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anonymous

Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 70 views

www.nytimes.com/...-faces-questions-on-value.html

technology schools change critique measurement effectiveness integration

shared by anonymous on 04 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”
  • Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.
  • how the district was innovating.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • district was innovating
  • there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again
  • “We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”
  • $46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
  • If we know something works
  • it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training
  • The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.
  • Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Dec 11
       
      yep - so where does leadership come in?
  • “It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”
  • “Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”
  • that computers can distract and not instruct.
  • “They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”
  • The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.
  • rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
  • engagement is a “fluffy
  • term” that can slide past critical analysis.
  • creating an impetus to rethink education entirely
    • Steve Ransom
      Steve Ransom on 04 Sep 11
       
      Like teaching powerpoint is "rethinking education". Right.
  • guide on the side.
  • Professor Cuban at Stanford
  • But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint
  • “There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
  • Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.
  • This is big business.
  • “Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”
  • anonymous on 07 Dec 11
     
    Shallow (still important) analysis of the major issues regarding technology integration in schools.
Marianne Hart

The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 48 views

www.newsweek.com/...the-creativity-crisis.html

shared by Marianne Hart on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  • “Creativity can be taught,”
  • it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children
    • Brian C. Smith
      Brian C. Smith on 26 Jul 10
       
      Students are labeled as "creative" if they display a knack for art or music, and sometimes in writing, however, they are rarely recognized as creative in math or science where a lot of creativity is not only needed, but excellent for learning within those very two disciplines.
    • Bill Genereux
      Bill Genereux on 23 Aug 10
       
      This is precisely why creativity education is important. It is needed everywhere, not just in the arts. Those teaching outside of arts education need to start recognizing the importance of creative thinking as well.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
  • The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.
  • When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 23 Jul 10
       
      Surely, "more quickly"?
  • Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
    • Brian C. Smith
      Brian C. Smith on 26 Jul 10
       
      Likely because it was out of necessity and the hardships of life. Not that we don't have hardships and necessities, but innovation has solved a lot of problems and automation has made skills and tasks easy.
  • What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.
    • Brian C. Smith
      Brian C. Smith on 26 Jul 10
       
      Everyday process of work or school... over time, consistent and non-prescriptive.
  • kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.
  • project-based learning
  • highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
  • When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
  • solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others
  • The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.
  • When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
  • The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach
  • those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
  • The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer
  • The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.
  • “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”
  • In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
  • fact-finding
  • problem-finding
  • Next, idea-finding
  • there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
  • Christian Howd on 13 Jul 10
     
    For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong-and how we can fix it.
Gareth Jones

