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Gary Brown

71 Presidents Pledge to Improve Their Colleges' Teaching and Learning - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...125285

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • In a venture known as the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability, they have promised to take specific steps to gather more evidence about student learning, to use that evidence to improve instruction, and to give the public more information about the quality of learning on their campuses.
  • The 71 pledges, officially announced on Friday, are essentially a dare to accreditors, parents, and the news media: Come visit in two years, and if we haven't done these things, you can zing us.
  • deepen an ethic of professional stewardship and self-regulation among college leaders
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Beginning in 2011, all first-year students at Westminster will be required to create electronic portfolios that reflect their progress in terms of five campuswide learning goals. And the college will expand the number of seniors who take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, so that the test can be used to help measure the strength of each academic major.
  • "The crucial thing is that all of our learning assessments have been designed and driven by the faculty," says Pamela G. Menke, Miami Dade's associate provost for academic affairs. "The way transformation of learning truly occurs is when faculty members ask the questions, and when they're willing to use what they've found out to make change.
  • Other assessment models might point some things out, but they won't be useful if faculty members don't believe in them."
  • "In the long term, as more people join, I hope that the Web site will provide a resource for the kinds of innovations that seem to be successful," he says. "That process might be difficult. Teaching is an art, not a science. But there is still probably a lot that we can learn from each other."
Gary Brown

Academic Grants Foster Waste and Antagonism - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124920

grants

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • We think that our work is primarily organized by institutions of higher education, or by departments, or by conferences, but in reality those have become but appendages to a huge system of distributing resources through grants.
  • It's time we looked at this system—and at its costs: unpaid, anxiety-filled hours upon hours for a single successful grant; scholarship shaped, or misshaped, according to the demands of marketlike forces and the interests of nonacademic private foundations. All to uphold a distributive system that fosters antagonistic competition and increasing inequality.
  • Every hour spent working on or worrying about grants is an hour that could be better spent on research (or family life, or civic engagement, or sleep). But every hour not spent on a grant gives a competitive edge to other applicants.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The grant is basically an outsourcing of assessment that could, in most situations, be carried out much better by paid professional staff members.
  • Meanwhile grant-receiving institutions, like universities, become increasingly dependent on grants, to the point that faculty members and other campus voices can scarcely be heard beneath the din of administrators exhorting them to get more and more grants.
  • Colleagues whose research may be equally valuable (based on traditional criteria of academic debate) could be denied resources and livelihoods because, instead of grant writing, they favor publishing, or public engagement, or teaching.
  • Grant applications normalize a mode of scholarly writing and thought that, whatever its merits, has not been chosen collectively by academe in the interests of good scholarship, but has been imposed from without, with the grant as its guide. And as application procedures grow more stringent, the quality of successful projects is likely to sink. Can we honestly expect good scholarship from scholars who must constantly concentrate on something other than their scholarship? Academic life is increasingly made up of a series of applications, while the applied-for work dwindles toward insignificance.
  • It's time, I think, to put an end to our rationalizations. My spine will not be straightened. The agony will not be wiped off my brain. My mind misshapen will not be pounded back, and I have to stop telling myself that everything will be OK. Months and years of my life have been taken away, and nothing short of systemic transformation will redeem them.
Joshua Yeidel

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

www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=228514267&gid=1171287&type=news&item=228514267&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fnews%2Egoogle%2Ecom%2Fnews%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26fd%3DR%26usg%3DAFQjCNFtGpxVvvSMHWFLYe7182CFKjFmIQ%26url%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fchronicle%2Ecom%2

Assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10
     
    "Colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10
     
    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

chronicle.com/...124917

outcomes numbers

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10
     
    A good one to wrestle with.  It may be worth formulating distinctions we hold, and steering accordingly.
Gary Brown

Book review: Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education « Tony Bates - 2 views

