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Gary Brown

News: Assessing the Assessments - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

www.insidehighered.com/...vsa

assessment CLA VSA

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Nov 09 - Cached
  • The validity of a measure is based on evidence regarding the inferences and assumptions that are intended to be made and the uses to which the measure will be put. Showing that the three tests in question are comparable does not support Shulenburger's assertion regarding the value-added measure as a valid indicator of institutional effectiveness. The claim that public university groups have previously judged the value-added measure as appropriate does not tell us anything about the evidence upon which this judgment was based nor the conditions under which the judgment was reached. As someone familiar with the process, I would assert that there was no compelling evidence presented that these instruments and the value-added measure were validated for making this assertion (no such evidence was available at the time), which is the intended use in the VSA.
  • (however much the sellers of these tests tell you that those samples are "representative"), they provide an easy way out for academic administrators who want to avoid the time-and-effort consuming but incredibly valuable task of developing detailed major program learning outcome statements (even the specialized accrediting bodies don't get down to the level of discrete, operational statements that guide faculty toward appropriate assessment design)
  • f somebody really cared about "value added," they could look at each student's first essay in this course, and compare it with that same student's last essay in this course. This person could then evaluate each individual student's increased mastery of the subject-matter in the course (there's a lot) and also the increased writing skill, if any.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • These skills cannot be separated out from student success in learning sophisticated subject-matter, because understanding anthropology, or history of science, or organic chemistry, or Japanese painting, is not a matter of absorbing individual facts, but learning facts and ways of thinking about them in a seamless, synthetic way. No assessment scheme that neglects these obvious facts about higher education is going to do anybody any good, and we'll be wasting valuable intellectual and financial resources if we try to design one.
  • Gary Brown on 05 Nov 09
     
    ongoing discussion of these tools. Note Longanecker's comment and ask me why.
Corinna Lo

Official Google Blog: Transparency, choice and control - now complete with a Dashboard! - 2 views

googleblog.blogspot.com/...cy-choice-and-control-now.html

google

shared by Corinna Lo on 06 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 06 Nov 09
     
    "In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. "
Gary Brown

The Profession: More Pressure on Faculty Members, From Every Direction - Almanac of Hig... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...123918

change

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Changes in the American professoriate’s employment patterns and types, demographics, and work life are the greatest we have seen in over half a century.
  • But averages obscure the widening salary ranges on campuses, particularly between presidents and faculty members
  • The drive toward institutional prestige that most professors consider a high priority at their four-year institutions has intensified the focus on research there.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Some faculty members, permanent and contingent, are expected to cover their full salaries with grants. With the tenure bottleneck narrowing, junior faculty members are often advised to focus on research, do a reasonable job of teaching, and avoid service.
  • Faculty members report spending more than half of their time on teaching and classroom-related activities. Professors are increasingly expected to use new technologies in both distance education and on-campus courses, and to be more systematic about assessing student learning at both course and program levels.
  • The scholarship of teaching and learning, in which faculty members examine the effects of their teaching strategies, is spreading; the advent of conferences and publications marks its increasing acceptance as serious scholarship.
  • The “corporatization” of institutional administrations in the face of fiscal distress and severe budget cuts imperils faculty governance, which falls increasingly to the shrinking number of permanent tenured faculty members.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Aug 10
     
    New realities rendered starkly.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 26 Aug 10
     
    Note: A "premium content" article -- you must be a paid subscriber to see it, not just a registered site user.
Nils Peterson

Excerpt from Informal Learning - 2 views

www.internettime.com/excerpt-from-informal-learning

shared by Nils Peterson on 24 Aug 10 - Cached
  • WORKERS LEARN MORE in the coffee room than in the classroom. They discover how to do their jobs through informal learning: asking the person in the next cubicle, trial and error, calling the help desk, working with people in the know, and joining the conversation.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Aug 10
       
