Education

I heard Gary Stager speak at a technology conference, a few years back. I'd been following him for some time, via his intelligent blog posts and articles--and was very surprised that the room where he was speaking was virtually empty, with maybe a dozen people in attendance. Nearly everyone in the audience came from the previous packed keynote, held in the ballroom next door, called "Free is Good!" Stager's remarks were provocative and smart. He opened his presentation by noting that, contrary to the fast-talking, extended commercial for Web 2-point-whatever no-cost goodies we'd just experienced, none of those tools was truly "free." Someone's making money, he said. And it's almost a certainty that the someone is not in the classroom, or even an educator. While tech-based tools can absolutely transform learning, most of them are now are serving other goals: administrative tasks, jazzing up traditional direct instruction, impressing parents and soaking up public resources in the name of "innovation." It's not about kids' self-directed learning, at all. Don't be fooled. I thought about Stager's remarks again--for the hundredth time--today. I got an e-mail asking me to take a five-minute survey for an organization that sends out a free daily ed-news aggregator. After collecting some demographic and job-description data, this question: Are you responsible for purchasing the following for your district? [Radio-button list of materials, services, products that schools typically purchase.] Oh, I thought. Yup. No such thing as free, really. Teachers are infamous for being scroungers, tinkerers and thieves. We steal ideas from each other--or, more likely, generously offer them to our colleagues, flattered that someone would imitate a lesson plan or fall in love with a tool we designed. We cruise garage sales for used books, and recycle the beanbags from mom's basement as a reading nook. My friend Dale Rogers has been tinkering with technology in learning for more than a decade, serving his Career and Technical Ed students with continuously updated, custom-designed, web-accessible videos long before flipped instruction and blended learning were hot, marketable concepts. By my reckoning, he should be as notorious as Sal Khan--perhaps more famous, since his production values are better and his content designed by a professional educator. Dale's actually been doing what Gary Stager described as rare: designing opportunities for students to learn, on their own timetable. If we turn smart teachers loose, they will figure out ingeniously tailored, even elegant ways to enhance learning for their particular students--but none of the experiences and tools they devise are "free." They are generated by investment in instruction and people. Last week, I drove across northern Michigan to attend a "free" ed-camp-esque gathering of school superintendents and district technology directors. It was billed as a day of honest conversations about breaking out of old, tired education thinking. The big draw and guest of honor (who left after the opening panel) was Peter Ruddell, one of the governor's informal advisors, head of a self-described "aggressive" government-affairs law firm. Ruddell pitched a few ideas: giving students who leave high school a year early $2500 in free money--call 'em scholarships!-- plus erasing district boundaries, eliminating costly attendance-taking, and diversifying teacher pay. Offering calculus teachers more than physical education teachers was his example. All of these would free up loads of public resources--which could be used to purchase sophisticated data management programs and services, kicking data analysis into overdrive and making it useful in measuring and rewarding performance. There was no pushback. Other superintendents talked about "tremendous opportunities" afloat now--surviving the financial crunch by creating "niche markets," shaking off the "victim mentality" and launching new, en

Blog: Library Babel FishSome clever and thoughtful people at the American Society for Cell Biology have done us all a favor by putting in writing something that is so good and so true that I’m delighted by it. The Journal Impact Factor has gone from being a rough measure of relative journal significance to being the measure of researchers, something it was never designed for and something it does badly. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is intended as a “worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines.” The basic recommendation is this: “Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.” Yes! Thank you. Though it's not the first time an organization raised the misuse of formulas in assessing research, it's still very welcome. The Declaration goes on to offer advice for funding agencies, institutions, publishers, the people who cook up these kinds of metrics, and researchers on how to make the assessment of research value in ways that have more integrity. I like this part especially: “the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published.” I also like this advice about how to switch our focus of attention from faulty metrics to what it is we are actually assessing: “consider the value and impact of all research outputs (including datasets and software) in addition to research publications, and consider a broad range of impact measures including qualitative indicators of research impact, such as influence on policy and practice.” There are some intriguing hints at how we could build better ways to see the impact