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Theron DesRosier

The Atlantic Century: Benchmarking EU and U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness | The Inf... - 1 views

www.itif.org/...innovation-and-competitiveness

innovation education

shared by Theron DesRosier on 30 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 30 Mar 10
     
    "ITIF uses 16 indicators to assess the global innovation-based competitiveness of 36 countries and 4 regions. This report finds that while the U.S. still leads the EU in innovation-based competitiveness, it ranks sixth overall. Moreover, the U.S. ranks last in progress toward the new knowledge-based innovation economy over the last decade."
Kimberly Green

News: Class Advantage - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...inequality

enrollment education

shared by Kimberly Green on 02 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Kimberly Green on 02 Oct 09
     
    Re SAT scores and college admissions: … Parents of all economic classes want their children to succeed, but the wealthier ones "better understand the postsecondary landscape and competitive admission process and they invest in resources to promote college attendance," she [Alon] writes. As a result test score gaps of high school seniors -- grouped by economic background -- have grown during recent years. Alon writes that as long as college admissions remains competitive, such trends will continue -- with wealthier parents finding ways to improve performance for their children, no matter what measures colleges use to sort applicants.
Gary Brown

Views: The White Noise of Accountability - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

www.insidehighered.com/...adelman

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 06 Aug 10 - Cached
  • We don’t really know what we are saying
  • “In education, accountability usually means holding colleges accountable for the learning outcomes produced.” One hopes Burck Smith, whose paper containing this sentence was delivered at an American Enterprise Institute conference last November, held a firm tongue-in-cheek with the core phrase.
  • Our adventure through these questions is designed as a prodding to all who use the term to tell us what they are talking about before they otherwise simply echo the white noise.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • when our students attend three or four schools, the subject of these sentences is considerably weakened in terms of what happens to those students.
  • Who or what is one accountable to?
  • For what?
  • Why that particular “what” -- and not another “what”?
  • To what extent is the relationship reciprocal? Are there rewards and/or sanctions inherent in the relationship? How continuous is the relationship?
  • In the Socratic moral universe, one is simultaneously witness and judge. The Greek syneidesis (“conscience” and “consciousness”) means to know something with, so to know oneself with oneself becomes an obligation of institutions and systems -- to themselves.
  • Obligation becomes self-reflexive.
  • There are no external authorities here. We offer, we accept, we provide evidence, we judge. There is nothing wrong with this: it is indispensable, reflective self-knowledge. And provided we judge without excuses, we hold to this Socratic moral framework. As Peter Ewell has noted, the information produced under this rubric, particularly in the matter of student learning, is “part of our accountability to ourselves.”
  • But is this “accountability” as the rhetoric of higher education uses the white noise -- or something else?
  • in response to shrill calls for “accountability,” U.S. higher education has placed all its eggs in the Socratic basket, but in a way that leaves the basket half-empty. It functions as the witness, providing enormous amounts of information, but does not judge that information.
  • Every single “best practice” cited by Aldeman and Carey is subject to measurement: labor market histories of graduates, ratios of resource commitment to various student outcomes, proportion of students in learning communities or taking capstone courses, publicly-posted NSSE results, undergraduate research participation, space utilization rates, licensing income, faculty patents, volume of non-institutional visitors to art exhibits, etc. etc. There’s nothing wrong with any of these, but they all wind up as measurements, each at a different concentric circle of putatively engaged acceptees of a unilateral contract to provide evidence. By the time one plows through Aldeman and Carey’s banquet, one is measuring everything that moves -- and even some things that don’t.
  • Sorry, but basic capacity facts mean that consumers cannot vote with their feet in higher education.
  • If we glossed the Socratic notion on provision-of-information, the purpose is self-improvement, not comparison. The market approach to accountability implicitly seeks to beat Socrates by holding that I cannot serve as both witness and judge of my own actions unless the behavior of others is also on the table. The self shrinks: others define the reference points. “Accountability” is about comparison and competition, and an institution’s obligations are only to collect and make public those metrics that allow comparison and competition. As for who judges the competition, we have a range of amorphous publics and imagined authorities.
  • There are no formal agreements here: this is not a contract, it is not a warranty, it is not a regulatory relationship. It isn’t even an issue of becoming a Socratic self-witness and judge. It is, instead, a case in which one set of parties, concentrated in places of power, asks another set of parties, diffuse and diverse, “to disclose more and more about academic results,” with the second set of parties responding in their own terms and formulations. The environment itself determines behavior.
  • Ewell is right about the rules of the information game in this environment: when the provider is the institution, it will shape information “to look as good as possible, regardless of the underlying performance.”
  • U.S. News & World Report’s rankings
  • The messengers become self-appointed arbiters of performance, establishing themselves as the second party to which institutions and aggregates of institutions become “accountable.” Can we honestly say that the implicit obligation of feeding these arbiters constitutes “accountability”?
  • But if the issue is student learning, there is nothing wrong with -- and a good deal to be said for -- posting public examples of comprehensive examinations, summative projects, capstone course papers, etc. within the information environment, and doing so irrespective of anyone requesting such evidence of the distribution of knowledge and skills. Yes, institutions will pick what makes them look good, but if the public products resemble AAC&U’s “Our Students’ Best Work” project, they set off peer pressure for self-improvement and very concrete disclosure. The other prominent media messengers simply don’t engage in constructive communication of this type.
  • Ironically, a “market” in the loudest voices, the flashiest media productions, and the weightiest panels of glitterati has emerged to declare judgment on institutional performance in an age when student behavior has diluted the very notion of an “institution” of higher education. The best we can say is that this environment casts nothing but fog over the specific relationships, responsibilities, and obligations that should be inherent in something we call “accountability.” Perhaps it is about time that we defined these components and their interactions with persuasive clarity. I hope that this essay will invite readers to do so.
  • Clifford Adelman is senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. The analysis and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the positions or opinions of the institute, nor should any such representation be inferred.
  • Gary Brown on 06 Aug 10
     
