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Peggy Collins

Blackboard Press Releases - 1 views

www.blackboard.com/...Press-Releases.aspx

shared by Peggy Collins on 04 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Peggy Collins on 04 Nov 09
     
    "Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB) announced the launch of a native application for BlackBerry(R) mobile devices, debuting at the University of Washington this week, as part of the new Blackboard Mobile(TM) platform which is being leveraged by a growing number of campuses and K-12 schools to deliver a rich set of campus life services and content to mobile devices. The BlackBerry application enables many more users to enjoy an enhanced experience while navigating course catalogs and campus maps, e-mailing professors and classmates and receiving real time updates on course schedules, campus events, news and sports with Mobile Central (formerly MobilEdu(TM)), Blackboard Mobile's flagship suite of applications. Originally optimized for users of Apple(R) iPhone(R) and iPod Touch(R) devices, the best Mobile Central experience is now available to users of BlackBerry devices. The suite is also generally accessible to users of any smart phone or mobile Web enabled device. "This new platform allows us to easily reach our students, faculty and staff around the clock and deliver information whenever and wherever they want it, which increasingly is on mobile devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone," said David Morton, Director of Mobile Communication Strategies at the University of Washington (UW). "As a modern, global university, UW committed to embracing mobile communications and is pleased to be the launch institution for the BlackBerry initiative." "
Gary Brown

Lawmakers Focus Ire on Accreditors for Abuses at For-Profit Colleges - Government - The... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...123771

accountability accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Six weeks after vowing to cull the bad apples from the for-profit higher-education sector, some Senate Democrats are asking whether the whole barrel is spoiled, and largely blaming accreditors for the rot.
  • Pressed by lawmakers, Mr. Kutz faulted the Education Department, saying it has failed in its oversight of the sector.
  • "Consistent oversight is going to be necessary," he said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Senate Democrats focused most of their ire on accreditors, grilling the head of one national agency about the standards it uses to judge institutions.
  • "Do you think maybe your rigorous standards aren't rigorous enough?" asked Senator Franken, of Minnesota.
  • it was "apparent to me that we need a hearing on accreditation."
  • "But your on-site evaluations didn't detect it," Senator Harkin said. "It seems like you accept the schools' word on what they're doing."
  • Mr. Harkin said he planned to "look into" the financing structure of the accrediting system, saying it "seems to be a situation that is rife with conflict."
  • That should please committee Republicans, who called for a broader investigation into higher education. Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the top Republican on the education panel, said he would ask the GAO to expand its investigation to nonprofit colleges as well.
  • Gary Brown on 05 Aug 10
     
    Though the focus is on recruiting and finance of the for-profits, it is hard not to see more emphasis on verification coming down the pike....
Gary Brown

Brainless slime mould makes decisions like humans | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discov... - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...ld-makes-decisions-like-humans

learning

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • These results strongly suggest that, like humans, Physarum doesn’t attach any intrinsic value to the options that are available to it. Instead, it compares its alternatives. Add something new into the mix, and its decisions change.
  • But how does Physarum make decisions at all without a brain?  The answer is deceptively simple – it does so by committee. Every plasmodium is basically a big sac of fluid, where each part rhythmically contracts and expands, pushing the fluid inside back-and-forth. The rate of the contractions depends on what neighbouring parts of the sac are doing, and by the local environment. They happen faster when the plasmodium touches something attractive like food, and they slow down when repellent things like sunlight are nearby.
  • It’s the ultimate in collective decision-making and it allows Physarum to perform remarkable feats of “intelligence”, including simulating Tokyo’s transport network, solving mazes, and even driving robots.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Aug 10
     
