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by Ron Tanner, November 6, 2011 This article echoes some of what Geoff ? said several years ago. When I began teaching a course called "Writing for the Web," three years ago, I pictured myself scrambling to keep up with my plugged-in, tech-savvy students. I was sure I was in over my head. So I was stunned to discover that most of the 20-year-olds I meet know very little about the Internet, and even less about how to communicate effectively online. The media present young people as the audacious pilots of a technological juggernaut. Think Napster, Twitter, Facebook. Given that the average 18-year-old spends hours each day immersed in electronic media, we oldsters tend to assume that every other teenager is the next Mark Zuckerberg. Aren't kids crazy about downloading music, swapping files, sharing links, texting, and playing video games? But video games do not create savvy users of the Internet. Video games predate the Internet and have little to do with online culture. When games are played online, the computer is no longer an open portal to the world. It is an insular system, related only to other gaming machines, like Nintendo and Xbox. The only communication that games afford is within the closed world of the game itself-who is on my team? At their worst, games divert children from other, more enriching experiences. The Internet's chief similarity to video games is that both siphon off audiences from television, which will soon reside exclusively on the Internet. As a delivery system for television, film, and games, the Internet has proved itself a premier source of entertainment. And that's all that most young people know about it. Why wouldn't we educate students in sophisticated uses of the Internet, which is commanding an increasing amount of the world's time and attention? I'm not talking about a course on "How to Understand the Internet" or an introduction to searching for legitimate research-paper sources online (although that is useful, obviously

"The relationship between innovation and learning is about finding a relationship between what is familiar and what is strange. Creativity and imagination are both maps that allow us to do that. Imagination is a quality we all have, and it is an unlimited resource. The goal of education, training, and innovation spaces is to create and structure an environment where imagination can flourish. Those environments need to possess three qualities: A Space to Ask "What If" In order for imagination to flourish, there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective. The imagination has to reconcile what is imagined within the boundaries of what is actual and therefore must understand how the world would have to change in order to make what is imagined a reality. Tools and Technique to Re-Imagine Context The work of imagination only has a payoff if it can be put into practice. That means that the context needs to be shaped and articulated in a meaningful way. In the 21st century we are surrounded by tools that allow us to reshape and re-imagine context all the time. From social network sites, to video and music distribution, to web design and production, we are surrounded by opportunities not just to create new content, but literally to transform the context in which that content has meaning. A Network of Imagination Imagination can only flourish when there is a networked collection of people to share that imaginative vision, embellish it, and develop it. What we have elsewhere called "networks of imagination" are shared tools of communication and in some cases co-presence that allow groups of people to construct those imagined realities in practical and concrete ways. Today's networked technology is more than just a conduit to communicate info

Miami Dade, which has more than 90,000 students, for example, decided to require those who place into developmental courses to take a "success" course that teaches basic study and time-management skills. That requirement helped to double graduation rates for the college's minority students. Valencia, seeing data that students who added classes late had poor completion rates, instituted a policy barring students from registering for classes that have already met. To maintain some flexi­bility, the college introduced "flex start" sections, which begin a month into the semester. Another excerpt: Faculty-Led Efforts Faculty buy-in is another crucial component to colleges' meeting their completion goals. Finalists for the Aspen Prize all had faculty members strongly dedicated to teaching-and conducting research on teaching methods. "What we heard a lot from faculty was, 'How can I find better ways to deliver instruction to my students?'" Mr. Wyner says. As part of the tenure process at Valencia, full-time faculty develop three-year "action research projects" on teaching techniques that involve training courses, advisers, and peer-review panels. The faculty members test teaching strategies, assessing students' performance against that of control groups. Ideas that work find a place in the classroom. In one project, a professor tried giving individual lab assignments to developmental-reading students, rather than a blanket assignment for all students. The new method worked better, the professor determined, and all sections of that course on Valencia's East Campus now use that model of instruction. Valencia is not the only college where faculty drive the innovation. At Miami Dade, faculty members banded together to improve students' pass rates in math, choosing and testing several new teaching methods. Some showed promise, such as testing algebra students more often on smaller amounts of material, a practice that continued.

Book review by Corinne E. Hyde of Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies. How to assess writing with technology. Having firmly established that the technology is omnipresent, that it can be reductive and inaccurate, and that it shifts the purpose and nature of writing itself, he goes on to describe what he terms "hypertechs," which can have a much more positive effect on the field of teaching writing. He describes hypertechs as consisting of hypertext (in which readers can progress through the text in multiple ways, and in which there are multiple linked connections), hypermedia (which is very similar to "new media" or "multimedia composition"), and hyperattention (which is actually a characteristic of the writer and reader, and could be equated with the short attention span produced by bombardment and integration of digital media in daily life). Neal then provides concrete suggestions for selecting and evaluating the various technologies that are available for assessing writing, advocating the use of both construct validity and writing outcomes in the process of determining which technologies will provide the greatest benefit to writing educators.