Looking in the Wrong Places | Edge.org - 5 views

www.edge.org/...er-looking-in-the-wrong-places

NaturalScience senseperception paradigm

shared by Gareth Jones on 19 May 18 - No Cached
  • We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
  • I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.
  • The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • That makes this field of science rather peculiar and probably explains why there hasn’t been much progress. But it’s not like we don’t have any questions that need to be answered. There are a lot of questions that have been around for decades. For example, what is dark energy? What is dark matter? What are the masses of the Standard Model particles? And what’s up with the foundation of quantum mechanics? Is a theory that's fundamentally not deterministic, where we cannot predict outcomes, the last word that we have, or is there something more to it? Is there maybe another underlying structure to reality?
  • but we haven't reached the fundamental level. Maybe we will never reach it. Certainly, the theories that we have right now are not all there is. The question is, of course, if we don’t have any guidance by experiment, how do we make progress? And are we doing the right thing?
  • We’ve reached this point where we have to carefully rethink if the criteria that we’re using to select our theories are promising at all. If one looks at the history of this field in the foundations of physics, progress has usually been made by looking at questions that, at least in hindsight, were well posed, where there was an actual mathematical contradiction. For example, special relativity is incompatible with Newtonian gravity. If you try to resolve this incompatibility, you get general relativity.
  • There are various similar examples where such breakthroughs have happened because there was a real problem. There was an inconsistency and people had to resolve it. It had nothing to do with beauty. Maybe beauty was, in some cases, the personal motivation of the people to work on it. There’s certainly some truth to this, but I don’t think it’s good to turn this story around and say that if we only pay attention to this motivation that comes from ideals of beauty it will lead to progress.
  • If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
  • The way that research is funded in foundations of physics and in many other fields just puts a lot of things at a disadvantage that are not pursued anymore. Typically, everything that takes longer than three years to complete, no one will start it because they can’t afford it. They can literally not afford it.
  • Who makes the decisions about the funding? Superficially, people say that it's a funding agency, so it’s the university who get to hire people. But that puts the blame on the wrong party. In the end it’s the community itself who makes the decisions. What do the funding agencies do if they get a proposal? They send it to reviewers. And who are the reviewers? They're people from the same community. If you look at how hiring decisions are being made, there’s some committee and they are people from the same community. They have some advisory boards or something, which contains people from the same community.
  • Even if that wasn’t so, what the people in these committees would be doing is looking at easy measures for scientific success. Presently, the most popular of these measures are the number of publications and the number of citations. And maybe also whether the person has published in high-impact journals. So, these are the typical measures that are presently being used. But what do they measure? They primarily measure popularity. They indicate whether somebody’s research is well received by a lot of people in the same community. And that’s why once a research area grows beyond a certain critical mass, you have sufficiently many people who tell each other that what they’re doing is the good thing to do. They review each other’s papers and say that that’s great and it's what we should continue to do. It’s a problem in all communities that grow beyond a certain size.
  • I later came to the United States and then Canada, and that gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about quantum gravity. I also figured out that much of what goes on in quantum gravity is very detached from reality. It’s pretty much only mathematics. Yes, the mathematics is there, but I still don’t know if it’s the mathematics that describes reality.
  • That’s the very reason why we don’t normally think of gravity as a weak force. It’s the only force that is left over on long distances, and the reason for this is that it adds up. It gets stronger the more mass you pile up. More precisely, we should say that the reason we find it so hard to measure quantum gravitational effects is that we either have a particle that has very pronounced quantum properties, like, say, a single electron or something like that, but then it’s so light that we cannot measure the gravitational field. Or we have some object that is so heavy that we can measure the gravitational field, but then it doesn’t have quantum properties. Okay, so that’s the actual problem.
Don Doehla

Language Magazine » The U.S. Foreign Language Deficit - 13 views

languagemagazine.com/?page_id=6466

language magazine u s foreign language deficit news

shared by Don Doehla on 04 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Don Doehla on 04 Jun 13
     
    Americans must learn other languages! Pick one to learn, any one! Pick one that interests you. Pick one from your community, your family history... Just pick one and enlarge your mind, your connections, your world! Support others learning as well, especially your own children if you have any. 
Florence Dujardin

Ethnotelling for User-generated Experiences - 30 views

journalofia.org/...04-boiano

ux ethnography narrative method identity information_architecture

shared by Florence Dujardin on 02 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Florence Dujardin on 02 Nov 12
     
    This paper focuses on storytelling as a research tool for social sciences, especially for cultural anthropology. After a short review of the main methodological tools traditionally used in ethnography, with particular regard to observation and interview, we focus on collecting and crafting stories (ethnotelling) as suitable tools for conveying the relational nature of fieldwork. Drawing on the works of Orr, Chipchase, Marradi and Adwan/Bar-on, we show how stories – collected, mediated or made up – are valuable tools for representing experiences and identities. As a result, we suggest a different approach to user-experience design, based on the creation of "thick" environments enabling a whole range of possibilities, where users can imagine or live their own user-generated experiences.
tapiatanova

A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of High... - 98 views

chronicle.com/...129609

social network sociallearning Social Media learning education millenials socialnetworking socialbookmarking pln ple optometry

shared by tapiatanova on 08 Nov 11 - No Cached
Kate Pok liked it
  • Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
    • trisha_poole
      trisha_poole on 08 Nov 11
       
      Very important - social pedagogies for authentic tasks - a key for integrating SNTs in the classroom.
    • Daniel Spielmann
      Daniel Spielmann on 09 Nov 11
       
      Agreed, for connectivism see also www.connectivism.ca
  • External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
    • Daniel Spielmann
      Daniel Spielmann on 09 Nov 11
       
