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Theron DesRosier

OECD Feasibility Study for the International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Ou... - 3 views

www.oecd.org/...61291_40624662_1_1_1_1,00.html

assessment accountability accreditation

shared by Theron DesRosier on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 01 Jul 10
     
    "What is AHELO? The OECD Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) is a ground-breaking initiative to assess learning outcomes on an international scale by creating measures that would be valid for all cultures and languages. Between ten and thirty-thousand higher education students in over ten different countries will take part in a feasibility study to determine the bounds of this ambitious project, with an eye to the possible creation of a full-scale AHELO upon its completion."
Gary Brown

Details | LinkedIn - 0 views

www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers

grading scales

shared by Gary Brown on 04 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • I'm interested to hear from you how you arrive at a grade A, B, B+ etc. I assume from reading the various postings here that you use numerical marking (ratio scale) for different criteria to reach a final grade? At our institute we have been using ordinal scales for some time but now find that these are too broad to do justice to the quality of the work that students submit. On the other hand, using a direct ratio scale seems a daunting task for a lot of people and according to the literature is difficult to deal with. I appreciate to hear about your opnions and experiences.
  • Gary Brown on 04 Sep 10
     
    A transparency in grading discussion that hits on an area of interest. Hmmm
Gary Brown

Disciplines Follow Their Own Paths to Quality - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...125055

assessment accreditation critical thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • But when it comes to the fundamentals of measuring and improving student learning, engineering professors naturally have more to talk about with their counterparts at, say, Georgia Tech than with the humanities professors at Villanova
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10
       
      Perhaps this is too bad....
  • But there is no nationally normed way to measure the particular kind of critical thinking that students of classics acquire
  • er colleagues have created discipline-specific critical-reasoning tests for classics and political science
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Political science cultivates skills that are substantially different from those in classics, and in each case those skills can't be measured with a general-education test.
  • he wants to use tests of reasoning that are appropriate for each discipline
  • I believe Richard Paul has spent a lifetime articulating the characteristics of discipline based critical thinking. But anyway, I think it is interesting that an attempt is being made to develop (perhaps) a "national standard" for critical thinking in classics. In order to assess anything effectively we need a standard. Without a standard there are no criteria and therefore no basis from which to assess. But standards do not necessarily have to be established at the national level. This raises the issue of scale. What is the appropriate scale from which to measure the quality and effectiveness of an educational experience? Any valid approach to quality assurance has to be multi-scaled and requires multiple measures over time. But to be honest the issues of standards and scale are really just the tip of the outcomes iceberg.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10
       
      Missing the notion that the variance is in the activity more than the criteria.  We hear little of embedding nationally normed and weighted assignments and then assessing the implementation and facilitation variables.... mirror, not lens.
  • the UW Study of Undergraduate Learning (UW SOUL). Results from the UW SOUL show that learning in college is disciplinary; therefore, real assessment of learning must occur (with central support and resources)in the academic departments. Generic approaches to assessing thinking, writing, research, quantitative reasoning, and other areas of learning may be measuring something, but they cannot measure learning in college.
  • It turns out there is a six week, or 210+ hour serious reading exposure to two or more domains outside ones own, that "turns on" cross domain mapping as a robust capability. Some people just happen to have accumulated, usually by unseen and unsensed happenstance involvements (rooming with an engineer, son of a dad changing domains/careers, etc.) this minimum level of basics that allows robust metaphor based mapping.
Nils Peterson

Tom Vander Ark: How Social Networking Will Transform Learning - 2 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...l-networking-wit_b_349467.html

learning web2.0 higher_education

shared by Nils Peterson on 12 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Key assumption: teacher effectiveness is the key variable; more good teachers will improve student achievement
  • I'm betting on social learning platforms as a lever for improvement at scale in education. Instead of a classroom as the primary organizing principle, social networks will become the primary building block of learning communities (both formal and informal). Smart recommendation engines will queue personalized content. Tutoring, training, and collaboration tools will be applications that run on social networks. New schools will be formed around these capabilities. Teachers in existing schools will adopt free tools yielding viral, bureaucracy-cutting productivity improvement.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Mar 10
       