      Jay Cross, _Informal Learning_ ca 2003
  • Training programs, workshops, and schools get the lion’s share of the corporate budget for developing talent, despite the fact that this formal learning has almost no impact on job performance. And informal learning, the major source of knowledge transfer and innovation, is left to chance. This book aims to raise your consciousness about informal teaming. You will discover that informal learning is a profit strategy, that it flexes with change, and that it respects and challenges workers. You will see how hard-nosed businesses use organizational network analysis, conversation space, and communities of purpose to fuel innovation and agility.
  • Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, “to learn” is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.
Gary Brown

Ranking Employees: Why Comparing Workers to Their Peers Can Often Backfire - Knowledge@... - 2 views

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm

ratings feedback

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Aug 10 - Cached
  • We live in a world full of benchmarks and rankings. Consumers use them to compare the latest gadgets. Parents and policy makers rely on them to assess schools and other public institutions,
  • "Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive -- to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens," says Barankay, whose previous research and teaching has focused on personnel and labor economics. "Workers can become complacent and de-motivated. People who rank highly think, 'I am already number one, so why try harder?' And people who are far behind can become depressed about their work and give up."
  • mong the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Nothing is more compelling than data from actual workplace settings, but getting it is usually very hard."
  • Instead, the job without the feedback attracted more workers -- 254, compared with 76 for the job with feedback.
  • "This indicates that when people are great and they know it, they tend to slack off. But when they're at the bottom, and are told they're doing terribly, they are de-motivated," says Barankay.
  • In the second stage of the experiment
  • The aim was to determine whether giving people feedback affected their desire to do more work, as well as the quantity and quality of their work.
  • Of the workers in the control group, 66% came back for more work, compared with 42% in the treatment group. The members of the treatment group who returned were also 22% less productive than the control group. This seems to dispel the notion that giving people feedback might encourage high-performing workers to work harder to excel, and inspire low-ranked workers to make more of an effort.
  • it seems that people would rather not know how they rank compared to others, even though when we surveyed these workers after the experiment, 74% said they wanted feedback about their rank."
  • top performers move on to new challenges and low performers have no viable options elsewhere.
  • feedback about rank is detrimental to performance,"
  • it is well documented that tournaments, where rankings are tied to prizes, bonuses and promotions, do inspire higher productivity and performance.
  • "In workplaces where rankings and relative performance is very transparent, even without the intervention of management ... it may be better to attach financial incentives to rankings, as interpersonal comparisons without prizes may lead to lower effort," Barankay suggests. "In those office environments where people may not be able to assess and compare the performance of others, it may not be useful to just post a ranking without attaching prizes."
  • "The key is to devote more time to thinking about whether to give feedback, and how each individual will respond to it. If, as the employer, you think a worker will respond positively to a ranking and feel inspired to work harder, then by all means do it. But it's imperative to think about it on an individual level."
  • Gary Brown on 23 Aug 10
     
    the conflation of feedback with ranking confounds this. What is not done and needs to be done is to compare the motivational impact of providing constructive feedback. Presumably the study uses ranking in a strictly comparative context as well, and we do not see the influence of feedback relative to an absolute scale. Still, much in this piece to ponder....
Joshua Yeidel

Outcomes and Distributions in Program Evaluation - 2 views

www.usablellc.net/ibutions-in-prorgam-evaluation

assessment outcomes

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 19 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 19 Aug 10
     
    "The key here is to understand that looking only at the total outcome of a program limits your ability to use evaluation data for program improvement."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 19 Aug 10
     
    Eric Graig discusses the need to slice and dice the data.
Gary Brown

Quick Takes: May 13, 2010 - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

www.insidehighered.com/...qt

accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • A proposed change in the Council for Higher Education Accreditation's policies for recognizing accrediting agencies is drawing criticism from the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Under the proposed change, which is part of a larger revision of the council's procedures for reviewing the work of accreditors, would require agencies to show that they "inform the public of decisions on [individual colleges' or programs'] accreditation status and the reasons for these decisions."
  • CHEA language is ambiguous about the purpose of the new requirement." CHEA is seeking comment on the new standards.
  • Gary Brown on 07 Jun 10
     
    changing pressures influencing changes in accreditation, and a link to weigh in....
Joshua Yeidel

