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Nils Peterson

Jeff Sheldon on the Readiness for Organizational Learning and Evaluation instrument | A... - 4 views

shared by Nils Peterson on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The ROLE consists of 78 items grouped into six major constructs: 1) Culture, 2) Leadership, 3) Systems and Structures, 4) Communication, 5) Teams, and 6) Evaluation.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      You can look up the book in Amazon and then view inside and search for Appendix A and read the items in the survey. http://www.amazon.com/Evaluation-Organizations-Systematic-Enhancing-Performance/dp/0738202681#reader_0738202681 This might be useful to OAI in assessing readiness (or understanding what in the university culture challenges readiness) OR it might inform our revision (or justify staying out) of our rubric. An initial glance would indicate that there are some cultural constructs in the university that are counter-indicated by the analysis of the ROLE instrument.
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    " Readiness for Organizational Learning and Evaluation (ROLE). The ROLE (Preskill & Torres, 2000) was designed to help us determine the level of readiness for implementing organizational learning, evaluation practices, and supporting processes"
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    An interesting possibility for a Skylight survey (but more reading needed)
Joshua Yeidel

Five fallacies of cloud computing - 4 views

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    "much of the thinking and hype surrounding cloud computing is built upon fallacies while ignoring the market realities. Let me outline those fallacies here." Especially note Fallacy #5, which includes a discussion of "trust".
S Spaeth

Matthews et al: Selecting influential members of social networks - 0 views

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    Opinion leaders are influential members of their social networks, strategically selected for their ability to sway community norms. The aims of the study were to assess: 1) whether it is feasible to identify student opinion leaders (SOLs) and their social networks among Grade 11 students at two high schools in Cape Town, South Africa; and 2) whether these opinion leaders would be willing to be involved in an HIV/AIDS prevention program in their school. The students (N = 412) completed a semi-structured, anonymous, self-administered questionnaire. ... Of these, all but two at each school were willing and available to participate in a HIV/AIDS prevention program. ---------- Focuses on HIV/AIDS prevention but can we use principles in other contexts and Facebook recommendation tools to support the process?
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    I've been thinking about how to support the development and visibility of SOLs using technology, without creating a creepy treehouse. How do we make them more visible and accessible?
Nils Peterson

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them. Radical experiments in teaching carry no guarantees and even fewer rewards in most tenure and promotion systems, even if they are successful. In many cases faculty are required to assess their students in a standardized way to fulfill requirements for the curriculum. Nothing is easier to assess than information recall on multiple-choice exams, and the concise and “objective” numbers satisfy committee members busy with their own teaching and research.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Do we think this is true? Many?
  • In a world of nearly infinite information, we must first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there.
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    "Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative."
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    Connect this to the 10 point self assessment we did for AACU comparing institutional vs community-based learning https://teamsite.oue.wsu.edu/ctlt/home/Anonymous%20Access%20Documents/AACU%202009/inst%20vs%20comm%20based%20spectrum.pdf
Gary Brown

For Accreditation, a Narrow Window of Opportunity - Commentary - The Chronicle of Highe... - 4 views

  • After two years as president of the American Council on Education, I feel compelled to send a wake-up call to campus executives: If federal policy makers are now willing to bail out the nation's leading banks and buy equity stakes in auto makers because those companies are "too big to fail," they will probably have few reservations about regulating an education system that they now understand is "too important to fail."
  • Regardless of party, policy makers are clearly aware of the importance of education and are demanding improved performance and more information, from preschool to graduate school. In this environment, we should expect college accreditation to come under significant scrutiny.
  • It has also clearly signaled its interest in using data to measure institutional performance and student outcomes, and it has invested in state efforts to create student-data systems from pre-kindergarten through graduate school.
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  • Higher education has so far navigated its way through the environment of increased regulatory interest without substantial changes to our system of quality assurance or federally mandated outcomes assessment. But that has only bought us time. As we look ahead, we must keep three facts in mind: Interest in accountability is bipartisan, and the pendulum has swung toward more regulation in virtually all sectors. The economic crisis is likely to spur increased calls from policy makers to control college prices and demonstrate that students are getting value for the dollar. The size of the federal budget deficit will force everyone who receives federal support to produce more and better evidence that an investment of federal funds will pay dividends for individuals and society.
  • If we do not seize the opportunity to strengthen voluntary peer accreditation as a rigorous test of institutional quality, grounded in appropriate measures of student learning, we place at risk a precious bulwark against excessive government intervention, a bulwark that has allowed American higher education to flourish. When it comes to safeguarding the quality, diversity, and independence of American higher education, accreditors hold the keys to the kingdom.
  • all accreditors now require colleges and universities to put more emphasis on measuring student-learning outcomes. They should be equally vigilant about ensuring that those data are used to achieve improvements in outcomes
  • share plain-language results of accreditation reviews with the public.
  • It takes very little close reading to see through the self-serving statements here: namely that higher education institutions must do a better PR job pretending they are interested in meaningful reform so as to head off any real reform that migh come from the federal authorities.
  • THEREFORE, let me voice a wakeup call for those who are really interested in reform--not that there are many.1.There will never be any meaningful reform unless we have a centralized and nationalized higher educational system. Leaving higher education in the hands of individual institutions is no longer effective and is in fact what has led to the present state we find ourselves in. Year after countless year we have been promised changes in higher education and year after year nothing changes. IF CHANGE IS TO COME IT MUST BE FORCED ONTO HIGHER EDUCATION FROM THE OUTSIDE.
  • Higher education in America can no longer afford to be organized around the useless market capitalism that forces too many financially marginalized institutions to compete for less and less.
  • Keeping Quiet by Pablo NerudaIf we were not so singled-mindedabout keeping our lives moving,and for once could do nothing,perhaps a huge silencemight interrupt this sadnessof never understanding ourselvesand of threatening ourselves with death.
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    It is heating up again
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.
Judy Rumph

