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The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted.  The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top.  What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order to create additional meaning from new information.  In short, with tests we see traces of learning, not learning itself.

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patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.

they can improve their online-education efforts to help students find streamlined, affordable pathways to a degree.

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief.

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

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we have a responsibility to ensure that our students develop skills to perform heuristic tasks in order to compete in the job market.

According to SDT the three basic psychological needs for motivation are competence, where one feels effective and efficacious; relatedness, where one feels close and connected to others; and autonomy, where one feels causation and ownership of one’s behavior

Starkey (2011) suggests that creativity is the penultimate learning experience and that sharing the knowledge is the ultimate goal (p. 25), a concept supported by Siemen’s (2004) connectivism learning theory, where learning and knowledge rests on a number of opinions that when connected allows us to know more (2004).

children from low-income families spend more time handling technology -- across platforms -- than their wealthier counterparts, and across class, kids mainly use their "handling skills" for entertainment. They play games, watch videos, and visit social networking sites.

there's scant evidence that anyone but the companies who make, sell, and advertise on these new technologies benefit from the time young children spend with them, there's plenty of reason to be worried about it.

studies showing that the bells and whistles of electronic books actually detract from reading comprehension.

nonprofits and libraries can request and receive technology products donated by TechSoup partners, and they can find tech-focused content and community tuned to their needs.

e&nbsp;demands for innovation probably won't create an all-new landscape, the resulting product of ongoing changes is likely to be unrecognizable compared to that of the last several&nbsp;decades.

alternative credentialing and changing demographics to testing concerns and the rise of STEM

America's 629 public four-year institutions, 1,845 private four-year institutions, 1,070 public two-year institutions, and 596 private two-year institutions will soon be competing over a smaller pipeline of potential incoming students.&nbsp;

Primary and secondary appraisals formed theoretically consistent and reliable evaluations of threat and challenge. Secondary appraisals were significantly lower for students who viewed the performance as a threat. Students who viewed the performance as a challenge reported significantly less cognitive anxiety and higher self-confidence. Findings indicate that the PAM is a brief and reliable measure of cognitive appraisals that trigger precompetitive emotions of anxiety and confidence which can be used to identify those performers who could benefit from pre-performance intervention strategies to manage performance stress.

Music performance anxiety (MPA) can be controlled when musicians cognitively restructure their own thoughts and feelings about their performance by anticipating symptoms of anxiety and turning them to constructive use

The cognitive interpretation, or appraisal, of an initial emotional response, such as fear, exerts a proximal influence on performance

a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.

Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law,

Far from being autonomous computer programs oblivious to outside pressure, Google’s algorithms are subject to regular tinkering from executives and engineers who are trying to deliver relevant search results, while also pleasing a wide variety of powerful interests and driving its parent company’s more than $30 billion in annual profit.

Dickens had encountered that narrative trope in the stories written by the Lowell mill girls, who typically published either anonymously or under pseudonyms like “Dorothea” or “M.” In one anonymous story called “A Visit from Hope,” the narrator is “seated by the expiring embers of a wood fire” at midnight, when a ghost, an old man with “thin white locks,” appears before him. The ghost takes the narrator back to scenes from his youth, and afterward the narrator promises to “endeavor to profit by the advice he gave me.” Similarly, in “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is sitting beside “a very low fire indeed” when Marley’s ghost appears before him. And, later, after Scrooge has been visited by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, he promises, “The spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

That’s not how the scholars see it. Literary borrowing, even quite detailed borrowing, was accepted practice at the time—“It was just a different way of looking at things back then,” says Archibald. (“American Notes,” for instance, includes many pages of writing by the famed 19th-century physician Samuel Gridley Howe, all without attribution, and apparently without any thought by Dickens that he was doing something improper.)