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Nils Peterson

Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement (EDUCAUSE Rev... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...209320

shared by Nils Peterson on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • openness in practice requires little additional investment, since it essentially concerns transparency of already planned course activities on the part of the educator.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Aug 10
       
      Search YouTube for "master class" Theron and I are looking at violin examples. The class is happening with student, master, and observers. What is added is video recording and posting to YouTube. YouTube provides additional community via comments and linked videos.
  • This second group of learners — those who wanted to participate but weren't interested in course credit — numbered over 2,300. The addition of these learners significantly enhanced the course experience, since additional conversations and readings extended the contributions of the instructors.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Aug 10
       
      These additional resources might also include peer reviews using a course rubric, or diverse feedback on the rubric itself.
  • Enough structure is provided by the course that if a learner is interested in the topic, he or she can build sufficient language and expertise to participate peripherally or directly.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Although courses are under pressure in the "unbundling" or fragmentation of information in general, the learning process requires coherence in content and conversations. Learners need some sense of what they are choosing to do, a sense of eventedness.5 Even in traditional courses, learners must engage in a process of forming coherent views of a topic.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Aug 10
       
      An assumption here that the learner needs kick starting. Its an assumtion that the learner is not a Margo Tamez making an Urgent Call for Help where the learner owns the problem. Is it a way of inviting a community to a party?
  • The community-as-curriculum model inverts the position of curriculum: rather than being a prerequisite for a course, curriculum becomes an output of a course.
  • They are now able, sometimes through the open access noted above and sometimes through access to other materials and guidance, to engage in their own learning outside of a classroom structure.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Aug 10
       
      A key point is the creation of open learners. Impediments to open learners need to be understood and overcome. Identity mangement is likely to be an important skill here.
  • Educators continue to play an important role in facilitating interaction, sharing information and resources, challenging assertions, and contributing to learners' growth of knowledge.
Nils Peterson

Excerpt from Informal Learning - 2 views

www.internettime.com/excerpt-from-informal-learning

shared by Nils Peterson on 24 Aug 10 - Cached
  • WORKERS LEARN MORE in the coffee room than in the classroom. They discover how to do their jobs through informal learning: asking the person in the next cubicle, trial and error, calling the help desk, working with people in the know, and joining the conversation.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Aug 10
       
      Jay Cross, _Informal Learning_ ca 2003
  • Training programs, workshops, and schools get the lion’s share of the corporate budget for developing talent, despite the fact that this formal learning has almost no impact on job performance. And informal learning, the major source of knowledge transfer and innovation, is left to chance. This book aims to raise your consciousness about informal teaming. You will discover that informal learning is a profit strategy, that it flexes with change, and that it respects and challenges workers. You will see how hard-nosed businesses use organizational network analysis, conversation space, and communities of purpose to fuel innovation and agility.
  • Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, “to learn” is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.
Gary Brown

Texas A&M's Faculty Ratings: Right and Wrong - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Edu... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...124330

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • "Academia is highly specialized. We don't mean to be exclusive. We are a public-serving group of people. But at the same time, that public isn't well-enough aware of what we do and who we are to evaluate us."
  • But the think tank is correct that taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. Public-university operating costs in Texas have gone up more than 60 percent in the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation, and professors are among the state's highest-paid public employees. The state needs accountability measures, and they must be enforced by a party other than the faculty, who, it could easily be charged, have a conflict of interest. That's what Texas A&M got right.
  • Moosally is right about one thing: The public isn't well aware of what she and many of her colleagues do. But they should be. That is not to say that the public will be able to understand what goes on in all of the chemistry laboratories in Texas. But Moosally teaches English at a college that is not exactly tasked with performing cutting-edge research. Houston-Downtown's mission is to provide "educational opportunities and access to students from a variety of backgrounds including many first-generation college students."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • No doubt there is useful research coming out of the university system. But plenty could be omitted without a great deal of detriment to students' education. For instance, Hugill's most recent contributions have included a chapter on "Transitions in Hegemony: A Theory Based on State Type and Technology" and the article "German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896-1914." Moosally's master's thesis was titled "Resumptive Pronouns in Modern Standard Arabic: A Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Account," and her current research interests include "interactions between grammar knowledge and writing abilities/interest [and] cross-linguistic patterns of agreement."
  • Only 35 percent of respondents felt it was very important for colleges to "provide useful information to the public on issues affecting their daily lives."
  • According to a 2004 survey by The Chronicle, 71 percent of Americans thought it was very important for colleges to prepare undergraduates for careers, while only 56 percent thought it was very important for colleges to "discover more about the world through research."
  • What Texas A&M officials have also missed is that faculty members must be held accountable for what they teach.
  • Professors receive more credit for teaching higher-level students. But again, that is backward. The idea should be to give senior faculty members more credit for teaching introductory classes.
  • Moreover, the metric entirely ignores teaching quality. Who cares how many "student hours" professors put in if they are not particularly good teachers anyway?
  • Ultimately there needs to be a systemic solution to the problem of teacher quality. Someone—a grown-up, preferably—needs to get into the classroom and watch what is being done there.
  • Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10
     
