Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

Posted by speaker Graham R. Gibbs on YouTube, June 19 2010. Gibbs discusses open coding for qualitative analysis. Part 1 of 4.

Posted by Graham R. Gibbs on June 19 2010. This is part 2 of 4 on open coding, part of the grounded theory technique of qualitative analysis.

Created by the Office of Justice Programs, this site bills itself as a clearinghouse for "Evidence-Based Programs and What Works in Criminal Justice." You can look for programs with a particular focus (e.g. juveniles or substance abuse) or you can look at all programs. All programs have undergone a rigorous research and screening process (see" Learn how programs are rated" link) and each then receives a rating of "effective," "promising" or "no effects."

I find this site both appealing and compelling. For the reader, the material is rendered very simply, but still reflects the deep preliminary research that the Office of Justice has done. Perhaps also a good teaching tool in terms of how to evaluate reports or information. -- Stephanie

Interviewed by Leonard Lopate on The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC, Sept 4 2012. Listen or stream from this page. Tough has a new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. In this interview, he discusses the importance of these "character traits" both in terms of pre-K and later in terms of high school and college persistence.

By Soha El Borno on Idealware, August 2012; originally published by TechSoup. Article focuses on nonprofits, but walks readers through some major ideas behind crowdsourcing, including pooling knowledge, microvolunteering, and crowd creation. Real-world examples are given for each.

On the home page, it says, "Hieroglyph is a publication, collective conversation and incubator for the "moonshot ecosystem" bringing together writers, scientists, engineers, technologists, industrialists and other creative, synoptic thinkers to collaborate on bold ideas in a protected space for creative play, science, and imagination."

This platform is surely of interest. Uses a forum format, each of which contains a "big idea" that is described and discussed. In addition, the wiki contains curated content about the project.

Tagline: A forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshine thinking and teamwork. Similar to TED talks, but with a (so far) much smaller archive, each talk in this series focuses on solving a "moonshot" problem, generally through significant and radical innovation. From their About page, "Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems."

Part of the Solve for X project, posted on YouTube by wesolveforx on Feb 7 2012. Crow is president of Arizona State University and his "moonshot project" (in the parlance of Solve for X) is to re-think higher education. In this brief video, he describes some of the changes he's brought to ASU in the last 10 years. For more on this project, follow tag solve_x.

Doesn't talk about technology, per se, but does talk about the need to shake up the institutions.

By Steve Hargadon, posted to his eponymous blog on August 6 2012. Hargadon is the host of the FutureofEducation.com lecture series. Scroll down for links to the recording of the event and a link to the "Mighybell" discussion and resource space. Panelists were Stephen Downes, Howard Gardner, Alfie Kohn and Gary Stager.

"With regard to the adoption of learning analytics, now is an exceptionally practical time to explore analytics. The complex challenges that schools and universities face can, at least partially, be illuminated through analytics applications."

By Ben Betts on his (corporate) blog, Ben Betts is stoatly different, July 23 2012. Tin Can is "the latest iteration of the SCORM family." [According to Wikipedia, "Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based e-learning."]. It appears to relate to learning analytics, and the blogger describes applications in the workplace (not merely for post-secondary education).

From Stephanie: This is a bit over my head, but might be of interest to the more technical among us.

By Doug Belshaw on his blog, dougbelshaw.com, July 25 2012. Belshaw -- who works on badge-related projects for Mozilla Foundation -- describes a new plug-in for WordPress that facilitates creating badges.

I'm bookmarking this to keep in the back of our minds. As we develop the GSCC project -- or possibly for other e-PD projects -- badges may become of greater interest. Interesting to see how badges can be done on WordPress platforms.

By Ellen Wagner and Phil Ice in Eduause Review Online, July 18 2012. A look at learning analytics and how they are being utilized in higher education.

On the same theme as the recently bookmarked article in The Chronicle.

By Marc Parry, Technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18 2012. This piece profiles some of the new "Big Data" innovations at Arizona State University, the largest public university in the US. There are systems to track students against the requirements of their majors; recommendations about classes in which they might be successful, etc., all towards the goal of improving retention and graduation rates.

Many provocative ideas in this article, not the least of which is how these applications speak to various "recommender systems," whether telling students what courses to take, professors how to teach, administration how to track, etc.

Posted by Beth Kanter on her blog, Beth's Blog, July 13 2012. In this post, Kanter includes a recent presentation titled The Unanticipated Benefits of Content Curation; with much food for thought in terms of the process, the tools and the possible positive results.

U.S. government's clearinghouse for public projects where they are looking for crowdsourced solutions. Some projects look for apps and other "innovative tools." Others are more like contests. You can browse by category or by government agency.

"the first four levels is that they illuminate the path from attending a webinar, to learning a new skill, to applying the skill, and to measuring the change as a result of the skill. Each step along the way can be captured and measured by using the framework, and each step can be easily understood and described to decision makers."

Presented by the Knight Digital Media Center, these presentations are described as "multimedia and internet technology training workshops," on topics like Digital Storytelling ("How to tell stories with Data (Reallly)") and Web 2.0 Training ("Digital Visualization Strategy and Workflow" or "Data Visualization on a Budget"). While the workshops are geared to journalists, many of the lessons might be relevant to those in other public-facing fields as well.