    Perhaps the most important piece I've read recently. Yes must be our answer to Adelman's last challenge: It is time for us to disseminate what and why we do what we do.
Gary Brown

Academic Grants Foster Waste and Antagonism - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Educ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124920

grants

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • We think that our work is primarily organized by institutions of higher education, or by departments, or by conferences, but in reality those have become but appendages to a huge system of distributing resources through grants.
  • It's time we looked at this system—and at its costs: unpaid, anxiety-filled hours upon hours for a single successful grant; scholarship shaped, or misshaped, according to the demands of marketlike forces and the interests of nonacademic private foundations. All to uphold a distributive system that fosters antagonistic competition and increasing inequality.
  • Every hour spent working on or worrying about grants is an hour that could be better spent on research (or family life, or civic engagement, or sleep). But every hour not spent on a grant gives a competitive edge to other applicants.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The grant is basically an outsourcing of assessment that could, in most situations, be carried out much better by paid professional staff members.
  • Meanwhile grant-receiving institutions, like universities, become increasingly dependent on grants, to the point that faculty members and other campus voices can scarcely be heard beneath the din of administrators exhorting them to get more and more grants.
  • Colleagues whose research may be equally valuable (based on traditional criteria of academic debate) could be denied resources and livelihoods because, instead of grant writing, they favor publishing, or public engagement, or teaching.
  • Grant applications normalize a mode of scholarly writing and thought that, whatever its merits, has not been chosen collectively by academe in the interests of good scholarship, but has been imposed from without, with the grant as its guide. And as application procedures grow more stringent, the quality of successful projects is likely to sink. Can we honestly expect good scholarship from scholars who must constantly concentrate on something other than their scholarship? Academic life is increasingly made up of a series of applications, while the applied-for work dwindles toward insignificance.
  • It's time, I think, to put an end to our rationalizations. My spine will not be straightened. The agony will not be wiped off my brain. My mind misshapen will not be pounded back, and I have to stop telling myself that everything will be OK. Months and years of my life have been taken away, and nothing short of systemic transformation will redeem them.
Joshua Yeidel

