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Nils Peterson

Dave's Educational Blog » Blog Archive » Feedbook - 0 views

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    The feedbook is a collection of feeds (including podcast, blogs and someday soon hopefully vlogs) contained in an open ended opml first seeded by a course instructor and added to (or pared down) according to student needs.
Theron DesRosier

ecitizenfoundation.org - 0 views

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    "I invite you to join and promote an exciting collaboration called BigDialog.Org: Ask President-Elect Obama an online question. This effort is co-sponsored by the Foundation, the MIT eCitizen Architecture Program under the leadership of MIT Professor William Mitchell, powered by Founding Partners communityCOUNTS (forum) and CIVICS.com (open frameworks) and supported by cyberspace luminaries like Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, Professor Ethan Katsh of UMass and Professor Michael Froomkin of University of Miami Law School. Our growing community of partners also includes techPresident, change.org, pajamasmedia, voterwatch, blip.tv and many more."
Theron DesRosier

Our Mission: The Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice - 0 views

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    SLJ offers an engaging, law-themed curriculum, with the goal of providing a high-quality, 9-12 education to under-resourced students. SLJ's focus on the study of law builds upon the success and experiences of The Bronx School for Law, Government, and Justice (BLGJ). BLGJ opened in 1997 in the South Bronx and has maintained 95% graduation rates in the first three graduating classes, with 90% of those graduates going on to college. Over its seven years, BLGJ has developed an array of law-themed courses that range from constitutional law to forensic science, and has established a successful internship model through which seniors spend three afternoons a week in courthouses, law firms, and non-profit organizations. SLJ was developed in conjunction with members of the BLGJ community including teachers, students, parents, and the principal.
S Spaeth

Dossiers technopédagogiques - 0 views

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    This article endeavours to denote and promote pedagogical experimentations concerning a Free/Open technology called a "Wiki". An intensely simple, accessible and collaborative hypertext tool Wiki software challenges and complexifies traditional notions of - as well as access to - authorship, editing, and publishing. Usurping official authorizing practices in the public domain poses fundamental - if not radical - questions for both academic theory and pedagogical practice. The particular pedagogical challenge is one of control: wikis work most effectively when students can assert meaningful autonomy over the process. This involves not just adjusting the technical configuration and delivery; it involves challenging the social norms and practices of the course as well (Lamb, 2004). Enacting such horizontal knowledge assemblages in higher education practices could evoke a return towards and an instance upon the making of impossible public goods" (Ciffolilli, 2003).
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    Maybe going out on a limb but if I had to choose one thing that best embodied the Web 2.0 approach and spirit it would be the collaborative potential of wikis.
Joshua Yeidel

Silverlight & WPF Chart - 0 views

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    Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components - powered by Microsoft® Silverlight™ & WPF...Visifire can also be embedded in any webpage as a standalone Silverlight App. Visifire is independent of server side technology. It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML. No radar charts, but for some things, this might be useful.
Gary Brown

2 Efforts to Provide Data on Colleges to Consumers Fall Short, Report Says - Administra... - 2 views

  • Higher education will have to be more accountable for its performance and more open to consumers about the actual cost of attending a college, and help people make easier comparisons among institutions, in order to succeed as the nation's economic engine, says a new report from two nonprofit think tanks here.
  • too little information to make informed choices about where they will get the most from their tuition dollars, say researchers at the two organizations, the libertarian-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and Education Sector, which is a proponent of reforming higher education
  • And without a more thorough and open form of accountability, institutions will not have any incentive to make the changes that will improve students' success,
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  • "If existing flaws are not resolved, the nation runs the risk of ending up in the worst of all worlds: the appearance of higher education accountability without the reality," the authors say.
  • The two voluntary systems criticized in the study are the University and College Accountability Network, begun in September 2007 by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities to provide information about private colleges, and the Voluntary System of Accountability,
  • it does not obligate institutions to gather or reveal any data that are not already available elsewhere,"
  • associations are beginning to offer workshops and other opportunities for system participants to learn how to use the data they're collecting to improve the college experience for students, she said
  • VSA has the testing lobby written all over it
  • We may all appreciate the cultural context inhibiting public accountability but it is also important to understand that this same accountability is lacking internally where it effectively thwarts attempts to manage the institution rationally; i.e., informed with a continuous flow of mission-critical performance information. With the scant objective information at their command, college presidents and their associates must perform as shamans, reading the tea leaves of opinion and passion among stakeholders.
  • On balance, America's institutions of higher education function in a managerial vacuum.
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    More of the same and the discussion is familiar--our challenge is to bring this topic to the attention of our points.
Gary Brown

