her essay, Ann Blair notes that over the course of this period, a typical scholarly library might have grown by a factor of fifty, while Brian Ogilvie demonstrates an equivalent acceleration in the production and consumption of texts in the domain of natural history; and there is a large literature to back both of these arguments up. But the fact of accelerated textual production and consumption is not what is principally at issue here. What is essential is the sense that such a phenomenon was taking place and the variety of responses to it.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Mar 10
       
      info overload 1550-1750 -- rom printed books
  • She examines the varieties of textual practices "deployed by early modern scholars" in response to a perceived "overabundance of books" during the period between 1550 and 1700, and she argues that historians have paid disproportionate attention to what she calls "literary reading" and not enough to other modes of encountering and engaging textual materials ranging from browsing and skimming to buying and collecting to annotating, cutting and pasting, and dog-earing. For Blair these other modes of acting upon texts are important in all historical moments, but in situations where readers feel themselves overwhelmed by information, they become all that much more crucial and telling.
  • "By the 1580s," Ogilvie writes, "the botanical tyro had to master a tremendous number of words, things, and authorities." And during this period botanical literature increasingly sought to address precisely this concern. Already in the 1550s, with the work of Conrad Gesner and Remert Dodoens, Ogilvie observes a shift from an older form of botanical treatise, descended from the alphabetical materia medica, to a new form organized around "tacit notions of similarity" among different natural types. Not that all of these developments were useful. As Ogilvie notes, the move toward similarity was not a direct move toward scientific taxonomy, and in different works vastly different categorical schemes applied, so that the same plant might be grouped with "shrubs" in one and, in another, with "plants whose flowers please." Eventually, with Caspar Bauhin at the end of the sixteenth century and John Ray at the end of the seventeenth, Ogilvie notes the rise of a new class of scientific literature aimed not only at describing and organizing natural facts but at doing the same work for scientific texts themselves.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Mar 10
       
      organization strategies. see the TED talk Theron bookmarked recently, new tools to navigate the web by grouping similarly tagged pages
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  • The old encyclopedia of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance based its prestige on its claim to comprehensiveness. But by the middle of the sixteenth century, these claims had become very difficult for any single author or work to support. Ironically, as the plausibility of the old claims weakened, demand for the genre intensified. This is attested to by the great commercial success of the Cyclopaedia and by the still greater success of the renowned Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert. For the latter, just as for Chambers, the indexical format of the encyclopedic dictionary speaks to an epistemological urgency. In a world of rapid change, quick access to knowledge becomes as important as knowledge itself.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Mar 10
       
      quick access as important as knowledge itself. Filtering as a modern tool, and powerful search
  • Taken together, these papers suggest that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries factors such as an increasing production and dissemination of books, developing networks of scientific communication, discoveries and innovations in the sciences, and new economic relationships all conspired to produce such quantities of new information that a substantial reorganization of the intellectual world was required.
Theron DesRosier

A Tale of Two Blogospheres: Discursive Practices on the Left and Right | Berkman Center - 1 views

cyber.law.harvard.edu/...iscursive_Practices_left_right

blogging social networking politics

shared by Theron DesRosier on 29 Apr 10 - Cached
  • n this paper, we revisit these findings by comparing the practices of discursive production and participation among top U.S. political blogs on the left, right, and center during Summer, 2008. Based on qualitative coding of the top 155 political blogs, our results reveal significant cross-ideological variations along several important dimensions. Notably, we find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs. Sites on the left adopt more participatory technical platforms; are comprised of significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in our sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization as well as discursive production.
Gary Brown

Fortnightly Mailing: "Data is not the plural of anecdote". Eric Mazur talks about how t... - 3 views

fm.schmoller.net/...rove-large-group-learning.html

educational research evidence

shared by Gary Brown on 12 May 10 - Cached
  • Eric Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, describes the main innovations he has made in how he runs his courses - and the painstaking empirical research that he has used to guide these changes.
  • Gary Brown on 12 May 10
     