Blog U.: It Boils Down to... - Confessions of a Community College Dean - Inside Higher Ed - 4 views

  • I had a conversation a few days ago with a professor who helped me understand some of the otherwise-puzzling opposition faculty have shown to actually using the general education outcomes they themselves voted into place.
  • Yet getting those outcomes from ‘adopted’ to ‘used’ has proved a long, hard slog.
  • The delicate balance is in respecting the ambitions of the various disciplines, while still maintaining -- correctly, in my view -- that you can’t just assume that the whole of a degree is equal to the sum of its parts. Even if each course works on its own terms, if the mix of courses is wrong, the students will finish with meaningful gaps. Catching those gaps can help you determine what’s missing, which is where assessment is supposed to come in. But there’s some local history to overcome first.
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    This is an interesting take on what we are doing and the comments interesting
S Spaeth

SPage- The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups - 0 views

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    In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another.The Differenceis about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Differencereveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality.
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    We (Jayme Jacobson, Nils Peterson, and I) have been talking about this a lot lately. This article reminded me of another article in the Harvard Business Review by Lakhani and Jeppesen on crowdsourcing. They found that successful Innocentive solvers often worked in disciplines removed from the posted problem. "Radical innovations often happen at the intersections of disciplines…The more diverse the problem solving population, the more likely the problem will be solved." Lakhani and Jeppesen May 2007 Harvard Business Review Thanks Stephen
Peggy Collins

Science in the open » Google Wave in Research - the slightly more sober view ... - 4 views

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    an interesting post about Google Wave and academic document collaboration
Nils Peterson

Innovating the 21st-Century University: It's Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 4 views

  • change is required in two vast and interwoven domains that permeate the deep structures and operating model of the university: (1) the value created for the main customers of the university (the students); and (2) the model of production for how that value is created. First we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created.
  • Research shows that mutual exploration, group problem solving, and collective meaning-making produce better learning outcomes and understanding overall. Brown and Adler cite a study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education: "Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students' success in higher education . . . was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own."
  • Second, the web enables students to collaborate with others independent of time and geography. Finally, the web represents a new mode of production for knowledge, and that changes just about everything regarding how the "content" of college and university courses are created.
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  • As Seymour Papert, one of the world's foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, put it: "The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery."14 Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have — to "construct" new knowledge structures and meaning.
  • Universities need an entirely new modus operandi for how the content of higher education is created. The university needs to open up, embrace collaborative knowledge production, and break down the walls that exist among institutions of higher education and between those institutions and the rest of the world.To do so, universities require deep structural changes — and soon. More than three years ago, Charles M. Vest published "Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University" in EDUCAUSE Review. In his concluding paragraph, Vest offered a tantalizing vision: "My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university — a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure." Vest wrote that the meta-university "will speed the propagation of high-quality education and scholarship. . . . The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the Web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials, scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, teleoperation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a noble and global endeavor."17
  • Used properly, wikis are tremendously powerful tools to collaborate and co-innovate new content. Tapscott wrote the foreword for a book called We Are Smarter Than Me (2008). The book, a best-seller, was written by Barry Libert, Jon Spector, and more than 4,000 people who contributed to the book's wiki. If a global collaboration can write a book, surely one could be used to create a university course. A professor could operate a wiki with other teachers. Or a professor could use a wiki with his or her students, thereby co-innovating course content with the students themselves. Rather than simply being the recipients of the professor's knowledge, the students co-create the knowledge on their own, which has been shown to be one of the most effective methods of learning.
  • The student might enroll in the primary college in Oregon and register to take a behavioral psychology course from Stanford University and a medieval history course from Cambridge. For these students, the collective syllabi of the world form their menu for higher education. Yet the opportunity goes beyond simply mixing and matching courses. Next-generation faculty will create a context whereby students from around the world can participate in online discussions, forums, and wikis to discover, learn, and produce knowledge as networked individuals and collectively.
  • But what about credentials? As long as the universities can grant degrees, their supremacy will never be challenged." This is myopic thinking. The value of a credential and even the prestige of a university are rooted in its effectiveness as a learning institution. If these institutions are shown to be inferior to alternative learning environments, their capacity to credential will surely diminish. How much longer will, say, a Harvard undergraduate degree, taught mostly through lectures by teaching assistants in large classes, be able to compete in status with the small class size of liberal arts colleges or the superior delivery systems that harness the new models of learning?
  • As part of this, the academic journal should be disintermediated and the textbook industry eliminated. In fact, the word textbook is an oxymoron today. Content should be multimedia — not just text. Content should be networked and hyperlinked bits — not atoms. Moreover, interactive courseware — not separate "books" — should be used to present this content to students, constituting a platform for every subject, across disciplines, among institutions, and around the world. The textbook industry will never reinvent itself, however, since legacy cultures and business models die hard. It will be up to scholars and students to do this collectively.
  • Ultimately, we will need more objective measures centered on students' learning performance.
Gary Brown