of a particular publication. One recommendation, “remove all reuse limitations on reference lists in research articles and make them available under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication” would enable some useful ways of aggregating and mining data. I also like the final two points addressed to researchers: “Use a range of article metrics and indicators on personal/supporting statements, as evidence of the impact of individual published articles and other research outputs.” “Challenge research assessment practices that rely inappropriately on Journal Impact Factors and promote and teach best practice that focuses on the value and influence of specific research outputs.” We have put far too much emphasis on proof of productivity using blunt-force numbers. Number of publications and impact factors of journals, like robo-graders, are easier to administer at scale than actually, you know, assess stuff honestly. So long as we can measure how many papers a person has generated, no need to read them, and with a special sauce that gives us a prestige factor, no need to make any distinctions at all. Just run the numbers. We just had our last class period in a course I teach on finding and using information. Students reported on interviews they did with researchers. All of their subjects spoke with passion about their research. All of them talked about the importance of integrity and gave many examples of situations in which they protected privacy of subjects, avoided bias, or went to lengths to ensure that they were not misrepresenting their findings. Yet when it comes to evaluating the work of scholars, we’re okay with sloppily misapplying a bogus formula? How ironic is that? I signed the declaration. You might want to, too. Barbara FisterShow on Jobs site:

Blog: Confessions of a Community College Dean“What if we published the number of registered voters / voting record average for colleges?” -- Susanna Williams (@SusannaDW) on Twitter I love this question. College “scorecards” are all the rage now. Many states -- possibly soon including my own -- either are or are planning to base funding on performance scorecards. Right now the popular measures include graduation rates, employment rates upon graduation, transfer rates, and success in addressing racial gaps in student success. None of those is without issues, especially as currently measured, but it’s easy enough to grasp the idea behind the measure. What if we judged colleges based in part on voter participation rates by recent graduates? As with any other measure, it would have to be constructed carefully to avoid gaming the system. If we only measured voter registration rates among current students, then a college could make voter registration almost impossible to avoid. In the absence of any other measure, that probably wouldn’t lead to much increase in student engagement in politics, so we’d defeat the purpose. And I’d argue for weighting by student demographics, so that a college with a large low-income population that gets its students voting at, say, ten percent higher rates than their peers, would get more recognition than a college full of rich kids that doesn’t move the needle at all. It’s about value added. But if it were constructed to reflect, say, a few years after graduation, then we might have something. We’d have an incentive for colleges to encourage civic engagement among students. This is not an entirely new idea. The term “liberal arts” is a reference to the “arts of liberty,” or the skills that free people need to function as self-determining citizens. The idea of “rhetoric” as a necessary skill for politics goes back at least to the sophists, if not earlier. (Modern readers will think of “sophistry” as a dark art, but it’s also the root of “sophisticated.”) In a sense, measuring higher education by its capacity to produce engaged citizens is returning it to its roots. But with a healthy twist. Higher education is more inclusive than it used to be. At this point, women outnumber men among American undergraduates, particularly at liberal arts colleges and community colleges. (A few years ago there was a spate of stories about exclusive liberal arts colleges practicing affirmative action for male students, just so the dating pool on campus wouldn’t get too skewed. Young women had so thoroughly outpaced young men academically that the only way to establish balance was to put a thumb on the scale.) Racial and economic gaps remain -- in some ways, the economic gaps are widening -- but there’s an argument to be made that encouraging civic participation among the least advantaged could help reverse those trends. Right now senior citizens vote at much higher rates than do 20 year olds, and our political priorities reflect that. If the 20 year olds caught up, I’d expect to see political priorities shift, too. The Great Republican Evolution on Immigration that occurred, seemingly spontaneously, last Fall showed what can happen when voting patterns shift. Coming from a liberal arts background as I do, I always cringe when I see purely instrumentalist measures of higher ed gain currency (no pun intended). Yes, of course, it’s important to be able to make a living. I take that as given, and have no argument with it. But college shouldn’t only be about that. It should also be about preparing educated citizens to take leadership in the shared project of democracy. Public colleges and universities will focus, to some degree, on what their state funders tell them to. What if their state fu