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching - Curriculum - The Chroni... - 4 views

  • "Without an unrelenting focus on quality—on defining and measuring and ensuring the learning outcomes of students—any effort to increase college-completion rates would be a hollow effort indeed."
  • If colleges are going to provide high-quality educations to millions of additional students, they said, the institutions will need to develop measures of student learning than can assure parents, employers, and taxpayers that no one's time and money are being wasted.
  • "Effective assessment is critical to ensure that our colleges and universities are delivering the kinds of educational experiences that we believe we actually provide for students," said Ronald A. Crutcher, president of Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, during the opening plenary. "That data is also vital to addressing the skepticism that society has about the value of a liberal education."
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  • But many speakers insisted that colleges should go ahead and take drastic steps to improve the quality of their instruction, without using rigid faculty-incentive structures or the fiscal crisis as excuses for inaction.
  • Handing out "teacher of the year" awards may not do much for a college
  • W.E. Deming argued, quality has to be designed into the entire system and supported by top management (that is, every decision made by CEOs and Presidents, and support systems as well as operations) rather than being made the responsibility solely of those delivering 'at the coal face'.
  • I see as a certain cluelessness among those who think one can create substantial change based on volunteerism
  • Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods.
  • The approach that makes sense to me is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in a discussion of the future and the implications of the future for their field, their college, their students, and themselves. You are invited to join an ongoing discussion of this issue at http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/addressing-the-problem-of
  • Putting pressure on professors to improve teaching will not result in better education. The primary reason is that they do not know how to make real improvements. The problem is that in many fields of education there is either not enough research, or they do not have good ways of evaluationg the results of their teaching.
  • Then there needs to be a research based assessment that can be used by individual professors, NOT by the administration.
  • Humanities educatiors either have to learn enough statistics and cognitive science so they can make valid scientific comparisons of different strategies, or they have to work with cognitive scientists and statisticians
  • good teaching takes time
  • On the measurement side, about half of the assessments constructed by faculty fail to meet reasonable minimum standards for validity. (Interestingly, these failures leave the door open to a class action lawsuit. Physicians are successfully sued for failing to apply scientific findings correctly; commerce is replete with lawsuits based on measurement errors.)
  • The elephant in the corner of the room --still-- is that we refuse to measure learning outcomes and impact, especially proficiencies generalized to one's life outside the classroom.
  • until universities stop playing games to make themselves look better because they want to maintain their comfortable positions and actually look at what they can do to improve nothing is going to change.
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    our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.
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    How about using examples of highly motivational lecture and teaching techniques like the Richard Dawkins video I presented on this forum, recently. Even if teacher's do not consciously try to adopt good working techniques, there is at least a strong subconscious human tendency to mimic behaviors. I think that if teachers see more effective techniques, they will automatically begin to adopt adopt them.
Gary Brown

AFT Opens New Web Site as Forum on Accountability and Student Success - The Ticker - Th... - 0 views

  • The American Federation of Teachers is weighing in on the debate over accountability and student success with a new Web site. The site is billed as a "clearinghouse of accountability initiatives" and as a forum for educators to discuss the accountability systems that best help students succeed.
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    one to be aware of....
Joshua Yeidel

THINK Global School Blog - 3 views

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    "A recent experiment we did asked the question: What happens if you combine lessons from web 2.0 and social media to the process of developing a rubric? The result? We've built what we call "Social Rubrics". Essentially this tool facilitates the process of building a rubric for teachers (and students) in a much more open and collaborative way." A plug-in for Elgg.
Nils Peterson

