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The New Muscle: 5 Quality-of-Learning Projects That Didn't Exist 5 Years Ago - Special ... - 0 views

shared by Nils Peterson on 30 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The New Muscle: 5 Quality-of-Learning Projects That Didn't Exist 5 Years Ago   Lumina Foundation for Education's Tuning USA Year started: 2009 What it does: Supports statewide, faculty-led discussions, meetings, and surveys to define discipline-specific knowledge and skills that college and state officials, students, alumni, and employers can expect graduates of particular degree programs to have.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      That they lump VSA in here with the others suggests to me that the Chronicle's author doesn't distinguish the nuance.
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Teachers Aren't the Only Ones Who Should Care About Learning - Measuring Stick - The Ch... - 0 views

shared by Nils Peterson on 30 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The governing boards of America’s colleges and universities have tremendous untapped potential for assuring and furthering academic quality.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      See "Five Dysfunctions of a Charter School Board" where he advocates that the board spend most of its time on issues of student learning outcomes.
  • Boards should ensure that evidence about student learning is examined regularly, and they should ask appropriate questions about it.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Our A of A is a mechanism a Board could adopt
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A Small Company, Promising Major Savings on Vital Software, Lures Colleges - Technology... - 0 views

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    "A million dollars a year is a lot of money, yet colleges can hand over that much or more every year to software companies that supply and maintain essential systems for accounting, human resources, and student enrollment. Now, fed up with the fees, some colleges are ditching giant vendors for a small company that promises to support this software at half the price."
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    What this article fails to mention is that when you can get support only from the vendor, their incentive to provide good service is minimal, because the lock-in (the cost of moving to another platform) makes change-over almost unthinkable.
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2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views

  • This session explores the notion that assessment for transformational learning is best utilized as a learning tool. By providing timely, transparent, and appropriate feedback, both to students and to the institution itself, learning is enhanced – a far different motive for assessment than is external accountability.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      need to get to these guys with our harvesting gradebook ideas...
    • Nils Peterson
       
      decided to attend another session. Hersh was OK before lunch, but the talk by Pan looks more promising
  • Academic and corporate communities agree on the urgent need for contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement in STEM fields. Participants will learn how leaders from academic departments and institutions have collaborated with leaders from the corporate and business community in regional networks to ensure that graduates meet the expectations of prospective employers and the public.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      here is another session with links to CTLT work, both harvesting gradebook and the ABET work
  • Professor Pan will discuss the reflective teaching methods used to prepare students to recognize and mobilize community assets as they design, implement, and evaluate projects to improve public health.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Students tasked to learn about a community, ride the bus, make a Doc appt. Then tasked to do a non-clinical health project in that community (they do plenty of clinical stuff elsewhere in the program). Project must build capacity in the community to survive after the student leaves. Example. Work with hispanic parents in Sacramento about parenting issue, ex getting kids to sleep on time. Student had identified problem in the community, but first project idea was show a video, which was not capacity building. Rather than showing the video, used the video as a template and made a new video. Families were actors. Result was spanish DVD that the community could own. Pan thinks this is increased capacity in the community.
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  • Freshman Survey annually examines the academic habits of mind of entering first-year students.  Along with academic involvement, the survey examines diversity, civic engagement, college admissions and expectations of college. 
  • The project aims to promote faculty and student assessment of undergraduate research products in relation to outcomes associated with basic research skills and general undergraduate learning principles (communication and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and integration and application of knowledge).
  • They focus educators on the magnitude of the challenge to prepare an ever-increasingly diverse, globally-connected student body with the knowledge, ability, processes, and confidence to adapt to diverse environments and respond creatively to the enormous issues facing humankind.
  • One challenge of civic engagement in the co-curriculum is the merging of cost and outcome: creating meaningful experiences for students and the community with small staffs, on small budgets, while still having significant, purposeful impact. 
  • a)claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and b) counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences.  
    • Nils Peterson
       