      The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
    • tapiatanova
      tapiatanova on 03 Jan 14
       
      yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
  • Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • back-channel conversations
  • While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
    • trisha_poole
      trisha_poole on 08 Nov 11
       
      An effective use of Twitter that can be translated to classrooms.
    • Daniel Spielmann
      Daniel Spielmann on 09 Nov 11
       
      All classrooms?
    • John Dorn
      John Dorn on 09 Nov 11
       
      classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
  • Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
  • A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
  • Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
  • Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
  • Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
  • The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
    • Daniel Spielmann
      Daniel Spielmann on 09 Nov 11
       
      Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
  • Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
  • Daniel Spielmann on 09 Nov 11
     
    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
  • John Dorn on 09 Nov 11
     
    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
  • tapiatanova on 03 Jan 14
     
    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
Maureen Greenbaum

How about no grades for classwork? It might happen in some North Texas classrooms this ... - 52 views

educationblog.dallasnews.com/...exas-classrooms-this-fall.html

wesch couros not yet grade

shared by Maureen Greenbaum on 31 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • One idea brought up by several speakers this year is a hybrid grades-free way of evaluating students. In each case, it included a high-bar pass/fail approach to class assignments, with a final, more regular grade for the entire semester. One of the speakers who presented what he called a “Not Yet” grade was “digital ethnographer” Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University. That’s his photo at the top. He told the crowd that they had to inspire “wonder” in their students in order to get them to learn as much as possible. Some key quotes from him: “Low standards/high stakes are the opposite of what you want.”
  • “The new divide will be between those with wonder and curiosity and those without.”
  • Keynote speaker George Couros is a what’s called a “division principal” back home in Canada. He’s a blogger and author who is all about encouraging creativity and change in public education with an emphasis on taking advantage of digital tools. He told the conference that that it’s foolish to deny students use of their smartphones and other digital tools in the classroom — and even on exams. In 2015, being able to figure out what information is relevant is more important than memorization when most facts are a click away, he said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “The world only cares what you can do with what you know,” Couros said. He said he clashed with a teacher back home who complained that his approach would let students Google up the answers for her exams. His response: “If I can look up the answers to the questions on your test on Google, your questions suck.”
  • Students get assignments, of course. And they are expected to complete them. In fact, they are required to master them. So kids who might have been happy to get the equivalent of a C on an assignment in another classroom would be required to work at it until they hit the level defined as “mastery.” And the teachers keep track of whether the students have succeeded, whether they’re turning work in on time and whether they are responding to feedback.
  • Maureen Greenbaum on 31 Aug 15
     
    "The new divide will be between those with wonder and curiosity and those without." "The world only cares what you can do with what you know," Couros said. He said he clashed with a teacher back home who complained that his approach would let students Google up the answers for her exams. His response: "If I can look up the answers to the questions on your test on Google, your questions suck."
Maureen Greenbaum

Daniel Pinkwater on Pineapple Exam: 'Nonsense on Top of Nonsense' - Metropolis - WSJ - 18 views

blogs.wsj.com/...am-nonsense-on-top-of-nonsense

shared by Maureen Greenbaum on 22 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • An agent I had years ago said just because it’s nonprofit and educational, don’t let them not pay you, because they’re making money.
    • Jolynn Asato
      Jolynn Asato on 22 Apr 12
       
      Wow. What is done in the name of "educational". So much exploitation by an industry that makes much money off the misery of high stakes accountability!
  • They basically turned it into test-ese.
  • and I must interject that I admire the job they did, because it makes even less sense than mine
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • We don’t count that against the kid’s grade, we put that there as a sort of brain teaser to show them that not everything is quantifiable, and to let them have a little fun,” then I’ll retract all my aspersions about how they’re money-grubbing b——- and overcharge for this stuff and sell it over and over again and underpay the poor authors they buy it off of
  • those stupid tests — and you can quote me, stupid tests
  • maybe I misjudged them. Maybe somebody working on the test was slowly going crazy, and wanted to put in something amusing for him or herself, and also for the kids.
  • I’m on this earth to put up a feeble fight against the horrible tendency people have to think that there’s a formula. “If I do the following things, I’ll get elected president.” No you won’t. “If I do the following things, my work of art will be good.” Not necessarily. “If I follow this recipe, the dish will come out very delicious.” Maybe. Trust me, there is no formula for most things that are not math.
  • Maureen Greenbaum on 22 Apr 12
     