    This probably also apples to change theory....
Gary Brown

A Measure of Learning Is Put to the Test - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124519

assessment accountability CLA

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Others say those who take the test have little motivation to do well, which makes it tough to draw conclusions from their performance.
  • "Everything that No Child Left Behind signified during the Bush administration—we operate 180 degrees away from that," says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, which developed and promotes the CLA. "We don't want this to be a high-stakes test. We're putting a stake in the ground on classic liberal-arts issues. I'm willing to rest my oar there. These core abilities, these higher-order skills, are very important, and they're even more important in a knowledge economy where everyone needs to deal with a surplus of information." Only an essay test, like the CLA, he says, can really get at those skills.
  • "The CLA is really an authentic assessment process," says Pedro Reyes, associate vice chancellor for academic planning and assessment at the University of Texas system.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • "The Board of Regents here saw that it would be an important test because it measures analytical ability, problem-solving ability, critical thinking, and communication. Those are the skills that you want every undergraduate to walk away with." (Other large systems that have embraced the CLA include California State University and the West Virginia system.)
  • value added
  • We began by administering a retired CLA question, a task that had to do with analyzing crime-reduction strategies,
  • performance task that mirrors the CLA
  • Mr. Ernsting and Ms. McConnell are perfectly sincere about using CLA-style tasks to improve instruction on their campuses. But at the same time, colleges have a less high-minded motive for familiarizing students with the CLA style: It just might improve their scores when it comes time to take the actual test.
  • by 2012, the CLA scores of more than 100 colleges will be posted, for all the world to see, on the "College Portrait" Web site of the Voluntary System of Accountability, an effort by more than 300 public colleges and universities to provide information about life and learning on their campuses.
  • If familiarizing students with CLA-style tasks does raise their scores, then the CLA might not be a pure, unmediated reflection of the full range of liberal-arts skills. How exactly should the public interpret the scores of colleges that do not use such training exercises?
  • Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education and senior adviser to the chancellor for academic planning and evaluation at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, believes it is a serious mistake to publicly release and compare scores on the test. There is too much risk, she says, that policy makers and the public will misinterpret the numbers.
  • most colleges do not use a true longitudinal model: That is, the students who take the CLA in their first year do not take it again in their senior year. The test's value-added model is therefore based on a potentially apples-and-oranges comparison.
  • freshman test-takers' scores are assessed relative to their SAT and ACT scores, and so are senior test-takers' scores. For that reason, colleges cannot game the test by recruiting an academically weak pool of freshmen and a strong pool of seniors.
  • students do not always have much motivation to take the test seriously
  • seniors, who are typically recruited to take the CLA toward the end of their final semester, when they can already taste the graduation champagne.
  • Of the few dozen universities that had already chosen to publish CLA data on that site, roughly a quarter of the reports appeared to include erroneous descriptions of the year-to-year value-added scores.
  • It is clear that CLA scores do reflect some broad properties of a college education.
  • Students' CLA scores improved if they took courses that required a substantial amount of reading and writing. Many students didn't take such courses, and their CLA scores tended to stay flat.
  • Colleges that make demands on students can actually develop their skills on the kinds of things measured by the CLA.
  • Mr. Shavelson believes the CLA's essays and "performance tasks" offer an unusually sophisticated way of measuring what colleges do, without relying too heavily on factual knowledge from any one academic field.
  • Politicians and consumers want easily interpretable scores, while colleges need subtler and more detailed data to make internal improvements.
  • The CLA is used at more than 400 colleges
  • Since its debut a decade ago, it has been widely praised as a sophisticated alternative to multiple-choice tests
Joshua Yeidel

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) - 0 views

www.useit.com/ipad.html

usability apple ipad nielsen

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 10 May 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 10 May 10
     
    Preliminary usability studies of the iPad show some UI problems in the first generation of apps. Overadoption of the iPhone UI raises one set of issues; avoidance of some standard Web concepts raises others. Many content providers are hoping that their iPad apps will capture users more than Web sites do; that will remain to be seen.
Nils Peterson

Apple Apps Ahead - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB123980962988921409.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 09 - Cached
  • new health-related iPhone accessories. LifeScan Inc., of Milipitas, Calif., a Johnson & Johnson-owned company that makes glucose monitors, recently demonstrated a software program it hopes will help make it easier for diabetes patients to communicate their glucose levels to caregivers and family. The program, taking advantage of the iPhone's new ability to connect with accessories wirelessly, reads the patient's glucose level from the monitor, then transmits it through the phone.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 09
       
      Or point the camera at one of those 2D bar codes and enter a rubric-based feedback? Bar code could ID both the item and the feedback form to be used.
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