    Another resource particularly useful for science faculty
Gary Brown

(the teeming void): This is Data? Arguing with Data Baby - 3 views

teemingvoid.blogspot.com/...ta-arguing-with-data-baby.html

data evidence

shared by Gary Brown on 19 May 10 - Cached
  • Making that call - defining what data is - is a powerful cultural gesture right now, because as I've argued before data as an idea or a figure is both highly charged and strangely abstract.
  • In other words data here is not gathered, measured, stored or transmitted - or not that we can see. It just is, and it seems to be inherent in the objects it refers to; Data Baby is "generating" data as easily as breathing.
  • This vision of material data is also frustrating because it has all the ingredients of a far more interesting idea: data is material, or at least it depends on material substrates, but the relationship between data and matter is just that, a relationship, not an identity. Data depends on stuff; always in it, and moving transmaterially through it, but it is precisely not stuff in itself.
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  • Data does not just happen; it is created in specific and deliberate ways. It is generated by sensors, not babies; and those sensors are designed to measure specific parameters for specific reasons, at certain rates, with certain resolutions. Or more correctly: it is gathered by people, for specific reasons, with a certain view of the world in mind, a certain concept of what the problem or the subject is. The people use the sensors, to gather the data, to measure a certain chosen aspect of the world.
  • If we come to accept that data just is, it's too easy to forget that it reflects a specific set of contexts, contingencies and choices, and that crucially, these could be (and maybe should be) different. Accepting data shaped by someone else's choices is a tacit acceptance of their view of the world, their notion of what is interesting or important or valid. Data is not inherent or intrinsic in anything: it is constructed, and if we are going to work intelligently with data we must remember that it can always be constructed some other way.
  • We need real, broad-based, practical and critical data skills and literacies, an understanding of how to make data and do things with it.
  • Gary Brown on 19 May 10
     
    A discussion that coincides with reports this morning that again homeland security had the data; they just failed to understand the meaning of the data.
Nils Peterson

Edge: THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY By Don Tapscott - 1 views

www.edge.org/...tapscott09_index.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 Jun 09 - Cached
  • For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 28 Aug 09
       
      Hard to read because of the double negatives. He's saying there is lots of evidence of a new model in operation
  • It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 28 Aug 09
       
      and it has implications for assessment and vehicles for assessment (portfolios)
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Jun 09
     
    "In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either. "
S Spaeth

MIT Press Journals - International Journal of Learning and Media - Full Text - 0 views

www.mitpressjournals.org/...ijlm.2009.0005

pbj ALT assessment co-development

shared by S Spaeth on 22 May 09 - Cached
  • Howard GardnerHobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • As shown in table 1, we will be cognizant throughout of who the learners are, where they learn, how they learn, what are the principal curricula, and how competences are purveyed via the media of the time. The grid itself contains generalizations about the past and present, and speculation about the future, thus providing a broad portrait of changes over time. While we do not discuss each entry in the grid, we hope that it aids in thinking about learning in formal and informal settings.
  • Uniform schooling reflects both fairness and efficiency. It appears fair to treat all children in the same way; and it is also efficient, given classes of 20, 30, or even 60 charges in one room, sometimes arrayed by age, sometimes decidedly heterogeneous in composition.
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  • It would be an exaggeration to claim that formal education takes place without attention to what has been learned about the processes of successful learning, such as insights into student motivation, study habits, strategies, metacognition, and other approaches obtained from experience, or, more recently and systematically, from the psychological and cognitive sciences. But it would probably be accurate to say that such accumulated knowledge is used only spottily and sporadically in most parts of the world. Education—teaching and learning—changes very slowly.
  • Yet, nowhere are these ideas dominant. Indeed, until today, one might say that the European classroom models of the 19th century continue to hold sway: Teachers give out information, students are expected to master it with little help, and the awards of the culture during the years of school go to those who can crack the various literate and disciplinary codes.
  • One strategy might involve formal education playing a role in informal learning spaces (perhaps on the analogy of teaching hospitals), and learners' out-of-school passions finding a validating place in formal educational arenas.
  • NDM's vast resources, including the provision of many activities in which the user assumes a formative role, can complement constructivist approaches to education. As noted above, a motivated learner can investigate a wide variety of personal interests on his or her own.
  • At this point in time, deeply constructivist classrooms remain few and far between despite evidence that hands-on, problem-solving approaches in the classroom result in higher levels of student engagement, conceptual thinking, knowledge transfer, and retention (Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Lamon 1994; Bransford et al. 1999; Hmelo-Silver 2004; Meier 1995; Project Zero and Reggio Children 2001; Sizer 1984). But in an environment of “No Child Left Behind” and standardized tests linked to federal funding, the implementation of constructivist principles in the classroom can be considered a risky enterprise for public schools.
  • A web-based project at MIT, for instance, paired French language students with peers in France learning to speak English, and provided students an authentic opportunity to practice their language skills, learn online communication skills, and negotiate the implicit guidelines of a different culture (Cultura 2007).
  • S Spaeth on 22 May 09
     
    In this article we argue that, after millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person's own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.). How these seemingly contradictory directions are addressed impacts the future complexion of learning.
Gary Brown

