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Convert metric units of length - 48 views
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2011 College Completion Data | Complete College America - 4 views
www.completecollege.org/state_data
college readiness graduation rates college data completion higher education
shared by Randolph Hollingsworth on 11 Jan 12
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Includes state profiles from 33 states - includes a 20 page summary, tables, separate profiles for each state and full report; uses the following metrics: total degrees and certificates, graduation rates for certificate/assoc/bacc, time to degree, credits to degree, remediation enrollment, remediation graduation, transfers
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Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views
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"AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
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CBI: Our education systems are not delivering - while average performance rises gently,... - 0 views
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UK ranks among the highest spending OECD countries measured in terms of percentage of GDP on education.
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explanation for the conveyor belt comes not from money, therefore, but from other incentives that schools face.
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We should not be surprised that these drive behaviour – but not always the behaviour that the Department for Education wants.
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When we look at whether the improvement on the GCSE metric is general or specific to those close to the grade boundary, it is clear that this measure is driving what is happening in schools.
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intensive targeting of resources on pupils just below the C grade and/or an increase in teachers’ expertise in ‘teaching to the test’ has been behind improvements.
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Whatever the explanation, it doesn’t inspire confidence that the rise in exam grades for average ability candidates really reflects an increase across all groups in mastery of the subjects studied.
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Narrowly-defined targets like these, based only on exam results subtly inhibit the overall education of young people.
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At earlier stages in the system, similar testing frameworks focus school accountability on achieving a certain percentage of pupils reaching a defined average, rather than a focus on absolute attainment.
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it is possible to dramatically reduce attainment gaps in their primary school populations and raise standards on a broader basis than the UK has managed.
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CBI: Change is possible - but we must be clearer about what we ask schools to develop i... - 1 views
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In Finland, the goals of education are explicitly linked to competitiveness, research and innovation.
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This lack of a comprehensive statement of the achievement we are looking for schools to deliver is a key failing.
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One such school leader told us they had taken a conscious decision with one group of young people to focus on five key subjects and some life skills, knowing that the accountability system would score them down for it, as it expected eight qualifications from all students at that time.
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Our system should reward schools making brave decisions which focus on boosting long-term outcomes for pupils, not punish them.
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It should be able to survive changes of government and provide the test against which policy changes and school actions are judged
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shine the light on whether the system is truly addressing the needs of all students, rather than just the few required to meet a government target.
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thos and culture that build the social skills also essential to progress in life and work, and allow them time to focus on this
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Have a school accountability and assessment framework that supports these goals rather than defining them.
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An exclusive focus on subjects for study would fail to equip young people with these, though rigour in the curriculum does help
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Behaviours can only be developed over time, through the entire path of a young person’s life and their progress through the school system.
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Development of a clear, widely-owned and stable statement of the outcome that all schools are asked to deliver.
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resourcing these bodies to develop an approach based on a wider range of measures and assessments than are currently in use,
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Would Gandhi Use Social Media?, by Nipun Mehta - 26 views
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What transformation does is shift the pattern of addiction altogether; changing the habits of your heart was the true genius of these social change giants.
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The Internet, then, is great for spreading awareness and it can be quite powerful in terms of its impact as well. Where it lacks, though, is the third element -- transformation.
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FaceBook's organizing principle is to retain the online attention of its users and monetize it by displaying ads
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If we are to have sustainable revolutions that last for generations, our modern day technologies have to be designed for this element of inner transformation.
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Each of those legendary service heroes started with changing themselves at the root level, and despite leading vast revolutions, always kept that front and center.
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When organized, such inner-transformation driven designs work at the intersection of three big circles: outer change, systemic change and personal change.
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Giftivism: the practice of radically generous acts that change the world. It works by transforming the heart of the change maker, even more than the impact on its external beneficiaries. A key metric of giftivism is that it works to uplift the 100%. It has no enemies. It is unconditionally kind to everyone.
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The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views
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proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
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Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
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felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
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One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
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adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
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Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
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Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
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“Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
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One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
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Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
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“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
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Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
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We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
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ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
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e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
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pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
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a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
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he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
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Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
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certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
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MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
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It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
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part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
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“hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
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I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
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it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
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for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
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Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
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professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
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The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
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Education News : Professional Development Articles :: 100+ Google Tricks for Teachers - 114 views
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Convert units. Whether you want to convert currency, American and metric units, or any other unit, try typing in the known unit and the unknown unit to find your answer (like "how many teaspoons in a tablespoon" or "10 US dollars in Euros").
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Search within a specific website. If you know you want to look up Babe Ruth in Wikipedia, type in "site:wikipedia.org Babe Ruth" to go directly to the Wikipedia page about Babe Ruth. It works for any site, not just Wikipedia.
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Coh-Metrix - 30 views
edr.sagepub.com/...223.abstract
readability textselection individualized matrix formula reading Coh-Metrix textanalysis
shared by SHARON DRESSEL on 01 Jul 11
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five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity
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Computer analyses of text characteristics are often used by reading teachers, researchers, and policy makers when selecting texts for students. The authors of this article identify components of language, discourse, and cognition that underlie traditional automated metrics of text difficulty and their new Coh-Metrix system. Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. The authors discuss five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity. They consider the importance of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts for assigning the right text to the right student at the right time.
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How do we go about selecting texts for individualized reading assistance? This sounds like a new way.
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Creativity vs. Quants - NYTimes.com - 42 views
www.nytimes.com/...egan-creativity-vs-quants.html
creativity Common Core quantify polls metrics education Marketing
shared by Steven Szalaj on 22 Mar 14
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Educational Leadership:Teaching for the 21st Century:21st Century Skills: The Challenge... - 119 views
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Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history
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What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills
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Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.
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some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
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First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills
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Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained
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At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.
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if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
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Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
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But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
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We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.
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education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.
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Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method
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These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.
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Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.
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measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.
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When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.
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Will Richardson: My Kids are Illiterate. Most Likely, Yours Are Too - 10 views
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I wonder if most parents (and even some teachers) even know what this means. Sometimes I think we are too entrenched in old-school ways of thinking students need to know and love classics instead of understanding how literature is a reflection of the times and using the classics as mentor pieces for creating something which reflects here and now!
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kids need to be in systems that care for them and are focused on literacy they will need to be successful in their lives instead of being focused primarily on standardizing their way to "high student achievement" based on a metric that is growing less and less relevant each day
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I'm mad that the "big" conversations around "reform" in education right now all revolve around basically doing what we've been doing for the past 100 years only "better," and that we'll get there by incentivizing teachers to teach for a test.
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