    Another one in which the comments say more than I might--but the range of these accountability pieces underscore the work to do....
Nils Peterson

Redesigning Scientific Reputation - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/...1

shared by Nils Peterson on 17 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Thus, one’s reputation is not measured by credentials, but by one’s contribution both to expanding knowledge and to the community.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 17 Sep 10
       
      The systems the cite suggest that they understand open assessment, though they don't specifically say that in this piece. One of these authors (Adler) will be at the PaloAlto meeting Monday.
Gary Brown

The Potential Impact of Common Core Standards - 2 views

www.convergemag.com/...-of-Common-Core-Standards.html

standards

shared by Gary Brown on 28 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • According to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), the goal “is to ensure that academic expectations for students are of high quality and consistent across all states and territories.” To educators across the nation, this means they now have to sync up all curriculum in math and language arts for the benefit of the students.
  • They are evidence based, aligned with college and work expectations, include rigorous content and skills, and are informed by other top performing countries.”
  • “Educational standards help teachers ensure their students have the skills and knowledge they need to be successful by providing clear goals for student learning.” They are really just guidelines for students, making sure they are on the right track with their learning.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When asked the simple question of what school standards are, most students are unable to answer the question. When the concept is explained, however, they really do not know if having common standards would make a difference or not. Codie Allen, a senior in the Vail School Distract says, “I think that things will pretty much stay stagnate, people aren’t really going to change because of standards.”
  • Council of Chief State School Officers. Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010.
Gary Brown

GE Reform Process - Revising General Education: Comments and Questions - University Col... - 0 views

universitycollege.wsu.edu/...default.aspx

general education

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • I actually learned something in these classes for 3 main reasons. The first reason was that the class size was small, and my interaction with my classmates and professor/teacher made the material meaningful and educational. Secondly, the essays required for these classes pushed me in my writing skills, and promoted independent research and construction of ideas through writing.
  • Taking the class with students who were serious and knowledgeable about their field of study made my experience educational. Sitting in a large lecture hall with 200 other students who also are taking the class just to get the requirement is not educationally stimulating.
  • Spending money on classes that don’t have any impact is especially hard now that tuition has gone through the roof. Requiring less classes of greater quality will help alleviate this problem and help students graduate on time.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I also think that if there are going to be any cut-backs on classes it should be done on GE classes. Also, the writing portfolio process is tedious for DDP students, especially for those who transferred from a community college. Honestly the hardest part of the process was not the proctored test (I received a pass with distinction) but hunting down professors to sign the required
  • Likewise, if we eliminate western history, mythology, philosophy and comparative politics, we abandon our common heritage and reduce our graduates to individuals with technical skills but no understanding of how America became the greatest nation in history and of our individual responsibilities as productive and educated citizens
  • Gary Brown on 23 Sep 10
     
    a student reviewing the gened reform proposal....
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.
Kimberly Green

Commodification of Academic Research (Inside HIgher Ed) - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...radder

education higher_education

shared by Kimberly Green on 25 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Kimberly Green on 25 Oct 10
     