      also, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
  • This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes.
  • Exciting pedagogies of engagement abound, including undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and international study.  However, such experiences are typically optional and non-credit-bearing for students, and/or “on top of” the workload for faculty. This session explores strategies for integrating engaged learning into the institutional fabric (curriculum, student role, faculty role) and increasing access to these transformative experiences.
  • hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy but how can this be provided in increasingly larger introductory classes? 
  • As educators seek innovative ways to manage knowledge and expand interdisciplinary attention to pressing global issues, as students and parents look for assurances that their tuition investment will pay professional dividends, and as alumni look for meaningful ways to give back to the institutions that nurtured and prepared them, colleges and universities can integrate these disparate goals through the Guilds, intergenerational membership networks that draw strength from the contributions of all of their members.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      see Theron's ideas for COMM.
  • Civic engagement learning derives its power from the engagement of students with real communities—local, national, and global. This panel explores the relationship between student learning and the contexts in which that learning unfolds by examining programs that place students in diverse contexts close to campus and far afield.
  • For institutional assessment to make a difference for student learning its results must result in changes in classroom practice. This session explores ways in which the institutional assessment of student learning, such as the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, can be connected to our classrooms.
  • Interdisciplinary Teaching and Object-Based Learning in Campus Museums
  • To address pressing needs of their communities, government and non-profit agencies are requesting higher education to provide education in an array of human and social services. To serve these needs effectively, higher educationneeds to broaden and deepen its consultation with practitioners in designing new curricula. Colleges and universities would do well to consider a curriculum development model that requires consultation not only with potential employers, but also with practitioners and supervisors of practitioners.
  • Should Academics be Active? Campuses and Cutting Edge Civic Engagement
  • If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it?  How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment? 
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Purpose of university is not to grant degrees, it has something to do with learning. Keeling's perspective is that the learning should be transformative; changing perspective. Liberating and emancipatory Learning is a complex interaction among student and others, new knowledge and experience, event, own aspirations. learners construct meaning from these elements. "we change our minds" altering the brain at the micro-level Brain imaging research demonstrates that analogical learning (abstract) demands more from more areas of the brain than semantic (concrete) learning. Mind is not an abstraction, it is based in the brain, a working physical organ .Learner and the environment matter to the learning. Seeds magazine, current issue on brain imaging and learning. Segway from brain research to need for university to educate the whole student. Uses the term 'transformative learning' meaning to transform the learning (re-wire the brain) but does not use transformative assessment (see wikipedia).
  • But as public debates roil, higher education has been more reactive than proactive on the question of how best to ensure that today’s students are fully prepared for a fast-paced future.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Bologna process being adopted (slowly) in EU, the idea is to make academic degrees more interchangeable and understandable across the EU three elements * Qualification Frameworks (transnational, national, disciplinary). Frameworks are graduated, with increasing expertise and autonomy required for the upper levels. They sound like broad skills that we might recognize in the WSU CITR. Not clear how they are assessed * Tuning (benchmarking) process * Diploma Supplements (licensure, thesis, other capstone activities) these extend the information in the transcript. US equivalent might be the Kuali Students system for extending the transcript. Emerging dialog on American capability This dialog is coming from 2 directions * on campus * employers Connect to the Greater Exceptions (2000-2005) iniative. Concluded that American HE has islands of innovation. Lead to LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) Initiative (2005-2015). The dialog is converging because of several forces * Changes in the balance of economic and political power. "The rise of the rest (of the world)" * Global economy in which innovation is key to growth and prosperity LEAP attempts to frame the dialog (look for LEAP in AACU website). Miami-Dade CC has announced a LEAP-derived covenant, the goals must span all aspects of their programs. Define liberal education Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world intellectual and practical skills responsibility integrative skills Marker of success is (here is where the Transformative Gradebook fits in): evidence that students can apply the essential learning outcomes to complex, unscripted problems and real-world settings Current failure -- have not tracked our progress, or have found that we are not doing well. See AACU employer survey 5-10% percent of current graduates taking courses that would meet the global competencies (transcript analysis) See NSSE on Personal and social responsibility gains, less tha
  • Dr. Pan will also talk about strategies for breaking down cultural barriers.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Pan. found a non-profit agency to be a conduit and coordinator to level the power between univ and grass roots orgs. helped with cultural gaps.
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Jumo - Together in Concert - 0 views