HP Labs : Solutions and Services Research : New Competitive Spaces : BRAIN - 0 views

www.hpl.hp.com/...brain

predictivemarkets socialnetworking

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 23 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 23 Mar 09
     
    Predictive Markets at HP: "we is smarter than all of us". Leslie R/ Fine: "The BRAIN Process is an information aggregation tool that harnesses all of the power and truth-telling properties of market mechanisms and implements it with all of the simplicity and robustness of a simple survey.
Nils Peterson

Tech's 29 Most Powerful Colleges - Page 1 - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...echs-29-most-powerful-colleges

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 May 10 - Cached
  • which schools really represent a pipeline to the top jobs? To find out, The Daily Beast scoured the biographies of hundreds of key technology executives from the nation’s biggest companies and some of its hottest startups, too. Our goal was to identify which colleges, compared student-for-student (undergraduate enrollment data courtesy of the National Center for Education Statistics), have turned out the most undergraduates destined for high-tech greatness.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 10
       
      Post-hoc analysis. Who holds the job, where did they graduate?
  • some schools excel at inculcating a crucial skill for techland: dealing with uncertainty and making the right decision without taking too long to size up a situation quickly.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 10
       
      Rubric dimensions.
  • I want someone who’s quick and decisive and a good leader, like a graduate of' and then they'll name certain schools.” Champion says part of that stems from the competitive environment of the top schools, which vet their admittees so heavily. "Is the competition the only the reason they’re successful? No,” Champion says. “But is it the beginning of training in a process that helps them be successful? Yes.”
Gary Brown

Top News - School of the Future: Lessons in failure - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...top-news

transformation technology microsoft 21st Century Skills

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09 - Cached
  • School of the Future: Lessons in failure How Microsoft's and Philadelphia's innovative school became an example of what not to do By Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor   Primary Topic Channel:  Tech Leadership   Students at the School of the Future when it first opened in 2006. <script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vj?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=6&abr=$scriptiniframe"></script><noscript><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/cc?z=eschool&pos=6"><img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vc?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=6&abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"></a></noscript> Also of Interest Cheaper eBook reader challenges Kindle Carnegie Corporation: 'Do school differently' Former college QB battles video game maker Dueling curricula put copyright ed in spotlight Campus payroll project sees delays, more costs <script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/vj?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=2&abr=$scriptiniframe"></script><noscript><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/cc?z=eschool&pos=2"><img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/vc?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=2&abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"></a></noscript> When it opened its doors in 2006, Philadelphia's School of the Future (SOF) was touted as a high school that would revolutionize education: It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement. But three years, three superintendents, four principals, and countless problems later, experts at a May 28 panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) agreed: The Microsoft-inspired project has been a failure so far. Microsoft points to the school's rapid turnover in leadership as the key reason for this failure, but other observers question why the company did not take a more active role in translating its vision for the school into reality. Regardless of where the responsibility lies, the project's failure to date offers several cautionary lessons in school reform--and panelists wondered if the school could use these lessons to succeed in the future.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09
     
    The discussion about Microsoft's Philadelphia School of the future, failing so far. (partial access to article only)
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09
     
    I highlight this as a model where faculty and their teaching beliefs appear not to have been addressed.
Gary Brown

Education Sector: Research and Reports: Ready to Assemble: Grading State Higher Educati... - 0 views

www.educationsector.org/...research_show.htm

accountability higher ed

shared by Gary Brown on 30 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Gary Brown on 30 Jun 09
     
    I note Washington gets a check mark for learning outcomes.
  • Gary Brown on 30 Jun 09
     
