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Theron DesRosier

The Future of Work: As Gartner Sees It - 3 views

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    "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."
Gary Brown

YouTube - Neil Gershenfeld: The beckoning promise of personal fabrication - 3 views

  • Neil Gershenfeld: The beckoning promise of personal fabrication
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    Nominalism fully debunked.  The keynote from EDUCAUSE.  
Gary Brown

Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College? - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

  • Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants.  All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.
  • I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of persons attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning. 
  • As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down (something already happening I suspect) or drop-out rates will rise.  
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  • The relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership is incompatible with this view
  • Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher education apologists is causing more and more persons to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level –there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.Ds, other doctorates, or professional degrees.
  • “Estimating Marginal Returns in Education,”
  • In other words, even if on average, an investment in higher education yields a good, say 10 percent, rate of return, it does not follow that adding to existing investments will yield that return, partly for reasons outlined above.
  • should we be subsidizing increasingly problematic educational programs for students whose prior academic record would suggest little likelihood of academic much less vocational success?
  • I think the American people understand, albeit dimly, the logic above.
  • Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.
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    The tone is not the same as Berliner's, but the numbers suggest WSU's and others goals merit a second look.
Joshua Yeidel

Higher Education: Assessment & Process Improvement Group News | LinkedIn - 2 views

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    "Colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime."
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    A philosophical critique of a rapidly-approaching "metric future", with "comensuration" (assigning meaning to measurements) run amok. While the application of student learning outcomes given in the article is not ours, the critique of continuous quality improvement challenges some of our assumptions.
Gary Brown

The Future of Wannabe U. - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

  • Alice didn't tell me about the topics of her research; instead she listed the number of articles she had written, where they had been submitted and accepted, the reputation of the journals, the data sets she was constructing, and how many articles she could milk from each data set.
  • colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime.
  • higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.
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  • annabe administrator noted that the recipient had published well more than 100 articles. He never said why those articles mattered.
  • And all we have are numbers about teaching. And we don't know what the difference is between a [summary measure of] 7.3 and a 7.7 or an 8.2 and an 8.5."
  • The problem is that such numbers have no meaning. They cannot indicate the quality of a student's education.
  • or can the many metrics that commonly appear in academic (strategic) plans, like student credit hours per full-time-equivalent faculty member, or the percentage of classes with more than 50 students. Those productivity measures (for they are indeed productivity measures) might as well apply to the assembly-line workers who fabricate the proverbial widget, for one cannot tell what the metrics have to do with the supposed purpose of institutions of higher education—to create and transmit knowledge. That includes leading students to the possibility of a fuller life and an appreciation of the world around them and expanding their horizons.
  • But, like the fitness club's expensive cardio machines, a significant increase in faculty research, in the quality of student experiences (including learning), in the institution's service to its state, or in its standing among its peers may cost more than a university can afford to invest or would even dream of paying.
  • Such metrics are a speedup of the academic assembly line, not an intensification or improvement of student learning. Indeed, sometimes a boost in some measures, like an increase in the number of first-year students participating in "living and learning communities," may even detract from what students learn. (Wan U.'s pre-pharmacy living-and-learning community is so competitive that students keep track of one another's grades more than they help one another study. Last year one student turned off her roommate's alarm clock so that she would miss an exam and thus no longer compete for admission to the School of Pharmacy.)
  • Even metrics intended to indicate what students may have learned seem to have more to do with controlling faculty members than with gauging education. Take student-outcomes assessments, meant to be evaluations of whether courses have achieved their goals. They search for fault where earlier researchers would not have dreamed to look. When parents in the 1950s asked why Johnny couldn't read, teachers may have responded that it was Johnny's fault; they had prepared detailed lesson plans. Today student-outcomes assessment does not even try to discover whether Johnny attended class; instead it produces metrics about outcomes without considering Johnny's input.
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    A good one to wrestle with.  It may be worth formulating distinctions we hold, and steering accordingly.
Gary Brown