      I just Diigoed UrgentEvoke.com (a game) and Jumo.com a new social site, each targeted at working on big, real-world problems.
  • Theron DesRosier on 12 Nov 09
     
    Vander Ark was the first Executive Director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. From his post: "There are plenty of theories about how to improve education. Most focus on what appear to be big levers--a point of entry and system intervention that appears to provide some improvement leverage. These theories usually involve 'if-then' statements: 'if we improve this, then other good stuff will happen.'" "One problem not addressed by these theories is the lack of innovation diffusion in education--a good idea won't cross the street. Weak improvement incentives and strong bureaucracy have created a lousy marketplace for products and ideas." "Key assumption: teacher effectiveness is the key variable; more good teachers will improve student achievement" "I'm betting on social learning platforms as a lever for improvement at scale in education. Instead of a classroom as the primary organizing principle, social networks will become the primary building block of learning communities (both formal and informal). Smart recommendation engines will queue personalized content. Tutoring, training, and collaboration tools will be applications that run on social networks. New schools will be formed around these capabilities. Teachers in existing schools will adopt free tools yielding viral, bureaucracy-cutting productivity improvement."
  • Nils Peterson on 18 Mar 10
     
    "Key assumption: teacher effectiveness is the key variable; more good teachers will improve student achievement" Vander Ark was the first Executive Director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. From his post:"There are plenty of theories about how to improve education. Most focus on what appear to be big levers--a point of entry and system intervention that appears to provide some improvement leverage. These theories usually involve 'if-then' statements: 'if we improve this, then other good stuff will happen.'" "One problem not addressed by these theories is the lack of innovation diffusion in education--a good idea won't cross the street. Weak improvement incentives and strong bureaucracy have created a lousy marketplace for products and ideas." "I'm betting on social learning platforms as a lever for improvement at scale in education. Instead of a classroom as the primary organizing principle, social networks will become the primary building block of learning communities (both formal and informal). Smart recommendation engines will queue personalized content. Tutoring, training, and collaboration tools will be applications that run on social networks. New schools will be formed around these capabilities. Teachers in existing schools will adopt free tools yielding viral, bureaucracy-cutting productivity improvement."\n\n\n
Joshua Yeidel

Above-Campus Services: Shaping the Promise of Cloud Computing for Higher Education (EDU... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...185222

higher_education information technology

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 15 Jun 10 - Cached
  • In the early 1990s, Mike Zucchini, formerly the CIO of Fleet/Norstar, saw four possible reasons for outsourcing information technology. He explained these reasons in his "4-S" model: Scale — the desire to access economies of scale and efficiency that an institution could not achieve alone; Specialty — the desire to access specialized expertise that is too expensive to staff; Sale — the desire to turn nonproductive assets of capital facilities and IT equipment into cash to improve a balance sheet and reduce headcount; and Surrender — the desire to simplify the IT agenda by essentially giving up and hoping that a contract for service yields the outcomes an executive desires.7 Zucchini argued that Scale and Specialty are functional reasons for outsourcing and that Sale and Surrender are ultimately dysfunctional. History supports his insights: the big Sale/Surrender outsourcing deals of Kodak, American Express, GM, and Xerox all proved transient as the complexities of managing by contract and service-level agreements led to the eventual re-creation of internal IT service capabilities
  • Joshua Yeidel on 15 Jun 10
     
    Describes a "meta-versity" concept based on cloud computing shared by HE institutions. Although the article focuses on the institution level, many of the considerations also occur in department-level movement toward the cloud.
Theron DesRosier

University of the people - 0 views

mashable.com/...education-social-media

education future social eLearning

shared by Theron DesRosier on 27 Jul 09 - Cached
  • One vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn’t afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas. The school is a one hundred percent online institution, and utilizes open source courseware and peer-to-peer learning to deliver information to students without charging tuition. There are some costs, however. Students must pay an application fee (though the idea is to accept everyone who applies that has a high school diploma and speaks English), and when they’re ready, students must pay to take tests, which they are required to pass in order to continue their education. All fees are set on a sliding scale based on the student’s country of origin, and never exceed $100.
  • Theron DesRosier on 27 Jul 09
     
    "One vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN's Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn't afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas. All fees are set on a sliding scale based on the student's country of origin, and never exceed $100. "
Joshua Yeidel