    "Daniel Pinkwater on Pineapple Exam: 'Nonsense on Top of Nonsense'"
maureen greenbaum

BetaKit » Is Adaptive Learning the Future of Education? - 2 views

betakit.com/...arning-the-future-of-education

shared by maureen greenbaum on 21 May 12 - No Cached
  • adaptive learning will adjust every question based on a student’s previous answer.
  • Knewton is working on having educational content tagged so it can be placed into a “Knowledge Graph.” This system determines what concepts need to be learned before a student can move on to others, and how they all fit together.
  • The company recently parterned with Pearson to tag every textbook under their imprint work with the Knewton Knowledge Graph.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • ata mining and take various inputs, like test question results, activity on the system, what links students clicked, etc. to make a prediction of the next best piece of content for a student to learn.
  • The technology seems to be working. After a pilot project at Arizona State University with 5,000 remedial math students, pass rates improved from 66 percent to 75 percent, with half the class finishing four weeks early
  • “The professors are much better prepared for a single class so that they can give much more individualized instruction,” Lui said. “The practical effectiveness of this means that teachers are now able to use their time more efficiently to hone in on the things that are most troublesome or useful for different groups of students. You’re not teaching to the mean or bottom quartile.”
  • Analyzing and collecting big data is really what Junyo is about, enabling everyone in the education sector to make the learning experience more personal.
  • The students also have their own dashboard to see recommended content.
  • Teachers don’t have the time to do detailed reporting of a student’s progress and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to provide one on one tutoring for every single student at different stages of learning.
  • students are learning more outside the classroom than in the classroom, and educators are finally starting to acknowledge that.
  • maureen greenbaum on 21 May 12
     
    "The professors are much better prepared for a single class so that they can give much more individualized instruction," Lui said. "The practical effectiveness of this means that teachers are now able to use their time more efficiently to hone in on the things that are most troublesome or useful for different groups of students. You're not teaching to the mean or bottom quartile."
Javier E

'There's Something Very Exciting Going On Here' - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic - 20 views

www.theatlantic.com/...262119

online learning

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 12 - Cached
  • One effort I started in June was to announce a seed grant program to support individual faculty and small teams that wanted to try different ways of teaching their course. So the internal funding helps support students or assistants or web developers or other people to help faculty recraft all or part of their course in order to see if new approaches really help.
  • here isn't an actual fixed fund. We got about 40 applicants. Maybe 20 of those things we funded. Each one was up to $25,000. I think I'd like to continue that on a quarterly basis. And really, we're new at all this. So the scale of this effort will depend on the faculty input and the outcome of how effective we find this to be.
  • We now have the ability for individual faculty or programs on campuses to produce appealing online content with relatively low effort and distribute that wide
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • we'd like to see a number of things tried so we can have a good discussion that's informed by rational experiment and collected data. Beyond these individual experiments, one class at a time, I think it would be great to have one or two departments really try to integrate an online experience into their core curriculum so we can understand how that works, so we can provide students more options
  • Many of these first round of MOOCs were produced with a webcam by an individual instructor using a tablet PC. That's on the order of a thousand dollars worth of equipment. Maybe. Certainly, it's extremely inexpensive compared with a laptop 5 years ago. So the cost of the technology is lower. There's good software for editing video -- we're in an era where producing video is similar to word processing. And everyone is used to interacting with people online in different ways than were prevalent 10 to 15 years ago. The kind of discussion you can have online is more sophisticated. People understand social conventions for how to contribute constructively to an online discussion. Those factors really contribute to the effectiveness of a MOOC or a smaller scale online course.
  • I think we'll see an evolution of a range of different ways of using technology, and probably some expansion of the set of options that a student has. Instead of going off to college, maybe some students will live in their parents' homes or elsewhere and take a first year or two online. Or they'll spend two years in college and finish two years online as they work. There will be different, in effect, educational programs coming out of this phenomenon that offer credit, certification, job placement, and other things beyond the self learning that MOOCs provide. So I think we really are going to see a transformation in the way teaching and learning are developed and delivered
Christopher Lee