Western Governors U. President Wins a McGraw Prize in Education - The Ticker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • The university's president, Robert W. Mendenhall, was cited for creating "a compelling example of how technology and a competency-based academic model -- where students earn degrees by demonstrating what they know and can do -- can expand access to higher education."
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    Western Governor's getting some attention
Gary Brown

Students: Video lectures allow for more napping | eCampus News - 1 views

  • College students gave video lectures high marks in a recent survey, although many students supported the technology because it freed up more time for napping and hanging out with friends.
  • A majority of students who responded to the survey, conducted in August by audio, internet, and video conferencing provider InterCall, said they would only attend a live lecture if an exam were scheduled for that day, or to borrow notes from a classmate
  • confirm a key fear of many college professors about the availability of video lecture-capture technology: that it could lead to a drop in attendance at the live lectures themselves.
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  • Fifty-three percent of respondents said they “learn more effectively” with online lectures, and 54 percent “report that their grades improve when lectures are streamed via video online,”
  • Nearly three-quarters of students said that streaming lectures online “helps them be better prepared for exams.”
  • 49 percent of students take matters into their own hands and record lectures on their own so they can review the material later.
  • “indicative” of the modern college-student mindset. “They can’t be bothered with things that require stepping out of their own comfort and convenience zone,” she said. “Rather than adapt themselves … they want things the way they want things.
  • ‘It’s about me and my convenience’ is one that extends into many aspects of their lives, from school, to work, to community obligations,” Gregory said. “How much more self-absorbed does it get?”
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    It is interesting to see the resistance to what is sometimes considered student-centered approaches to learning.   One wonders whose "convenience" will have primacy in the education market, and at what....cost?
Theron DesRosier

Tertiary21: 21st Century Assessment: The University of Farmville - 0 views

  • Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell's talk on the future of gaming is thought provoking. It gives some interesting insights into what educational assessment might look like by mid 21st Century.
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    An interesting perspective on the future of assessment using the analogy of game design.
Joshua Yeidel

Strategic Directives for Learning Management System Planning | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

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    A largely sensible strategic look at LMS in general. "The LMS, because of its integration with other major institutional technology systems, has itself become an enterprise-wide system. As such, higher education leaders must closely 7 monitor the possible tendency for LMSs to contribute only to maintaining the educational status quo.40 The most radical suggestion for future LMS use would dissolve the commercially enforced "course-based" model of LMS use entirely, allowing for the creation of either larger (departmental) or smaller (study groups) units of LMS access, as the case may require. This ability to cater to context awareness is perhaps the feature most lacking in most LMS products. As noted in a study in which mobile or handheld devices were used to assemble ad hoc study groups,41 this sort of implementation is entirely possible in ways that don't necessarily require interaction through an LMS interface." Requires EDUCAUSE login (free to WSU)
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    The EDUCAUSE paper suggests "dissolv[ing] the commercially enforced 'course-based' model of LMS". How about dissolving the "course-based" model of higher education on which the commercial LMS is based?
Gary Brown

Opinion | Legislature's waning support for higher education creates chasm for middle class | Seattle Times Newspaper - 1 views

  • Today in Washington, the traditional on-campus experience is increasingly enjoyed primarily by children of the wealthy or the very poor who are very bright.
  • The Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board reports that based on the number of degrees per 100 residents, our children are not as well-educated as their parents.
  • we rank 48th in undergraduate enrollment and 49th in graduate enrollment. We are losing business to other states and need to realize they probably have better educated work forces.
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  • If our public universities do not get increased support from the state of Washington, they will decrease in quality and need to become increasingly private.
  • it is time for Washington to return to the concept that all individuals, regardless of their incomes, should have the opportunity to have access to an affordable, high-quality education.
  • Samuel H. Smith is president emeritus of Washington State University, a member of the Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board, and a founding board member of the College Success Foundation and the Western Governors University. He is also a member of The Seattle Times board of directors.
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    An old friend...
Gary Brown

