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in title, tags, annotations or url

"We conclude that value-added data has an important role to play in teacher evaluation systems, but that there is much to be learned about how best to use value-added information in human resource decisions." No mention of the role of assessment in improvement.

A Portal for Innovative Ideas This portal is produced by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, and is a marketplace of ideas and examples of government innovation. Browse or search to access news, documents, descriptions of award-winning programs, and information on events in your area of interest related to innovation. * RSS Feeds are available for each individual topic area. * We invite you to register to access online events, and to receive the biweekly Innovators Insights newsletter. * And, we encourage you to visit the Ash Institute YouTube Channel. The Ash Institute's Innovations in American Government Awards Program, and its affiliated international programs, are integral to the Government Innovators Network. Learn about the IAG program and how to apply.

what separates College 2.0 from the anonymity of Web 2.0 is not just that you have to put your name behind your words, but that college gives us the chance to practice what our blogs preach...a shift from education as primarily information intake (watching a Hollywood movie), to education as action (posting our own movie on YouTube)...This is education by doing, or education based on the idea that we can get things done. Now....college plays an integral role as an enabler of what we want to do...college has given me the confidence to speak up when someone has the wrong idea - like the theory that college is dying. It's not dying, it's rebooting.

What would John Dewey make of this?

This looks like it might be something we would want to follow up on. would like to see this in action.

"In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive. This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.org/futureofeverything/), brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus. Date: May 19, 2009 Place: Norwood, MA"

Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt, which since 1981 has been ruled by Mubarak's National Democratic Party under a permanent state-of-emergency law. An estimated 18,000 Egyptians are imprisoned under the law, which allows the police to arrest people without charges, allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government. Newspapers are monitored by the Ministry of Information and generally refrain from directly criticizing Mubarak. And so for young people in Egypt, Facebook, which allows users to speak freely to one another and encourages them to form groups, is irresistible as a platform not only for social interaction but also for dissent.

points at seely brown social life of information, gives a couple takes on future of the CMS

Information from the Personal Democracty forum on next steps for networked governance.

"Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative."

Connect this to the 10 point self assessment we did for AACU comparing institutional vs community-based learning https://teamsite.oue.wsu.edu/ctlt/home/Anonymous%20Access%20Documents/AACU%202009/inst%20vs%20comm%20based%20spectrum.pdf

After four months of spirited discussion, the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community has voted on the, "Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009." The final list for 2009, ranked by popularity, includes (click on individual Challenges to visit their wiki page): 1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation. 2. Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual). 3. Reaching and engaging today's learner. 4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT. 5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.

The Harvard Networks in Political Science Conference\nThis site contains papers and presentations on network applications in political science. Interresting titles include: "Network Analysis for International Relations", "Social Networks and Correct Voting", "Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks", "Mapping Iran's Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere ", and "Mining Political Blog Networks".

"Visualising CoAuthors in Open Repository Online Papers, Part 3 In Visualising CoAuthors in Open Repository Online Papers, Part 2 I described an approach for pulling author information out of the OU ORO repository and displaying it in various ways, such as using a Graphviz plotted graph. I knew that ORO was scheduling an update, which has been pushed in the last few days, so the screen scraper I wrote to work with the old repository is now broken (of course...). The new ORO engine is capable of generating RSS search feeds though, so looking forwards, the whole system is far easier to play with it..."

FROM OVERVIEW: "They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Persuasive Writing is recommended for use in Sages First Seminars. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein have created a book of templates useful for "Demystifying Academic Conversation" (Preface ix). While the book has received mixed reviews (mostly related to the contentious issue of whether or not templates are useful/proper tools for use in writing instruction; see "Responses to TSIS" below), we present the following information to help you decide for yourself. In addition, you will find sample exercises from the text (some of which have been tested in the classroom) under "Links." '

Students consistently told us that "really good" or "the best" writing is writing that is performative, that makes something happen in the world; for more information about this aspect of our findings, please see our article "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy" Throughout the five years, students reported being deeply engaged with writing out of class: for these students, extracurricular writing is very important, often more important than any of the writing they are doing for classes. Of the thousands of out-of-class texts students contributed, here is a representative sample:

Predictive Markets at HP: "we is smarter than all of us". Leslie R/ Fine: "The BRAIN Process is an information aggregation tool that harnesses all of the power and truth-telling properties of market mechanisms and implements it with all of the simplicity and robustness of a simple survey.

"Q: What elements help make institutional effectiveness assessment successful? Suskie: One factor really stands out: If institutional leaders really value assessment results and use them to inform important decisions on important goals, your institutional effectiveness efforts will be a resounding success."

A must read spotted by Jane Sherman--I've highlighed, as usual, much of it.

The lack of correlation might be rephrased--there appears to be no corrlation between what is useful for faculty who teach and what is useful for the VSA. A corollary question: Of what use is the VSA?

another to watch--the politization of the, well, everything

a long blog, but underlying principles align with the Guide to Effective Assessment on many levels.