CTLT and Friends

A review of "Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Scghools in Raleigh", by sociologist Gerald Grant. Raleigh merged its school district with suburban Wake County and integrated its schools not just by race, but by socioeconomic status. Quoting the 1966 Coleman Report: "The norms of a good school are shaped more by the children who come through the door than the dollars spent on books, buildings, laboratories, teacher salaries, or other traditional measures of school quality." Is this why "selective" colleges are more successful? How are the "norms" of WSU shaped?

David Leonhardt reports that "a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years...should also include ... public universities... in terms of its core mission -- turning teenagers into educated college graduates -- much of the system is simply failing." Leonhardt summarizes a book called "Crossing the Finish Line".

At Books-A-Million (the big book store here in Gainesville, FL), I noticed the science section is very small, there is no psychology section (but only a large Self-Help section that is heavily religious), and no biology section. The religion section is by far the largest of all. I wondered, does this reflect the interests of people in the area? If so, the lack of interest in science is really sad. The contrasting (as opposed to just commparing) science and religion is also a sad societal phenomenon, I think. But then again--while stores mostly buy inventory they think will sell best, the inventory that builds up on the shelves is that which sells the least. So I don't know how to guage this.

I've long held that we learn far more from failure than success. Success doesn't teach us anything really, accept that it once worked the way it did. This is really from another point of view..

Neurons learn from success individually but not from failure..

Don't you wish students could be taught to think like this. Most people ask what, maybe why, but seldom how.

Inspirational about thought..

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.

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.

a hot topic for us right now, and the comments are important.

Our friend Mary Ellen Weimer sets the stage for addressing a critical bottleneck to innovation, suggesting faculty insecurity/inexperience result in exerting authority.

inch by inch new models make the news and subsequently make progress

Washington Monthly's College Guide includes an introduction by the editor which frames the issue of assessment in terms of the unsustainability of the current paradigm and its rising costs. He asserts that "the higher education market is missing a measure of value, quality divided by price". "Value measures would allow colleges to do what they can't do now: lower prices without being punished by the market." The introduction points to several other useful articles in the College Guide.

Examples of course portfolios from Indiana University Bloomington. All of these link to the Pew Course Portfolio Peer Review of Teaching Project http://www.courseportfolio.org/peer/pages/index.jsp

It's not the African American aspect of this story that interests me. It is the aspect of attitudes--whether they be ethnically correlated or not. Politically problematic but I think this includes, at its core, crucial factors to consider. I think this research would have been better conducted not in consideration of ethnicity but rather groups as determined by criteria derived from factor analysis. To me, the point is that memes matter. Both behavioral and belief memes can characterize groups of friends (a better unit of study than a nebulous ethnicity) and provide them with a baseline of comparative likelinesses in achievements of various kinds.

An article in the Atlantic today by Clayton Christensen discusses "Revolution in the Classroom" In a paragraph on data collection he says the following: Creating effective methods for measuring student progress is crucial to ensuring that material is actually being learned. And implementing such assessments using an online system could be incredibly potent: rather than simply testing students all at once at the end of an instructional module, this would allow continuous verification of subject mastery as instruction was still underway. Teachers would be able to receive constant feedback about progress or the lack thereof and then make informed decisions about the best learning path for each student. Thus, individual students could spend more or less time, as needed, on certain modules. And as long as the end result - mastery - was the same for all, the process and time allotted for achieving it need not be uniform." The "module" focus is a little disturbing but the rest is helpful.

"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.

Silent screencast shows creation and customization of a simple Data View Web Part to display an RSS Feed.