Skim | Home - 2 views

skim-app.sourceforge.net

pdf software mac opensource freeware

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 11 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 11 Nov 09
     
    "Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file. Stop printing and start skimming."
Joshua Yeidel

Start-Up Aspires to Make the World 'One Big Study Group' - Wired Campus - The Chronicle... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...26780

higher_education learning web_2.0

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 13 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 13 Sep 10
     
    A more modest attempt to "open up" education, using a study-group model rather than a course model like P2PU.
Nils Peterson

Here, There, & Everywhere -- Campus Technology - 2 views

campustechnology.com/...ePortfolios.aspx

shared by Nils Peterson on 04 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Electronic portfolios can follow a student beyond graduation into careers and other life pursuits-- but not if the university can't guarantee access, or if the data won't transfer from one system to another. A look at how ePortfolios can be true repositories of lifelong learning.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 04 Nov 09
       
      despite this lead, it moves off to look at cloud-based portfolios in a pretty good fashion
Nils Peterson

An Expert Surveys the Assessment Landscape - Student Affairs - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...48945

AI-TopNews AI-Accreditation

shared by Nils Peterson on 28 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Colleges and universities have plenty of tools, but they must learn to use them more effectively. That is how George D. Kuh describes the state of assessing what college students learn.
Theron DesRosier

An Expert Surveys the Assessment Landscape - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...48945

chronicle kuh assessment accountability higher_education

shared by Theron DesRosier on 30 Oct 09 - Cached
  • What we want is for assessment to become a public, shared responsibility, so there should be departmental leadership.
  • Theron DesRosier on 30 Oct 09
     
    "What we want is for assessment to become a public, shared responsibility, so there should be departmental leadership." George Kuh director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.
  • Theron DesRosier on 30 Oct 09
     
    Kuh also says, "So we're going to spend some time looking at the impact of the Voluntary System of Accountability. It's one thing for schools to sign up, it's another to post the information and to show that they're actually doing something with it. It's not about posting a score on a Web site-it's about doing something with the data." He doesn't take the next step and ask if it is even possible for schools to actually do anything with the data collected from the CLA or ask who has access to the criteria: Students? Faculty? Anyone?
Gary Brown

Best Colleges: The Real Rankings - CBS MoneyWatch.com - 2 views

moneywatch.bnet.com/...345754

ranking colleges PLE

shared by Gary Brown on 28 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Ultimately, though, the usefulness of any college ranking will depend on what criteria matters most to you and your teen. The best strategy: Use a few of the rankings to amass quantifiable and
  • Gary Brown on 28 Sep 09
     
    key advice for prospective college students--and a way to think about providing models that engage authentic learning opportunities as critical benchmark.
  • Gary Brown on 28 Sep 09
     
    key advice for prospective college students--and a way to think about providing models that engage authentic learning opportunities as critical benchmark.
Gary Brown

What students Want from Moodle is not always what Teachers build @sukhwantlot... - 2 views

www.moodlenews.com/...at-teachers-build-sukhwantlota

lms moodle

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The comic is a quick over view of what students generally want from any web-based resources (perhaps especially a course resource like Moodle) and what teachers provide more often than not.
  • Gary Brown on 20 Sep 10
     
    No surprise, but just to share and archive
Joshua Yeidel

Students Know Good Teaching When They Get It, Survey Finds - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...11education.html

education value-added assessment teaching

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 11 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 11 Dec 10
     
    ... as measured by student evals and "value-added modeling".  Note some of the student eval items, though... e.g., students agree or disagree with "In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes."
Gary Brown

