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Joshua Yeidel

The Tower and The Cloud | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

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

Certain Green Industries Have Job Openings : NPR - 0 views

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    Tens of thousands of layoffs in the Midwest have left a huge pool of job-seekers. In Ohio, wind turbine makers say they have jobs available that offer good pay and benefits. But they say they are having trouble finding skilled workers for that renewable energy industry
Nils Peterson

Innovating the 21st-Century University: It's Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 4 views

  • change is required in two vast and interwoven domains that permeate the deep structures and operating model of the university: (1) the value created for the main customers of the university (the students); and (2) the model of production for how that value is created. First we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created.
  • Research shows that mutual exploration, group problem solving, and collective meaning-making produce better learning outcomes and understanding overall. Brown and Adler cite a study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education: "Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students' success in higher education . . . was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own."
  • Second, the web enables students to collaborate with others independent of time and geography. Finally, the web represents a new mode of production for knowledge, and that changes just about everything regarding how the "content" of college and university courses are created.
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  • As Seymour Papert, one of the world's foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, put it: "The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery."14 Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have — to "construct" new knowledge structures and meaning.
  • Universities need an entirely new modus operandi for how the content of higher education is created. The university needs to open up, embrace collaborative knowledge production, and break down the walls that exist among institutions of higher education and between those institutions and the rest of the world.To do so, universities require deep structural changes — and soon. More than three years ago, Charles M. Vest published "Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University" in EDUCAUSE Review. In his concluding paragraph, Vest offered a tantalizing vision: "My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university — a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure." Vest wrote that the meta-university "will speed the propagation of high-quality education and scholarship. . . . The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the Web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials, scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, teleoperation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a noble and global endeavor."17
  • Used properly, wikis are tremendously powerful tools to collaborate and co-innovate new content. Tapscott wrote the foreword for a book called We Are Smarter Than Me (2008). The book, a best-seller, was written by Barry Libert, Jon Spector, and more than 4,000 people who contributed to the book's wiki. If a global collaboration can write a book, surely one could be used to create a university course. A professor could operate a wiki with other teachers. Or a professor could use a wiki with his or her students, thereby co-innovating course content with the students themselves. Rather than simply being the recipients of the professor's knowledge, the students co-create the knowledge on their own, which has been shown to be one of the most effective methods of learning.
  • The student might enroll in the primary college in Oregon and register to take a behavioral psychology course from Stanford University and a medieval history course from Cambridge. For these students, the collective syllabi of the world form their menu for higher education. Yet the opportunity goes beyond simply mixing and matching courses. Next-generation faculty will create a context whereby students from around the world can participate in online discussions, forums, and wikis to discover, learn, and produce knowledge as networked individuals and collectively.
  • But what about credentials? As long as the universities can grant degrees, their supremacy will never be challenged." This is myopic thinking. The value of a credential and even the prestige of a university are rooted in its effectiveness as a learning institution. If these institutions are shown to be inferior to alternative learning environments, their capacity to credential will surely diminish. How much longer will, say, a Harvard undergraduate degree, taught mostly through lectures by teaching assistants in large classes, be able to compete in status with the small class size of liberal arts colleges or the superior delivery systems that harness the new models of learning?
  • As part of this, the academic journal should be disintermediated and the textbook industry eliminated. In fact, the word textbook is an oxymoron today. Content should be multimedia — not just text. Content should be networked and hyperlinked bits — not atoms. Moreover, interactive courseware — not separate "books" — should be used to present this content to students, constituting a platform for every subject, across disciplines, among institutions, and around the world. The textbook industry will never reinvent itself, however, since legacy cultures and business models die hard. It will be up to scholars and students to do this collectively.
  • Ultimately, we will need more objective measures centered on students' learning performance.
Theron DesRosier

The Future of Work: As Gartner Sees It - 3 views

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    "Gartner points out that the world of work will probably witness ten major changes in the next ten years. Interesting in that it will change how learning happens in the workplace as well. The eLearning industry will need to account for the coming change and have a strategy in place to deal with the changes."
Theron DesRosier

Aviation High School - 0 views

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    "In addition to core courses in math, science, language arts, and social studies, we offer electives such as art, environmental stewardship, forensics, Japanese, and science olympiad, plus a series of seminars focused on aviation and aerospace, including Aviation and the American Character, History of Aircraft Design, and Robotics. In each course, students complete projects that demonstrate a depth of understanding and skill related to our essential questions and schoolwide learning goals. The more complex projects are developed in collaboration with industry experts, such as a wing-design engineer, a transit planner, an Arctic researcher, and a local river-cleanup coalition. "
Theron DesRosier

techPresident - How the candidates are using the web, and how the web is using them. - 0 views

