Group items tagged

By Robin Wilson in the Faculty section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept 5 2010. This article looks at the resistance to measuring learning outcomes -- and the progress that is being made, as well.

By Sara Lipka in the Students section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov 11 2010. Reporting on the latest report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement, which states that "Increasing college completion is meaningless unless certificates and degrees represent real learning, which community colleges must work harder to ensure."

Program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the page includes program news, news of recent grants and publications, and the relevant program staff.

This site bills itself as "your one stop shop for higher education news, collaboration and innovation." There are a variety of resources (websites, videos, webinars, etc.), as well as forums and groups. Because the site promotes collaboration, membership is encouraged.

By Doug Lederman in Inside Higher Ed, May 12 2010. Review of the Action Analytics Symposium, which was co-sponsored by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (29 public 2-year and 4-year institutions) and Capella Univesrity (a for-profit, online institution). The concept is "a multi-dimensional effort aimed squarely at fundamental and strategic education reform in the context of massive economic, social, and technological change... [A]ction analytics strategically uses data, statistics, predictive modeling and visualization to promote student success, achieve institutional efficiency, and demonstrate transparency."

By Jennifer Howard in the Technology section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29 2011. Interview with Nancy Sims, lawyer, librarian and copyright-program librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. A basic overview of copyright law, particularly in academic setting, includes a list of additional copyright resources at the end of the article.

"Corporations use TWO process form, BOTH missing entirely from dowdy lazy sloppy dishonest (Harvard) universities; a) process weaves----emediated process flows PUNCTUATED with mass workshop EVENTS b) pulsed systems---rhythms of engagement with disengagement, sameness with difference, local with global---so that mere addition of connectedness is not allowed to destroy all creativity. "

By Katie Ash in Education Week, March 16, 2010. Coverage of the increasing popularity of mobile learning (m_learning), that is, the use of mobile phones in the classroom. The feature includes links to related stories.

by Derek Bruff, November 6, 2011. The best justification of the Innovation Lab premise that I have seen. "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."" Often our students engage in what Ken Bain, vice provost and a historian at Montclair State University, calls strategic or surface learning, instead of the deep learning experiences we want them to have. 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. My students might not see the beauty and power of mathematics, but they can look forward to participating in a community effort to learn about math. 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.

By Jennifer Gonzalez, Students section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February2 2012. The new project is being led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement and will analyze data from four different surveys: Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the Survey of Entering Student Engagement, the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, and the newly created Community College Institutional Survey. Reports will be produced annually for the next three years. See CCCSE tag for first year's report.

By Tracy Jan in the Boston Globe, May 5 2010. In Massachusetts, a new plan to "measure and report student achievement," called the Vision Project. Development of the plan included all 29 of the state's public colleges, universities, and community colleges.

Home page of the popular print- and web-based journal. There are some interesting RSS feeds, including Wired Campus and a community college e-newsletter.

Article by Amy Cavender on issues and gains from using eportfolios with college students. Mentions several eportfolio possibilities in article and in comments, such as Google Sites, Mahara, Yola, Weebly, or WordPress.

This research is why I was encouraging host ambassadors to upload their pictures and profiles--they can be far more successful than I at engaging their peers in Polilogue-learning prior to the Conference.

Apparently, crowdsourcing of scholarly work requires support just as online networks/communities require assistance for 'voluntary' members to identify desired outcomes within a fleshed out change model; design and rollout processes and collaborative technologies; sometimes analyze content generated, provoke movement or change in tactics, etc.

Interesting look-see by retiring community college president Eric Reno in TX. He points out that the failure to get an AS degree is not an indicator of failure but simply that a person may have chosen a different transfer point to enter a four year college. Yet lawmakers and policy makers look to the AS completion degree as the end of story for community college effectiveness. According to this single measure, I am a failure because I did not obtain an AS degree but my sister who received an AS in nursing is a success! We both have master's degrees.

"Making Data More Usable with ScraperWiki," by Jason B. Jones in PROFHACKER, The Chronicle of HE. Includes a short (2.36 minutes) video on ScraperWiki, a tool to gather information systematically from websites, Twitter, etc. and download it into an Excel spreadsheet for further study. September 20, 2011

"Unlike most traditional academic conferences, sessions at an unconference don't consist of one or three or five people delivering papers to an audience. Instead, they might feature project demonstrations, discussions, creative work sessions, or other formats that build on the knowledge and expertise of whoever attends. For the Texas THATCamp (and I think this is fairly typical at others), participants posted session ideas beforehand on the website, followed by a 45-minute scheduling process as THATCamp began. Topic headings generated by those initial session ideas were posted on the walls of a large meeting room, and participants circulated through the space to meet up with others interested in similar topics. After some productive chaos (which admittedly tested my structure- and schedule-loving personality a bit) the group developed a schedule of sessions that represented not only a variety of interests but also the desire to cluster certain topics into tracks. Like any conference, I frequently wanted to be in two places at once - which I see as one marker of the event's success."