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Tracy Tuten

The real economics of massive online courses (essay) | Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

  • Is there a model out there, or an institution/student mix that could effectively utilize MOOCs in such a way as to get around this flaw? It’s hard to tell. Recent articles on Inside Higher Ed have suggested that distance education providers (like the University of Maryland’s University College – UMUC) may opt to certify the MOOCs that come out of these elite schools and bake them into their own online programs. Others suggest that MOOCs could be certified by other schools and embedded in prior learning portfolios.
  • The fatal flaw that I referred to earlier is pretty apparent:  the very notions of "mass, open" and selectivity just don’t lend themselves to a workable model that benefits both institutions and students. Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.
  • In other words, as economists tell us, students themselves are an important input to education. The fact that no school uses a lottery system to determine who gets in means that determining who gets in matters a great deal to these schools, because it helps them control quality and head off the adverse effects of unqualified students either dropping out or performing poorly in career positions. For individual institutions, obtaining high quality inputs works to optimize the school’s objective function, which is maximizing prestige.
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  • We also know that there are plenty of low- to no-cost learning options available to people on a daily basis, from books on nearly every academic topic at the local library and on-the-job experience, to the television programming on the National Geographic, History and Discovery channels. If learning can and does take place everywhere, there has to be a specific reason that people would be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years of their life to get it from one particular source like a college. There is, of course, and again it’s the credential, because no matter how many years I spend diligently tuned to the History Channel, I’m simply not going to get a job as a high-school history teacher with “television watching” as the core of my resume, even if I both learned and retained far more information than I ever could have in a series of college history classes.
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    On why MOOCs are flawed
Kate Pok

FinAid | Loans | Public Service Loan Forgiveness - 67 views

  • Employment: The borrower must be employed full-time in a public service job for each of the 120 monthly payments. Public service jobs include, among other positions, emergency management, government (excluding time served as a member of Congress), military service, public safety and law enforcement (police and fire), public health (including nurses, nurse practitioners, nurses in a clinical setting, and full-time professionals engaged in health care practitioner occupations and health care support occupations), public education, early childhood education (including licensed or regulated childcare, Head Start, and State-funded prekindergarten), social work in a public child or family service agency, public services for individuals with disabilities or the elderly, public interest legal services (including prosecutors, public defenders and legal advocacy on behalf of low-income communities at a nonprofit organization), public librarians, school librarians and other school-based services, and employees of tax exempt 501(c)(3) organizations. Full-time faculty at tribal colleges and universities, as well as faculty teaching in high-need subject areas and shortage areas (including nurse faculty, foreign language faculty, and part-time faculty at community colleges), also qualify.
  •  
    FYI
Roland Gesthuizen

City Teacher Data Reports Are Released - SchoolBook - 36 views

  • The rankings stem from a desire by policy makers to find an objective way to distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers, untainted by the subjective judgment of individual evaluators, like school principals.
  • Critics also say there are aspects of a child’s life — or distractions on test day — that the numbers cannot capture: supportive parents, a talented principal, the help of a tutor, allergies or a relentlessly barking dog outside the classroom.
  • there are schools where students are taught by multiple teachers, making it difficult to figure out the weight of their individual contributions
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  • The union has warned that the result will be sweeping, with good teachers steering clear of grades that have standardized tests, parents’ attempts to switch their children to other classrooms, low morale among teachers and worse.
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    After a long legal battle and amid much anguish by teachers and other educators, the New York City Education Department released individual performance rankings of 18,000 public school teachers on Friday, while admonishing the news media not to use the scores to label or pillory teachers.
Philip Pulley

How Free and Open Technologies Benefit the Affluent - EdTech Researcher - Education Week - 1 views

    • Philip Pulley
       
      Like Outliers, the affluent students and schools have more hours of practice and the low-income schools can't catch up.
    • Philip Pulley
       
      I hope that isn't used as a reason NOT to get those resources to lower performing schools. Stop spending money on knowledge level testing and start funding poor schools so that the "Playing Field" becomes somewhat more level than the steep slope it actually is.
  • I hope that isn't used as a reason NOT to get those resources to lower performing schools. Stop spending money on knowledge level testing and start funding poor schools so that the "Playing Field" becomes somewhat more level than the steep slope it actually is
Jim Aird

Feds Call on Universities for Ideas for 'Experimental Sites,' New Learning Technologies -- Campus Technology - 32 views

  • Education, particularly K-12 education, remains relatively untouched by advances in our understanding of how people learn, how to design instruction that incorporates those insights, and the explosion in information technologies such as low-cost smartphones and tablets, cloud computing, broadband networks, speech recognition and speech synthesis, predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning, intelligent tutors, simulations, games, computer-[supported] collaborative work, and many other technologies.
Andrew Spinali