    States need strong higher education systems, now more than ever. In the tumultuous, highly competitive 21st century economy, citizens and workers need knowledge, skills, and credentials in order to prosper. Yet many colleges and universities are falling short. To give all students the best possible postsecondary education, states must create smart, effective higher education accountability systems, modeled from the best practices of their peers, and set bold, concrete goals for achievement
Gary Brown

Web Site Lets Students Bet on What Grades They'll Earn - Wired Campus - The Chronicle o... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...26134

grades

shared by Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Students can make a small bet on how well they'll do in a course, with a starting limit of $25 on how much they can earn. The students contribute a chunk of the money, and Ultrinsic puts up the rest. If they make the grade, they win it all.
  • In 2009, they piloted the idea with a different model that put students in the same course in direct competition with each other. Last year, about 600 students from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, the first two campuses where the company's most recent iteration became available, made wagers on Ultrinsic.
  • Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10
     
    Betting on the perception that school is a game.....
Nils Peterson

OCW Consortium - Running courses openly - fewer problems and more benefits th... - 0 views

www.ocwconsortium.org/...1

shared by Nils Peterson on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The idea of open teaching — opening access to the course materials and interaction to anyone, not just the enrolled students — seems foreign and a bit wacky to many professors and lecturers. More students sound like more work, less opportunity to engage with each individual student, and the practicalities of facilitating a diverse group of participants using online technologies seems daunting as well. It turns out that those who try it are often surprised that it’s much more rewarding and easier than they thought.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Aug 10
       
      Punch line is the last sentence. Theron is showing me violin & piano master classes on YouTube. Question of earning credit for the learning is also addressed in the master class context -- audition for positions, play competitions.
Gary Brown

Ranking Employees: Why Comparing Workers to Their Peers Can Often Backfire - Knowledge@... - 2 views

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm

ratings feedback

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Aug 10 - Cached
  • We live in a world full of benchmarks and rankings. Consumers use them to compare the latest gadgets. Parents and policy makers rely on them to assess schools and other public institutions,
  • "Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive -- to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens," says Barankay, whose previous research and teaching has focused on personnel and labor economics. "Workers can become complacent and de-motivated. People who rank highly think, 'I am already number one, so why try harder?' And people who are far behind can become depressed about their work and give up."
  • mong the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Nothing is more compelling than data from actual workplace settings, but getting it is usually very hard."
  • Instead, the job without the feedback attracted more workers -- 254, compared with 76 for the job with feedback.
  • "This indicates that when people are great and they know it, they tend to slack off. But when they're at the bottom, and are told they're doing terribly, they are de-motivated," says Barankay.
  • In the second stage of the experiment
  • it seems that people would rather not know how they rank compared to others, even though when we surveyed these workers after the experiment, 74% said they wanted feedback about their rank."
  • Of the workers in the control group, 66% came back for more work, compared with 42% in the treatment group. The members of the treatment group who returned were also 22% less productive than the control group. This seems to dispel the notion that giving people feedback might encourage high-performing workers to work harder to excel, and inspire low-ranked workers to make more of an effort.
  • The aim was to determine whether giving people feedback affected their desire to do more work, as well as the quantity and quality of their work.
  • top performers move on to new challenges and low performers have no viable options elsewhere.
  • feedback about rank is detrimental to performance,"
  • it is well documented that tournaments, where rankings are tied to prizes, bonuses and promotions, do inspire higher productivity and performance.
  • "In workplaces where rankings and relative performance is very transparent, even without the intervention of management ... it may be better to attach financial incentives to rankings, as interpersonal comparisons without prizes may lead to lower effort," Barankay suggests. "In those office environments where people may not be able to assess and compare the performance of others, it may not be useful to just post a ranking without attaching prizes."
  • "The key is to devote more time to thinking about whether to give feedback, and how each individual will respond to it. If, as the employer, you think a worker will respond positively to a ranking and feel inspired to work harder, then by all means do it. But it's imperative to think about it on an individual level."
  • Gary Brown on 23 Aug 10
     
    the conflation of feedback with ranking confounds this. What is not done and needs to be done is to compare the motivational impact of providing constructive feedback. Presumably the study uses ranking in a strictly comparative context as well, and we do not see the influence of feedback relative to an absolute scale. Still, much in this piece to ponder....
Gary Brown