This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

Interview with MIT's provost L. Rafael Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Jeffrey R. Young, Wired Campus, Chronicle of HE, February 6, 2012. Like the idea of "karma points" mentioned below because it suggests something less than a formalized badges system (easy to implement), and gives high school students an understanding of altruistic behaviors that get some light and fun recognition, and new terminology. Excerpt: "Q. You refer to what's being given by MITx as a certificate. But there's also this trend of educational badges, such as an effort by Mozilla, the people who make the Firefox Web browser, to build a framework to issue such badges. Is MIT planning to use that badge platform to offer these certificates? Mr. Agarwal: There are a lot of experiments around the Web as far as various ways of badging and various ways of giving points. Some sites call them "karma points." Khan Academy has a way of giving badges to students who offer various levels of answering questions and things like that. Clearly this is a movement that is happening in our whole business. And we clearly want to leverage some of these ideas. But fundamentally at the end of the day we have to give a certificate with a grade that says the student took this course and here's how they did-here's their grade and we will give it to them. … But there are many, many ways the Internet is evolving to include some kind of badging and point systems, so we will certainly try to leverage these things. And that's a work in progress."

NAEP administers assessments in the areas of mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history. These assessments are conducted periodically and adhere to a uniform approach using the same set of test booklets across the nation. This site represents the different components of the NAEP assessment. Another website, The Nation's Report Card (nationsreportcard.gov), publishes the results of the assessments.

Title: Companies are Erecting In-House Social Networks, June 26, 2011, This article intrigued me from the get-go because: 1) it speaks to the desire for people to be connected socially in their work; 2) it provides forums (opportunities) for the distantly-connected worker(s)/network member(s) to 'trickle-up' by sharing innovative practice/ideas; 3) it resembles Facebook for its ease of participation and entry level; 4) it creates a social network, which is the beginning of conversation, which is the beginning of collaboration, no? :-) We know that high school students LOVE the SLI because it gives them the opportunity to meet and greet and sometimes talk about meaningful social justice issues. But the hook is social, then learning. We have been talking about trying Facebook this year to ease the way in for up to 200 kids, but many school districts do not allow students to access Facebook from school computers. Maybe we need to explore Yammer or Chatter or look to see if there is a comparable open source app?

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 Kevin Carey in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Issue #15, Winter 2010. In this editorial, Carey (policy director of think tank Education Sector) argues that colleges are not fulfilling their mission to students: costs are rising and students are not learning (or even graduating). He argues for transparency and studies of the effectiveness of teaching and learning, and warns of the education-related lobbies that keep the rest of us in the dark about higher education.

"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."

Fascinating must read on how "attention blindness" prevents us from seeing the bigger world and how unstructured charges to students on finding academic uses of iPods they had been given as Duke first year students led to interconnected learning, innovation, etc. Excerpt: But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college-the term paper-and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent-not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

excerpt on teaching critical thinking "What are the right kinds of questions to ask? In figuring out what questions to ask, it's really helpful to look at Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's begins with a knowledge-based question such as, "Who was the first president of the United States?" To answer that question simply requires knowledge. That's just a first step. Next you want them to be able to evaluate. So I push teachers to look at the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy that involve the analysis and evaluation type of questions. That's when you're pushing kids' thinking. For instance, if you ask, "To what extent was George Washington successful as the first president of the United States?" that's a much higher-level question. It requires a student to evaluate, to create a set of criteria for what makes someone a great president, to possess knowledge about George Washington, and to evaluate his performance against that set of criteria. I suggest that teachers really think about questions that hit four specific criteria. Questions should be open-ended, with no right or wrong answer, which prompts exploration in different directions require synthesis of information, an understanding of how pieces fit together be "alive in their disciplines," which means perpetually arguable, with themes that will recur throughout a student's lifetime and always be relevant be age-appropriate

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is the administrative unit for primary and secondary public education. Agency responsibilities include: managing the textbook adoption process; overseeing development of the statewide curriculum; administering the statewide assessment program; administering a data collection system on public school students, staff, and finances; rating school districts under the statewide accountability system; operating research and information programs; monitoring for compliance with federal guidelines; and serving as a fiscal agent for the distribution of state and federal funds.

The Learning Network Blog on NYTimes.com. For two years, students, teachers, parents and others have posted and commented on this blog. Daily lessons for subjects across curriculum based on Times content are offered. Suggestions are given for using the The Learning Network posts in the classroom. The Learning Network is accessible without a digital subscription, as are the articles linked from Learning Network posts.

Op-Ed by David Brooks in the New York Times, October 31 2011. Brooks finds that the disparity between college grads and non-grads is much more glaring than that of the "1%" who are the focus of the Occupy Wall Street and similar movements. And he finds that this disparity is seen in small cities and towns all over America. Not only does he cite income disparity, but also family structure and things like health risks.

The DECA Institute was formed with grant funds awarded to the Dayton Early College Academy. The purpose of the grant was to share successful practices for urban students with other Ohio schools. Video and PowerPoint resources from the Institute are available on the website.

By Jane Stancill in the Education section of the North Carolina NewsObserver.com, December 31 2010. "North Carolina has become the nation's incubator of early college high schools, with one-third of the total in the United States," 71 schools with 15,000 students. In 2011, NC State University will launch a new early college high school. This article provides background on the ECHS.

"But many of the problems we face today are COMPLEX, and methods to solve simple and complicated problems will not work with complex ones. One of the ways we addressed simple & complicated problems was through training. Training works well when you have clear and measurable objectives. However, there are no clear objectives with complex problems. Learning as we probe the problem, we gain insight and our practices are emergent (emerging from our interaction with the changing environment and the problem). Training looks backwards, at what worked in the past (good & best practices), and creates a controlled environment to develop knowledge and skills."

Alexander Russo's This Week in Education, June 22, 2011 chart on College Haves and Have-Nots with great graphics showing the people-side of the data.