Group items tagged

Fifth in a series on outcome management. "This guide is unique in offering suggestions to nonprofits for analyzing regularly collected outcome data. The guide focuses on those basic analysis activities that nearly all programs, whether large or small, can do themselves. It offers straightforward, common-sense suggestions. "

I've been wrestling with the tension again between supporting programs to help them improve, but then rating them for the accountability charge we hold.  So I've been looking into the concept and practice of the "Critical Friend."  Some tensions are inherent. This quote helps clarify.

The implications for feedback issues are pretty clear.

Create interactive data-rich web pages like these ones below without ever touching a database or a web server, or doing any programming:

"Complexity and Social Networks Blog of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, Harvard University\n\nWelcome! The objective of this blog is to offer a forum for the discussion of the intertwined subjects of network analysis and complex systems theory. "

Introduction to the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education's "Spaces for Interaction" program. AACE runs conferences, and they are asking how technology can improve the posibilities for interaction at and around conferences.

Stanford professor, Linda Darling-Hammond, will chair Obama's transition team studying education policy. This sounds unremarkable, but just like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein are lightning rods, so is Darling-Hammond. The main reason is that Darling-Hammond has been consistently skeptical of the nameless movement's efforts to shake up public schools. She has criticized Teach For America, the alternative certification program for teachers; criticized high-stakes testing, and criticized No Child Left Behind for narrowing the curriculum.

"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."

School of Environmental Studies: Taking Class Outdoors At this Minnesota school focused on problem solving, the academic program and the architecture were designed to promote interdisciplinary project-based learning. More to this story.

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

This week, Stanford has started to roll out a new course, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Taught by Leonard Susskind, one of America's leading physics minds, this course is the fourth of a six-part sequence - Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum - that traces the development of modern physics, moving from Newton to Black Holes. As the title suggests, this course focuses squarely on the groundbreaking work of Albert Einstein. And, it's undoubtedly a plus that the course was presented in Stanford's Continuing Studies program, which means that it's tailored to smart non-specialists like you. You can watch the first lecture on iTunes here, or YouTube below. The remaining lectures will be rolled out on a weekly basis. If you would like to watch the longer sequence of courses, I have provided a complete list of links here. Enjoy.

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.

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

Capella has mandatory faculty training program, and then they select from the training program those who will teach. Candidates also pay their own tuition for the "try-out" or training.

"The National Education Data Model is a conceptual but detailed representation of the education information domain focused at the student, instructor and course/class levels. It delineates the relationships and interdependencies between the data elements necessary to document, operate, track, evaluate, and improve key aspects of an education system. The NEDM strives to be a shared understanding among all education stakeholders as to what information needs to be collected and managed at the local level in order to enable effective instruction of students and superior leadership of schools. It is a comprehensive, non-proprietary inventory and a map of education information that can be used by schools, LEAs, states, vendors, and researchers to identify the information required for teaching, learning, administrative systems, and evaluation of education programs and approaches. "

walkiing the fine line

"Our web-based assessment solution for tracking, comparing, and reporting on student progress and performance gives faculty and administrators the tools they need to assess a class, department, or institution based on your standards, goals, or objectives. The Digication AMS integrates tightly with our award winning e-Portfolio system, enabling students to record and showcase learning outcomes within customizable, media friendly templates."

Could this start out as with program portfolios, and bgrow to include student work?

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