The Tower and The Cloud | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...133998

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 06 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 06 Nov 08
     
    "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."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 03 Dec 08
     
    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.
Joshua Yeidel

News: 'You Can't Measure What We Teach' - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...humanities

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10
     
    "Despite those diverging starting points, the discussion revealed quite a bit more common ground than any of the panelists probably would have predicted. Let's be clear: Where they ended up was hardly a breakthrough on the scale of solving the Middle East puzzle. But there was general agreement among them that: * Any effort to try to measure learning in the humanities through what McCulloch-Lovell deemed "[Margaret] Spellings-type assessment" -- defined as tests or other types of measures that could be easily compared across colleges and neatly sum up many of the learning outcomes one would seek in humanities students -- was doomed to fail, and should. * It might be possible, and could be valuable, for humanists to reach broad agreement on the skills, abilities, and knowledge they might seek to instill in their students, and that agreement on those goals might be a starting point for identifying effective ways to measure how well students have mastered those outcomes. * It is incumbent on humanities professors and academics generally to decide for themselves how to assess whether their students are learning, less to satisfy external calls for accountability than because it is the right thing for academics, as professionals who care about their students, to do. "
  • Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10
     
    Assessment meeting at the accreditors -- driven by expectations of a demand for accountability, with not one mention of improvement.
Joshua Yeidel

Taking the sting out of the honeybee controversy - environmentalresearchweb - 1 views

environmentalresearchweb.org/...41522

harvesting environment rubric

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 28 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 28 Jan 10
     
    Researchers use "harvesting feedback" and a uncertainty scale to illuminate how stakeholders use evidence to explain honeybee declines in France.
Joshua Yeidel

Learn More about Pivot | Live Labs Pivot - 1 views

www.getpivot.com

visualization microsoft pivot

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 21 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 21 Apr 10
     
    "Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web."
Joshua Yeidel

Managing Lists and Libraries with Thousands or Millions of Items - SharePoint Joel's Sh... - 0 views

www.sharepointjoel.com/...Post.aspx

sharepoint repository

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 14 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 14 Jul 09
     
    One of the biggest challenges for a document management system built on SharePoint is scaling lists.  There is actually quite a bit of knowledge spread across the help files, technet documentation, in whitepapers and on blogs… but it's still quite difficult to navigate this challenge.
Nils Peterson

The Huffington Post Allows Top Commenters To Become Bloggers - Publishing 2.0 - 0 views

publishing2.com/...-commenters-to-become-bloggers

shared by Nils Peterson on 04 Sep 09 - Cached
  • they took a middle path, opening up an opportunity for ANYONE who actively comments on Huffington Post to become a blogger — but with one caveat…they have to EARN it. Or put another way — they are leveraging the power of the network, while still creating boundaries to channel value.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 04 Sep 09
       
      How to become a HuffPost blogger. Gives insight into assessment scales
  • Since launching in May 2005, we’ve received more than 2.7 million comments, posted by over 115,000 commenters.
  • Our decision will be based on how many fans a commenter has, how often their comment is selected as a Favorite, and our moderators’ preferences. Every comment now has an “I’m A Fan Of” link and a “Favorite” link, so start voting for the comments and commenters you like best.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • By using a “groupsourcing” method to highlight well-received commenters — from whom we’ll be able to choose new bloggers — we’re leveraging the power of the HuffPost community to serve as a filter, highlighting strong writers who have something to add to our group blog mix.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 04 Sep 09
       
      So this is the crux of the issue for Cathy Davidson. Her syllabus proposes using a single criteria "satisfactory" and it appears that it might work if the volume of voters is large and their demographics sufficiently distributed. Also note that its voting for a cream of the crop, not just satisfactory. In a smaller setting, a scale with more than two values and comments like CTLT proposes gives more chance for discrimination and value in the feedback
Nils Peterson

How would you design an ICT/education program for impact? | A World Bank Blog on ICT us... - 0 views

blogs.worldbank.org/...what-to-do

shared by Nils Peterson on 21 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Country x has, in various ways, been host to numerous initiatives to introduce computers into its schools and, to lesser extents, to train teachers and students on their use, and schools have piloted a variety of digital learning materials and education software applications.  It is now ready, country leaders say, to invest in a rigorous, randomized trial of an educational technology initiative as a prelude to a very ambitious, large-scale roll-out of the use of educational technologies nationwide. It asks: What programs or specific interventions should we consider?
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 21 Jul 10
       