Was Dickens's Christmas Carol borrowed from Lowell's mill girls? - Ideas - The Boston Globe - 15 views

  • 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.)
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    Fascinating read about Massachusetts connections in "A Christmas Carol." This could definitely be used to teach claim and counter claim.
Oscar Tapara

Stocks, Bonds, and Investing: Oh, My! - 30 views

  • However, that is not the case with ETFs.
    • Oscar Tapara
       
      ETFs doesn't has fees?, just 1.5 of your investment?
    • Oscar Tapara
       
      No, just fro .18% NAV. So. you are trading mutual fund for very cheap
  • The good news is your costs.
  • ETFs are created by companies for the specific purpose of low management costs, estimated to be around .18% of your NAV.
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  • But Wait! There's More.Again
  • There is yet another advantage ETFs have over mutual funds
  • and that is their tax benefit
  • However, unlike mutual funds, ETFs do not sell stocks to pay for redemptions
  • As people withdraw their money from a mutual fund, the mutual fund must sell securities to cover those redemptions. So, every time the mutual fund sells a stock, you have to pay capital gains tax on it.
  • This being the case, the capital gains that you must pay on an ETF are much less than that of a mutual fund because of the lack of capital gains.
  • Danger, Will Robinson!
  • However, be careful not to confuse
  • an ETF
  • ith an Indexed Mutual Fund
  • Indexed Mutual Funds are mutual funds provided by a mutual fund company
  • But, just like any other mutual fund, you have to pay fees
  • Vanguard will charge you managerial fees to set up and manage the fund.
  • The ETF's Potential Disadvantage
  • they do have a potential drawback
  • What it really depends upon is how much you are going to invest and how frequently you are going to invest.
  • If you're only going to invest $200 a month in an ETF, the $20 commission results in an immediate 10% loss,
  • Just something to think about before you jump into ETFs.
Bradley Robertson

instaGrok.com - 139 views

shared by Bradley Robertson on 04 Apr 12 - No Cached
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    An innovative search engine built for education. Search via concept map, save searches in a personal journal. Great concept to check out. 
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    Search engine built for education.
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    Diigo and Wolfram Alpha make a love child!
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    Filtered search engine that presents related terms in a web + displays results for web sites, pictures, and some key facts on the right side of the page. Suggested by Jeremy Carver, 5/7/2012; **** NOTE: as of 5/7/2012 this site claims not to work in Internet Explorer ****
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    Wow! I had a hard time pulling myself away. I'd like to experiment more with this tool. Thanks for sharing it.
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    "To understand thoroughly and intuitively" - A search tool that show the inter-relatedness of a topic and allows users to graphically see the information relations.
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    Research any topic with an interactive concept map, that you can customize and share. Free personal and low cost educational accounts.
Matt Renwick

Rage Against the Common Core - NYTimes.com - 22 views

  • Race to the Top program to encourage states
  • misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread
  • Many teachers like the standards, because they invite creativity in the classroom — instead of memorization, the Common Core emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving.
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  • unreliable and biased against those who teach both low- and high-achieving students.
  • 76 percent of teachers favored nationwide academic standards
  • Obama administration has only itself to blame
  • emphasized high-stakes “accountability” and market-driven reforms
  • link talented teachers with engaged students and a challenging curriculum
Steve Kelly

What would an exceptional middle and high school computer science curriculum include? - Quora - 48 views