Creating a Wordsearch using Google Spreadsheets - 1 views

blog.pamelafox.org/...g-wordsearch-using-google.html

gapps googleapps gdocs wordsearch activator vocabulary spreadsheets

shared by Christopher Lee on 25 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Christopher Lee on 25 Jul 12
     
    SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2009 Creating a Wordsearch using Google Spreadsheets I'm a fan of alternative learning and testing techniques. Back when I was the teaching assistant for the "History of Video Games" class (yes, that's a real class), I gave the final exam as an illustrated crossword puzzle. It was surprisingly hard to find software for creating that crossword, so I hoped to make a Spreadsheets gadget to make it easier. Unfortunately, crossword-solving algorithms that run entirely in JavaScript are hard to find, and I gave up and went for second best: a wordsearch gadget. (A big thanks to Robert Klein for the wordsearch JavaScript library.) Here are steps for using the gadget: Create a new spreadsheet, and put a list of words in the first column. (Or, alternatively, use an existing spreadsheet that has a column of words you're interested in). My sample spreadsheet has a simple animals wordlist: Click on the "Insert" menu and then select "Gadget..." This presents you with various categories of gadgets to choose from (similar to the iGoogle directory). My gadget isn't yet in the gallery, so you'll need to select "Custom" and then type in the URL to the gadget: The gadget will appear embedded in the current worksheet, and it will prompt you to select a range of data to send to the gadget. Select all the cells that contain the desired words, and you should see the Range text field update with the range. If it doesn't work, you can always manually type it in. You can now customize the number of rows and columns. The default is 10 by 10, but if you have more words, you likely want a larger wordsearch. Click "Apply", and see the generated output. You have a few options for how you use the wordsearch. You can play with it immediately, inside that gadget, or you can use the option on the gadget menu to move the gadget to its own sheet and use it there. Note that each time you reload the spreadsheet, the wordsearch will be randomly generated with a new layout - so
Tracy Tuten

The Irascible Professor on "The SAT that isn't (the death of aptitude.)" - 2 views

irascibleprofessor.com/comments-08-11-12.htm

education essay SAT 2012 esteem objectivism

shared by Tracy Tuten on 13 Aug 12 - Cached
  • It used to be that the SAT was distinguished from its competitor the ACT by the fact that the former was seen as measuring aptitude and being effectively un-coachable, while the latter was a gauge of achievement in learning.
  • At the risk of sounding pejorative, I'd say that I was expecting the test to be a measure of who I was, while some of my fellow students and their parents treated it more as a test of how they could present themselves to admissions officers.  And while I wouldn't suggest that people tend to think of it in these terms, I believe that the latter perception relies on the academically damaging belief that an individual student's capabilities need not matter to what goals he sets for himself.  That perception leads people to believe that there is something inherently unfair about a test that you can't study for.
  • And if after four years of high school they haven't developed much skill for reasoning, that's okay – they can take preparatory courses to learn how to fake it for an exam, and let that be their stepping stone toward academic accomplishment.  As a society that values the promise of formal education more than the satisfaction of actual learning, we have precipitated the death of aptitude.  We are afraid to acknowledge that it exists, because aptitude, whether the product of inborn talent or effective rearing, makes some people better suited than others for certain goals.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.  As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."  To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.  Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.
  • But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.  College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.  The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.  By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.
  • We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.  Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.  But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.
  • We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.  It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.
  • Tracy Tuten on 13 Aug 12
     
    An essay on what the SAT says about society's view of education, accomplishments, aptitude, and self-esteem. 
kurt stavenhagen

steindl-rast | zen writ - 12 views

zenwrit.wordpress.com/...gallehr

shared by kurt stavenhagen on 13 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • combine our intellect with will and our emotions, only than can we truly understand the meaning of gratefulness.
    • kurt stavenhagen
      kurt stavenhagen on 13 Sep 13
       
