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Some suggestions fort Scientists about blogging. "So what should you put in your blog? (1) Talk about your research. What have you done in the past? What are you working on at the moment? There is some controversy as to how transparent you should be when talking about your research (OMG, someone is going to steal my idea if I write it down! No wait, if everyone knows I said it first, then they can't steal it!), so it's up to you to decide how comfortable you are about sharing your research ideas. I'm old-fashioned enough that I tend towards the side that thinks we should be discreet about the details of what we're working on, but I also understand the side that wants everything to be out there. (2) Talk about other people's research. Do you agree with their results? Do you think that they missed something important? You may feel unqualified to criticize somebody else's work, but science does not advance through groupthink. Remember, part of your job as a scientist will be to review other people's papers. Now is as good a time as any to start practicing. (3) Talk about issues related to your research. Are you working on smartphones? Talk about how they're being integrated into museum visits. Working on accessibility issues? Talk about some of the problems that the handicapped encounter during their daily routine. Just make sure you choose to talk about something that interests you so that you feel motivated to write to your blog. "

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

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....

"Definition 2 - disaggregating power There is a very different power relationship between being given a space which 'enables contexts' and 'allows supports' for a user and a space that you build and support for yourself. It dodges those institutionally created problems of student mobility, of losing the connections formed in your learning and gives you a professional 'place' from which you can start to make long term knowledge network connections that form the higher end of the productive learning/knowing that is possible on the web. The power is disaggregated in the sense that while attending an institution of learning you are still under the dominance of the instructor or the regulations surrounding accreditation, but coming to your learning space is not about that dominance. The power held (and, i should probably add, that you've given to that institution in applying for accreditation/learning it's not (necessarily) a power of tyranny) by the institution only touches some of your work, and it need not impede any work you choose to do. Here's where I get to the part about the 'personal' that's been bothering me The danger in taking definition two as our definition for PLE is that we lose sight of the subtle, complex dance of person and ecology so eloquently described by Keith Hamon in his response to my post. Maybe more dangerously, we might get taken up as thinking that learning is something that happens to the person, and not as part of a complex rhizome of connections that form the basis of the human experience. Learning (and I don't mean definitions or background) and the making of connections of knowledge is something that is steeped in complexity. At each point we are structured in the work (written in a book, sung in a song, spoken in a web session) of others that constantly tests our own connections and further complexifies our understanding. This is the pattern of knowledge as i understand it. It is organic, and messy, and su

We agree with both President Obama and Senator Coburn that universal accessibility of such information is worthwhile goal. However, we believe this is only a first step. In a deep sense, our prior post is designed to serve as a demonstration project. We are just two graduate students working on a shoestring budget. With the resources of the federal government, however, it would certainly be possible to create a series of simple interfaces designed to broadly represent of large amounts of information. While these interfaces should rely upon the best available analytical methods, such methods could probably be built-in behind the scenes. At a minimum, government agencies should follow the suggestion of David G. Robinson and his co-authors who argue the federal government "should require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large."

an interesting example of work with large data sets, but also, a research group that is working "off-shore" from their campus and in a blog in ways that seem to parallel WSUCTLT

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

In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another.The Differenceis about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Differencereveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality.

We (Jayme Jacobson, Nils Peterson, and I) have been talking about this a lot lately. This article reminded me of another article in the Harvard Business Review by Lakhani and Jeppesen on crowdsourcing. They found that successful Innocentive solvers often worked in disciplines removed from the posted problem. "Radical innovations often happen at the intersections of disciplines…The more diverse the problem solving population, the more likely the problem will be solved." Lakhani and Jeppesen May 2007 Harvard Business Review Thanks Stephen

This is about games to improve employee work.

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

irst, ePortfolios can integrate student learning in an expanded range of media, literacies, and viable intellectual work. As the robust ePortfolio projects at Washington State, Clemson, and Pennsylvania State Universities illustrate, ePortfolios enable students to collect work and reflections on their learning through text, imagery, and multimedia artifacts. Given that we are already living in a culture where visual communication is as influential as written text, the ability to represent learning through integrated media will be essential.

What emerged from this work was a picture of learning that drew our attention to a series of intermediate thinking processes that characterize flexible thinking, processes that digital media are especially good at making visible. This includes such things as how students work through difficulty, consider alternative pathways to solve problems, speculate about ideas, and argue with one another about meaning. These kinds of thinking processes turn out to be much more than just cognitive. Motivation, confidence, fear, one's sense of identity, experience, as well as formal knowledge all come to bear on them.

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.

our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.

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.

"The professor said he did find a way to greatly reduce cheating on homework in his class. He switched to a "studio" model of teaching, in which students sit in small groups working through tutorials on computers while professors and teaching assistants roam the room answering questions, rather than a traditional lecture. With lectures, he detected cheating on about 11 percent of homework problems, but now he detects copying on only about 3 percent of them. It might help that he shares findings from his study to his students, showing them that cheaters are much more likely to get C's and D's on exams than those who work out homework problems on their own. "

A physics professor figures out how to detect cheating on homework, (an assessment), triangulates with another assessment (OK, it's an exam) to determine the impact on student learning, and modifies his teaching practice, reducing cheating from 11% to 3%.

This is a happy ending and an interesting useful outcome from assessment. There is also a kind of "duh" quality to it, but that is not a problem. What I'm pondering, though, is the time and energy expended for a 7% gain. What I hope follows is further assessment of the gains for the other 93% relative to learning and attitude toward learning, school, and the subject matter.....

I went to Virtual TA and Highlighted their language describing how it works.

I believe it's a case of the students wanting to challenge the whole notion of "We want to stop you from doing something wrong, and so we're going to (do something wrong ourselves, and ...) steal your work and the work of others to build a hugely profitable business acting as the plagiarism police."