www.tonybates.ca/...d-learning-in-higher-education

teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Christensen Hughes, J. and Mighty, J. (eds.) (2010) Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Montreal QC and Kingston ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 350 pp, C$/US$39.95
  • ‘The impetus for this event was the recognition that researchers have discovered much about teaching and learning in higher education, but that dissemination and uptake of this information have been limited. As such, the impact of educational research on faculty-teaching practice and student-learning experience has been negligible.’
  • Julia Christensen Hughes
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Chapter 7: Faculty research and teaching approaches Michael Prosser
  • What faculty know about student learning Maryellen Weimer
  • ractices of Convenience: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
  • Chapter 8: Student engagement and learning: Jillian Kinzie
  • (p. 4)
  • ‘much of our current approach to teaching in higher education might best be described as practices of convenience, to the extent that traditional pedagogical approaches continue to predominate. Such practices are convenient insofar as large numbers of students can be efficiently processed through the system. As far as learning effectiveness is concerned, however, such practices are decidedly inconvenient, as they fall far short of what is needed in terms of fostering self-directed learning, transformative learning, or learning that lasts.’
  • p. 10:
  • …research suggests that there is an association between how faculty teach and how students learn, and how students learn and the learning outcomes achieved. Further, research suggests that many faculty members teach in ways that are not particularly helpful to deep learning. Much of this research has been known for decades, yet we continue to teach in ways that are contrary to these findings.’
  • ‘There is increasing empirical evidence from a variety of international settings that prevailing teaching practices in higher education do not encourage the sort of learning that contemporary society demands….Teaching remains largely didactic, assessment of student work is often trivial, and curricula are more likely to emphasize content coverage than acquisition of lifelong and life-wide skills.’
  • What other profession would go about its business in such an amateurish and unprofessional way as university teaching? Despite the excellent suggestions in this book from those ‘within the tent’, I don’t see change coming from within. We have government and self-imposed industry regulation to prevent financial advisers, medical practitioners, real estate agents, engineers, construction workers and many other professions from operating without proper training. How long are we prepared to put up with this unregulated situation in university and college teaching?
Nils Peterson

Half an Hour: Open Source Assessment - 0 views

halfanhour.blogspot.com/...open-source-assessment.html

Downes learning2.0 outcomes_assessment learning_community end_of_LMS

shared by Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10 - Cached
  • 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
      Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10
       
      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
      Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10
       
      assumes a test as the form of assessment, rather than something more open ended.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • 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
      Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10
       
      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.
  • Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10
     
    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

Views: Accreditation's Accidental Transformation - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...eaton

accountability accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Why the national attention? Why the second-guessing of the accreditation decisions? It is part of the accidental transformation of accreditation.
  • Academic quality assurance and collegiality -- the defining features of traditional accreditation -- are, at least for now, taking a backseat to consumer protection and compliance with law and regulation. Government and the public expect accreditation to essentially provide a guarantee that students are getting what they pay for in terms of the education they seek.
  • Blame the powerful demand that, above all, colleges and universities provide credentials that lead directly to employment or advancement of employment. Driven by public concerns about the difficult job market and the persistent rise in the price of tuition, accrediting organizations are now expected to assure that the colleges, universities and programs they accredit will produce these pragmatic results.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The worth of higher education is determined less and less through the professional judgments made by the academic community. The deference at one time accorded accrediting organizations to decide the worth of colleges and universities is diminished and perhaps disappearing.
  • Do we know the consequences of this accidental transformation? Are we prepared to accept them? These changes may be unintended, but they are dramatic and far-reaching. Is this how we want to proceed? Judith S. Eaton is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
  • Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10
     
    It is this discussion that programs that approach accreditation perfunctorily need to attend.
Theron DesRosier

How Smartphones and Handheld Computers Are Bringing on an Educational Revolution | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...a-is-for-app.html

smartphones education how web2.0 assessment learning

shared by Theron DesRosier on 29 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 29 Mar 10
     
    "As smartphones and handheld computers move into classrooms worldwide, we may be witnessing the start of an educational revolution. How technology could unleash childhood creativity -- and transform the role of the teacher. "
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
Nils Peterson

The New Digital Underclass - Forbes.com - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...mnists-trevor-butterworth.html

digital divide education

shared by Nils Peterson on 11 Mar 10 - No Cached
  • At a certain point in the 17th century, the known world suddenly became, in one particular and peculiar sense, unknowable. This seems, on the face of it, counter-intuitive: This was, after all, a time when modern science came into existence, when mathematics and methodology reorganized the capacity and reach of thought, when thinkers such as Descartes, Galileo and Newton altered the conceptual fabric of the universe, and gave the woozy gauze of what had been imagined the hard contours of what could be measured. But at the same time, this period of immense, almost incredible, transformation meant the end of homo universalis; if man could now measure everything, he was no longer the measure of everything.
  • Who was the last universal genius, the last person to grasp the entirety of knowledge? The most famous candidate is Gottfried Leibniz, whose research and achievements are asthma-inducing in breadth--and extend to studying Chinese and writing poetry. Less well-known, but no less interesting, is the Jesuit priest Anasthasius Kircher, who, over 72 volumes, analyzed everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics to harmonics.
  • But by the turn of the 18th century, this kind of panoptic vision was increasingly impossible; there was simply too much to know; and the deaths of Kircher in 1680 and Leibniz in 1716 marked the beginning of a new era in conceptual history, one that might be seen as the flip side of the rise of specialization
Gary Brown

