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Joshua Yeidel

Learn More about Pivot | Live Labs Pivot - 1 views

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    "Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web."
Nils Peterson

News & Broadcast - World Bank Frees Up Development Data - 0 views

  • April 20, 2010—The World Bank Group said today it will offer free access to more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been available only to paying subscribers.
  • Hans Rosling, Gapminder Foundation co-founder and vigorous advocate of open data at the World Bank, said, “It’s the right thing to do, because it will foster innovation. That is the most important thing.”He said he hoped the move would inspire more tools for visualizing data and set an example for other international institutions.
  • The new website at data.worldbank.org offers full access to data from 209 countries, with some of the data going back 50 years. Users will be able to download entire datasets for a particular country or indicator, quickly access raw data, click a button to comment on the data, email and share data with social media sites, says Neil Fantom, a senior statistician at the World Bank.
Nils Peterson

Accreditation and assessment in an Open Course - an opening proposal | Open Course in E... - 1 views

  • A good example of this may be a learning portfolio created by a students and reviewed by an instructor. The instructor might be looking for higher orders of learning... evidence of creative thinking, of the development of complex concepts or looking for things like improvement.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      He starts with a portfolio reviewed by the instructor, but it gets better
  • There is a simple sense in which assessing people for this course involves tracking their willingness to participate in the discussion. I have claimed in many contexts that in fields in which the canon is difficult to identify, where what is 'true' is not possible to identify knowledge becomes a negotiation. This will certainly true in this course, so I think the most important part of the assessment will be whether the learner in question has collaborated, has participated has ENGAGED with the material and with other participants of the course.
  • What we need, then, is a peer review model for assessment. We need people to take it as their responsibility to review the work of others, to confirm their engagement, and form community/networks of assessment that monitor and help each other.
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  • (say... 3-5 other participants are willing to sign off on your participation)
    • Nils Peterson
       
      peer credentialling.
  • Evidence of contribution on course projects
    • Nils Peterson
       
      I would prefer he say "projects" where the learner has latitude to define the project, rather than a 'course project' where the agency seems to be outside the learner. See our diagram of last April, the learner should be working their problem in their community
  • I think for those that are looking for PD credit we should be able to use the proposed assessment model (once you guys make it better) for accreditation. You would end up with an email that said "i was assessed based on this model and was not found wanting" signed by facilitators (or other participants, as surely given the quality of the participants i've seen, they would qualify as people who could guarantee such a thing).
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Peer accreditation. It depends on the credibility of those signing off see also http://www.nilspeterson.com/2010/03/21/reimagining-both-learning-learning-institutions/
  • I think the Otago model would work well here. I call it the Otago model as Leigh Blackall's course at Otago was the first time i actually heard of someone doing it. In this model you do all the work in a given course, and then are assessed for credit AFTER the course by, essentially, challenging for PLAR. It's a nice distributed model, as it allows different people to get different credit for the same course.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Challenging for a particular credit in an established institutional system, or making the claim that you have a useful solution to a problem and the solution merits "credit" in a particular system's procedures.
Gary Brown

Accountability Effort for Community Colleges Pushes Forward, and Other Meeting Notes - ... - 1 views

  • A project led by the American Association of Community Colleges to develop common, voluntary standards of accountability for two-year institutions is moving forward, and specific performance measures are being developed, an official at the association said.
  • financed by the Lumina Foundation for Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is now its second phase
  • The project's advocates have begun pushing a public-relations campaign to build support for the accountability effort among colleges.
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  • common reporting formats and measures that are appropriate to their institutions
  • Mr. Phillippe said one area of college performance the voluntary accountability system will measure is student persistence and completion, including retention and transfer rates. Student progress toward completion may also be measured by tracking how many students reach certain credit milestones. Other areas that will be measured include colleges' contributions to the work force and economic and community development.
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    Footsteps....
Gary Brown

How to Prepare Students for Careers - 0 views

  • Educators and industry partners can help students learn these skills through the following three practices:   1. Involve the community
  • Combine academic and technical knowledge That means educators must play on the same team.
  • . Make learning relevant Students need to see the tie between concepts they're learning and their application in life, said Allyson Knox, an academic program manager for Microsoft Corp.'s U.S. Partners in Learning program.
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    walkiing the fine line
Theron DesRosier