    This article provides an international view of the commodification of academic research, including this base line definition, from an email interview with Hans Radder, a professor of the philosophy of science and technology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Q: Academic research has always cost money to produce, and led to products that made money for others. How is the "commodification" of research different today than in past periods? A: Commodification means that all kinds of activities and their results are predominantly interpreted and assessed on the basis of economic criteria. In this sense, recent academic research is far more commodified than it was in the past. In general terms, one can say that the relation between "money" and specific academic activity has become much more direct. Consider the following examples: first, the amount of external funding acquired is often used as a measure of individual academic quality; second, specific assessments by individual scientists have a direct impact on departmental budgets; for instance, if I now pass this doctoral dissertation, my department receives a substantial sum of money; if not, it ends up with a budget deficit; third, the growing practice of patenting the results of academic research is explicitly aimed at acquiring commercial monopolies. Related to these financial issues are important and substantial changes of academic culture. Universities are increasingly being run as big corporations. They have a top-down command structure and an academic culture in which individual university scientists are forced to behave like mini-capitalists in order to survive, guided by an entrepreneurial ethos aimed at maximizing the capitalization of their knowledge.
Gary Brown

Improving Teaching Will Require Strategic Thinking - Letters to the Editor - The Chroni... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...64010

change teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Feb 10 - Cached
  • a rather large gap between knowledge about effective teaching practices in higher education and the use of these practices in higher education.
  • the greatest gains in STEM education are likely to come from the development of strategies to encourage faculty and administrators to implement proven instructional strategies."
  • The issue is not just one of finding better ways to motivate professors. Most professors already take their teaching responsibilities seriously and are motivated to do a good job. Improving instruction will require strategic and systematic work at all levels of the educational system.
  • Gary Brown on 09 Feb 10
     
    note the focus on systems
  • Kimberly Green on 15 Feb 10
     
    This piece raises a related issue we have been discussing at OAI -- "First, and perhaps most important, there is very little research conducted on how to promote change in instructional practices used in higher education. " How does leadership promote change? How do leaders -- such as dept chairs -- promote and manage change? How do they get, or invest in, those skills?
Gary Brown

Struggling Students Can Improve by Studying Themselves, Research Shows - Teaching - The... - 3 views

chronicle.com/...64004

feedback peer review

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Feb 10 - Cached
  • "We're trying to document the role of processes that are different from standard student-outcome measures and standard ability measures,
  • We're interested in various types of studying, setting goals for oneself, monitoring one's progress as one goes through learning a particular topic."
  • Mr. Zimmerman has spent most of his career examining what can go wrong when people try to learn new facts and skills. His work centers on two common follies: First, students are often overconfident about their knowledge, assuming that they understand material just because they sat through a few lectures or read a few chapters. Second, students tend to attribute their failures to outside forces ("the teacher didn't like me," "the textbook wasn't clear enough") rather than taking a hard look at their own study habits.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • That might sound like a recipe for banal lectures about study skills. But training students to monitor their learning involves much more than simple nagging, Mr. Zimmerman says. For one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • or one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • "The first one is, Give students fast, accurate feedback about how they're doing. And the second rule, which is less familiar to most people, is, Now make them demonstrate that they actually understand the feedback that has been given."
  • "I did a survey in December," he says. "Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique 'somewhat,' and eight said 'a lot.' So we were pleased that they didn't forget about us after the program ended."
  • "Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique 'somewhat,' and eight said 'a lot.' So we were pleased that they didn't forget about us after the program ended."
  • And over time, we've realized that these methods have a much greater effect if they're embedded within the course content.
  • "Once we focus on noticing and correcting errors in whatever writing strategy we're working on, the students just become junkies for feedback,"
  • "Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection," Mr. Zimmerman says. "We're trying to help instructors and students see errors not as an endpoint, but as a beginning point for understanding what they know and what they don't know, and how they can approach problems in a more effective way."
  • Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection,"
  • Self-efficacy" was coined by Albert Bandura in the 1970's
  • "Self-efficacy" was coined by Albert Bandura in the 1970's,
  • The 1990 paper from _Educational Psychologist_ 25 (1), pp. 3-17) which is linked above DOES include three citations to Bandura's work.
  • The 1990 paper from _Educational Psychologist_ 25 (1), pp. 3-17) which is linked above DOES include three citations to Bandura's work.
  • What I am particularly amazed by is that the idea of feedback, reflection and explicitly demonstrated understanding (essentially a Socratic approach of teaching), is considered an innovation.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Feb 10
     
    selected for the focus on feedback. The adoption by half or fewer, depending, is also interesting as the research is of the type we would presume to be compelling.
Nils Peterson