News & Broadcast - World Bank Frees Up Development Data - 0 views

  • April 20, 2010—The World Bank Group said today it will offer free access to more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been available only to paying subscribers.
  • Hans Rosling, Gapminder Foundation co-founder and vigorous advocate of open data at the World Bank, said, “It’s the right thing to do, because it will foster innovation. That is the most important thing.”He said he hoped the move would inspire more tools for visualizing data and set an example for other international institutions.
  • The new website at data.worldbank.org offers full access to data from 209 countries, with some of the data going back 50 years. Users will be able to download entire datasets for a particular country or indicator, quickly access raw data, click a button to comment on the data, email and share data with social media sites, says Neil Fantom, a senior statistician at the World Bank.
Joshua Yeidel

Cross-Disciplinary Grading Techniques - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    "So far, the most useful tool to me, in physics, has been the rubric, which is used widely in grading open-ended assessments in the humanities. "
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    A focus on improving the grading experience, rather than the learning experience, but still a big step forward for (some) hard scientists.
Corinna Lo

Blackboard Outcomes Assessment Webcast - Moving Beyond Accreditation: Using Institution... - 0 views

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    The first 12 minutes of the webcast is worth watching. He opened up with a story of the investigation of cholera outbreak during Victorian era in London, and brought that into how it related to student success. He then summarized what the key methods of measurement were, and some lessons Learned: An "interdisciplinary" led to unconventional, yet innovative methods of investigation. The researchers relied on multiple forms of measurement to come to their conclusion. The visualization of their data was important to proving their case to others.
Joshua Yeidel

Google Fixes IE6 with Chrome Frame - 0 views

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    Chrome Frame is a new open-source product from Google that promises to answer web developer dreams. It's a free plug-in for IE6, IE7 and IE8 that turns Internet Explorer into Google's Chrome browser!
Gary Brown

Don't Shrug Off Student Evaluations - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

  • On their most basic level, student evaluations are important because they open the doors of our classrooms. It is one of the remarkable ironies of academe that while we teachers seek to open the minds of our students—to shine a light on hypocrisy, illusion, corruption, and distortion; to tell the truth of our disciplines as we see it—some of us want that classroom door to be closed to the outside world. It is as if we were living in some sort of academic version of the Da Vinci code: Only insiders can know the secret handshake.
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    A Chronicle version that effectively surveys the issues. Maybe nothing new, but a few nuggets.
Gary Brown

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

  • 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.
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    The discussion about Microsoft's Philadelphia School of the future, failing so far. (partial access to article only)
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    I highlight this as a model where faculty and their teaching beliefs appear not to have been addressed.
Nils Peterson

Washington State's Dilemma: How to Serve Up a Book Criticizing the Food Industry - Chro... - 0 views

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    The last paragraph is a good one and the core question I think we have been working on with harvesting gradebook - make not only the student work, but the assignment and the assessment criteria open as community property. Why not have community involved in the conversation about what is important to study?
Joshua Yeidel

Google Code Blog: PPK: The Open Web Goes Mobile - 0 views

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    "Now, fortunately, PPK [of Quirksmode.com] is turning his attention to the world of mobile web devices. To no one's surprise, browser compatibility on mobile devices is even worse than it is on the desktop."
Joshua Yeidel

Video: Can Web Tools Replace Blackboard? - Chronicle.com - 0 views

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    In this 4-minute video, Jim Groom articulates the "LMS is out-of-date" argument, and suggests that the future of online education depends on re-imagining the "form". He points to issues like openness of code and owndership of data.
Theron DesRosier

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything - 0 views

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    Garrett Lisi's paper is the most downloaded article on the arXiv. When you go to this page check out the blog links on the right-hand side of the page. This is an example of an open scientific network of practice.
Joshua Yeidel

eXe : eLearning XHTML editor - 0 views

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    A free, open-source webpage creation and editing tool that can export in IMS Content Package, IMS Common Cartridge, or SCORM formats (or as stand-alone web pages.
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