Another Benefit of Robot Teachers: No 'Moral Problems' - College 2.0 - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • The unusual project aims to create robots that can teach English to schoolchildren here, and it is a huge undertaking. The research is supported by more than $100-million in grants, mostly from the South Korean government, and it involves more than 300 researchers, said Mr. Kim.
  • Forty robots will go into service for a pilot test in December, teaching at 18 elementary schools for three months to see how well they do.
  • “There are some problems and some accidents in hiring native speakers at the schools right now,” said the researcher. “For example, the immigration system in Korea is not good enough to examine whether the foreign visitors are clean or not, or they did some crime,” he added. “That’s the reason why the government thinks about such robot systems—they don’t have any such social problems, they don’t do the drugs.”
Gary Brown

Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change - International - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

    • Gary Brown
       
      And what are people for, after all?
  • Peter P. Smith, senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, said that if traditional universities did not adjust, new institutions would evolve to meet student needs. Those new institutions, said Mr. Smith, whose company is a for-profit education provider, would be more student-centric, would deliver instruction with greater flexibility, and would offer educational services at a lower cost.
  • both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society.
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  • The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers
  • Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization.
  • many faculty members may be "uncomfortable" with having deeper links to industry because they don't understand that world. Students, however, are highly practical, Mr. Fadel said, and are specifically seeking education that will get them a job or give them an advantage in the workplace.
  • "I'm sorry, as a student, you do not go to university to learn. You go to get a credential," he said.
    • Gary Brown
       
      And if you graduate more appreciative of the credential than what and how you have learned, then the education.
  • That does not mean colleges simply ought to turn out more graduates for in-demand professions like science and engineering, Mr. Fadel added. Colleges need to infuse other disciplines with science and engineering skills.
Nils Peterson

Half an Hour: Open Source Assessment - 0 views

  • When posed the question in Winnipeg regarding what I thought the ideal open online course would look like, my eventual response was that it would not look like a course at all, just the assessment.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      I remembered this Downes post on the way back from HASTAC. It is some of the roots of our Spectrum I think.
  • The reasoning was this: were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.
  • In Holland I encountered a person from an organization that does nothing but test students. This is the sort of thing I long ago predicted (in my 1998 Future of Online Learning) so I wasn't that surprised. But when I pressed the discussion the gulf between different models of assessment became apparent.Designers of learning resources, for example, have only the vaguest of indication of what will be on the test. They have a general idea of the subject area and recommendations for reading resources. Why not list the exact questions, I asked? Because they would just memorize the answers, I was told. I was unsure how this varied from the current system, except for the amount of stuff that must be memorized.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      assumes a test as the form of assessment, rather than something more open ended.
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  • As I think about it, I realize that what we have in assessment is now an exact analogy to what we have in software or learning content. We have proprietary tests or examinations, the content of which is held to be secret by the publishers. You cannot share the contents of these tests (at least, not openly). Only specially licensed institutions can offer the tests. The tests cost money.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      See our Where are you on the spectrum, Assessment is locked vs open
  • Without a public examination of the questions, how can we be sure they are reliable? We are forced to rely on 'peer reviews' or similar closed and expert-based evaluation mechanisms.
  • there is the question of who is doing the assessing. Again, the people (or machines) that grade the assessments work in secret. It is expert-based, which creates a resource bottleneck. The criteria they use are not always apparent (and there is no shortage of literature pointing to the randomness of the grading). There is an analogy here with peer-review processes (as compared to recommender system processes)
  • What constitutes achievement in a field? What constitutes, for example, 'being a physicist'?
  • This is a reductive theory of assessment. It is the theory that the assessment of a big thing can be reduced to the assessment of a set of (necessary and sufficient) little things. It is a standards-based theory of assessment. It suggests that we can measure accomplishment by testing for accomplishment of a predefined set of learning objectives.Left to its own devices, though, an open system of assessment is more likely to become non-reductive and non-standards based. Even if we consider the mastery of a subject or field of study to consist of the accomplishment of smaller components, there will be no widespread agreement on what those components are, much less how to measure them or how to test for them.Consequently, instead of very specific forms of evaluation, intended to measure particular competences, a wide variety of assessment methods will be devised. Assessment in such an environment might not even be subject-related. We won't think of, say, a person who has mastered 'physics'. Rather, we might say that they 'know how to use a scanning electron microscope' or 'developed a foundational idea'.
  • We are certainly familiar with the use of recognition, rather than measurement, as a means of evaluating achievement. Ludwig Wittgenstein is 'recognized' as a great philosopher, for example. He didn't pass a series of tests to prove this. Mahatma Gandhi is 'recognized' as a great leader.
  • The concept of the portfolio is drawn from the artistic community and will typically be applied in cases where the accomplishments are creative and content-based. In other disciplines, where the accomplishments resemble more the development of skills rather than of creations, accomplishments will resemble more the completion of tasks, like 'quests' or 'levels' in online games, say.Eventually, over time, a person will accumulate a 'profile' (much as described in 'Resource Profiles').
  • In other cases, the evaluation of achievement will resemble more a reputation system. Through some combination of inputs, from a more or less define community, a person may achieve a composite score called a 'reputation'. This will vary from community to community.
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    Fine piece, transformative. "were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources."
Gary Brown