National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment - 1 views

learningoutcomesassessment.org/occasionalpapertwo.htm

NILOA Trudy Banta

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Of the various ways to assess student learning outcomes, many faculty members prefer what are called “authentic” approaches that document student performance during or at the end of a course or program of study.  Authentic assessments typically ask students to generate rather than choose a response to demonstrate what they know and can do.  In their best form, such assessments are flexible and closely aligned with teaching and learning processes, and represent some of students more meaningful educational experiences.  In this paper, assessment experts Trudy Banta, Merilee Griffin, Theresa Flateby, and Susan Kahn describe the development of several promising authentic assessment approaches. 
  • Educators and policy makers in postsecondary education are interested in assessment processes that improve student learning, and at the same time provide comparable data for the purpose of demonstrating accountability.
  • First, ePortfolios provide an in-depth, long-term view of student achievement on a range of skills and abilities instead of a quick snapshot based on a single sample of learning outcomes. Second, a system of rubrics used to evaluate student writing and depth of learning has been combined with faculty learning and team assessments, and is now being used at multiple institutions. Third, online assessment communities link local faculty members in collaborative work to develop shared norms and teaching capacity, and then link local communities with each other in a growing system of assessment.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10
       
      hey, does this sound familiar? i'm guessing the portfolios are not anywhere on the Internet, but we're otherwise in good company
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Three Promising Alternatives for Assessing College Students' Knowledge and Skills
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Feb 10
       
      I'm not sure they are 'alternatives' so much as 3 elements we would combine into a single strategy
Gary Brown

The Ticker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...9217

accreditation department of education

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The U.S. Education Department today released a report critical of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, saying the regional accrediting organization did not set minimum standards for its member institutions on program length or credit hours.
  • The accreditor responded that "the fundamental concern of higher education's constituencies is whether students graduate with appropriate knowledge, skills, and competencies, not how many hours they spend in a classroom."
  • Gary Brown on 15 Dec 09
     
    A critical indicator of why I see our work as work with accreditors rather than for accreditors.
Gary Brown

Learning to Hate Learning Objectives - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...49399

shared by Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Perhaps learning objectives make sense for most courses outside the humanities, but for me—as, no doubt, for many others—they bear absolutely no connection to anything that happens in the classroom.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      The homeopathic fallacy, debunked by volumes of research...
  • The problem is, this kind of teaching does not correlate with the assumption of my local accreditation body, which sees teaching—as perhaps it is, in many disciplines—as passing on a body of knowledge and skills to a particular audience.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      A profoundly dangerous misperception of accreditation and its role.
  • We talked about the ways in which the study of literature can help to develop and nurture observation, analysis, empathy, and self-reflection, all of which are essential for the practice of psychotherapy,
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      Reasonable outcomes, with a bit of educational imagination and an understanding of assessment obviously underdeveloped.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • They will not achieve any "goals or outcomes." Indeed, they will not have "achieved" anything, except, perhaps, to doubt the value of terms like "achievement" when applied to reading literature.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      good outcome
  • To describe this as a learning objective is demeaning and reductive to all concerned.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 16 Dec 09
       
      Only in the sense Ralph Tyler criticized, and he is the one who coined the term and developed the concept.
  • except to observe certain habits of mind, nuances of thinking, an appreciation for subtleties and ambiguities of argument, and an appreciation of the capacity for empathy, as well as the need, on certain occasions, to resist this capacity. There is no reason for anyone to take the course except a need to understand more about the consciousness of others, including nonhuman animals.
Matthew Tedder

A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing : Uncertain Principles - 0 views

scienceblogs.com/...t_of_knowledge_is_a_danger.php

education

shared by Matthew Tedder on 13 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Matthew Tedder on 13 Jan 10
     
    Not the best example but the problem, I can attest, is very real. In general from my experience, exams tend to be tailored for a superficial memorization of facts such that any comprehenisve understanding is penalized severely. My guess is that about 40% of questions, on average, are like this. I learned very much the hard way that understanding a subject better is at some point detrimental to passing an exam on it. The key is to learn what expected answers are and learning to let technical truths go. In other words, to dumb ones understanding down for the sake of passing. I have grumbled to myself about this on most exams I've even taken, short of those I truly knew little about.
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
Matthew Tedder

A New School Teaches Students Through Videogames | Popular Science - 1 views

www.popsci.com/...es-students-through-videogames

education

shared by Matthew Tedder on 11 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Matthew Tedder on 11 Jan 10
     