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    While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion.
Joshua Yeidel

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google - CNN.com - 1 views

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    "# Google says hackers from China got into its Gmail system # Bruce Schneier says hackers exploited feature put into system at behest of U.S. government # When governments get access to private communications, they invite abuse, he says # Government surveillance and control of Internet is flourishing, he says"
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    A security expert looks at who's spying on whom... (hint: it's not just China)
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    But China is clearly among the most aggressive in this area. I remember being taught in the military that most espionage is industrial (by governments for industry) but Universities are also targets for various classified research, such as DARPA funded research. I think of perhaps shock physics, for example. Certain kinds of spying are essential for peace--that which is to determine "intent" of the other helps eliminate the ill-affects of paranoia. Other kinds can be detrimental to peace, such as China's many successful attempts at acquiring U.S. military technological and operational information.
Kimberly Green

Would You Like Credit With That Internship? - Students - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    Students pay tuition to work for free ... unpaid internships are growing in this down economy, favoring the wealthy who can afford them. But internships are generally valuable for students, administrators say. The complementary courses involve journals, essays, oral presentations, or work portfolios. Independent studies lean toward academics. Companies often see academic credit as substitute compensation that qualifies interns as legally unpaid trainees and keeps them on their colleges' liability insurance. Advertisements specify: "Candidates must be able to receive academic credit." That makes some campus officials bristle. "What they're saying is holding the institution hostage," says Kathy L. Sims, director of career services at the University of California at Los Angeles. Employers don't know colleges' academic standards, she says. "It's really not their call whether their experience is creditworthy." Colleges have dealt with that quandary in various ways. Some, especially those with traditions of experiential learning, vet and monitor internships, enrolling students in courses designed to complement their real-world work. Others let professors sponsor independent studies based on internships. More and more have devised some form of noncredit recognition to try to satisfy employers without altering academic philosophies or making students pay tuition to work free. At Bates College, the game is up. "We're quite adamant about our refusal to play along," says James W. Hughes, a professor of economics. As chairman of the department eight years ago, he got dozens of calls from students, parents, and employers asking for credit for unpaid internships, mainly in the financial industry. "Why is it that we have to evaluate this experience," he says, "just so some multibillion-dollar bank can avoid paying $7.50 an hour?" But the law is vague, and arguably antiquated. In the for-profit sector, guidelines for legally unpaid internships come from a 1947 U
Nils Peterson

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

  • 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
       
      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
       
      and it has implications for assessment and vehicles for assessment (portfolios)
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    "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. "
Nils Peterson

New Grilling of For-Profits Could Turn Up the Heat for All of Higher Education - Govern... - 1 views

shared by Nils Peterson on 25 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Congress plans to put for-profit colleges under the microscope on Thursday, asking whether a higher-education model that consumes more than double its proportionate share of federal student aid is an innovation worthy of duplication or a recipe for long-term economic disaster.
  • The evaluation threatens new headaches for an industry that is sometimes exalted by government policy makers as a lean results-oriented example for the rest of academe, and other times caricatured as an opportunistic outlier that peddles low-value education to unprepared high school dropouts.
  • Economic bubbles such as the unsustainable surge in housing prices "typically are built on ignorance and borrowed money," says one prominent pessimist on the matter, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. "And the reason you've got a higher-education bubble is ignorance and borrowed money," Mr. Reynolds said.
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  • Congress and colleges still lack a firm sense of "what our higher education system is producing," said Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education.
  • Mr. Reynolds said. Colleges of all type have been raising tuition for years as the government offers ever-growing amounts of grant aid and loan money, he said. The price inflation is driven by the fact that a government-backed loan, while offering students only a slight break from market interest rates, "looks cheap because you don't have to make payments for a while,"
  • That determination to expand the distribution of federal tuition assistance has left Congress and the White House seeking other ways to ensure that students get quality for their money. Just last week, the House education committee held a hearing in which Democratic members joined the Education Department's inspector general in pressing accrediting agencies to more clearly define the "credit hour" measurement used in student-aid allocations. Some colleges have objected, wanting more flexibility in defining their educational missions.
  • Whether it involves defining credit hours or setting accreditation standards, the root of the problem may be that the government is looking for better ways to ensure that its money is spent on worthwhile educational ventures, and yet it doesn't want to challenge the right of each college to define its own mission. So far that has proven to be a fundamental contradiction in judging the overall value of higher education, said Mr. Merisotis, of the Lumina Foundation. "There's got to be a third way," he said. "We don't have it yet."
Nils Peterson