Blog: Technology and LearningWe are all trying to figure out the best way to include remote colleagues in our team meetings. A number of factors have come together to drive the use of online tools in meetings where some people are meeting face-to-face in one room, while other colleagues are participating in the meeting at a distance. There are many factors driving the growth of hybrid face-to-face / online meetings. Here are 3: 1. Shifting and More Flexible Work Arrangements: A growth of people working part-time, or bundling together multiple positions. These .5 or .25 colleagues often need to join our team meetings while traveling or onsite at their other gigs. 2. Distributed Teams and Partners: We work on teams with people at other institutions, as projects and groups now span multiple locales. Our local teams must find methods to bring distributed colleagues into the normal flow of our discussions. 3. Improvement in Online Meeting Platforms: Online meeting tools are getting both better and cheaper. Incumbents such as Adobe Connect, WebEx, Collaborate, and GoToMeeting are improving - while new players such as Zoom and FuzeBox are shaking up the market. There are many ways to run a hybrid meeting. The best method (I think) is to have everyone in the face-to-face / local meeting all open up their laptops, start their cameras, and participate in the meeting in the same way that the remote colleague is participating. This puts everyone on a more level playing field, with each person getting access to the same digital tools (webcam, chat, notes) independent of location. The agenda for the meeting can be displayed through the web meeting, so that everyone can see what is going on. Any PowerPoints or exhibits can also be displayed through the web meeting, again giving everyone equal access to the discussion. Having everyone participate in the meeting with laptops open has the added benefit of encouraging the meeting facilitator to better include the non-local participants in the meetings, as comments and questions can be solicited by going down the online list of participants. An alternative method for running a hybrid meeting is to display the online meeting platform on a large conference room monitor. A webcam can be set up to show all the local people, and anyone distant can have their webcam images shown on the large screen. Presentations are run through the meeting software, displaying on the large screen for the local participants and in the browser (or mobile) window for the distant colleagues. Meeting notes can also be taken in the meeting tool, displayed in real time to all participants. Whatever method you decide to run your hybrid meeting it is important to keep in mind that the non-local people are at risk of not being fully included in the discussion. A discussion is a sort of dance, with everyone in the meeting trying to figure out the right mix between listening and contributing. There exists no correlation between the amount a person speaks and the value of their contributions. Some people talk more, some people talk less - the balance is never perfect. What is clear is that the flow of conversation depends largely on non-verbal cues. Who leans forward. Who makes eye contact. Relying on non-verbal cues to jump into the conversation is impossible for the distant meeting participants. They cannot see when the best time is to interject, and cannot easily signal they have something to say. The result is that the distant participants will almost always say the least, even when they have the most to add. What is the solution? One idea is for whoever is running the meeting to have as an explicit goal to equally include all participants, whether they be local or remote. Announce at the start of the meeting that this is your goal, and talk about how you plan to achieve your aim. Some best practices for running hybrid meetings include: Share

Blog: GradHackerEva Lantsoght is a PhD Candidate in Structural Engineering at Delft University of Technology and blogs about academia and concrete research on PhD Talk. You can follow her on twitter at @evalantsoght. The internet contains a wealth of information - we are all aware of that. But this enormous amount of information can make us feel overloaded and overstimulated. Our brains turn jittery, wanting to check the news again, or wondering what's new in our Twitter streams. We become afraid of missing out on information, or addicted to stuffing bits and pieces of random articles into our brains. Ideally, our information streams deliver us a lot of great contents, and little random side-information that sets us up for some unnecessary surfing or distracts us. We want a lot of signal, and little noise. If you feel like your digital arteries are getting clogged, then it is more than time for a pre-summer cleanse of your digital information streams: your newsletter subscriptions, blog roll, social media channels, favorite websites and everything else you stuff into your brain. Below are six steps that you can use to clean-sweep your digital information habits, and help you to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of your information streams: Step 1: Go cold-turkey If you have a bad case of infobesitas, drastically cut back on your information channels. Commit to a weekend or week without reading stuff on your regular information streams. Instead, refuel your brain by reading analog books, spend time with friends and family, practice sports and immerse yourself in creative work. Ideally, you take this