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Yin Wah Kreher

How to Think Like a Maker: Values Your Company Should be Adopting | WIRED - 3 views

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    Embrace imperfection. Makers are more interested in learning and experimenting rather than perfection and that's OK. They try (and fail) often to perfect their projects and to make lots of small bets which eventually lead them to THE BIG IDEA. Makers do it for the fun first and iterate and refine as they go.

    Love the process. A focus on trusting the process rather than outcome is essential to the Maker mentality. Creativity and making is an ongoing rhythm, a lifestyle which is more a way of being than a hobby or isolated event.
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    Other thoughts on this interesting link. Writing a grant focused on the iterative process of improving health care this is exactly what the funders are looking for. How to set up teams (with the 'right' mix of individuals) that are working in an environment where they can fail (without hurting anybody) and improve processes both for the team and the rest of the organization. The later is much harder - how to disseminate good processes that others can then improve upon in complex organizations. But yes the goal is to always work on the process improvement (the makers mentality as it is called in this piece).
Tom Woodward

How to Design A Modern Office Space for Optimism - 0 views

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    "When you look around an office, nine times out of 10 you can tell if it was designed for fear. How does fear manifest in space? High walls. No windows. Closed spaces. By extracting management from the doers and makers of the company, there's plausible deniability. When conversation is inhibited by high-walled cubicles, information is controlled. And to effectively instill fear in office culture, you have to control information. You have to make sure teams are segmented into departments, information is transmitted linearly and power is centralized."
Jonathan Becker

"Social Media has Opened a World of Open Communications..." - 1 views

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    An online focus group was used to investigate the experiences of nine individuals with cerebral palsy who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and social media. Information was gathered related to (a) advantages of social media, (b) disadvantages of social media, (c) barriers to successful use, (d) supports to successful use, and (e) recommendations for other individuals using AAC, support personnel, policy makers, and technology developers. Participants primarily chose to focus on social media as a benef cial tool and viewed it as an important form of communication. The participants did describe barriers to social media use (e.g., technology). Despite barriers, all the participants in this study took an active role in learning to use social media. The results are discussed as they relate to themes and with reference to published literature.
Yin Wah Kreher

Popcorn Maker - 2 views

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    #vcuthink resources for makes or more
Enoch Hale

New effort aims to standardize faculty-driven review of student work | InsideHigherEd - 0 views

  • Campbell also said that the project will be much more significant if it ultimately shows whether students' skills improve over time. "If you don't have some kind of comparison of change, showing what they could do when they came in and when they left," she said, "it may do exactly what the rankings do: reinforce the reality that great students produce great work, and great institutions have great students."
  • Arum said the AAC&U/SHEEO approach has the potential to be one of "multiple indicators" that higher education institutions and policy makers eventually embrace to understand student learning. "No one measure is going to be sufficient to capture student learning performance outcomes," he said. "Responsible parties know there's a place for multiple measures, multiple approaches." Campbell, of Teachers College, agrees that "because [student learning] is such a complicated issue, any one method is going to have complications and potential limitations"
  • The Results The faculty participants scored the thousands of samples of work (which all came from students who had completed at least 75 percent of their course work) in three key learning outcome areas: critical thinking, written communication and quantitative literacy. Like several other recent studies of student learning, including Academically Adrift, the results are not particularly heartening. A few examples: Fewer than a third of student assignments from four-year institutions earned a score of three or four on the four-point rubric for the critical thinking skill of "using evidence to investigate a point of view or reach a conclusion." Nearly four in 10 work samples from four-year colleges scored a zero or one on how well students "analyzed the influence of context and assumptions" to draw conclusions. While nearly half of student work from two-year colleges earned a three or four on "content development" in written communication, only about a third scored that high on their use of sources and evidence. Fewer than half of the work from four-year colleges and a third of student work from two-year colleges scored a three or four on making judgments and drawing "appropriate conclusions based on quantitative analysis of data."
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  • After her training in using the VALUE rubrics, Mullaney gathered nine faculty members on her campus to be the core of the two-year college's project group. They were previously unfamiliar with the rubrics, she says, but together they "went through them with a fine-toothed comb" and agreed "that these rubrics do represent an accurate way to assess these skills." The professors brought in their own (and their colleagues') assignments to see how well (or poorly) they aligned with the rubrics, Mullaney said. "Sometimes their assignments were missing things, but they could easily add them in and make them better." The last step of the process at the institutional level, she said, was gathering a representative sample of student work, so that it came from all of CCRI's four campuses and 18 different disciplines, and mirrored the gender, racial and ethnic demographics and age of the community college's student body. Similar efforts went on at the other 60-odd campuses.
  • "I might have thought so before, but through this process our faculty has really connected with the idea that this is about student learning," she said. "When they see areas of weakness, I think they'll say, 'Wow, OK, how can we address this? What kinds of teaching strategies can we use?'"
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    Assessment: What are students really learning?
Enoch Hale

Why 'Nudges' to Help Students Succeed Are Catching On - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

  • It can also be used to redesign systems so that they’re easier to navigate in the first place.
  • A nudge, like the text-message reminders that helped students make the transition to college, offers a workaround to help people get through a complex system,
  • A nudge, they explained, encourages — but does not mandate — a certain behavior: think putting healthier options at eye level in the cafeteria.
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  • Researchers have used a series of text messages like this one to "nudge" students to complete important tasks like filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The researchers, Ben Castleman and
  • He says there are two aspects of behavioral work: trying to solve a behavioral problem, and doing so with a behavioral solution.
  • Social psychologists are interested in how people make sense of an experience, which can in turn direct their behavior.
  • "We begin a step back in the causal process," Mr. Walton says. As a result, social psychology’s interventions often strive to change how students see the social world around them, or actually change that world — for instance, by having teachers frame their feedback differently.
  • The approach is elegant, creative, and aligned with common sense.
  • It’s possible some people would argue that we act like completely rational beings, but probably not anyone who spends a lot of time around college students.
  • Given their low cost, behavioral solutions often appealing to funders and policy makers.
  • But the flip side of the coin is that such low-cost solutions cannot replace other, pricier efforts to improve college access and success.
  • Higher education presents a "perfect storm for the frailties of human reasoning," Mr. Kelly says. "The system often seems set up to frustrate people."
  • Critics of efforts to simplify or inform students’ choices often say that college isn’t meant to be easy. If someone cannot successfully apply for financial aid, maybe that person doesn’t belong in college. Researchers typically respond by saying they are working to help students through the pesky tasks on the periphery of going to college. Filing the Fafsa — which, incidentally, the most advantaged students don’t have to deal with — isn’t meant to be an admissions test.
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    I wish I could automate some things like this in rampages . . . like if you do a bare URL that doesn't link . . . I'd like to auto comment with some directions on how to make a link. Seems doable in terms of programming.
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