Home Page | The College Completion Agenda - 1 views

  • The percentage of American adults with postsecondary credentials is not keeping pace with other industrialized nations. Improving postsecondary success for all our citizens, but most urgently for low-income and minority students, is critical to our nation's economic and social health. To help policymakers and educators achieve the goal of 55% by 2025, The College Board Advocacy & Policy Center has developed the College Completion Agenda
    • Nils Peterson
       
      The 2010 progress report is linked here.
Gary Brown

Details | LinkedIn - 0 views

  • Although different members of the academic hierarchy take on different roles regarding student learning, student learning is everyone’s concern in an academic setting. As I specified in my article comments, universities would do well to use their academic support units, which often have evaluation teams (or a designated evaluator) to assist in providing boards the information they need for decision making. Perhaps boards are not aware of those serving in evaluation roles at the university or how those staff members can assist boards in their endeavors.
  • Gary Brown • We have been using the Internet to post program assessment plans and reports (the programs that support this initiative at least), our criteria (rubric) for reviewing them, and then inviting external stakeholders to join in the review process.
Gary Brown

Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change - International - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 1 views

    • Gary Brown
       
      And what are people for, after all?
  • Peter P. Smith, senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, said that if traditional universities did not adjust, new institutions would evolve to meet student needs. Those new institutions, said Mr. Smith, whose company is a for-profit education provider, would be more student-centric, would deliver instruction with greater flexibility, and would offer educational services at a lower cost.
  • both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society.
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  • The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers
  • Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization.
  • many faculty members may be "uncomfortable" with having deeper links to industry because they don't understand that world. Students, however, are highly practical, Mr. Fadel said, and are specifically seeking education that will get them a job or give them an advantage in the workplace.
  • "I'm sorry, as a student, you do not go to university to learn. You go to get a credential," he said.
    • Gary Brown
       
      And if you graduate more appreciative of the credential than what and how you have learned, then the education.
  • That does not mean colleges simply ought to turn out more graduates for in-demand professions like science and engineering, Mr. Fadel added. Colleges need to infuse other disciplines with science and engineering skills.
Gary Brown

Making College Degrees Easier to Interpret - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 1 views

  • Over the past few decades, the central purpose of undergraduate education in the United States has steadily evolved away from elite studies in the liberal arts and toward course work that prepares students for successful careers in their chosen fields. 
  • how do employers determine the values of the college degrees held by young job applicants? 
  • There is essentially no method to determine which of the three graduates have the knowledge and skills that match the advertised position. Grades and academic standards often vary so much by institution, department, and instructor that transcripts are written off as arbitrary and meaningless by those making hiring decisions. Outside fields with licensure exams like accounting and nursing, employers often hire workers based on connections, intuition, and the sometimes-misleading reputations of applicants’ alma maters. 
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  • This system doesn’t allow labor markets to function efficiently.
  • To rectify this broken hiring system, academia and industry should form stronger partnerships to better determine which skills and knowledge students in various fields need to master
  • The traditional college transcript is simply too impenetrable for anyone outside—or inside—academia to comprehend.
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    The purposes are problematic, but the solution points to one of our approaches.  Where is John Dewey when we need him?
Gary Brown

Book review: Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning in Higher Educat... - 2 views

  • Christensen Hughes, J. and Mighty, J. (eds.) (2010) Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Montreal QC and Kingston ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 350 pp, C$/US$39.95
  • ‘The impetus for this event was the recognition that researchers have discovered much about teaching and learning in higher education, but that dissemination and uptake of this information have been limited. As such, the impact of educational research on faculty-teaching practice and student-learning experience has been negligible.’
  • Julia Christensen Hughes
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  • Chapter 7: Faculty research and teaching approaches Michael Prosser
  • What faculty know about student learning Maryellen Weimer
  • ractices of Convenience: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
  • Chapter 8: Student engagement and learning: Jillian Kinzie
  • (p. 4)
  • ‘much of our current approach to teaching in higher education might best be described as practices of convenience, to the extent that traditional pedagogical approaches continue to predominate. Such practices are convenient insofar as large numbers of students can be efficiently processed through the system. As far as learning effectiveness is concerned, however, such practices are decidedly inconvenient, as they fall far short of what is needed in terms of fostering self-directed learning, transformative learning, or learning that lasts.’
  • p. 10:
  • …research suggests that there is an association between how faculty teach and how students learn, and how students learn and the learning outcomes achieved. Further, research suggests that many faculty members teach in ways that are not particularly helpful to deep learning. Much of this research has been known for decades, yet we continue to teach in ways that are contrary to these findings.’
  • ‘There is increasing empirical evidence from a variety of international settings that prevailing teaching practices in higher education do not encourage the sort of learning that contemporary society demands….Teaching remains largely didactic, assessment of student work is often trivial, and curricula are more likely to emphasize content coverage than acquisition of lifelong and life-wide skills.’
  • What other profession would go about its business in such an amateurish and unprofessional way as university teaching? Despite the excellent suggestions in this book from those ‘within the tent’, I don’t see change coming from within. We have government and self-imposed industry regulation to prevent financial advisers, medical practitioners, real estate agents, engineers, construction workers and many other professions from operating without proper training. How long are we prepared to put up with this unregulated situation in university and college teaching?
Gary Brown