Scholars Assess Their Progress on Improving Student Learning - Research - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...48933

teaching learning assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which drew 650 people. The scholars who gathered here were cautiously hopeful about colleges' commitment to the study of student learning, even as the Carnegie Foundation winds down its own project. (Mr. Shulman stepped down as president last year, and the foundation's scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning program formally came to an end last week.) "It's still a fragile thing," said Pat Hutchings, the Carnegie Foundation's vice president, in an interview here. "But I think there's a huge amount of momentum." She cited recent growth in faculty teaching centers,
  • Mary Taylor Huber, director of the foundation's Integrative Learning Project, said that pressure from accrediting organizations, policy makers, and the public has encouraged colleges to pour new resources into this work.
  • The scholars here believe that it is much more useful to try to measure and improve student learning at the level of individual courses. Institutionwide tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment have limited utility at best, they said.
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  • Mr. Bass and Toru Iiyoshi, a senior strategist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's office of educational innovation and technology, pointed to an emerging crop of online multimedia projects where college instructors can share findings about their teaching. Those sites include Merlot and the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive.
  • "If you use a more generic instrument, you can give the accreditors all the data in the world, but that's not really helpful to faculty at the department level," said the society's president, Jennifer Meta Robinson, in an interview. (Ms. Robinson is also a senior lecturer in communication and culture at Indiana University at Bloomington.)
  • "We need to create 'middle spaces' for the scholarship of teaching and learning," said Randall Bass, assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University, during a conference session on Friday.
  • It is vital, Ms. Peseta said, for scholars' articles about teaching and learning to be engaging and human. But at the same time, she urged scholars not to dumb down their statistical analyses or the theoretical foundations of their studies. She even put in a rare good word for jargon.
  • No one had a ready answer. Ms. Huber, of the Carnegie Foundation, noted that a vast number of intervening variables make it difficult to assess the effectiveness of any educational project.
  • "Well, I guess we have a couple of thousand years' worth of evidence that people don't listen to each other, and that we don't build knowledge," Mr. Bass quipped. "So we're building on that momentum."
  • Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09
     
    Note our friends Randy Bass (AAEEBL) and Mary Huber are prominent.
Gary Brown

News: Turning Surveys Into Reforms - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...nsse

assessment NSSE Closing the loop

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, warned those gathered here that they would be foolish to think that accountability demands were a thing of the past.
  • She said that while she is “impressed” with the work of NSSE, she thinks higher education is “not moving fast enough” right now to have in place accountability systems that truly answer the questions being asked of higher education. The best bet for higher education, she said, is to more fully embrace various voluntary systems, and show that they are used to promote improvements.
  • One reason NSSE data are not used more, some here said, was the decentralized nature of American higher education. David Paris, executive director of the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, said that “every faculty member is king or queen in his or her classroom.” As such, he said, “they can take the lessons of NSSE” about the kinds of activities that engage students, but they don’t have to. “There is no authority or dominant professional culture that could impel any faculty member to apply” what NSSE teaches about engaged learning, he said.
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  • She stressed that NSSE averages may no longer reflect any single reality of one type of faculty member. She challenged Paris’s description of powerful faculty members by noting that many adjuncts have relatively little control over their pedagogy, and must follow syllabuses and rules set by others. So the power to execute NSSE ideas, she said, may not rest with those doing most of the teaching.
  • Research presented here, however, by the Wabash College National Study of Liberal Arts Education offered concrete evidence of direct correlations between NSSE attributes and specific skills, such as critical thinking skills. The Wabash study, which involves 49 colleges of all types, features cohorts of students being analyzed on various NSSE benchmarks (for academic challenge, for instance, or supportive campus environment or faculty-student interaction) and various measures of learning, such as tests to show critical thinking skills or cognitive skills or the development of leadership skills.
  • The irony of the Wabash work with NSSE data and other data, Blaich said, was that it demonstrates the failure of colleges to act on information they get -- unless someone (in this case Wabash) drives home the ideas.“In every case, after collecting loads of information, we have yet to find a single thing that institutions didn’t already know. Everyone at the institution didn’t know -- it may have been filed away,” he said, but someone had the data. “It just wasn’t followed. There wasn’t sufficient organizational energy to use that data to improve student learning.”
  • “I want to try to make the point that there is a distinction between participating in NSSE and using NSSE," he said. "In the end, what good is it if all you get is a report?"
  • Kimberly Green on 26 Oct 09
     