Public Higher Education Is 'Eroding From All Sides,' Warn Political Scientists - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

  • The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.
  • And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They'd rather see the state spend money on health care."
  • Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."
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  • Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.
  • His own campus, Mr. Nelson said, has recently seen several multimillion-dollar projects that were favorites of administrators but were not endorsed by the faculty.
  • Instead, he said that faculty activists should open up a more basic debate about the purposes of education. They should fight, he said, for a tuition-free public higher-education system wholly subsidized by the federal government.
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    The issues are taking root in disciplinary discussions, so perhaps awareness and response will sprout.
Gary Brown

Student-Centered Learning: Target or Locus for Universities? -- Campus Technology - 1 views

  • Student-centered learning has been largely a rhetorical distinction for decades--e.g., more group work or less group work--because, practically speaking, everything happened in the classroom.
  • Now, the distinction is not just rhetorical, but a life style distinction: scarcity learning (content delivery) in the classroom or abundance learning (discovery) often out in real-world situations. In scarcity learning, the student is the target for delivery systems, while in abundance learning the student is the locus, the starting point, of learning.
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    missing here is the resistance we encounter--from faculty and students alike. Still a good read from our colleague at AAEEBL.
Nils Peterson

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

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
       
      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.
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  • 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
       
      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

Saving Public Universities - 0 views

  • Many public universities do offer online courses while primarily maintaining traditional ones. But the public higher-education model for the future may already exist: the completely online Western Governors University (WGU), launched in 1998. Back then, it was described as highly controversial. Now WGU is the largest virtual university in the United States, using technology to offer a flexible structure and reasonable pricing to meet adult learners’ needs.
  • keeps its costs down by relying heavily on technology and independent learning resources, and by using a student-centric model versus a professor-centric approach
  • Additionally WGU is the first and only system that gives students credit for what they know rather than the courses they complete.
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  • “As you take a course at WGU, you pass it by passing certain tests along the way,” Thomasian said. “Your tests aren’t on a set schedule in terms of, ‘You have to take it this month or that month.’ You can start moving those tests ahead, passing that competency and moving to the end of the course, and passing the competency for that.”
  • It was fun to cross the 10,000 student threshold about two years ago,” Partridge said, “and we’re right at the door of 20,000 right now.”
  • Now he said the university enrolls approximately 1,000 new students each month.
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    The rise of the faculty free institution--should we worry?
Gary Brown

Teacher unions fighting accountability - Leonard Pitts Jr. - MiamiHerald.com - 2 views

  • Teacher unions fighting accountability
  • Enough. It is time teachers embraced accountability. Time parents, students and government did, too
  • this is an argument about the future -- and whether this country will have one
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  • Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
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    Another call for accountability...again from the side of the political spectrum that I think we should consider allies...
Joshua Yeidel

HELP WANTED PROJECTIONS of JOBS and EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS Through2018 - 0 views

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    "America is slowly coming out of the Recession of 2007-only to find itself on a collision course with the future: not enough Americans are completing college . . . By 2018, we will need 22 million new workers with college degrees-but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million postsecondary degrees . . . At a time when every job is precious, this shortfall will mean lost economic opportunity for millions of American workers."
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