Changing Higher Education: An Interview with Lloyd Armstrong, USC « Higher Education Management Group - 1 views

highereducationmanagement.wordpress.com/...rview-with-lloyd-armstrong-usc

outcomes change

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • There are obviously real concerns that outcomes measures are measuring the right outcomes.   However, those expressing those concerns seldom are ready to jump in to try to figure out how to measure what they think is important – a position that is ultimately untenable
  • Learning outcomes risk changing the rules of the game by actually looking at learning itself, rather than using the surrogates of wealth, history, and research.  Since we have considerable data that show that these surrogates do not correlate particularly well with learning outcomes (see e.g. Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges),
  •  As Bok pointed out, to improve learning outcomes, the faculty would have to learn to teach in new ways.  Most academic leaders would prefer not to get into a game that would require that kind of change!  In fact, at this point I believe that the real, critical, disruptive innovation in higher education is transparent learning outcomes measures.  Such measures are likely to enable the innovations discussed in the first question to transform from sustaining to disruptive.
  • Gary Brown on 09 Mar 10
     
    another executive source, but notes the critical underpinning reason we NEED to do our work.
Joshua Yeidel

YouTube - Google Wave: Live collaborative editing - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

google google_wave

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 08 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Google engineer David Wang explains how collaborative editing through concurrency control and operational transform work in Google Wave.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 08 Oct 09
     
    Google engineer David Wang explains how collaborative editing through concurrency control and operational transform work in Google Wave.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 08 Oct 09
     
    Under-the-hood (but very general) description of how Google wave handles concurrent edits.
Nils Peterson

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education | Page 4 | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...who-needs-harvard.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 24 Sep 09 - Cached
  • WGU constantly surveys both graduates and their employers to find out if they are lacking in any competencies so they can continue to fine-tune their programs.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Sep 09
       
      Here is our community providing feedback on the rubric and helping with the norming
  • So far, the open-education movement has been supported, to an astonishing extent, by a single donor: The Hewlett Foundation has made $68 million worth of grants to initiatives at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Rice, Stanford, and Tufts. Today, such foundation money is slowing, but new sources of financing are emerging. President Barack Obama has directed $100 billion in stimulus money to education at all levels, and he recently appointed a prominent advocate of open education to be undersecretary of education (Martha Kanter, who helped launch the 100-member Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources and the Community College Open Textbook Project)
  • Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions.
Nils Peterson

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education | Page 3 | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...who-needs-harvard.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 13 Aug 09 - Cached
  • If open courseware is about applying technology to sharing knowledge, and Peer2Peer is about social networking for teaching and learning, Bob Mendenhall, president of the online Western Governors University, is proudest of his college's innovation in the third, hardest-to-crack dimension of education: accreditation and assessment.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Sep 09
       
      Spoke too soon
  • Theron DesRosier on 13 Aug 09
     
    "We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree." WGU began by convening a national advisory board of employers, including Google and Tenet Healthcare. "We asked them, 'What is it the graduates you're hiring can't do that you wish they could?' We've never had a silence after that question." Then assessments were created to measure each competency area. Mendenhall recalls one student who had been self-employed in IT for 15 years but never earned a degree; he passed all the required assessments in six months and took home his bachelor's without taking a course.
Nils Peterson

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...who-needs-harvard.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 04 Sep 09 - Cached
  • "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Sep 09
       
      Several people to follow in this article. They are moving from open content up the ladder. I don't see them pointing to open assessment as Downes did a couple years back, but that may make a place for us to play with them
  • Joshua Yeidel on 04 Sep 09
     
    A good overview of how higher ed's core functions are being remixed online. As you might expect from the source, the emphasis is on the positive.
Corinna Lo

Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...25wikipedia.html

wikipedia

shared by Corinna Lo on 31 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 31 Aug 09
     
    Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people. The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia's leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.
Peggy Collins

Ten Things I (no longer) Beli... - 0 views

docs.google.com/Edit

technology transform change

shared by Peggy Collins on 31 Aug 09 - No Cached
  • Peggy Collins on 31 Aug 09
     
    From the 2 Steves at TLT Group - a series of blog posts are linked from this table view of 10 things they no longer believe about transforming Teaching & Learning with Technology. The right part of the table includes a summary of what they believe and suggest today.
Gary Brown

Top News - School of the Future: Lessons in failure - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...top-news