      Sometimes I think that he tries too hard to separate the intellect from the will. I wonder on a physiological level what this looks like in the brain: are their separate components in the brain for recognition and judgment. Perhaps there are. If so, should those be the terms rather than intellect and will?
  • its not giving up.
  • back to bed again”
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • haven’t reached them yet
  • Just to be living on this earth in this solar system in this galaxy in this universe is immensely rare and lucky.
  • to recognize is to accept something as true, but to acknowledge is to have a perspective, or how you choose to view that recognizable truth.
  • Some people feel the rain, and others just get wet
  • acknowledgement is perspective.
  • uses the word surprise as a way of saying be mindful and appreciate the little things in life that go on around you
  • ollowing this quote the author goes on to
  • because many of use feel a moral obligation to return our benefactor the favor thus making the seemingly “gratuitous act” a debt that we must repay by giving our own gift.
  • the bonds of interdependence set us free
  • once you can acknowledge a gift for a gift and acknowledge dependence then you’re free to go forward into full gratefulness.
  • yesterday morning my friend, knowing that I’m not an early bird, brought an extra granola bar to class just to give it to me which was a surprise that I had not expected. This was merely a simple surprise that I felt then, but after I thought it over again, this surprise made me realize how grateful I felt for having a such friend
  • By allowing ourselves to be helped in life and understanding that receiving help is not a show of weakness but in fact a show of mindfulness, we open ourselves up to the surprises and pleasures of communicating with people on a regular day basis
  • independent vs dependent. Being considered “legally” independent I have truly learned how dependent I am for others.
  • I always thought why would I hassle someone else for my incompetency
  • that weak need to feel weak in order to grow. We need to put everything out there and grow and learn from our experiences.
  • Letting weakness show is one of the strongest things we can do in order to know ourselves at a deeper level
  • Helping someone, whether it is a friend, neighbor or family member is something one should do out of the goodness of our heart. Everything comes full circle,
  • it is a personal choice to help others, and my way of reminding myself that I am grateful to be here,
  • I know what a horse looks like, feels like and moves like, but every time I go visit, I am still surprised and amused just by watching the horses out in the field.
  • The more grateful you become the more you appreciate life, which in a sense does make you younger because you are embracing living life
  • When my dad and hundreds of others died on 9/11/01 you could notice something different in the air.
  • kurt stavenhagen on 13 Sep 13
     
    "teindl-Rast inspired me to start working on a project that I have been putting off. (ironically when I chose to read this passage I was procrastinating) There is never an ideal or perfect time for any person to start any task. Instead of taking this moment right now, we co"
Martha Hickson

Measuring Worth - User Guide - 13 views

www.measuringworth.com/guide.php

shared by Martha Hickson on 03 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Martha Hickson on 03 Jun 14
     
    The principle of the MeasuringWorth is that there is no one standard measure for comparing what a monetary value in the past is worth today. The best measure depends on the question asked. At present, we have comparators that give you seven answers for the United States (from 1774 on), five for the United Kingdom (from 1270 on), five for Australia (from 1828 on). These dates are determined by the limits of available data.
Marsha Ratzel

Blogging Begins « What Else? 1DR - 33 views

askwhatelse.wordpress.com/...blogging-begins

news blogging begins

shared by Marsha Ratzel on 05 Jul 10 - Cached
    • Marsha Ratzel
      Marsha Ratzel on 05 Jul 10
       
      This is where I see the power really get amped up
  • While reading about Martin Luther King, Jr, students chose a quote from his work. Students wrote the quote on an index card and explained why they chose the quote or what they thought about the quote.  Then we passed the card to the student on the left, and that student read the card and added a sticky note comment. The note needed to be at least three sentences, refer or quote something from the original text, and be “overly positive.” We handed the card and comment to the left again, and that student read the comment and the card. We continued passing to the left and adding sticky note comments, which could comment on the original text or any of the comments.
  • As we passed the work along, student comments became longer and better as they read other comments that were better than some who had not followed our protocol and simply wrote, “I agree.”  By the time every one had commented on every one else’s card, all students had written at least one good comment.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When the original writer received the card, they chose and shared the comments that helped them think more or caused them to want to add to their original ideas.
  • new site called Tween Tribune (http://tweentribune.com/), a site for students and teachers with kid-friendly news feeds on which to comment or add their own stories.  We read comments and critiqued them, noticing some grammatical errors and mostly that some comments did not add to the conversation.
  • Marsha Ratzel on 05 Jul 10
     