cold-turkey approach when you go on a holiday, or when you want to create a thesis-writing retreat for yourself. Step 2: Reintroduce the essentials After this period, evaluate what you really missed, and what you *really* feel curious about, and simply discard all the rest. Unsubscribe, delete, unfriend - clean out all those time-sucks and make space for your treasured set of inspiring blogs, tweeps and more. If you're in doubt, throw it out - you can always reconnect at a later point in time should you feel like you want to receive updates again. Be mindful about every single subscription you keep. Ask yourself what its contribution to your life is, what you are getting out of it, and if it's worth the expensive investment of your time and interest. Step 3: Introduce an evaluation period Whenever you subscribe to a newsletter, blog or other information channel, make sure you take some time after 30 days to evaluate this subscription, and decide if it's worth your time and the investment of your interest. You can simply put a reminder in your calendar to evaluate this subscription after a while. On that given day, simply ask yourself how much you are learning from this subscription and if you want to stay informed or not. Step 4: Limit your time The best way to get more efficient at soaking up useful information is by knowing that you have a limited amount of time to weed through whatever has piled up in your information channels. You can play the email game to sift through an exploding inbox. We all know that we should limit our use of internet and e-mail to given time-slots in each day - commit to truly making this change. If you want to focus, put that bleeping, flashing smartphone in a drawer and work on your important tasks. Have a fixed moment during the day to batch-process your information channels. Don't feel obliged to do anything - and delete or unsubscribe to whatever is not of your interest. Step 5: Consider the internet as a tool Imagine the internet as a giant drawer full of keyword cards. If you're old enough to remember how libraries worked before their digitization, then use that image as a reference. If you want to know something, if a thought crosses your mind during the day, don't immediately go and look it up online. Jot it down, and leave it for "when you go to the

Blog: University of VenusEarlier I wrote about my dilemma about applying for Doctoral programs, and you’ve all been waiting with bated breath to hear how it all turned out. I eventually applied to three Ph.D. programs in Women’s Studies – just to see if I could get in. And then? I was accepted to 2 out of 3 programs and was suddenly faced with an entirely different dilemma – what do I do now? I had spent remarkably little time considering what to do if I were actually offered a position in these programs; as I was fairly certain it was inevitable that I would simply receive 3 rejections. This belief didn’t stem from a false sense of self-modesty, I was merely being pragmatic. My position at as Graduate Studies Officer meant that I saw the grades of all graduate students, as I performed their final degree audits. I saw the students in my own program receive much higher grades than I did, and while a final GPA equating to an A- was still acceptable – it was certainly not outstanding in comparison. So while my grades were acceptable, I certainly didn’t approach my applications with an overwhelming sense of confidence. However, I really enjoyed the process. Researching potential programs, preparing research proposals, receiving the advice and support of my referees was really interesting and gratifying. But then I received my acceptances and had some hard and unexpected decisions to make. But it all seemed to come together with surprising ease. There was a clause in my contract that allowed me to request a leave from my job for the two-year residency period of the program, and more importantly, the Vice-President was willing to approve the request. I consulted with my realtor who was confident that I would have no problem either selling or renting my condo, and I had friends willing to let me live with them during my residency. Administratively, it seemed I would have no trouble accepting the offer(s). But I had other, more personal and emotional, concerns that gave me pause. And it was while I was trying to sort those out that I experienced some unexpected side-effects to what I had believed was an individual choice. It seems that other people were just as invested in my decision as I was. When speaking with one individual about my quandary, she attempted to be helpful and lay out the pros and cons. (The situation would have been laughable if I hadn’t found it to be so distressing at the time). She hypothesized all the reasons I would decide to actually go, and what it would mean, and the ramifications etc. This went on for a couple of minutes and it all made good sense. And then she turned to “and if you decide not to go, it will be because...” Insert long pause and crickets chirping. She couldn’t come up with anything. And while she tried to gracefully cover this up, the point had been made. She couldn’t figure out any reason why I *wouldn’t* go. And why should she? She had her Ph.D., she had made the decision to pursue this life, and couldn’t fathom why I wouldn’t follow the same path. And this was essentially the same response I received from everyone I spoke to within the academy. Whether they had their Ph.D.’s or not, everyone either implied or outright stated that I should; nay that I would go. The conflict for me came from the fact that there was no right or wrong decision. There was nothing bad either way. If I went, I would have a plethora of challenging and rewarding experiences, and eventually a new credential. However, if I stayed, I would be continuing with a job I loved, supporting an aging Father who was concerned about my potential departure, and not leaving a partner I adored, and the rest of my support system. In the end? I decided to turn the opportunities down. If you’re curious why – it’s essentially because I realized that I didn’t want