transformation technology microsoft 21st Century Skills

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09 - Cached
  • School of the Future: Lessons in failure How Microsoft's and Philadelphia's innovative school became an example of what not to do By Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor   Primary Topic Channel:  Tech Leadership   Students at the School of the Future when it first opened in 2006. <script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vj?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=6&abr=$scriptiniframe"></script><noscript><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/cc?z=eschool&pos=6"><img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/173768/0/vc?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=6&abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"></a></noscript> Also of Interest Cheaper eBook reader challenges Kindle Carnegie Corporation: 'Do school differently' Former college QB battles video game maker Dueling curricula put copyright ed in spotlight Campus payroll project sees delays, more costs <script language=JavaScript src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/vj?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=2&abr=$scriptiniframe"></script><noscript><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/cc?z=eschool&pos=2"><img src="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/324506/0/vc?z=eschool&dim=173789&pos=2&abr=$imginiframe" width="300" height="250" border="0"></a></noscript> When it opened its doors in 2006, Philadelphia's School of the Future (SOF) was touted as a high school that would revolutionize education: It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement. But three years, three superintendents, four principals, and countless problems later, experts at a May 28 panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) agreed: The Microsoft-inspired project has been a failure so far. Microsoft points to the school's rapid turnover in leadership as the key reason for this failure, but other observers question why the company did not take a more active role in translating its vision for the school into reality. Regardless of where the responsibility lies, the project's failure to date offers several cautionary lessons in school reform--and panelists wondered if the school could use these lessons to succeed in the future.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09
     
    The discussion about Microsoft's Philadelphia School of the future, failing so far. (partial access to article only)
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jun 09
     
    I highlight this as a model where faculty and their teaching beliefs appear not to have been addressed.
Gary Brown

NCATE - public - Home Page - 0 views

ncate.org/...2309_TeacherEdRequirements.asp

accreditation NCATE authentic learning

shared by Gary Brown on 24 Jun 09 - Cached
  • “The new focus will help close the gap between theory and practice, and assure that teacher education program candidates are able to help diverse students be successful learners,” says NCATE president James G. Cibulka. “In the past, accreditation wrapped clinical experience around coursework. This approach reverses the priority, encouraging institutions to place teacher candidates in year-long training programs and wrap coursework around clinical practice.”
  • “However, regardless of pathway, all candidates should meet the same set of high standards.”
  • Gary Brown on 24 Jun 09
     
    Note shift in NCATE accreditation to make the authentic or clinical training central; the classroom should supplement the authentic. There is also an emphasis on bringing change or transformation to the world.
Nils Peterson

Change Magazine - The New Guys in Assessment Town - 0 views

www.changemag.org/...full-assessment-town.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 May 09 - Cached
  • if one of the institution’s general education goals is critical thinking, the system makes it possible to call up all the courses and programs that assess student performance on that outcome.
  • bringing together student learning outcomes data at the level of the institution, program, course, and throughout student support services so that “the data flows between and among these levels”
  • Like its competitors, eLumen maps outcomes vertically across courses and programs, but its distinctiveness lies in its capacity to capture what goes on in the classroom. Student names are entered into the system, and faculty use a rubric-like template to record assessment results for every student on every goal. The result is a running record for each student available only to the course instructor (and in a some cases to the students themselves, who can go to the system to  get feedback on recent assessments).
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      sounds like harvesting gradebook. assess student work and roll up
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      This system has some potential for formative use at the per-student leve.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “I’m a little wary.  It seems as if, in addition to the assessment feedback we are already giving to students, we might soon be asked to add a data-entry step of filling in boxes in a centralized database for all the student learning outcomes. This is worrisome to those of us already struggling under the weight of all that commenting and essay grading.”
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      its either double work, or not being understood that the grading and the assessment can be the same activity. i suspect the former -- grading is being done with different metrics
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      I am in the unusual position of seeing many papers _after_ they have been graded by a wide variety of teachers. Many of these contain little "assessment feedback" -- many teachers focus on "correcting" the papers and finding some letter or number to assign as a value.
  • “This is where we see many institutions struggling,” Galvin says. “Faculty simply don’t have the time for a deeper involvement in the mechanics of assessment.” Many have never seen a rubric or worked with one, “so generating accurate, objective data for analysis is a challenge.”  
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      Rather than faculty using the community to help with assessment, they are outsourcing to a paid assessor -- this is the result of undertaking this thinking while also remaining in the institution-centric end of the spectrum we developed
  • I asked about faculty pushback. “Not so much,” Galvin says, “not after faculty understand that the process is not intended to evaluate their work.”
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      red flag
  • the annual reports required by this process were producing “heaps of paper” while failing to track trends and developments over time. “It’s like our departments were starting anew every year,” Chaplot says. “We wanted to find a way to house the data that gave us access to what was done in the past,” which meant moving from discrete paper reports to an electronic database.
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      It's not clear whether the "database" is housing measurements, narratives and reflections, or all of the above.
  • Can eLumen represent student learning in language? No, but it can quantify the number of boxes checked against number of boxes not checked.”
  • developing a national repository of resources, rubrics, outcomes statements, and the like that can be reviewed and downloaded by users
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      in building our repository we could well open-source these tools, no need to lock them up
  • “These solutions cement the idea that assessment is an administrative rather than an educational enterprise, focused largely on accountability. They increasingly remove assessment decision making from the everyday rhythm of teaching and learning and the realm of the faculty.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 06 May 09
       
      Over the wall assessment, see Transformative Assessment rubric for more detail
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