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Mar 10 - Cached
  • There are no magic solutions to the challenges our world faces. But there are millions of people around the globe who work each day to improve the lives of others. Unfortunately, there are millions more who don’t know how to meaningfully help. Jumo brings together everyday individuals and organizations to speed the pace of global change. We connect people to the issues, organizations, and individuals relevant to them to foster lasting relationships and meaningful action. 
    • Nils Peterson
       
      New social problem solving site being launched soon by one of the co-founders of Facebook, who went on to the My Barack Obama effort during the election.
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Urgent Evoke » About the EVOKE game - 0 views

  • About the EVOKE game Posted by Alchemy on 27 Jan under Behind the scenes EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere. The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems. The game begins on March 3, 2010. Players can join the game at any time. On May 12th, 2010 the first season of the game will end, and successful participants will form the first graduating class of the EVOKE network. Players who successfully complete 10 game challenges will be able to claim their honors: Certified EVOKE Social Innovator – Class of 2010. Top players will also earn online mentorships with experienced social innovators and business leaders from around the world, seed funding for new ventures, and travel scholarships to share their vision for the future at the EVOKE Summit in Washington DC.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Using gaming as a tool to build networked learning skills to solve real problems. Steps seem to include finding real resources on the web and bringing them back to enrich the game site. I found this from a TED talk by Jane McGonigal, Institute for the Future and game designer. Puts a new spin on the DML call for games. This project funded by World Bank
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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?
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OCW Consortium - Running courses openly - fewer problems and more benefits th... - 0 views

  • The idea of open teaching — opening access to the course materials and interaction to anyone, not just the enrolled students — seems foreign and a bit wacky to many professors and lecturers. More students sound like more work, less opportunity to engage with each individual student, and the practicalities of facilitating a diverse group of participants using online technologies seems daunting as well. It turns out that those who try it are often surprised that it’s much more rewarding and easier than they thought.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Punch line is the last sentence. Theron is showing me violin & piano master classes on YouTube. Question of earning credit for the learning is also addressed in the master class context -- audition for positions, play competitions.
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Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement (EDUCAUSE Rev... - 0 views

  • openness in practice requires little additional investment, since it essentially concerns transparency of already planned course activities on the part of the educator.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Search YouTube for "master class" Theron and I are looking at violin examples. The class is happening with student, master, and observers. What is added is video recording and posting to YouTube. YouTube provides additional community via comments and linked videos.
  • This second group of learners — those who wanted to participate but weren't interested in course credit — numbered over 2,300. The addition of these learners significantly enhanced the course experience, since additional conversations and readings extended the contributions of the instructors.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      These additional resources might also include peer reviews using a course rubric, or diverse feedback on the rubric itself.
  • Enough structure is provided by the course that if a learner is interested in the topic, he or she can build sufficient language and expertise to participate peripherally or directly.
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  • Although courses are under pressure in the "unbundling" or fragmentation of information in general, the learning process requires coherence in content and conversations. Learners need some sense of what they are choosing to do, a sense of eventedness.5 Even in traditional courses, learners must engage in a process of forming coherent views of a topic.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      An assumption here that the learner needs kick starting. Its an assumtion that the learner is not a Margo Tamez making an Urgent Call for Help where the learner owns the problem. Is it a way of inviting a community to a party?
  • The community-as-curriculum model inverts the position of curriculum: rather than being a prerequisite for a course, curriculum becomes an output of a course.
  • They are now able, sometimes through the open access noted above and sometimes through access to other materials and guidance, to engage in their own learning outside of a classroom structure.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      A key point is the creation of open learners. Impediments to open learners need to be understood and overcome. Identity mangement is likely to be an important skill here.
  • Educators continue to play an important role in facilitating interaction, sharing information and resources, challenging assertions, and contributing to learners' growth of knowledge.
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electronic portfolios and student learning outcomes assessment - 0 views

