Red Balloon Resources

"Smarter Than You Think Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself By STEVE LOHR October 4, 2010 Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined - win at chess, predict the weather - and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence. Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day. Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University - supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo - has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer - calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week - that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself. "

"MBS expands into online marketplace By Victoria Guida Oct 1, 2010 Dennis Flanagan, CEO of MBS Direct, recently launched Xplana, an online student learning platform that helps students manage their academic lives through social networking, study groups and e-textbooks. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other online resources have transformed the way students receive information. MBS Textbook Exchange, eying the exodus from print to digital, is evolving to keep up with the technological transformation. This summer, MBS launched an online social learning platform called Xplana that strives to connect Internet resources in a way that makes learning easier and more interactive for students. The company has since made the case that the new website is the way of the future on college campuses. "We began looking at the fact that learning was evolving in a lot of different ways," said Dennis Flanagan, CEO of MBS Direct and Xplana (pronounced ex plah' nah). "The traditional print book has always been one of the primary sources of learning, with the teacher standing up in front of the classroom. The Internet kind of changed that whole process. You don't necessarily look in a book to find information." MBS, which leads the textbook industry in wholesale production, acquired Xplana last October as a strategic move to keep up with the times, said Rob Reynolds, founder of Xplana."

"A Final Word on the Presidents' Student-Learning Alliance November 22, 2010, 1:36 pm By David Glenn Last week we published a series of comments (one, two, three) on the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability. Today we're pleased to present a reply from David C. Paris, executive director of the presidential alliance's parent organization, the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability: I was very pleased to see the responses to the announcement of the Presidents' Alliance as generally welcoming ("commendable," "laudatory initiative," "applaud") the shared commitment of these 71 founding institutions to do more-and do it publicly and cooperatively-with regard to gathering, reporting, and using evidence of student learning. The set of comments is a fairly representative sample of positions on the issues of evidence, assessment, and accountability. We all agree that higher education needs to do more to develop evidence of student learning, to use it to measure and improve our work, and to be far more transparent and accountable in reporting the results. The comments suggest different approaches-and these differences are more complementary than contradictory-to where we should focus our efforts and how change will occur. I'd suggest that none of us has the answer, and while each of these approaches faces obstacles, each can contribute to progress in this work. For William Chace, Cliff Adelman, and Michael Poliakoff, the focus should be on some overarching measures or concepts that will clearly tell us, our students, and the public how well we are doing. Obtaining agreement on a "scale and index," or the appropriate "active verbs" describing competence, or dashboards and other common reporting mechanisms will drive change by establishing a common framework for evaluation. Josipa Roksa, on the other hand, suggests that real change will only happen from the ground up. Facu

"Measuring Student Learning: Many Tools November 23, 2010, 2:44 pm By David Glenn Suppose that you've served on a faculty committee that has devised a list of collegewide learning objectives for your undergraduates. You don't want that list to just sit there on a Web site as a testimony to your college's good intentions. (Right?) You want to take reasonable steps to measure whether your students are actually meeting the goals you've defined. How best to do that is, of course, a highly contested question. Some scholars urge colleges to use nationally normed tests, like the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that attempt to capture students' critical-thinking and analytic-writing skills. Others say it is better to use student portfolios that allow students to demonstrate their skills in the context of their course work. (For a taste of that debate, see this post and the comments it engendered.) Charles Blaich, director of Wabash College's Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, advocates an all-of-the-above approach. Colleges should use as many reasonable kinds of data as they can get their hands on, he says. The CLA and other national tests can be powerful tools, but they can't possibly capture a college's full range of learning objectives."

"Californians Worry About Support for Higher Ed As California's public colleges and universities have faced severe budget shortfalls, many state residents have been slow to see a problem, but that may be changing. A statewide survey released by the Public Policy Institute of California found increases in the percentage of Californians who appear to see real problems. Among California residents, 74 percent of residents say the state does not provide enough money for colleges and universities, up 17 points from 57 percent in October 2007. Most Californians (68 percent) believe that spending for public higher education should be given a high or very high priority - up from 54 percent in November 2008, And 57 percent favor spending more on higher education, even at the expense of other programs."

"Call for 'Consumer Revolution' in Britain November 18, 2010 British students plan to launch a "consumer revolution" against a sector they see as unprepared for the consequences of marketization and high fees. The National Union of Students has demanded that sector-owned quasi-government entities be replaced by tough new regulators with the power to protect students from "collusion" on fee levels and to impose "genuine penalties" for malpractice and maladministration. With students saying that they have been let down by politicians and the "deafening silence" of most vice chancellors on the issue of the cuts facing the academy, Aaron Porter, the NUS president, said the union had no choice but to "completely change" its approach."