    Nothing more powerfully engages students than video games. It's just be very difficult finding ways to exploit this for educational purposes without destroying that affect in the process. My own best idea on the holy grail of a truly addictive game useful for very general and comprehensive educational purposes is an RTS game from an FPS perspective beginning the neolithic times, in a persistent world. A student would begin as a primitive man and gradually work his way toward inventing all the technologies of the modern world in building his civilization. He'd invent each tool by learning the physics and usefulness of it. Then he could add it to the village he founds to expand it. The village and eventual civilization would be, along with its annals, would be a e-portfolio (why the world needs to be persistent, not starting fresh each time the student logs on--he must always be building upon the foundations already established). The student would design the economic system, etc. and his "subjects" would follow the rules he stipulates. He could trade with the villages of others for items he might need to get ahead but cannot produce them himself until he learns the principles behind the technology. The population might be given needs also for entertainment, thus poetry, etc. for a more pacified people. Many ideas can be added within this framework. It's a student's own world in which he can feel safe and for which he should develop more interest as it continue to operation even when he is offline (to increase engagement). And being multiplayer can also provide the social aspect and teamwork for shared goals.... like say, building a trading route and defending it from bandits, investing materials for construction of a dam and irrigation... etc. I have a basic design to build the infrastructure for this. There wouldn't by chance be any grants out there that might apply?
  • Matthew Shirey on 11 Jan 10
     
    I really like this game idea. Seems like it would be a monster of an undertaking not just for the game engine itself, but more so for the content. Let me know if you get this one off the ground.
  • Matthew Tedder on 12 Jan 10
     
    I realized while writing this that it would be difficult to for education professionals to understand this concept. I should have known Shirey would get it. After so much experience in software, one starts to see two personality types--those who design software from a philosophical perspective and those who do so from an immediate, practical point of view. The philosophicals enjoy designing and writing new kinds of software. They are also the kind of people who tend to enjoy RTS games. The immediates struggle trying to write software from scratch, except for where they understand some pre-known framework for writing software of the particular class. They are more often relegated to debugging and tweaking software. These people tend to prefer FPS games. Systems administrators tend to fall more into this category, as well. It's a good complement, I think. I design and they maintain. Philosophicals tend not to be such good maintainers. Immediates tend to make good systems administrators, too. What this all suggests to me is that the only way non-philosophicals (the particular type I mean--don't use the term too generally) are unlikely to "get" the concept until the can see and use it. I would love to be proven wrong. I designed a framework that I think would make building it not so difficult or time consuming. But yes, building content is a chore. Therefore, the way I designed the framework is to allow run-time additions and modifications. That is, you can start simple and gradually add content over time. I think this makes sense in any case because as knowledge changes, so should educational content. Educational methods may also evolve. So I think it is very important that the mechanism for adding and editing be as easy to use as possible. This is where you want the input of non-software engineers.....even non-gamers.
Matthew Tedder

Turning Work into Play with Online Games | h+ Magazine - 0 views

hplusmagazine.com/...turning-work-play-online-games

education

shared by Matthew Tedder on 16 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Matthew Tedder on 16 Jan 10
     
    This is about games to improve employee work.
  • Matthew Tedder on 16 Jan 10
     
    This is about using online games to engage employees in work. This is very much the core of what I was talking about, except for education. For those more knowledgeable about software design: my thoughts so far were on using Google's V8 Javascript engine and a 3D engine, such as Ogre3D, perhaps wrapped by QT or SDL. The worlds would be managed on the server but code for each object type shipped to the clients and run, sychronized there. Everything would be an "object"--even a world itself (a container object). Each object would comprise of four code modules plus its media files (3D models, sounds, etc.): Affector -- this receives sensory input then filters and translates that to the object's internal properties. Intrinsor -- this is the object's behavioral programming. For example, it can be the functions of an espresso machine object or the AI and/or user-interface connector of an animate object, etc. Mitigator -- this is the code that controls the internal environment of any objects contained within this object. It mitigates the effects of contained objects to the affects of others. For example, a world object, a boat, a house, or a bag. The physics, weather, and such will depend on what they are contained within. The mitigator may also initiate effects to contained objects. Effector -- this provides the API for action attempts to the Intrinsor. It then filters and translates the action attempts to the objects actual action attempts that are read by this object's containor. (Yes--I mispelled some words above intentionally) This design provides a framework for a persistent world of decent individual performance. The V8 engine compiles to fast machine code (and caches). Only very minimal data need be communicated over the network. Objects can run in parallel precisely the same, so if a client fails the system continues. Updates of virtually any kind can be made on-the-fly without stopping the game. New object types will be relatively easy to b
Gary Brown