The Future of Wannabe U. - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124917

outcomes numbers

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Alice didn't tell me about the topics of her research; instead she listed the number of articles she had written, where they had been submitted and accepted, the reputation of the journals, the data sets she was constructing, and how many articles she could milk from each data set.
  • colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime.
  • higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • annabe administrator noted that the recipient had published well more than 100 articles. He never said why those articles mattered.
  • And all we have are numbers about teaching. And we don't know what the difference is between a [summary measure of] 7.3 and a 7.7 or an 8.2 and an 8.5."
  • The problem is that such numbers have no meaning. They cannot indicate the quality of a student's education.
  • or can the many metrics that commonly appear in academic (strategic) plans, like student credit hours per full-time-equivalent faculty member, or the percentage of classes with more than 50 students. Those productivity measures (for they are indeed productivity measures) might as well apply to the assembly-line workers who fabricate the proverbial widget, for one cannot tell what the metrics have to do with the supposed purpose of institutions of higher education—to create and transmit knowledge. That includes leading students to the possibility of a fuller life and an appreciation of the world around them and expanding their horizons.
  • But, like the fitness club's expensive cardio machines, a significant increase in faculty research, in the quality of student experiences (including learning), in the institution's service to its state, or in its standing among its peers may cost more than a university can afford to invest or would even dream of paying.
  • Such metrics are a speedup of the academic assembly line, not an intensification or improvement of student learning. Indeed, sometimes a boost in some measures, like an increase in the number of first-year students participating in "living and learning communities," may even detract from what students learn. (Wan U.'s pre-pharmacy living-and-learning community is so competitive that students keep track of one another's grades more than they help one another study. Last year one student turned off her roommate's alarm clock so that she would miss an exam and thus no longer compete for admission to the School of Pharmacy.)
  • Even metrics intended to indicate what students may have learned seem to have more to do with controlling faculty members than with gauging education. Take student-outcomes assessments, meant to be evaluations of whether courses have achieved their goals. They search for fault where earlier researchers would not have dreamed to look. When parents in the 1950s asked why Johnny couldn't read, teachers may have responded that it was Johnny's fault; they had prepared detailed lesson plans. Today student-outcomes assessment does not even try to discover whether Johnny attended class; instead it produces metrics about outcomes without considering Johnny's input.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10
     
    A good one to wrestle with.  It may be worth formulating distinctions we hold, and steering accordingly.
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

OECD Project Seeks International Measures for Assessing Educational Quality - Internati... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63764

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The first phase of an ambitious international study that intends to assess and compare learning outcomes in higher-education systems around the world was announced here on Wednesday at the conference of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
  • Richard Yelland, of the OECD's Education Directorate, is leading the project, which he said expects to eventually offer faculty members, students, and governments "a more balanced assessment of higher-education quality" across the organization's 31 member countries.
  • learning outcomes are becoming a central focus worldwide
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • the feasibility study is adapting the Collegiate Learning Assessment, an instrument developed by the Council for Aid to Education in the United States, to an international context.
  • At least six nations are participating in the feasibility study.
  • 14 countries are expected to participate in the full project, with an average of 10 institutions per country and about 200 students per institution,
  • The project's target population will be students nearing the end of three-year or four-year degrees, and will eventually measure student knowledge in economics and engineering.
  • While the goal of the project is not to produce another global ranking of universities, the growing preoccupation with such lists has crystallized what Mr. Yelland described as the urgency of pinning down what exactly it is that most of the world's universities are teaching and how well they are doing
  • Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, said she was also skeptical about whether the project would eventually yield common international assessment mechanisms.
  • Ms. Eaton noted, the same sets of issues recur across borders and systems, about how best to enhance student learning and strengthen economic development and international competitiveness.
  • Gary Brown on 28 Jan 10
     