  • There has been an upsurge in reports and press coverage concerning accountability issues and student learning outcomes assessment (SLOA) in higher education. This paper is a brief overview of that upsurge, citing and synthesizing some of the most recent information published about accountability and SLOA.
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    A resource
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In Many States, Public Higher Education Is Hitting a Point of 'Peril' - Government - Th... - 0 views

  • Nevada universities are preparing to close colleges, departments, and programs; demoralized professors are fleeing the state; and thousands of students are being shut out of classes at community colleges. The prospect of shutting down an entire institution remains a "distinct possibility" for the future, the chancellor says.
  • the resiliency of public financial support for American higher education is threatened, putting quality, capacity, and the underlying ability to meet student and societal needs at risk
  • "Higher education is changing by virtue of 1,000 painful cuts," said Stephen R. Portch, a former chancellor of the University System of Georgia. If public colleges cannot revamp their structures—such as by creating ways to measure learning more effectively and allowing capable students to earn degrees more quickly­—state tax systems will continue to limit spending on colleges in ways that will erode quality, Mr. Portch said, leaving faculty members to teach more and more students and take more and more unpaid furlough days, alongside fewer and fewer colleagues. "Business isn't coming back to normal this time," he says.
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    Nevada universities are preparing to close colleges, departments, and programs; demoralized professors are fleeing the state; and thousands of students are being shut out of classes at community colleges. The prospect of shutting down an entire institution remains a "distinct possibility" for the future, the chancellor says. The resiliency of public financial support for American higher education is threatened, putting quality, capacity, and the underlying ability to meet student and societal needs at risk.
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    Washington is not the hardest-hit state. Our work can be seen as having a direct bearing on this crisis.
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Education Data Model (National Forum on Education Statistics). Strategies for building ... - 0 views

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    "The National Education Data Model is a conceptual but detailed representation of the education information domain focused at the student, instructor and course/class levels. It delineates the relationships and interdependencies between the data elements necessary to document, operate, track, evaluate, and improve key aspects of an education system. The NEDM strives to be a shared understanding among all education stakeholders as to what information needs to be collected and managed at the local level in order to enable effective instruction of students and superior leadership of schools. It is a comprehensive, non-proprietary inventory and a map of education information that can be used by schools, LEAs, states, vendors, and researchers to identify the information required for teaching, learning, administrative systems, and evaluation of education programs and approaches. "
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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.
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The New Digital Underclass - Forbes.com - 0 views

  • 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
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The Age of External Knowledge - Idea of the Day Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • David Dalrymple, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks human memory will no longer be the key repository of knowledge, and focus will supersede erudition. Quote: Ignacio Rodriguez Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Kevin Facemyer and I offered a somewhat similar thought in the late 90's -- in a small education journal lost in the depths of time. We referred to it as "extra-somatic knowledge" and postulated that if you can retireve information in a timeframe that lets you continue with a conversation, it is the functional equivalent of knowing it (knowing in the older, within one's head sense).
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The World Question Center 2010 - 0 views

  • This year's Question is "How is the Internet changing the way YOU think?" Not "How is the Internet changing the way WE think?" We spent a lot of time going back on forth on "YOU" vs. "WE" and came to the conclusion to go with "YOU", the reason being that Edge is a conversation.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      EDGE question for 2010.
  • We wanted people to think about the "Internet", which includes, but is a much bigger subject than the Web, an application on the Internet, or search, browsing, etc., which are apps on the Web. Back in 1996, computer scientist and visionary Danny Hillis pointed out that when it comes to the Internet, "Many people sense this, but don't want to think about it because the change is too profound.
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Innovating the 21st-Century University: It's Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • Come to think of it, encyclopedias, newspapers, and record labels are a lot like colleges and universities as well. For fifteen years, we've been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university.1 We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be "relics" within thirty years.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Encyclopedias, newspapers, and record labels have a lot in common. They all are in the business of producing content... Their business model is based on scarcity -- which has been erased by the Internet
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Evaluating the effect of peer feedback on the quality of online discourse - 0 views