Wise Men Gone: Stephen Toulmin and John E. Smith - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63649

critical thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Toulmin, born in London in 1922, earned his undergraduate degree in 1942 from King's College, Cambridge, in mathematics and physics. After participating in radar research and intelligence work during World War II in England and at Allied headquarters in Germany, he returned to Cambridge, where he studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the greatest influence on his thought, earning his Ph.D. in moral philosophy in 1948.
  • Toulmin moved to the United States, where he taught at Brandeis, Michigan State, and Northwestern Universities and the University of Chicago before landing in 1993 at the University of Southern California.
  • Toulmin's first, most enduring contribution to keeping philosophy sensible came in his 1958 book, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press). Deceptively formalistic on its surface because it posited a general model of argument, Toulmin's view, in fact, was better described as taxonomic, yet flexible. He believed that formal systems of logic misrepresent the complex way that humans reason in most fields requiring what philosophers call "practical reason," and he offered, accordingly, a theory of knowledge as warranted belief.
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  • Toulmin rejected the abstract syllogistic logic, meant to produce absolute standards for proving propositions true, that had become fashionable in analytic philosophy. Instead he argued (in the spirit of Wittgenstein) that philosophers must monitor how people actually argue if the philosophers' observations about persuasion are to make any sense. Toulmin took jurisprudential reasoning as his chief example in The Uses of Argument, but he believed that some aspects of a good argument depend on the field in which they're presented, while others are "field invariant."
  • Toulmin's "central thesis is that every sort of argumentation can in principle claim rationality and that the criteria to be applied when determining the soundness of the argumentation depend on the nature of the problems to which the argumentation relates."
  • But Toulmin, trained in the hard sciences and mathematics himself, saw through the science worship of less-credentialed sorts. He didn't relent, announcing "our need to reappropriate the wisdom of the 16th-century humanists, and develop a point of view that combines the abstract rigor and exactitude of the 17th-century 'new philosophy' with a practical concern for human life in its concrete detail."
  • Toulmin declared its upshot: "From now on, permanent validity must be set aside as illusory, and our idea of rationality related to specific functions of ... human reason. ... For me personally, the outcome of 40 years of philosophical critique was thus a new vision of—so to speak—the rhetoric of philosophy."
  • Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10
     
    FYI, Toulmin was the primary influence on the first WSU Critical Thinking Rubric. (Carella was the other philosopher.)
Gary Brown

National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment - 2 views

www.learningoutcomesassessment.org/OccasionalPapers.htm

assessment; ePortfolios

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Three promising alternatives for assessing college students' knowledge and skills. (NILOA Occasional Paper No.2). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute of Learning Outcomes Assessment.
  • Gary Brown on 15 Jan 10
     
    Banta and team
Nils Peterson

The New Digital Underclass - Forbes.com - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...mnists-trevor-butterworth.html

digital divide education

shared by Nils Peterson on 11 Mar 10 - No Cached
  • At a certain point in the 17th century, the known world suddenly became, in one particular and peculiar sense, unknowable. This seems, on the face of it, counter-intuitive: This was, after all, a time when modern science came into existence, when mathematics and methodology reorganized the capacity and reach of thought, when thinkers such as Descartes, Galileo and Newton altered the conceptual fabric of the universe, and gave the woozy gauze of what had been imagined the hard contours of what could be measured. But at the same time, this period of immense, almost incredible, transformation meant the end of homo universalis; if man could now measure everything, he was no longer the measure of everything.
  • Who was the last universal genius, the last person to grasp the entirety of knowledge? The most famous candidate is Gottfried Leibniz, whose research and achievements are asthma-inducing in breadth--and extend to studying Chinese and writing poetry. Less well-known, but no less interesting, is the Jesuit priest Anasthasius Kircher, who, over 72 volumes, analyzed everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics to harmonics.
  • But by the turn of the 18th century, this kind of panoptic vision was increasingly impossible; there was simply too much to know; and the deaths of Kircher in 1680 and Leibniz in 1716 marked the beginning of a new era in conceptual history, one that might be seen as the flip side of the rise of specialization
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