YouTube - Assessment Quickies #1: What Are Student Learning Outcomes? - 3 views

shared by Gary Brown on 22 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Assessment Quickies #1: What Are Student Learning Outcomes?
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    a useful resource for our partners here at WSU from a new Cal State partner.
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.
Gary Brown

(How) Would You Use This Critical Thinking Video? at Beyond School - 3 views

  • This “Critical Thinking” video is worth a watch.
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    it is worth a watch, and as a resource
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    This is well done - many potential applications - a self check, for one, and for use in the myriad of teaching situations we find ourselves in both in work and outside of work.
Gary Brown

Fortnightly Mailing: "Data is not the plural of anecdote". Eric Mazur talks about how t... - 3 views

  • Eric Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, describes the main innovations he has made in how he runs his courses - and the painstaking empirical research that he has used to guide these changes.
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    Another resource particularly useful for science faculty
Gary Brown

Practitioner Research as a Way of Knowing: A Case Study of Teacher Learning in Improvi... - 3 views

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    Great resource, particularly for work with science and engineering.
Joshua Yeidel

Program Assessment of Student Learning - 3 views

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    "It is hoped that, in some small way, this blog can both engage and challenge faculty and administrators alike to become more intentional in their program assessment efforts, creating systematic and efficient processes that actually have the likelihood of improving student learning while honoring faculty time."
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    As recommended by Ashley. Apparently Dr. Rogers' blog is just starting up, so you can "get in on the ground floor".
Nils Peterson

Walmart's Growth: An Awesome Visualization Of The Retailer's Rapid Expansion (INFOGRAPHIC) - 3 views

  • Beginning with the first Walmart store, which opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, this incredible visualization -- put together by FlowingData, a data visualization website run by UCLA statistics doctoral student Nathan Yau -- traces the expansion of the seemingly omnipresent discount chain across America
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    an interesting visualization in its own right, perhaps another tool set we might use at "FlowingData"
Gary Brown

YouTube - Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology - 3 views

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    Sixth Sense Technology
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    In case you missed.
Gary Brown

Let's Make Rankings That Matter - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 3 views

  • By outsourcing evaluation of our doctoral programs to an external agency, we allow ourselves to play the double game of insulating ourselves from the criticisms they may raise by questioning their accuracy, while embracing the praise they bestow.
  • The solution to the problem is obvious: Universities should provide relevant information to potential students and faculty members themselves, instead of relying on an outside body to do it for them, years too late. How? By carrying out yearly audits of their doctoral programs.
  • The ubiquitous rise of social networking and open access to information via electronic media facilitate this approach to self-evaluation of academic departments. There is no need to depend on an obsolete system that irregularly publishes rankings when all of the necessary tools—e-mail, databases, Web sites—are available at all institutions of higher learning.
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  • A great paradox of modern academe is that our institutions take pride in being on the cutting edge of new ideas and innovations, yet remain resistant and even hostile to the openness made possible by technology
  • We should not hide our departments' deficiencies in debatable rankings, but rather be honest about those limitations in order to aggressively pursue solutions that will strengthen doctoral programs and the institutions in which they play a vital role.
Nils Peterson

Stolen Knowledge - 3 views

  • This is certainly not a trivial challenge-particularly for schools. The workplace, where our work has been concentrated, is perhaps the easiest place to design because, despite the inevitable contradictions and conflict, it is rich with inherently authentic practice-with a social periphery that, as Orr's (1990) or Shaiken's (1990) work shows, can even supersede attempts to impoverish understanding. Consequently, people often learn, complex work skills despite didactic practices that are deliberately designed to deskill. Workplace designers (and managers) should be developing technology to honor that learning ability, not to circumvent it.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Another John Seely Brown piece on Legitimate Peripheral Participation with interesting implications for our needs of professional development as OAI evolves. It also leads me back to Lave and Wenger so that I stop crediting JSB with the term.
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