"Blood, sweat, and tiers By Kevin Cullen Globe Columnist / September 14, 2010 There were two stories about local colleges in the paper recently that spoke an undeniable truth and hit a real nerve. One was about how UMass Amherst is a "second-tier'' state school struggling to attract top students after years of budget cuts and apathy on Beacon Hill. The other was about how Harvard's endowment now exceeds $27 billion, which is approximately the GDP of Costa Rica. First, the truth: If you want your school to have enough capital, it's better to rely on rich alumni than craven politicians. Now, about that nerve. When some people read "second-tier,'' they think second-rate. The UMass story, perfectly factual, was exquisitely timed. On the day that thousands of UMass students moved onto campus, a front-page story in the Globe announced that "UMass Amherst remains firmly lodged among the nation's second-tier state schools.'' Now, some might view that as a slap in the face. Most people I know who went to UMass would take the slap and say, "Is that all you got?''"

"In 5 States, Public Reluctance to Hike Taxes for Higher Ed A new poll from the Pew Center on the States and the Public Policy Institute of California finds that the public is much less likely to back tax increases for higher education than it is for elementary and secondary education. The poll looked at five states: Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois and New York. In all five states, more than 60 percent of voters said that they would back tax increases for elementary and secondary education, and majorities said that they would do so for health and human services. For higher education, support topped 40 percent in all five states, but did not hit a majority in any of them."

No Time to Waste A publication of the SREB 4 Imperatives for States: 1. Set statewide priority and direction, with specific goals, for increasing the numbers of degrees and certificates - including raising accountability for system and institutional leaders and setting measures to assess credential completion, among other actions. 2. Increase access and enrollment in postsecondary education even more, by improving college affordability, students' college readiness, and drawing more adults to postsecondary study. 3. Increase the numbers of credentials earned by students in all colleges and universities through targeted institutional actions- building campus cultures that make completion the first priority and institutionalizing a series of actions that guide students more directly to a credential. 4. Increase productivity and cost-efficiency in degree completion ─ by introducing strategies that reduce excess credits, streamline college-transfer systems, and expect timely degree completion at lower costs.

"Searching For Better Research Habits September 29, 2010 NEW YORK CITY -- Should colleges teach students how to be better Googlers? Educators who see the popular search engine as antithetical to good research might cringe at the thought of endorsing it to students. But they might not cringe nearly as hard as did attendees of the 2010 Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship Conference when Andrew Asher showed them what happens when students do not learn how to use Google properly. "Students do not have adequate information literacy skills when they come to college, and this goes for even high-achieving students," said Asher, the lead research anthropologist at the Enthographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, which recently studied the search habits of more than 600 Illinois students spanning a range of institutions and demographic groups. "And they're not getting adequate training as they're going through the curriculum," he said. Asher moved swiftly through a few slides featuring excerpts from interviews with students, each eliciting both chuckles and gasps from the audience of librarians and technologists. "I'm just trusting Google to know what are the good resources," responded one sophomore biology student. "Of all the students that I interviewed, not a single one of them could give an adequate conceptual definition of how Google returns results," said Asher. Not even those "who should know better," like computer science students. The word "magic" came up a lot, he noted. Asher pulled quotes from other students evidencing how the expectations and ignorances bred by habitual, unthinking use of Google had affected how students use other search engines, such as those built into the scholarly archive JSTOR. The students in the ERIAL sample seemed oblivious to the logic of search or how to generate or parse search results with much patience or intelligence. "I just throw up whatever I want into the search box and

"July 2, 2009 Online-Education Study Reaffirms Value of Good Teaching, Experts Say By David Glenn In a much-debated 1983 essay on distance learning, Richard E. Clark, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Southern California, argued that it was beside the point to ask whether distance education is better or worse than the traditional classroom. The medium isn't the crucial variable, Mr. Clark wrote. What is important is to look at the effectiveness of specific instructional strategies, regardless of how those strategies are delivered. Last week, more than 25 years after Mr. Clark's provocation, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that, at least at first glance, carries a strong message about the medium: Students learn more effectively in online settings. Most powerful of all appear to be "blended" courses that offer both face-to-face and online elements. Previous research has generally found that online and offline courses are equally effective. But even though the report, which synthesized data from several dozen high-quality studies, was framed and publicized as a circuit board-versus-chalkboard showdown, its authors do not view themselves as having flouted Mr. Clark's principles. On the contrary: Mr. Clark served as a technical adviser to the project, and the report's lead author says that Mr. Clark's basic insights are correct. "This report should not be interpreted as saying that one medium is better than another," says Barbara Means, a director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, a California research firm that conducted the project under contract with the Education Department. "This should not be interpreted as saying that computers are better than professors." Instead, Ms. Means says, the study offers evidence that particular kinds of online instructional techniques are effective-and some of those techniques, she suggests, could theoretically be imported into old-fas