  • Results indicate that continuous, anonymous, aggregated feedback had no effect on either the students' or the instructors' perception of discussion quality.
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    Abstract: This study explores the effect on discussion quality of adding a feedback mechanism that presents users with an aggregate peer rating of the usefulness of the participant's contributions in online, asynchronous discussion. Participants in the study groups were able to specify the degree to which they thought any posted comment was useful to the discussion. Individuals were regularly presented with feedback (aggregated and anonymous) summarizing peers' assessment of the usefulness of their contribution, along with a summary of how the individuals rated their peers. Results indicate that continuous, anonymous, aggregated feedback had no effect on either the students' or the instructors' perception of discussion quality. This is kind of a show-stopper. It's just one study but when you look at the results there appears to be no effect whatsoever from peers giving feedback about the usefulness of discussion posts, nor any perceived improvement in the quality of the discussions as evaluated by faculty. It looks like we'll need to begin looking carefully at just what kinds of feedback will really make a difference. Following up on Corinna's earlier post http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/twitters_potential_as_microfee.html about the effectiveness of short immediate feedback being more effective than lengthier feedback that actually hinders performance. The trick will be to figure out just what kinds of feedback will actually work in embedded situations. It's interesting that an assessment of utility wasn't useful...?
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Ads in Gmail - Gmail Help - 0 views

  • Until now, the ads you've seen next to a message were picked based on the content of that message only. For example, if you're looking at a confirmation email from a hotel in Chicago, you might see ads about flights, restaurants or other things relevant to your trip to Chicago. But sometimes, the ads related to a particular message aren't good enough. Rather than show less relevant ads, Gmail can now instantaneously serve ads based on another recent message on the same page of your inbox, helping make the ads more relevant to you. For example, if your friend sends you a message to say happy birthday, but there aren't any good ads to show related to birthdays, you might see ads related to another message in your inbox instead -- like flights to Chicago.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      further to streams and melding in some new information to the stream -- perhaps changing its focus. this is from the gmail ads policy
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Can We Afford Our State Colleges? - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • xperts do not agree on the precise numbers, but over the past generation we have moved from an environment in which states paid for 70 percent of cost and students paid 30 percent, to a situation in which those numbers have exactly reversed. Increasingly, tuition accounts for the lion’s share of institutional budgets, with state appropriations playing a minority role.
  • The sense I got Friday was that higher-education professionals do not expect the ”good old days” to return
  • the apparent consensus that public education needs to be more productive, because there was no discussion of the definition of productivity. 
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  • But even when instruction was (implicitly) assumed to be the measure of productivity, there was no discussion of measurable learning outcomes.
  • 5. It is true that public colleges do not measure learning outcomes. Neither does anyone else. U.S. universities resist this kind of accountability in every way they can think of. Since 1985, when the modern assessment movement gained traction, higher education can only be said to have been temporizing, getting ready to get ready through endless committees that go nowhere.
  • Most institutions continue to invoke apodictic notions of quality and refuse to define quality in modern terms (suitability to purpose; quality for whom and for what purpose) or to address the issue of value added, where career schools and community colleges will generally lead. At this time, there is virtually no institution-wide assessment system in place that would pass muster in a 501 measurement science course.
  • 6. Yes, public institutions need restructuring to make them more accountable and productive. Our independent colleges and universities need the same kind of restructuring and the agenda is rightfully one of public interest. The common perception that taxpayers do not support our private institutions is false.----------------------Robert W TuckerPresidentInterEd, Inc.www.InterEd.com
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    Tucker's note in the comments again suggests the challenge and opportunity of the WSU model.
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