    Great lesson idea for how to get started in classroom blogging.
  • Marsha Ratzel on 05 Jul 10
     
    One of the easiest ways I've seen to get started on blogging and commenting.
D. S. Koelling

Plagiarizing Yourself - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 31 views

chronicle.com/...124781

shared by D. S. Koelling on 05 Oct 10 - No Cached
msovoice liked it
  • Her presentation contained a slide that said academic dishonesty included plagiarizing yourself—i.e., taking a paper you had written for one course and turning it in for credit in another course. That, she explained, constituted a dishonest representation of your work for a course. "Unless," one of my colleagues chimed in at that point, "you're an academic, and you're presenting the same idea at a bunch of different conferences. Then it's clearly not dishonest."
  • "Are we allowed to use ideas from our writing exercise to help us write this paper?" she asked. "Of course," I said. "That was the whole point of the writing exercise—to get you a head start in thinking about how you want to approach your paper." "OK," she said. And then after a brief pause: "Because at orientation they told us we weren't allowed to use our own work twice." "Ah," I said. "That doesn't really apply in this case. And anyway, I don't really mind, in this course, if you take a paper that you've written for another course and revise it for an assignment in here. You just have to make sure that what you turn in fulfills my specific assignment. Other professors might feel differently, though. So I would always ask before you tried to do that."
  • So does the injunction against plagiarizing from yourself fall into the category of one of those hypocritical rules that we like to impose on our children: Drinking soda every day would be bad for your health, honey, but it's fine for me? If a categorical difference exists here between what we do and what we forbid our students to do, I confess, I have a hard time seeing it.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • counterargument
  • So why deprive our students of the opportunity to learn those same lessons, by recycling a particular paper from one course to the next?
  • I can foresee one more objection: What's to prevent a student from recycling the same paper from course to course to course? Students who did so would lose the valuable opportunity to practice their writing—and writing, like any other intellectual or physical skill, requires lots of practice. But—practically speaking—the opportunity to reuse a paper might arise only once or twice in a student's career, thanks to the diversity of our course assignments and disciplines.
  • First, do you see a problem with allowing students to revise a paper or presentation created for one course and turn it in for another one, assuming they can make it fit the assignment for the new course? Does this count as plagiarism? Second, are there any courses or programs that build such a process into the curriculum—requiring or encouraging students to take work from one course and adapt it for another? I encourage readers to offer their ideas. Of course if you have published or presented elsewhere on this subject, you should still go ahead and share your recycled idea. I will leave it up to you to decide whether to feel guilty about that.
Tony Baldasaro

Weblogg-ed » "Tinkering Toward Utopia" - 1 views

weblogg-ed.com/...tinkering-toward-utopia

weblogg learning technology schlecty

shared by Tony Baldasaro on 24 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Tony Baldasaro on 24 Jul 09
     
    During Boot Camp last week, Sheryl turned me on to Phillip Schlechty's newish book "Leading for Learning: How to Transform Schools into Learning Organizations" and I had a chance to get through a chunk of it on the cramped, smelly plane(s) to Melbourne. In it, he makes a pretty compelling case that "reform" is really not going to cut it in the face of the disruptions social Web technologies are creating and that we really do have to think more about "transform" when it comes to talking about schools. There are echoes of Sir Ken Robinson here, and I've still got Scott McLeod's NECC presentation riff on Christensen's "Disrupting Class" on my brain as well, especially the "the disruption isn't online learning; it's personalized learning" quote. And while there are others who I could cite here who are trumpeting the idea that this isn't business as usual, I think Schlechty does as good a job as I've seen of breaking down why schools in their current form as "bureaucratic" structures will end up on the "ash heap of history" if we don't get our brains around what's happening.
Carol Ansel

