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This book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods--to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. You can read the entire book online for free.

Chamberlain High School is small inner-city school within a school in a large urban district. Over its five years of existence, Chamberlain administrators have enlisted the aid of outside partners to help them realize the vision of an interdisciplinary environmental science theme based school. Partners include many university-based groups, as well as groups such as National Public Radio's Living on Earth, the Urban Ecology Institute (a non-profit university-based organization), and a local environmental literacy program. This study was undertaken to understand some of the dynamics behind those partnerships. Using activity theory as an analytical lens we found a set of tensions that drove many of the changes that have occurred between the school and its partners. In this paper we document these tensions so others who are working in similar situations will be able to leverage our experience and findings to support urban school change.

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best:

FROM OVERVIEW: "They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Persuasive Writing is recommended for use in Sages First Seminars. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein have created a book of templates useful for "Demystifying Academic Conversation" (Preface ix). While the book has received mixed reviews (mostly related to the contentious issue of whether or not templates are useful/proper tools for use in writing instruction; see "Responses to TSIS" below), we present the following information to help you decide for yourself. In addition, you will find sample exercises from the text (some of which have been tested in the classroom) under "Links." '

The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler's high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros' Networked Teacher. I hope that teachers will use it to help their colleagues, parents, and students understand networked learning in the 21st century. Anyone is free to use this video for educational purposes. You may download, translate, or use as part of another presentation. Please share.

This video should be required viewing for incoming faculty. Especially the end of the video; it gives a good description of the new roles faculty can take when they leave the lecture stand. Thanks Stephen

A very interesting useful site where we might help ourselves by getting involved.

"Q: What elements help make institutional effectiveness assessment successful? Suskie: One factor really stands out: If institutional leaders really value assessment results and use them to inform important decisions on important goals, your institutional effectiveness efforts will be a resounding success."

Google Gadget Ventures is a new Google pilot program dedicated to helping developers create richer, more useful gadgets. Inspired by the success of iGoogle, which has been driven by the creation by 3rd-party developers of a broad range of gadgets, Gadget Ventures provides two types of funding: Grants of $5,000 to those who've built gadgets we'd like to see developed further. You're eligible to apply for a grant if you've developed a gadget that's in our gadgets directory and gets at least 250,000 weekly page views. To apply, you must submit a one-page proposal detailing how you'd use the grant to improve your gadget. Seed investments of $100,000 to developers who'd like to build a business around the gadgets platform. Only Google Gadget Venture grant recipients are eligible for this type of funding. Submitting a business plan detailing how you plan to build a viable business around the gadgets platform is a required part of the seed investment application process. It's our hope that Google Gadget Ventures will give developers the opportunity to create a new generation of gadgets to benefit users. ---------- Consider this form of authentic assessment and the metrics they apply.

Bloom has not gone away, and this revision helps delimit the nominalist implications

10 skills and abilities that will help you tackle the world's toughest problems

Evoke skills, collaboration, courgage, creativity, entrepreneurship, local insight, knowledge share, resourcefulness, spark, sustainability, vision.

"The professor said he did find a way to greatly reduce cheating on homework in his class. He switched to a "studio" model of teaching, in which students sit in small groups working through tutorials on computers while professors and teaching assistants roam the room answering questions, rather than a traditional lecture. With lectures, he detected cheating on about 11 percent of homework problems, but now he detects copying on only about 3 percent of them. It might help that he shares findings from his study to his students, showing them that cheaters are much more likely to get C's and D's on exams than those who work out homework problems on their own. "

A physics professor figures out how to detect cheating on homework, (an assessment), triangulates with another assessment (OK, it's an exam) to determine the impact on student learning, and modifies his teaching practice, reducing cheating from 11% to 3%.

This is a happy ending and an interesting useful outcome from assessment. There is also a kind of "duh" quality to it, but that is not a problem. What I'm pondering, though, is the time and energy expended for a 7% gain. What I hope follows is further assessment of the gains for the other 93% relative to learning and attitude toward learning, school, and the subject matter.....

An article in the Atlantic today by Clayton Christensen discusses "Revolution in the Classroom" In a paragraph on data collection he says the following: Creating effective methods for measuring student progress is crucial to ensuring that material is actually being learned. And implementing such assessments using an online system could be incredibly potent: rather than simply testing students all at once at the end of an instructional module, this would allow continuous verification of subject mastery as instruction was still underway. Teachers would be able to receive constant feedback about progress or the lack thereof and then make informed decisions about the best learning path for each student. Thus, individual students could spend more or less time, as needed, on certain modules. And as long as the end result - mastery - was the same for all, the process and time allotted for achieving it need not be uniform." The "module" focus is a little disturbing but the rest is helpful.