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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Sven A. Miller

Sven A. Miller

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - Anu Partanen - National -... - 4 views

  • Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
  • Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.
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    Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.
Sven A. Miller

News: Wikipedia Aims Higher - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

  • Beyond grades, the fact that students are producing work that will be scrutinized by the public, not just a professor, heightens the incentive to do good work, several professors noted. Several reported that their students sent links to their entries to their parents — something they never did with papers.
  • “time-suck,”
    • Sven A. Miller
       
      This is an acute problem - also within the MA!!!
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • all these metacognitive process that we have such a hard time teaching
  • — and in this case actually defend yourself
  • It is going take time for … students who are less tech-savvy to be able to move on
  • sacrifice parts of his syllabus and devote about two full class periods to teaching students the technical ins and outs of writing and editing in Wikipedia and communicating with other editors
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    Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have "Wikipedia ambassadors" tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero's office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a "Wikipedian in residence" in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
Sven A. Miller

Like Iran & Tunisia, Egypt protests fueled by social sites Twitter, Facebook, YouTube a... - 0 views

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    With the rise of easy-to-use Web publishing tools like blogs and social platforms, citizens no longer depend on mainstream media to spread word of activist campaigns and dissent. Thanks to social media, every protester, every citizen, has the power to be a journalist, to broadcast breaking news to all the computer-using, phone-wielding people on Earth.
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