    Another day, another press, again thinking comparisons
Joshua Yeidel

Biggest Increases in Spending on Higher Education - Government - The Chronicle of Highe... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...64781

higher_education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 23 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 23 Mar 10
     
    A tough competitive environment...
Nils Peterson

Views: Changing the Equation - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...bassis

shared by Nils Peterson on 25 Mar 10 - Cached
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resource
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • year we strug
  • year we strug
  • those who control influential rating systems of the sort published by U.S. News & World Report -- define academic quality as small classes taught by distinguished faculty, grand campuses with impressive libraries and laboratories, and bright students heavily recruited. Since all of these indicators of quality are costly, my college’s pursuit of quality, like that of so many others, led us to seek more revenue to spend on quality improvements. And the strategy worked.
  • Based on those concerns, and informed by the literature on the “teaching to learning” paradigm shift, we began to change our focus from what we were teaching to what and how our students were learning.
  • No one wants to cut costs if their reputation for quality will suffer, yet no one wants to fall off the cliff.
  • When quality is defined by those things that require substantial resources, efforts to reduce costs are doomed to failure
  • some of the best thinkers in higher education have urged us to define the quality in terms of student outcomes.
  • Faculty said they wanted to move away from giving lectures and then having students parrot the information back to them on tests. They said they were tired of complaining that students couldn’t write well or think critically, but not having the time to address those problems because there was so much material to cover. And they were concerned when they read that employers had reported in national surveys that, while graduates knew a lot about the subjects they studied, they didn’t know how to apply what they had learned to practical problems or work in teams or with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
  • Our applications have doubled over the last decade and now, for the first time in our 134-year history, we receive the majority of our applications from out-of-state students.
  • We established what we call college-wide learning goals that focus on "essential" skills and attributes that are critical for success in our increasingly complex world. These include critical and analytical thinking, creativity, writing and other communication skills, leadership, collaboration and teamwork, and global consciousness, social responsibility and ethical awareness.
  • despite claims to the contrary, many of the factors that drive up costs add little value. Research conducted by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman found that “there is no consistent relationship between spending and performance, whether that is measured by spending against degree production, measures of student engagement, evidence of high impact practices, students’ satisfaction with their education, or future earnings.” Indeed, they concluded that “the absolute level of resources is less important than the way those resources are used.”
  • After more than a year, the group had developed what we now describe as a low-residency, project- and competency-based program. Here students don’t take courses or earn grades. The requirements for the degree are for students to complete a series of projects, captured in an electronic portfolio,
  • students must acquire and apply specific competencies
  • Faculty spend their time coaching students, providing them with feedback on their projects and running two-day residencies that bring students to campus periodically to learn through intensive face-to-face interaction
  • At the very least, finding innovative ways to lower costs without compromising student learning is wise competitive positioning for an uncertain future
  • As the campus learns more about the demonstration project, other faculty are expressing interest in applying its design principles to courses and degree programs in their fields. They created a Learning Coalition as a forum to explore different ways to capitalize on the potential of the learning paradigm.
  • a problem-based general education curriculum
  • After a year and a half, the evidence suggests that students are learning as much as, if not more than, those enrolled in our traditional business program
  • the focus of student evaluations has changed noticeably. Instead of focusing almost 100% on the instructor and whether he/she was good, bad, or indifferent, our students' evaluations are now focusing on the students themselves - as to what they learned, how much they have learned, and how much fun they had learning.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 25 Mar 10
       
      gary diigoed this article. this comment shines another light -- the focus of the course eval shifted from faculty member to course & student learning when the focus shifted from teaching to learning
  • Gary Brown on 25 Mar 10
     
    A must read spotted by Jane Sherman--I've highlighed, as usual, much of it.
Nils Peterson

