Evidence has shown that teenagers rely on college visits and Web sites to learn about colleges, rather than social-media outlets. When it comes to Twitter, students are barely on the site at all, let alone for college research purposes.
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Admission Officials' Tweets Fall on Deaf Ears - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 3 views
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Rebecca Whitehead, assistant director of campus visits and engagements at Winthrop University, maintains the admissions office’s Twitter account, which currently has 373 followers. She says she uses it largely to connect with other higher-education professionals, to find out about upcoming events or research.
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shared by Jeff Johnson on 23 Oct 08
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College Board Will Offer a New Test Next Fall - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...23sat.html
CollegeBoard College_Board test 8thgrade assessment instruction highschool high_school college
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Amid growing challenges to its role as the pre-eminent force in college admissions, the College Board on Wednesday unveiled a new test that it said would help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college. The test, which will be available to schools next fall, is intended only for assessment and instructional purposes and has nothing to do with college admissions, College Board officials said.
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The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley - 14 views
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"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo
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Portfolios & Additional Material | MIT Admissions - 13 views
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Will MITx Disrupt Higher Education? - Casting Out Nines - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 3 views
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MIT will launch MITx in Spring 2012 credentials. Certificates will be offered for those who pay for an MITx course with NO admissions requirements. (wonder how they will confirm someone is actually taking the course and not have it taken for them by another.) Fascinating developments that should have all universities standing up and taking note.
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An unseen disadvantage : The focus on independence at American universities can undermi... - 5 views
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For middle-class students, college is “the ultimate symbol of independence” and also allows students to “distinguish themselves from their parents and realize their individual potential.” By contrast, students from working-class backgrounds are likely to have been socialized with different “rules of the game” —rules that emphasize interdependence with others (i.e., being part of a community).
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“Many students from working-class families are influenced by limited financial resources and lack an economic safety net, and thus must rely on family and friends for support. Thus, these students’ expectations for college center around interdependent motives such as working together, connecting to others, and giving back,” said Stephens. “Given the largely independent college culture and the ways in which students’ social class backgrounds shape their motives for attending college, we questioned whether universities provide students from these different backgrounds with an equal chance of success.”
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Admissions materials and university mission statements could be revised to reflect the importance of interdependent norms In the classroom, professors could emphasize the importance of collaboration, require more group work, and seek to develop ongoing relationships with their students. Universities could provide students with more structured opportunities that encourage ongoing connections with peers and faculty.
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Debbie Meier and the Dawn of Central Park East by Seymour Fliegel, City Journal Winter ... - 3 views
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“I’ve got a problem in the Central Park East School between Debbie Meier and some of her parents,” he said. “Go see what it’s about.”
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I went over to Central Park East, which was then a fledgling alternative school just completing its second year, to introduce myself to Debbie Meier, the school’s director
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Debbie Meier has since become a nationally known authority on education, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, but in June 1976 that wasn’t the case.
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. What was not yet clear to outsiders was that it had been deliberately designed to thrive on conflict.
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. “The principals paid lip service to us and our aspirations,” she remembers, “but the changes didn’t last.” By the end of 1973, just as she was becoming disgusted by her lack of progress working within the established system, she got a call from Bonnie Brownstein, a science coordinator in District Four. Brownstein told Meier that Superintendent Alvarado had heard about her work and wanted her to start a new school in East Harlem. Meier, attuned to the ways of educational bureaucracies, was skeptical at first, but when she met with the new superintendent, he convinced her that he was serious.
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an educational method which she believed reflected the cognitive development of children, combining John Dewey’s learning theory with more recent psychological investigations of Jean Piaget.
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Meier and her associates proposed a pedagogy based on “open classrooms” where teachers would provide children with stimulating materials, observe them working and playing with those materials, and, guided by their observations, offer each child assistance to extend his or her skills and interests.
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Neither the parents in the neighborhood nor the other teachers in District Four understood what the school was trying to accomplish, and they regarded Meier’s efforts with attitudes ranging from indifference to outright hostility.
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Local educational conservatives, on the other hand, were equally mistrustful of what they saw as the school’s permissiveness.
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There would be one rule: Children would come to Central Park East because their parents chose that school for them
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parents were required to visit with their children in order to gain admission. Beyond that, Meier set forth no policies and promised no particular results.
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shared by Adrienne Michetti on 04 Jul 10
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International Program Catches On in U.S. Schools - NYTimes.com - 15 views
www.nytimes.com/...03baccalaureate.html
international InternationalSchool IBO IB&MYP highschool curriculum education
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Many parents, schools and students see the program as a rigorous and more internationally focused curriculum, and a way to impress college admissions officers.
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Our students don’t have as much diversity as people in some other areas, so this makes them open their eyes,” said Deb Pinkham, the program’s English teacher.
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the people who founded the I.B. were sitting in Geneva, post-World War II, thinking about how to ensure world peace, so the clear philosophical bent is that by integrating learning and understanding issues from multiple perspectives, we can promote global thinking,
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“A.P. is great for content-based traditional learning,” he said. “It’s great for kids who like to memorize. But for more creative kids, who want to make those connections, there’s nothing like the I.B.”
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Emily, who said she was bored with school last year, said the I.B. program had been more interesting and challenging.
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What's Wrong With the American University System - Culture - The Atlantic - 6 views
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it's awfully difficult to say, "Here's knowledge we don't need!" It sounds like book burning, doesn't it? What we'd say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done.