Ning Update - Creators - 0 views

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    Ning converting to pay site.
Gary Brown

Ethics? Let's Outsource Them! - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 4 views

  • Many students are already buying their papers from term-paper factories located in India and other third world countries. Now we are sending those papers back there to be graded. I wonder how many people are both writing and grading student work, and whether, serendipitously, any of those people ever get the chance to grade their own writing.”
  • The great learning loop of outcomes assessment is neatly “closed,” with education now a perfect, completed circle of meaningless words.
  • With outsourced grading, it’s clearer than ever that the world of rubrics behaves like that wicked southern plant called kudzu, smothering everything it touches. Certainly teaching and learning are being covered over by rubrics, which are evolving into a sort of quasi-religious educational theory controlled by priests whose heads are so stuck in playing with statistics that they forget to try to look openly at what makes students turn into real, viable, educated adults and what makes great, or even good, teachers.
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  • Writing an essay is an art, not a science. As such, people, not instruments, must take its measure, and judge it. Students have the right to know who is doing the measuring. Instead of going for outsourced grading, Ms. Whisenant should cause a ruckus over the size of her course with the administration at Houston. After all, if she can’t take an ethical stand, how can she dare to teach ethics?
  • "People need to get past thinking that grading must be done by the people who are teaching.” Sorry, Mr. Rajam, but what you should be saying is this: Teachers, including those who teach large classes and require teaching assistants and readers, need to get past thinking that they can get around grading.
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    the outsourcing loop becomes a diatribe against rubrics...
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    It's hard to see how either outsourced assessment or harvested assessment can be accomplished convincingly without rubrics. How else can the standards of the teacher be enacted by the grader? From there we are driven to consider how, in the absence of a rubric, the standards of the teacher can be enacted by the student. Is it "ethical" to use the Potter Stewart standard: "I'll know it when I see it"?
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    Yes, who is the "priest" in the preceding rendering--one who shares principles of quality (rubrics), or one who divines a grade a proclaims who is a "real, viable, educated adult"?
Joshua Yeidel

ILT - Jan 2010 issue - 2 views

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    Jane Hart describes five kinds of learning that social learning environments "have to support", describes Elgg as a platform for social learning, and lists some success factors based on her consulting for (no surprise) Elgg-using organizations.
Joshua Yeidel

Ning's Bubble Bursts: No More Free Networks, Cuts 40% Of Staff - 0 views

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    "One month after long-time Ning CEO Gina Bianchini was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal, the company is making some major changes: It has just announced that it is killing off its free product, forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. Rosenthal has also just announced that the company has cut nearly 70 people - over 40% of its staff."
Joshua Yeidel

Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Using Facebook for Your Customer Communi... - 0 views

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    "Last week I got exposed to the other side of Facebook, namely their ability to rescind or suspend accounts without any notification, explanation, or seemingly any recourse."
Joshua Yeidel

THINK Global School Blog - 3 views

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    "A recent experiment we did asked the question: What happens if you combine lessons from web 2.0 and social media to the process of developing a rubric? The result? We've built what we call "Social Rubrics". Essentially this tool facilitates the process of building a rubric for teachers (and students) in a much more open and collaborative way." A plug-in for Elgg.
Joshua Yeidel

ILT - Dec 2009 issue - 2 views

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    How do you create a social learning enviornment for free, but wihtout a mish-mash of incompatible tools? Jane Hart investigates"... Google, which at least gives single signon, but other integrations are noteably lacking.
Joshua Yeidel

ILT - Nov 2009 issue - 0 views

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    "In three issues for Inside Learning Technologies, Jane Hart shares the rpos and cons of building three types of social learning environment, and how to deliver them at low or no cost."
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    Assessment is not even mentioned, but the series is still useful.
Corinna Lo

IJ-SoTL - A Method for Collaboratively Developing and Validating a Rubric - 1 views