      World Bank Sr. Policy Wonk asking for help thinking through this quesion in a WB branded blog.
  • What would be a useful response to such inquiries?  How would you design a program for measurable impact in a way that is immediately policy-relevant for decisionmakers contemplating large investments in the use of technology in the education sector, and what would this program look like?
Nils Peterson

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine - 0 views

www.wired.com/...1

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back. This development — a familiar historical march, both feudal and corporate, in which the less powerful are sapped of their reason for being by the better resourced, organized, and efficient — is perhaps the rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the Internet Age. After all, this is a battle that seemed fought and won — not just toppling newspapers and music labels but also AOL and Prodigy and anyone who built a business on the idea that a curated experience would beat out the flexibility and freedom of the Web.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Aug 10
       
      An interesting perspective, goes along with another piece I diigoed in Educause Review that was exploring the turning of the tide against EduPunk. What is problematic with the graphic at the lead of this article is that it does not account for the volume of traffic, its all scaled to 100%. So while web's market share is falling as a percent of total packets, and video market share is growing, its not clear that web use (esp for tasks related to learning) is declining.
  • You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.
  • This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software
  • But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the Web as a worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, Wired published a now-infamous “Push!” cover story, which suggested that it was time to “kiss your browser goodbye.”
  • “Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of interactive media — increasingly, the center of gravity of all media — is moving to a post-HTML environment,” we promised nearly a decade and half ago. The examples of the time were a bit silly — a “3-D furry-muckers VR space” and “headlines sent to a pager” — but the point was altogether prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be less about browsing and more about getting.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Aug 10
       
      While the mode is different, does that mean that the independent creation of content and the peer-communities go away because the browser does? Perhaps, because the app is a mechanism to monetize and control content and interaction.
Gary Brown

Ranking Employees: Why Comparing Workers to Their Peers Can Often Backfire - Knowledge@... - 2 views

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm

ratings feedback

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Aug 10 - Cached
  • We live in a world full of benchmarks and rankings. Consumers use them to compare the latest gadgets. Parents and policy makers rely on them to assess schools and other public institutions,
  • "Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive -- to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens," says Barankay, whose previous research and teaching has focused on personnel and labor economics. "Workers can become complacent and de-motivated. People who rank highly think, 'I am already number one, so why try harder?' And people who are far behind can become depressed about their work and give up."
  • mong the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Nothing is more compelling than data from actual workplace settings, but getting it is usually very hard."
  • Instead, the job without the feedback attracted more workers -- 254, compared with 76 for the job with feedback.
  • "This indicates that when people are great and they know it, they tend to slack off. But when they're at the bottom, and are told they're doing terribly, they are de-motivated," says Barankay.
  • In the second stage of the experiment
  • it seems that people would rather not know how they rank compared to others, even though when we surveyed these workers after the experiment, 74% said they wanted feedback about their rank."
  • Of the workers in the control group, 66% came back for more work, compared with 42% in the treatment group. The members of the treatment group who returned were also 22% less productive than the control group. This seems to dispel the notion that giving people feedback might encourage high-performing workers to work harder to excel, and inspire low-ranked workers to make more of an effort.
  • The aim was to determine whether giving people feedback affected their desire to do more work, as well as the quantity and quality of their work.
  • top performers move on to new challenges and low performers have no viable options elsewhere.
  • feedback about rank is detrimental to performance,"
  • it is well documented that tournaments, where rankings are tied to prizes, bonuses and promotions, do inspire higher productivity and performance.
  • "In workplaces where rankings and relative performance is very transparent, even without the intervention of management ... it may be better to attach financial incentives to rankings, as interpersonal comparisons without prizes may lead to lower effort," Barankay suggests. "In those office environments where people may not be able to assess and compare the performance of others, it may not be useful to just post a ranking without attaching prizes."
  • "The key is to devote more time to thinking about whether to give feedback, and how each individual will respond to it. If, as the employer, you think a worker will respond positively to a ranking and feel inspired to work harder, then by all means do it. But it's imperative to think about it on an individual level."
  • Gary Brown on 23 Aug 10
     
    the conflation of feedback with ranking confounds this. What is not done and needs to be done is to compare the motivational impact of providing constructive feedback. Presumably the study uses ranking in a strictly comparative context as well, and we do not see the influence of feedback relative to an absolute scale. Still, much in this piece to ponder....
Nils Peterson