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Those people were teachers, in the true sense of the word. They were just as knowledgeable about their fields as anyone, but they had playful, imaginative minds. They could go on TV—Carl Sagan could talk about science, John Kenneth Galbraith could talk about economics. They weren't dumbing down their subjects. In fact, they were actually using their brains. The more you rely on lingo—"regressive discourses," "performativity"—the less you have to really think. You can just throw terms around and say, "Look, Ma, I'm a theorist!"
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We believe the current criteria for admissions—particularly the SAT—are just so out of whack. It's like No Child Left Behind. It really is. It's one of the biggest crimes that's ever been perpetrated. I mean, you took the SAT! It's multiple choice, a minute and quarter per question. What does it really test? It tests how good you are at taking tests! At a big university like Berkeley, where there are going to be 30,000 applications, here's what they do. On top of each folder, without even reading through it, they write your SAT score. That's the first winnowing. So the 1600s get looked at first, and then down from there.
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One of the things that I find scariest at the moment is that so many bright people have no conception at all of life for any people but those in the upper middle class and above. They live a sheltered suburban life, go to college with other sheltered suburban kids, and assume that everyone's life has been like theirs. Some years ago a relative of mine graduated from Cambridge. I asked what his classmates would be doing after graduation and he said "management consulting." These were very bright people with zero experience in the business world who had spent the last three years barely able to manage their binge drinking, let alone manage any business. I'd trust the high school grad who rose through the ranks way more than these bright young things.
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InformIT: The Business of Understanding > Ode to Ignorance - 1 views
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the most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something
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binary choice: I could teach about what I already knew, or I could teach about what I would like to learn
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My expertise has always been my ignorance, my admission and acceptance of not knowing. My work comes from questions, not from answers.
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The focus on bravado and competition in our society has helped breed into us the idea that it is impolitic, or at least impolite, to say, "I don't understand."
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at this end of the spectrum, understanding gets increasingly personal until it is so intimate that it cannot truly be shared with others
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"One of the best ways of communicating knowledge is through stories, because good stories are richly textured with details, allowing the narrative to convey a stable ground on which to build the experience."
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Without context, information cannot exist, and the context in question must relate not only to the data's environment (where it came from, why it's being communicated, how it's arranged, etc.), but also from the context and intent of the person interpreting it.
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education is so notoriously difficult: because one cannot count on one person's knowledge to transfer to another
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This is what education should be about, but too often it is only focused on information—and worse, data—simply because those are the only forms that are easy to measure.
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Without the opportunity, willingness, or openness to interact on a personal level, much of the power of these experiences are not made available to us.
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Wisdom is as personal as understanding gets—intimate, in fact—and it is a difficult level for many people to reach
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What can only be shared is the experiences that form the building blocks for wisdom, but these need to be communicated with even more understanding of the personal contexts of our audience than with information or knowledge.
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we need to expose people to the processes of introspection, pattern-matching, contemplation, retrospection, and interpretation so that they will have the beginnings of the tools to create wisdom
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shared by Ruth Howard on 15 Jul 09
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Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age | HASTAC - 0 views
www.hastac.org/...rning-institutions-digital-age
future learning education hastac HASTAC MIT research universities
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All these acts are collaborative and democratic, and all occur amid a worldwide community of voices.
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Today’s learning is interactive and without walls. Individuals learn anywhere, anytime, and with greater ease than ever before. Learning today blurs lines of expertise and tears down barriers to admission. While it has never been confined solely to the academy, today’s opportunities for independent learning have never been easier nor more diverse.
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The power of ten working interactively will invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.
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contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.
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mobilize flexibility, interactivity, and outcomes. Issues of consideration in these institutions are ones of reliability and predictability alongside flexibility and innovation.
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Students may work in small groups on a specific topic or together in an open-ended and open-sourced contribution.
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These ten principles, the authors argue, are the first steps in redesigning learning institutions to fit the new digital world.
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shared by Ruth Howard on 08 Oct 09
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M.I.T. Lets Student Bloggers Post Without Censoring - NYTimes.com - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...02blogs.html
censoring blogging MIT higher education admissions bestpractices administrator
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Recovering from the Need to Achieve - HBS Working Knowledge - 2 views
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DeLong believes the tendency to be a high-need-for-achievement type is embedded in the DNA, an addiction that spans across socioeconomic groups. Instead of experiencing happiness or well-being, HNAPs seek "relief in the accomplishment of tasks." Moving immediately to the next task on the list, they never savor accomplishments for long, he says. This creates a vicious cycle marked by a feeling of little or no real sense of purpose and a "flatness"—in career and in life. They often go through patches of life without creating or enhancing meaningful relationships, and even lack strength to deal with life's failures.
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I realize that most hard-driving managers and executives have been socialized to believe they cannot admit vulnerability to themselves or others. I would urge you to get past this misconception and realize that such admissions will enhance your productivity and career. So, consider: Do you regret any significant decisions you've made about your career? If you had to do it over again, would you do it differently? Have there been times when you treated your people unfairly? When you failed to listen and learn and instead directed and dictated? Do you feel you've been working at peak capacity in recent years? If not, why not? Are you unwilling to admit your mistakes to your direct reports? To your bosses? To your colleagues? Have you asked anyone for help recently? Have you admitted you didn't know something and needed to learn it? Have you asked for coaching? If you were to be completely honest with your boss and knew that there would be no negative repercussions, what secret fear or anxiety would you admit to him? Do you believe that you're in the right job, in the right group, and in the right organization? Or do you feel there's a mismatch between where you are now and what you want to accomplish
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Letting go—or flying without a net—is a big part of DeLong's prescription. He calls for the reader to stop and reflect with self-awareness; let go of the past; create a vision or specific goal with an agenda; seek support through mentors and a network; don't blink (or fall back on old behaviors); and take action that makes you vulnerable.
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