    An interesting discussion, exploring basic questions CTLT folks are familiar with, grappling with the question of how to use survey data and how to identify and address limitations. 10 years after launch of National Survey of Student Engagement, many worry that colleges have been speedier to embrace giving the questionnaire than using its results. And some experts want changes in what the survey measures. I note these limitations, near the end of the article: Adrianna Kezar, associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, noted that NSSE's questions were drafted based on the model of students attending a single residential college. Indeed many of the questions concern out-of-class experiences (both academic and otherwise) that suggest someone is living in a college community. Kezar noted that this is no longer a valid assumption for many undergraduates. Nor is the assumption that they have time to interact with peers and professors out of class when many are holding down jobs. Nor is the assumption -- when students are "swirling" from college to college, or taking courses at multiple colleges at the same time -- that any single institution is responsible for their engagement. Further, Kezar noted that there is an implicit assumption in NSSE of faculty being part of a stable college community. Questions about seeing faculty members outside of class, she said, don't necessarily work when adjunct faculty members may lack offices or the ability to interact with students from one semester to the next. Kezar said that she thinks full-time adjunct faculty members may actually encourage more engagement than tenured professors because the adjuncts are focused on teaching and generally not on research. And she emphasized that concerns about the impact of part-time adjuncts on student engagement arise not out of criticism of those individuals, but of the system that assigns them teaching duties without much support. S
  • Gary Brown on 02 Nov 09
     
    Repeat of highlighted resource, but merits revisiting.
Gary Brown

News: Defining Accountability - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...aei

accountability accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 19 Nov 09 - Cached
  • they should do so in ways that reinforce the behaviors they want to see -- and avoid the kinds of perverse incentives that are so evident in many policies today.
  • This is especially true, several speakers argued, on the thorniest of higher education accountability questions -- those related to improving student outcomes.
  • Oh, and one or two people actually talked about how nice it would be if policy makers still envisioned college as a place where people learn about citizenship or just become educated for education's sake.)
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • only if the information they seek to collect is intelligently framed, which the most widely used current measure -- graduation rates -- is not
  • "work force ready"
  • Accountability is not quite as straightforward as we think," said Rhoades, who described himself as "not a 'just say no' guy" about accountability. "It's not a question of whether [colleges and faculty should be held accountable], but how, and by whom," he said. "It's about who's developing the measures, and what behaviors do they encourage?"
  • federal government needs to be the objective protector of taxpayers' dollars,"
  • Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, said that government regulation would be a major mistake, but said that accreditors needed to come to agreement on "community-driven, outcomes-based standards" to which colleges should be held.
  • But while they complain when policy makers seek to develop measures that compare one institution against another, colleges "keep lists of peers with which they compare themselves" on many fronts, Miller said.
  • Gary Brown on 19 Nov 09
     
    High level debates again
Gary Brown

At Colleges, Assessment Satisfies Only Accreditors - Letters to the Editor - The Chroni... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...49236

accreditation assessment faculty development

shared by Gary Brown on 24 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Some of that is due to the influence of the traditional academic freedom that faculty members have enjoyed. Some of it is ego. And some of it is lack of understanding of how it can work. There is also a huge disconnect between satisfying outside parties, like accreditors and the government, and using assessment as a quality-improvement system.
  • We are driven by regional accreditation and program-level accreditation, not by quality improvement. At our institution, we talk about assessment a lot, and do just enough to satisfy the requirements of our outside reviewers.
  • Standardized direct measures, like the Major Field Test for M.B.A. graduates?
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  • The problem with the test is that it does not directly align with our program's learning outcomes and it does not yield useful information for closing the loop. So why do we use it? Because it is accepted by accreditors as a direct measure and it is less expensive and time-consuming than more useful tools.
  • Without exception, the most useful information for improving the program and student learning comes from the anecdotal and indirect information.
  • We don't have the time and the resources to do what we really want to do to continuously improve the quality of our programs and instruction. We don't have a culture of continuous improvement. We don't make changes on a regular basis, because we are trapped by the catalog publishing cycle, accreditation visits, and the entrenched misunderstanding of the purposes of assessment.
  • The institutions that use it are ones that have adequate resources to do so. The time necessary for training, whole-system involvement, and developing the programs for improvement is daunting. And it is only being used by one regional accrediting body, as far as I know.
  • Until higher education as a whole is willing to look at changing its approach to assessment, I don't think it will happen
  • Gary Brown on 24 Nov 09
     
    The challenge and another piece of evidence that the nuances of assessment as it related to teaching and learning remain elusive.
Gary Brown

U.S. GAO - Program Evaluation: A Variety of Rigorous Methods Can Help Identify Effectiv... - 1 views

www.gao.gov/GAO-10-30

rcts alternative methodology

shared by Gary Brown on 01 Dec 09 - Cached
  • In the absence of detailed guidance, the panel defined sizable and sustained effects through case discussion
  • The Top Tier initiative's choice of broad topics (such as early childhood interventions), emphasis on long-term effects, and use of narrow evidence criteria combine to provide limited information on what is effective in achieving specific outcomes.
  • Several rigorous alternatives to randomized experiments are considered appropriate for other situations: quasi-experimental comparison group studies, statistical analyses of observational data, and--in some circumstances--in-depth case studies. The credibility of their estimates of program effects relies on how well the studies' designs rule out competing causal explanations.
  • Gary Brown on 01 Dec 09
     
    a critical resource
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