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    "Assessing student learning outcomes relative to a valid and reliable standard that is academically-sound and employer-relevant presents a challenge to the scholarship of teaching and learning. In this paper, readers are guided through a method for collaboratively developing and validating a rubric that integrates baseline data collected from academics and professionals. The method addresses two additional goals: (1) to formulate and test a rubric as a teaching and learning protocol for a multi-section course taught by various instructors; and (2) to assure that students' learning outcomes are consistently assessed against the rubric regardless of teacher or section. Steps in the process include formulating the rubric, collecting data, and sequentially analyzing the techniques used to validate the rubric and to insure precision in grading papers in multiple sections of a course."
Corinna Lo

Scoring rubric development: validity and reliability. Moskal, Barbara M. & Jon A. Leydens - 1 views

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    "One purpose of this article is to provide clear definitions of the terms "validity" and "reliability" and illustrate these definitions through examples. A second purpose is to clarify how these issues may be addressed in the development of scoring rubrics."
Corinna Lo

A comparison of consensus, consistency, and measurement approaches to estimating interr... - 2 views

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    "The three general categories for computing interrater reliability introduced and described in this paper are: 1) consensus estimates, 2) consistency estimates, and 3) measurement estimates. The assumptions, interpretation, advantages, and disadvantages of estimates from each of these three categories are discussed, along with several popular methods of computing interrater reliability coefficients that fall under the umbrella of consensus, consistency, and measurement estimates. Researchers and practitioners should be aware that different approaches to estimating interrater reliability carry with them different implications for how ratings across multiple judges should be summarized, which may impact the validity of subsequent study results."
Gary Brown

How Colleges Could Better Prepare Students to Tackle Society's Problems - Students - Th... - 1 views

  • Employers increasingly want to hire students who are highly adaptive, who can work in a fast-paced environment, be creative and problem-solve—and these are not necessarily core skills universities focus on. Most universities focus on knowledge acquisition, but what the world requires is much more about learning how to work within a fast-changing environment and be a leader in that context.
  • social entrepreneurship is relevant in different disciplines
  • We're not just bringing them into the classroom, but we're involving them in more research collaborations and conversations, so the learning students do is guided by that.
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  • I just heard from a faculty member at Cornell who has increased the amount of experiential learning she requires for class projects. More students are asking for it, and she's using every opportunity to get people out in the community or talking to people so they can engage in real-world experience.
  • Maryland has created a Center for Social Value Creation
  • Siloed disciplines are one of our biggest challenges. The world doesn't operate in disciplines—its problems and organizations are cross-cutting. The more interdisciplinary people can think and learn, the more equipped they will be to deal with the complexity of the real world.
Theron DesRosier

Underground History of American Education - John Taylor Gatto - 1 views

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    "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
Gary Brown

News: The Specialists - Inside Higher Ed - 4 views

  • Choosing the academic program at a single university, they say, is a relic of a time before online education made it possible for a student in Oregon to take courses at a university in Florida
  • Much of the talk about this imminent unbundling has come from colleges that predict that students might want to transfer credits from other colleges that might have different missions. But the competition may also come from entities that do not even offer degrees.
  • The company outsources grading and other work to master’s degree-holders in India for much less than it would cost to employ similarly qualified teaching assistants in the United States.
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  • the confluence of several economic factors — particularly rising tuition and the unwillingness of many students to take on exorbitant debt, especially as they see their degree-holding peers struggling to land jobs — may force institutions to consider turning to outside specialists if they want to continue offering certain courses.And if they don’t, Smith says, students will likely turn to the outside specialists themselves.
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    Variations on a theme, but notable now in particular as we debate general education reform.
Gary Brown

New test measures students' digital literacy | eCampus News - 0 views

  • Employers are looking for candidates who can navigate, critically evaluate, and make sense of the wealth of information available through digital media—and now educators have a new way to determine a student’s baseline digital literacy with a certification exam that measures the test-taker’s ability to assess information, think critically, and perform a range of real-world tasks.
  • iCritical Thinking Certification, created by the Educational Testing Service and Certiport, reveals whether or not a person is able to combine technical skills with experiences and knowledge.
  • Monica Brooks, Marshall University’s assistant vice president for Information Technology: Online Learning and Libraries, said her school plans to use iCritical Thinking beginning in the fall.
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    the alternate universe, a small step away...
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