Edge 313 - 1 views

www.edge.org/...edge313.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10 - Cached
  • So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code. Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      US vs Euro thinking about the Internet
  • TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY 1.  No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.
  • Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished? 4. It has increased not the quality but the quantity of our writing — "our" meaning society's as a whole. The Internet for its part has increased not the quality but the quantity of the information we see. Increasing quantity is easier than improving quality. Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search.
  • Will you store your personal information on your own personal machines, or on nameless servers far away in the Cloud, or both? Answer: in the Cloud. The Cloud (or the Internet Operating System, IOS — "Cloud 1.0") will take charge of your personal machines. It will move the information you need at any given moment onto your own cellphone, laptop, pad, pod — but will always keep charge of the master copy. When you make changes to any document, the changes will be reflected immediately in the Cloud. Many parts of this service are available already.
  • The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses).
  • In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen.
  • The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The "velocity of information" is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today's typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it's not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure. 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      jayme will like this for her timeline portfolios
  • There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it's obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it's easy to blend any group of streams, it's easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for "snow" means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn't deal with snow. Subtracting the "not snow" stream from the mainstream yields a "snow" stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      is Yahoo Pipes a precursor? Theron sent me an email, subject: "let me pipe that for you"
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      Google Buzz might also be a ersion of this. It bring together items from your (multiple) public streams.
  • Internet culture is a culture of nowness. The Internet tells you what your friends are doing and the world news now, the state of the shops and markets and weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. The Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many different places at one moment in time.
  • Once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact. Such timelines are not history, but they are the raw material of history.
  • Before long, all personal, familial and institutional histories will take visible form in streams.   A lifestream is tangible time:  as life flashes past on waterskis across time's ocean, a lifestream is the wake left in its trail. Dew crystallizes out of the air along cool surfaces; streams crystallize out of the Cybersphere along veins of time. As streams begin to trickle and then rush through the spring thaw in the Cybersphere, our obsession with "nowness" will recede
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      barrett has been using lifestream. this guy claims to have coined it lonf ago...in any event, it is a very different picture of portfolio -- more like "not your father's" than like AAEEBL.
  • The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing just what we like and ignoring the rest. On the Net we have the satisfaction of reading only opinions we already agree with, only facts (or alleged facts) we already know. You might read ten stories about ten different topics in a traditional newspaper; on the net, many people spend that same amount of time reading ten stories about the same topic. But again, once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add "drift" to the net, so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you're tired) into places you hadn't planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.
Gary Brown

News: No Letup From Washington - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...hlc