The Daring Librarian: Wikipedia is not wicked! - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 70 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAYWSF8J_blog.html

wikipedia washintonpost daringlibrarian encyclopedia research

shared by Carol Ansel on 08 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Teaching Wikipedia in 5 Easy Steps: *Use it as background information *Use it for technology terms *Use it for current pop cultural literacy *Use it for the Keywords *Use it for the REFERENCES at the bottom of the page!
  • 4 ways to use Wikipedia (hint: never cite it) Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia 20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica Schiff, Stacy. “Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, February 26, 2006 And: Yes students, there’s a world beyond Wikipedia **Several years ago, Nature magazine did a comparison of material available on Wikipedia and Brittanica and concluded that Brittanica was somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, more accurate than Wikipedia. Brittanica lodged a complaint, and here, you can see what it complained about as well as Nature’s response. Nature compared articles from both organizations on various topics and sent them to experts to review. Per article, the averages were: 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia. -0- Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it! var entrycat = ' ' By Valerie Strauss  |  05:00 AM ET, 09/07/2011 .connect_widget .connect_widget_text .connect_widget_connected_text a {display:block;} #center {overflow:visible;} /*.override-width iframe {width:274px !important;}*/ Tumblr Reddit Stumbleupon Digg Delicious LinkedIn http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html#_=1315504289567&count=horizontal&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fanswer-sheet%2Fpost%2F
  • Carol Ansel on 08 Sep 11
     
    Excellent perspective on "The 'W' Word" - use it wisely for what it is - high school and college kids shouldn't be citing any general knowledge encyclopedias for serious research - but that doesn't mean there aren't some excellent uses for it.
Florence Dujardin

E-learning in India: the role of national culture and strategic implications - 0 views

www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm

E-learning multicultural education india culture

shared by Florence Dujardin on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Florence Dujardin on 23 Jun 11
     
    Purpose - The primary purpose of this research paper is to understand the role of national cultural dimensions on e-learning practices in India. India is considered a major player in the world economy today. US multinationals are significantly increasing their presence in India and understanding cultural preferences will help global companies transition better. Design/methodology/approach - This conceptual paper uses the national cultural dimensions of the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness project, which is identified as the most topical theoretical framework on culture. The national cultural scores are used to develop hypotheses for specific cultural dimensions. Examples from the literature are also used to strengthen the proposed hypotheses. Findings - This research proposes that national cultural dimensions of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, in-group collectivism, and future-orientation influence e-learning practices. This study distinguishes between synchronous and asynchronous methods of e-learning and the role of culture on the same. Future research can definitely empirically test the hypotheses proposed. Practical implications - This study provides strategic implications for multinationals with a guide sheet identifying the role of the various cultural dimensions on e-learning. The suggested strategies can be implemented by multinationals in other countries with similar national cultural dimensions also. Originality/value - This research also proposes a theoretical e-learning model identifying the impact of national cultural dimensions on e-learning practices. This research also provides practitioners a strategic implications model that could be implemented for e-learning initiatives in multinationals.
Peter Beens

Education Week Teacher: Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents - 1 views

www.edweek.org/...tillery.html

teachers tips communication parents

shared by Peter Beens on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Peter Beens on 23 Jun 11
     
    Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents By Gail Tillery Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org. You will face many challenging tasks as a new teacher. Dealing with parents is probably among the most intimidating, especially if you are young and in your first career. While communicating with parents can be tricky, a little preparation will help you to treat parents as partners and to be calmer when problems arise. Here's the first rule to live by: Your students' parents are not your enemies. Ultimately, they want the same thing you want, which is the best for their children. By maintaining respectful and productive communication, you can work together to help students succeed. Second, whenever problems arise, remember that parents are probably just as nervous about contacting you as you are about returning the contact-and maybe more so. I'll confess: Even after 26 years of teaching, I still get a little frisson of fear in my belly when I see an e-mail or hear a voicemail from a parent. But I have seen time and again that parents are often more nervous than the teacher is-especially if their child doesn't want them to contact the teacher. Indeed, some parents may even fear that if they raise concerns, their child will face some kind of retaliation. Remember that parents' tones or words may reflect such fears. In your response, try to establish that everyone involved wants to help the child. Here are some practical tips for communicating effectively with parents: Contact every parent at the beginning of the year. Do some "recon." Telephone calls are best for this initial contact, since they are more personal than e-mail. Ask the parent to tell you about his or her child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. Make sure to ask, "What is the best thing I can do to help your child succeed?" Remember to take notes! Once you've gathered the information you need, set a boundary with parents by saying, "Well, Ms. Smith, I have 25 more parent
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