  • What would an exceptional middle and high school computer science curriculum include?
  • This isn't a complete answer, but one thing the very first introductory classes should require is that the students turn off all their electronic computers and actually learn to walk through  algorithms with a computer that exists only on paper. (Or, I suppose, a whiteboard or a simulator.) This exercise would give the students a grounding in what is going on inside the computer as a very low level.My first computer programming class in my Freshman year of high school was completely on paper. Although it was done because the school didn't have much money, it turned out to be very beneficial.Another class I had in high school, that wouldn't normally be lumped into a Computer Science curriculum but has been a boon to my career, was good old Typing 101.
  • If you followed the CS Unplugged curriculum your students would know more about CS than most CS grads:http://csunplugged.orgIt's a really great intro to basic computer science concepts and very easy for students to understand.  Best of all you don't even need a computer per student if your school doesn't have the budget,
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  • For younger students, I think that the ability to make something professional-looking, like a real grown-up would, is paramount.  Sadly, I think this means that LOGO and BASIC aren't much use any more*.
  • So, we have a few choices.  You can try to write phone apps that look just like real phone apps, design interactive websites that look just like real interactive websites, or do something with embedded systems / robotics.  Avoid the temptation to make these things into group projects; the main thing every student needs to experience is the process of writing code, running it, debugging it, and watching the machine react to every command.
  • It is important to consider what an 11 to 18-year old is familiar with in terms of mathematics and logical thinking. An average 11-year old is probably learning about fractions, simple cartesian geometry, the concept of units, and mathematical expressions. By 15, the average student will be taking algebra, and hopefully will have the all-important concept of variables under his/her belt. So much in CS is dependent on solid understanding that symbols and tokens can represent abstract concepts, values, or algorithms. Without it, it's still possible to teach CS, but it must be done in a very different way (see Scratch).
  • At this point, concepts such as variables, parenthesis matching, and functions (of the mathematical variety) are within easy reach. Concepts like parameter passing, strings and collections, and program flow should be teachable. More advanced concepts such as recursion, references and pointers, certain data structures, and big-O may be very difficult to teach without first going through some more foundational math.
  • I tend to agree strongly with those that believe a foundational education should inspire interest and enforce concepts and critical thinking over teaching any specific language, framework, system, or dogma.
  • The key is that the concepts in CS aren't just there for the hell of it. Everything was motivated by a real problem, and few things are more satisfying than fixing something you really want to work with a cool technique or concept you just learned.
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    Great resource for teachers (especially those of us not initially trained in Computer Science) about what should 'count' as Computer Science.  Worth the read!
ron houtman

Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students' Motivation to Learn - 59 views

  • When it comes to motivating people to learn, disadvantaged urban adolescents are usually perceived as a hard sell. Yet, in a recent MetLife survey, 89 percent of the low-income students claimed I really want to learn applied to them. What is it about the school environment pedagogy, curriculum, climate, organization that encourages or discourages engagement in school activities? How do peers, family, and community affect adolescents attitudes towards learning? Engaging Schools reviews current research on what shapes adolescents school engagement and motivation to learn including new findings on students sense of belonging and looks at ways these can be used to reform urban high schools. This book discusses what changes hold the greatest promise for increasing students motivation to learn in these schools. It looks at various approaches to reform through different methods of instruction and assessment, adjustments in school size, vocational teaching, and other key areas. Examples of innovative schools, classrooms, and out-of-school programs that have proved successful in getting high school kids excited about learning are also included.
Sreedharen Sasidharen

Magnet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 11 views

    • Sreedharen Sasidharen
       
      What is it?
  • A magnet (from Greek μαγνήτις λίθος magnḗtis líthos, "Magnesian stone") is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron, and attracts or repels other magnets.
  • Ferromagnetic materials can be divided into magnetically "soft" materials like annealed iron, which can be magnetized but do not tend to stay magnetized, and magnetically "hard" materials, which do. Permanent magnets are made from "hard" ferromagnetic materials such as alnico and ferrite that are subjected to special processing in a powerful magnetic field during manufacture, to align their internal microcrystalline structure, making them very hard to demagnetize. To demagnetize a saturated magnet, a certain magnetic field must be applied, and this threshold depends on coercivity of the respective material. "Hard" materials have high coercivity, whereas "soft" materials have low coercivity.
Steve Ransom

Digital Age Damaging Learning | Nicholas Carr - 72 views

  • excessive use of the internet and other forms of technology diminishes our capacity for deep, meditative thinking, "the brighter the software, the dimmer the user", a counter-revolution may be required.
  • curricula must be developed not only with the potential benefits of technology linked to every learning outcome in mind, but also the costs.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      The Faustian bargain that Postman so often wrote about
  • available where there is clear utility, to remove it when there is not
    • Steve Ransom
       
      And who do we leave this decision up to? The individual? If so, we are in big trouble.
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  • we must be mindful of any cost associated with allowing ourselves to devolve to a more machine-like state.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      NO ONE is striving for this. Just the opposite.
  • Of greatest importance, however, is the status of our thinking, understanding how we think and the effect new technologies have on our cognitive processes. This debate extends beyond the neuroscience to questions relating to what is worth knowing and what mental functions are worth preserving at their present level of development
  • As a senior high school teacher, one of my greatest bugbears is the reluctance of students to reflect on the information they have collected and plan their essays. Rather, some expect to Google their entire essay, often skipping from one hyperlink to the next until they find something that appears to be relevant, then pasting it into their essay, frequently oblivious to academic honesty and coherence of argument. The ability to discern reliability of sources is also severely lacking
    • Steve Ransom
       