accountability accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Virtually all of the national higher education leaders who spoke to the country's largest accrediting group sent a version of the same message: The federal government is dead serious about holding colleges and universities accountable for their performance, and can be counted on to impose undesirable requirements if higher education officials don't make meaningful changes themselves.
  • "This is meant to be a wakeup call," Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said in Monday's keynote address
  • I believe it’s wise for us to assume they will have little reservation about regulating higher education now that they know it is too important to fail."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Obama administration will be tough on colleges because its officials value higher education and believe it needs to perform much better, and successfully educate many more students, to drive the American economy.
  • In her own speech to the Higher Learning Commission’s members on Sunday, Sylvia Manning, the group’s president, cited several signs that the new administration seemed willing to delve into territory that not long ago would have been viewed as off-limits to federal intrusion. Among them: A recently published “draft” of a guide to accreditation that many accrediting officials believe is overly prescriptive. A just-completed round of negotiations over proposed rules that deal with the definition of a “credit hour” and other issues that touch on academic quality -- areas that have historically been the province of colleges and their faculties. And, of special relevance for the Higher Learning Commission, a trio of critical letters from the Education Department’s inspector general challenging the association’s policies and those of two other regional accreditors on key matters -- and in North Central’s case, questioning its continued viability. With that stroke, Manning noted, the department’s newfound activism “has come to the doorstep, or into the living room, of HLC.”
  • Pressure to measure student learning -- to find out which tactics and approaches are effective, which create efficiency without lowering results -- is increasingly coming from what Broad called the Obama administration's "kitchen cabinet," foundations like the Lumina Foundation for Education (which she singled out) to which the White House and Education Department are increasingly looking for education policy help.
  • She cited an October speech in which the foundation's president, Jamie P. Merisotis, said that student learning should be recognized as the "primary measure of quality in higher education," and heralded the European Union's Bologna process as a potential path for making that so
  • we cannot lay low and hope that the glare of the spotlight will eventually fall on others," Broad told the Higher Learning Commission audience.
  • While higher ed groups have been warned repeatedly that they must act before Congress next renews the Higher Education Act -- a process that will begin in earnest in two or three years -- the reality is that politicians in Washington no longer feel obliged to hold off on major changes to higher education policy until that main law is reviewed. Congress has passed "seven major pieces of legislation" related to higher education in recent years, and "I wish I could tell you that the window is open" until the next reauthorization, Broad said. "But we cannot presume that we have the luxury of years within which to get our collective house in order. We must act quickly."
  • But where will such large-scale change come from? The regional accreditors acting together to align their standards? Groups of colleges working together to agree on a common set of learning outcomes for general education, building on the work of the American Association of Colleges and Universities? No answers here, yet.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Apr 10
     
    Note the positions of the participants
Gary Brown

The Wired Campus - Duke Professor Uses 'Crowdsourcing' to Grade - The Chronicle of High... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...7538

grading crowd-sourcing peer review

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says."You've got this real mismatch between the kind of participatory learning that’s happening online and outside of the classroom, and the top-down, hierarchical learning and rigid assessment schemes that we’re using in the classroom from grades K through 12 and all the way up to graduate school," Ms. Davidson says. "In school systems today, we’re putting more and more emphasis on quantitative assessment in an era when, out of the classroom, students are learning through an entirely different way of collaboration, customizing, and interacting."
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Aug 09
     
    We need to contact Cathy Davidson and work together on this.
Nils Peterson

Reasons Facebook Beat MySpace | HASTAC - 0 views

www.hastac.org/...reasons-facebook-beat-myspace

shared by Nils Peterson on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • To prove her point, Oshiro offers a couple of nice graphs that show a strong correlation between the introduction of Facebook Connect and a rapid migration from MySpace to Facebook. A closer look at the charts, however, suggests that while the API likely did hasten the shift, it was one that was already taking place. One notable conclusion we can draw from this data, however, is that Facebook's decision to open up user data to third parties did, indeed, have a strong measurable effect on popularity. As more applications became available that could integrate with Facebook, the site became more useful to users. Oshiro writes, "Facebook moved from being a College forum site to a full scale lifestyle platform. Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system."
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 15 Sep 09
       
      Pointing to the open API of Facebook as an aid to its popularity is interesting, but its a technical consideration to interoperate with other systems. My question is, does increased interoperation facilitate more collaboration and open the potential for collaboration by difference. What if Geo Hotz had used Twitter & FB rather than Blogger. Could he? Would it have made a difference? I am finding that having my blog linked to FB is getting me a little (very little) more attention and commenting than without it. But my friends only comment on things I say about Health Care; they don't seem interested in explorations of rubric-based assessment of learning.
Nils Peterson

Goal 2025 - Lumina Foundation: Helping People Achieve Their Potential - 0 views

www.luminafoundation.org/...goal3.html

attainment lumina assessment higher_education

shared by Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09
     
    "Based on current estimates, to reach the 60 percent level by 2025, the U.S. higher education system must produce 23 million more college graduates than are expected at present rates of production. The actual size of the gap will shift annually, as we make progress and new data become available. Obviously, we can't close this gap overnight. But, for example, if we can start to increase the rate of attainment each year and produce 150,000 more graduates than the year before - an annual increase of about 5 percent - we will reach the big goal by 2025."
  • Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09
     
    adding 150,000 more college graduates/year each year from now to 2025 is a significant scaling up. Spread over 5000 institutions its only 30/institution on average, which many could manage. Or perhaps Western Governors could absorb many of them.
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