Edge 313 - 1 views

www.edge.org/...edge313.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10 - Cached
  • So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code. Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      US vs Euro thinking about the Internet
  • TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY 1.  No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.
  • Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished? 4. It has increased not the quality but the quantity of our writing — "our" meaning society's as a whole. The Internet for its part has increased not the quality but the quantity of the information we see. Increasing quantity is easier than improving quality. Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search.
  • Will you store your personal information on your own personal machines, or on nameless servers far away in the Cloud, or both? Answer: in the Cloud. The Cloud (or the Internet Operating System, IOS — "Cloud 1.0") will take charge of your personal machines. It will move the information you need at any given moment onto your own cellphone, laptop, pad, pod — but will always keep charge of the master copy. When you make changes to any document, the changes will be reflected immediately in the Cloud. Many parts of this service are available already.
  • The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses).
  • In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen.
  • The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The "velocity of information" is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today's typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it's not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure. 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      jayme will like this for her timeline portfolios
  • There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it's obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it's easy to blend any group of streams, it's easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for "snow" means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn't deal with snow. Subtracting the "not snow" stream from the mainstream yields a "snow" stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      is Yahoo Pipes a precursor? Theron sent me an email, subject: "let me pipe that for you"
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      Google Buzz might also be a ersion of this. It bring together items from your (multiple) public streams.
  • Internet culture is a culture of nowness. The Internet tells you what your friends are doing and the world news now, the state of the shops and markets and weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. The Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many different places at one moment in time.
  • Once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact. Such timelines are not history, but they are the raw material of history.
  • Before long, all personal, familial and institutional histories will take visible form in streams.   A lifestream is tangible time:  as life flashes past on waterskis across time's ocean, a lifestream is the wake left in its trail. Dew crystallizes out of the air along cool surfaces; streams crystallize out of the Cybersphere along veins of time. As streams begin to trickle and then rush through the spring thaw in the Cybersphere, our obsession with "nowness" will recede
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      barrett has been using lifestream. this guy claims to have coined it lonf ago...in any event, it is a very different picture of portfolio -- more like "not your father's" than like AAEEBL.
  • The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing just what we like and ignoring the rest. On the Net we have the satisfaction of reading only opinions we already agree with, only facts (or alleged facts) we already know. You might read ten stories about ten different topics in a traditional newspaper; on the net, many people spend that same amount of time reading ten stories about the same topic. But again, once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add "drift" to the net, so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you're tired) into places you hadn't planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.
Gary Brown

News: The Specialists - Inside Higher Ed - 4 views

www.insidehighered.com/...statistics

for profits

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Choosing the academic program at a single university, they say, is a relic of a time before online education made it possible for a student in Oregon to take courses at a university in Florida
  • Much of the talk about this imminent unbundling has come from colleges that predict that students might want to transfer credits from other colleges that might have different missions. But the competition may also come from entities that do not even offer degrees.
  • The company outsources grading and other work to master’s degree-holders in India for much less than it would cost to employ similarly qualified teaching assistants in the United States.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the confluence of several economic factors — particularly rising tuition and the unwillingness of many students to take on exorbitant debt, especially as they see their degree-holding peers struggling to land jobs — may force institutions to consider turning to outside specialists if they want to continue offering certain courses.And if they don’t, Smith says, students will likely turn to the outside specialists themselves.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Apr 10
     
    Variations on a theme, but notable now in particular as we debate general education reform.
Sarah Usher

PoliceRecruitmentUK Helped Me Pass the Police Application Sift - 1 views

Becoming a police officer is my dream job. Since grade school I can only picture out myself as a police officer and so upon the first opportunity I applied at Wales in hopes to become a police offi...

become a police officer jobs recruitment

started by Sarah Usher on 07 Mar 11 no follow-up yet
Gary Brown

News: Green Revolution - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...agriculture

Sustainability competition

shared by Gary Brown on 27 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Gary Brown on 27 Apr 09
     
    WSU has jumped on this initiative.
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