Improving Teaching Will Require Strategic Thinking - Letters to the Editor - The Chroni... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...64010

change teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Feb 10 - Cached
  • a rather large gap between knowledge about effective teaching practices in higher education and the use of these practices in higher education.
  • the greatest gains in STEM education are likely to come from the development of strategies to encourage faculty and administrators to implement proven instructional strategies."
  • The issue is not just one of finding better ways to motivate professors. Most professors already take their teaching responsibilities seriously and are motivated to do a good job. Improving instruction will require strategic and systematic work at all levels of the educational system.
  • Gary Brown on 09 Feb 10
     
    note the focus on systems
  • Kimberly Green on 15 Feb 10
     
    This piece raises a related issue we have been discussing at OAI -- "First, and perhaps most important, there is very little research conducted on how to promote change in instructional practices used in higher education. " How does leadership promote change? How do leaders -- such as dept chairs -- promote and manage change? How do they get, or invest in, those skills?
Nils Peterson

Swift Kick Central: Playing Catch Up: Colleges and the Web - 1 views

blog.swiftkickonline.com/...h-up-colleges-and-the-web.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Based on the incredible investment of universities in social architecture: in quads, residence halls and lounges, it's ironic that most universities still do not see the internet as cost effective social venue, despite the countless examples online
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 Oct 09
       
      Found this guy because he put our Harvesting Gradebook YouTube in his feed. At this blog, and at Tom Krieglstein he is writing some interesting analysis.
  • Universities just couldn't see how to extend the old value and investment into connecting and learning, to the new field.
  • Universities are following along the same trends of the internet as a whole, with a bit of a lag. College websites are still mostly "web 1.0": characterized by static content, controlled by a centralized office.  Curriculum and learning is still centralized and controlled in learning managment systems like Blackboard. Where there are discussion features in Blackboard, the content stays centralized with the class and is lost at the end of the term. Where there are blogs on university websites, they tend to be written by selected and edited "brand ambassadors" - an attempt to put a real face on a preferred message.This year, often led by the admissions department, it has become fashionable for schools to use social media links on their sites. The thinking, however, is still mostly in the 1.0 paradigm: "follow the school on twitter" or "become a fan of the university on Facebook." In this paradigm, the university is still the focus, a one to many publisher in the center. Based on competition and financial pressures, businesses based on publishing models are scrambling to decentralize, lower cost structures, and move their models towards connecting and aggregating. When will the paradigm shift for the University?
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 Oct 09
       
      Is he asking the right, hard question, or, does the publishing model not apply?
Gary Brown

Encyclopedia of Educational Technology - 1 views

coe.sdsu.edu/...index.htm

learning

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The revised taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) incorporates both the kind of knowledge to be learned (knowledge dimension) and the process used to learn (cognitive process), allowing for the instructional designer to efficiently align objectives to assessment techniques. Both dimensions are illustrated in the following table that can be used to help write clear, focused objectives.
  • Teachers may also use the new taxonomy dimensions to examine current objectives in units, and to revise the objectives so that they will align with one another, and with assessments.
  • Anderson and Krathwohl also list specific verbs that can be used when writing objectives for each column of the cognitive process dimension.
  • Gary Brown on 20 Jan 10
     
    Bloom has not gone away, and this revision helps delimit the nominalist implications
Joshua Yeidel

Eric Legault My Eggo : The Secret Outlook Feature You Didn't Know You Needed - 1 views

blogs.officezealot.com/...21596.aspx

outlook

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 13 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 13 Oct 09
     
    A power tip for power users of Outlook -- Query Builder!
Joshua Yeidel

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google - CNN.com - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

google security

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 25 Jan 10
     
    "# Google says hackers from China got into its Gmail system # Bruce Schneier says hackers exploited feature put into system at behest of U.S. government # When governments get access to private communications, they invite abuse, he says # Government surveillance and control of Internet is flourishing, he says"
  • Joshua Yeidel on 25 Jan 10
     
    A security expert looks at who's spying on whom... (hint: it's not just China)
  • Matthew Tedder on 26 Jan 10
     
    But China is clearly among the most aggressive in this area. I remember being taught in the military that most espionage is industrial (by governments for industry) but Universities are also targets for various classified research, such as DARPA funded research. I think of perhaps shock physics, for example. Certain kinds of spying are essential for peace--that which is to determine "intent" of the other helps eliminate the ill-affects of paranoia. Other kinds can be detrimental to peace, such as China's many successful attempts at acquiring U.S. military technological and operational information.
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