      This is a by-product of failing to address and teach good research methods in a digital world and assigning work that can simply be cut and pasted. We must move beyond "reporting" in a digital, information-rich, and connected world.
  • A primary role of educators is to foster qualities that are distinctly human: our ability to reflect, reason and imagine
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Exactly... and this must happen, regardless of the types of information that we have access to. To say that technology impedes this is laughable.
  • In the curricula of tomorrow this may entail identifying topics and tasks that begin with an instruction to turn all electronic devices off.
    • Steve Ransom
       
      No- it should begin with teachers establishing and negotiating meaningful, interesting, and powerful learning opportunities with access to all available tools. The computer as a learning tool is meant to extend physical human capabilities, not weaken them. It is the low-level, rote tasks that we require that weaken them. It's time to recognize this and wake up. Blaming the technology does little more than preserve the status quo.
Andrew Williamson

Macworld Forums [Powered by Invision Power Board] - 0 views

    • Andrew Williamson
       
      Worth a look at for school. Sounds promising
  • For Australians wanting to try the Flip, I might point out Price USA -- www.priceusa.com.au. This is a mob in Mildura that work with an agent in the US and will order anything you can get in the US but can't get here. Go to their site, enter the URLs and details of the products you want, and they'll send you a quotation to confirm. Have used them in the past and prices (shipping and exchange rate) were quite reasonable; I can't make any guarantees, but it should be easy to land a Flip in Australia for well under $200.I think the reason Australian companies aren't importing this device is that it would cannibalise much of the low end of the video camera market. The most comparable device here -- a waterproof model from (can't remember off hand) is priced at $699.
Dana Huff

Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

    • Dana Huff
       
      I have seen this in high school, too. I think students have learned that A is doing going to be the default grade but the exceptional grade, but I have to admit C is not my defaut grade either, but a low grade.
  • “Instead of getting an A, they make an A,” he said. “Similarly, if they make a lesser grade, it is not the teacher’s fault. Attributing the outcome of a failure to someone else is a common problem.”
    • Dana Huff
       
      External locus of control seems to be attained later and later. I have many times explained this distinction to students. They see grades as something that results from how much a teacher likes them or luck more than how much effort they put in or how well they've written.
  • if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place.
    • Dana Huff
       
      Sadly, I wonder how realistic this is, based on what I've seen. I wish I taught in a school with no grades. They come between the student and learning.
Steve Ransom

Cell phones get top marks in class -- dailypress.com - 0 views

  •  
    But it has to be about so much more than just making things interesting and having fun. Those are important, no doubt, but are also potentially relatively low on the totem pole of meaningfulness.
Ed Bowen

Museum 2.0: Educational Uses of Back Channels for Conferences, Museums, and Informal Learning Spaces - 0 views

  • A talkback board. We gave everyone post-its in their registration packets and encouraged them to post their questions and comments, especially on the “gaps” in the conference, to the board. The board was directly outside the main conference room.
  • If you don't engage in multiple back channels, you may not see multiple use cases. Different tools are best for different types of interaction. Just because post-it notes didn't work at WebWise doesn't mean they don't work in galleries... as we know from the success of many talkback boards.If you ask visitors/participants to try a new tool, make sure it has as low a barrier to entry as possible. I have yet to see a museum set something up that is as simple to use as Today'sMeet.If discussion is the goal, you don't need user profiles - you just need a way to talk. If building up a personal profile/relationship with the institution is a goal, people need to uniquely identify themselves.Think about the possibility for asynchronous back channels that allow visitors (and staff) to share deep content with each other over time. Consider, for example, the rich conversation on Flickr about this image from the Chicago World's Fair. You could imagine a comparable conversation available to visitors onsite alongside exhibits or artifacts in the galleries.If possible, find ways to show the real-time location of people who are engaging in the back channel. The Mattress Factory's new SCREENtxt application uses a location-based system so that visitors can identify whether other participants are onsite at the museum or not.Make allowance for emergent back channels that visitors/users "bring with them" to the experience. These tools are particularly valuable for the "portal to the world" back channel use case. Every time I see a kid take a cellphone photo in an exhibit, I know that photo will immediately travel to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc. How can your system capture that activity?
Chris Sloan

Digitially Inclined survey - 43 views

  • Teachers increasingly value student-produced multimedia, student-created Web sites, blogs, and social media communities as well.
    • Chris Sloan
       
      However, only 16% highly valued the incorporation of social networks, and 15% highly valued blogging. These numbers were up about 5% from 2008. Still seems low to me.
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    More than three-quarters (76 percent) of K-12 educators say they use digital media, up significantly from 69 percent in 2008.
Robert Alford

The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley - 82 views

  • embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter.
  • Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good schools—than among schools
  • The results are specific and surprising. Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.
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  • Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.
  • What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record
  • Meanwhile, a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.
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    What matters most GRIT!
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