Group items tagged

narcisstic

bullying behavior.

mean-spirited

help your kids understand that other people also have a right to exist

But can we embrace the cloud? Can the faculty member who wears our institution's name in her title and e-mail address, to whom we've entrusted the academic and research mission of the institution, be trusted to reach into the cloud and pluck what she believes is the optimal tool to achieve her pedagogical aims and use it? Unfortunately, no. Many faculty and staff members simply use whatever service they choose, but they often do not have the knowledge or experience needed to evaluate those choices. And those who do try to work through the institution soon find themselves mired in bureaucracy.

But our faculty and staff are increasingly voting with their feet—they're more interested in the elegance, portability, and integration of commercial offerings, despite the inability to control how those programs change over time. By insisting on remaining with homegrown solutions, we are failing to fall in lockstep with those we support.

Data security? Of course there are plenty of fly-by-night operations with terrible security practices. However, as the infrastructure market has matured (one of the generally unrecognized benefits of cloud services), more and more small companies can provide assurances of data security that would shame many of us even at large research-intensive institutions.

change doesn't happen without individual people changing their thinking, beliefs and behavior

think differently about their jobs

change efforts often falter because individuals overlook the need to make fundamental changes in themselves.

cognitive dissonance

behavioral data to affect employee performance

change is an inside-out process

See an audio slide show about the Mad River Food Hub at the Reimagining Infrastructure series homepage, www.orionmagazine.org/infrastructure.

At last count, the site had 2,700 audio and video lectures from more than 25 universities; 268 audio books; and 105 e-books. Dr. Colman says he looks for lectures that "take ideas and make them come to life." And so you can learn 37 languages on Open Culture, or stream Jane Austen audio books, Hitchcock films and a John Hopkins biology lecture.

Why pay for test prep? M.I.T. OpenCourseWare has culled introductory courses in physics, calculus and biology, along with problem sets and labs, to help students prep for the Advanced Placement exams. (Not to miss an opportunity, there’s a link to the admissions office.)

Continuously upgrade educators' classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite of "highly effective" teaching

Home Advocacy Top Ten in '10: ISTE's Education Technology Priorities for 2010 Through a common focus on boosting student achievement and closing the achievement gap, policymakers and educators alike are now reiterating their commitment to the sorts of programs and instructional efforts that can have maximum effect on instruction and student outcomes. This commitment requires a keen understanding of both past accomplishment and strategies for future success. Regardless of the specific improvement paths a state or school district may chart, the use of technology in teaching and learning is non-negotiable if we are to make real and lasting change.  With growing anticipation for Race to the Top (RttT) and Investing in Innovation (i3) awards in 2010, states and school districts are seeing increased attention on educational improvement, backed by financial support through these grants. As we think about plans for the future, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has identified 10 priorities essential for making good on this commitment in 2010: 1. Establish technology in education as the backbone of school improvement . To truly improve our schools for the long term and ensure that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve in the 21st century, education technology must permeate every corner of the learning process. From years of research, we know that technology can serve as a primary driver for systemic school improvement, including school leadership, an improved learning culture and excellence in professional practice. We must ensure that technology is at the foundation of current education reform efforts, and is explicit and clear in its role, mission, and expected impact. 2. Leverage education technology as a gateway for college and career readiness . Last year, President Obama established a national goal of producing the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by the year 2020. To achieve this goal in the next 10 years, we must embrace new instructional approaches that both increase the college-going rates and the high school graduation rates. By effectively engaging learning through technology, teachers can demonstrate the relevance of 21st century education, keeping more children in the pipeline as they pursue a rigorous, interesting and pertinent PK-12 public education. 3. Ensure technology expertise is infused throughout our schools and classrooms.  In addition to providing all teachers with digital tools and content we must ensure technology experts are integrated throughout all schools, particularly as we increase focus and priority on STEM (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) instruction and expand distance and online learning opportunities for students. Just as we prioritize reading and math experts, so too must we place a premium on technology experts who can help the entire school maximize its resources and opportunities. To support these experts, as well as all educators who integrate technology into the overall curriculum, we must substantially increase our support for the federal Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program.  EETT provides critical support for on-going professional development, implementation of data-driven decision-making, personalized learning opportunities, and increased parental involvement. EETT should be increased to $500 million in FY2011. 4. Continuously upgrade educators' classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite of "highly effective" teaching . As part of our nation's continued push to ensure every classroom is led by a qualified, highly effective teacher, we must commit that all P-12 educators have the skills to use modern information tools and digital content to support student learning in content areas and for student assessment. Effective teachers in the 21st Century should be, by definition, technologically savvy teachers. 5. Invest in pre-service education technology

Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.

It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.

As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.

Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.

Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.

It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.

Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.

Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.

Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.

Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.

Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,”

For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous.

According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.”

one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot

1961, in Cambridge, J. C. R. Licklider, a scientist at the technology firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman, began a two-year study on the future of the library, funded by the Ford Foundation and aided by a team of researchers that included Marvin Minsky, at M.I.T.

Licklider envisioned a library in which computers would replace books and form a “network in which every element of the fund of knowledge is connected to every other element.”

Licklider’s two-hundred-page Ford Foundation report, “Libraries of the Future,” was published in 1965.

Kahle enrolled at M.I.T. in 1978. He studied computer science and engineering with Minsky.

Vint Cerf, who worked on ARPAnet in the seventies, and now holds the title of Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, has started talking about what he sees as a need for “digital vellum”: long-term storage. “I worry that the twenty-first century will become an informational black hole,” Cerf e-mailed me. But Kahle has been worried about this problem all along.

The Internet Archive is also stocked with Web pages that are chosen by librarians, specialists like Anatol Shmelev, collecting in subject areas, through a service called Archive It, at archive-it.org, which also allows individuals and institutions to build their own archives.

Illien told me that, when faced with Kahle’s proposal, “national libraries decided they could not rely on a third party,” even a nonprofit, “for such a fundamental heritage and preservation mission.”

screenshots from Web archives have held up in court, repeatedly.

Perma.cc has already been adopted by law reviews and state courts; it’s only a matter of time before it’s universally adopted as the standard in legal, scientific, and scholarly citation.

It’s not possible to go back in time and rewrite the HTTP protocol, but Van de Sompel’s work involves adding to it. He and Michael Nelson are part of the team behind Memento, a protocol that you can use on Google Chrome as a Web extension, so that you can navigate from site to site, and from time to time. He told me, “Memento allows you to say, ‘I don’t want to see this link where it points me to today; I want to see it around the time that this page was written, for example.’ ”