Views: Asking Too Much (and Too Little) of Accreditors - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

  • Senators want to know why accreditors haven’t protected the public interest.
  • Congress shouldn’t blame accreditors: it should blame itself. The existing accreditation system has neither ensured quality nor ferreted out fraud. Why? Because Congress didn’t want it to. If Congress truly wants to protect the public interest, it needs to create a system that ensures real accountability.
  • But turning accreditors into gatekeepers changed the picture. In effect, accreditors now held a gun to the heads of colleges and universities since federal financial aid wouldn’t flow unless the institution received “accredited” status.
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  • Congress listened to higher education lobbyists and designated accreditors -- teams made up largely of administrators and faculty -- to be “reliable authorities” on educational quality. Intending to protect institutional autonomy, Congress appropriated the existing voluntary system by which institutions differentiated themselves.
  • A gatekeeping system using peer review is like a penal system that uses inmates to evaluate eligibility for parole. The conflicts of interest are everywhere -- and, surprise, virtually everyone is eligible!
  • accreditation is “premised upon collegiality and assistance; rather than requirements that institutions meet certain standards (with public announcements when they don’t."
  • Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that many accredited colleges are adding little educational value. The 2006 National Assessment of Adult Literacy revealed that nearly a third of college graduates were unable to compare two newspaper editorials or compute the cost of office items, prompting the Spellings Commission and others to raise concerns about accreditors’ attention to productivity and quality.
  • But Congress wouldn’t let them. Rather than welcoming accreditors’ efforts to enhance their public oversight role, Congress told accreditors to back off and let nonprofit colleges and universities set their own standards for educational quality.
  • ccreditation is nothing more than an outdated industrial-era monopoly whose regulations prevent colleges from cultivating the skills, flexibility, and innovation that they need to ensure quality and accountability.
  • there is a much cheaper and better way: a self-certifying regimen of financial accountability, coupled with transparency about graduation rates and student success. (See some alternatives here and here.)
  • Such a system would prioritize student and parent assessment over the judgment of institutional peers or the educational bureaucracy. And it would protect students, parents, and taxpayers from fraud or mismanagement by permitting immediate complaints and investigations, with a notarized certification from the institution to serve as Exhibit A
  • The only way to protect the public interest is to end the current system of peer review patronage, and demand that colleges and universities put their reputation -- and their performance -- on the line.
  • Anne D. Neal is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The views stated herein do not represent the views of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, of which she is a member.
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    The ascending view of accreditation.
Nils Peterson

Assess this!: Assessment of learning is more complicated than it is (?) - 0 views

  • "I still feel like there's no there there" when it comes to colleges' efforts to measure student learning, Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, said in a speech at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation meeting Tuesday.Views like Carey's, which are widely held by policy experts who look at higher education from the outside, tend to aggravate faculty members and other professionals in the industry to no end...given how much assessment activity is unfolding on the campuses.That's where the disconnect comes in. Most of the assessment activity on campuses can be found in nooks and crannies of the institutions - by individual professors, or in one department - and it is often not tied to goals set broadly at the institutional level. Some of it has been undertaken directly in response to the outside calls for accountability, and seems workmanlike - testing or measurement done for measurement's sake.To be ultimately successful, any meaningful assessment effort must be embraced widely by instructors...and to do that, "you've got to start this conversation as an instructional conversation that includes assessment".... It must begin with agreement (in a department, a college, and ultimately across a discipline or institution) about the learning goals that students should derive from the curriculum - and then intensive work to infuse the skills needed to reach those goals into the curriculum, course by course....
    • Nils Peterson
       
      see Gary's oft-repeated comment about assessment is part of T&L. Also note the tension Ewell mentions
Gary Brown

How to Prepare Students for Careers - 0 views

  • Educators and industry partners can help students learn these skills through the following three practices:   1. Involve the community
  • Combine academic and technical knowledge That means educators must play on the same team.
  • . Make learning relevant Students need to see the tie between concepts they're learning and their application in life, said Allyson Knox, an academic program manager for Microsoft Corp.'s U.S. Partners in Learning program.
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    walkiing the fine line
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