So the semester is done, I am back to my Happy Place of Summertime Happiness, and all is well.  Of course, this also means that I am committed to getting back to the Writing Place of Summertime Writing, which is, in a word, exhausting.  And scary.  And maybe not quite so simple as “oh, I’ve got all this time!  Of course I shall meet my goals!” But so I had an epiphany in the shower today.  (See title of post.)  There are many things about myself as a writer, and as a person who is able to motivate herself to write, that are great.  I am content to draft and to revise.  I outline.  I am good about editing to others’ specifications in order to get a piece out for publication.  In other words, I’m not especially a perfectionist, and I’m pretty content to put the “good” (or “good enough”) before the “perfect” (as if such a thing exists!).  I don’t labor over sentences, nor do I hold tight to sentences, or paragraphs, or even whole pieces of writing, as if they are brilliant jewels to be honored and cherished. But what I discovered this morning, mid-shampoo, was that in spite of all of these admirable writer-qualities, I do have a problem, and it’s a problem that’s really reared its ugly head since the advent of The Dude.  The problem is that while I’m very good at all of the above, I’m not very good at keeping going even in the midst of… complications. Here is what I do.  I come up with a plan for writing, a schedule for accomplishing things.  (This is good.)  I make deadlines for myself, and then I make a set of “real” deadlines as a back-up.  (This is also good.)  But what I also do is I try to hold myself to working from beginning to end – ish.  It’s not that I always work in a totally linear way, I don’t, but whatever the “big chunk” is – a conference paper, a chapter, an article – well, I can’t really move on from it to another piece, or into revision of it, unless I feel like it has a beginning, middle, and an end.  Or I don’t.  So the result is this, it seems: I am that person who is constantly revising her schedule when shit doesn’t get done.  And then I feel overwhelmed by the revised schedule and then I don’t write at all.  And then I have to revise the schedule again.  This hasn’t happened to me for some time, but it is the writer that I am. Long story short: I had a schedule for getting a chapter of the book done by April (this was a third or fourth round revised schedule, let’s note).  That didn’t happen.  So rather than move on to the next thing on the “Master Schedule,” I was all, “well, I can’t do anything until I get that done!  I’ll just make an even stricter schedule for myself in order to do things in a linear-ish way!”  Needless to say, I just didn’t make any progress for the past couple of months.  (And then, as I confessed to you all, I directly blamed this on The Dude, though that wasn’t fair.) If we put this in Freshmen Comp terms, I am the student who can’t write the paper because she didn’t already write the introduction.  And it’s worth noting, I was that Freshmen Comp student, so I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m in this predicament right now. Except I am surprised.  Because historically, when I’ve run into this problem since those long ago days of Freshmen Comp, I’ve assumed the problem wasn’t “me” but rather that it was whatever the complication was. So, for example, once upon a time, during the one time in my life when I have described myself as having writer’s block, while I was writing my dissertation, I really thought it was “writer’s block” – that I was “blocked” by some mystical force, and that suddenly the “block” lifted by an equally

Blog: GlobalHigherEdThe last week of higher ed media coverage have been rich with discussions about the tangle of global networks being formed. A case in point is this announcement, by Imperial College London and Zhejiang University, to collaborate on a new initiative in London's White City. Much like the Amsterdam's plans to establish a new university ('On Amsterdam's Plans to Establish a Third University'), and the Cornell-Technion experiment in New York City, these global networks are quite tightly configured and very urban-centered: they are being harnessed to create new spaces of knowledge production to creatively unsettle and hopefully strengthen city-region innovation systems. On the global/urban theme, today's coverage also included news about the expansion of a Boston-based massive open online course (MOOC) platform - EdX - such that it will now double in size and serve universities from many more parts of the world. The EdX press release explains the nature of the expansion, while these two images - the first reflecting membership yesterday, and the second membership today - make it very clear EdX is now a much more global (if unevenly!) platform: EdX (20 May 2013) EdX (21 May 2013) See below for information about the founding universities of the two big MOOC platforms - Coursera and EdX - and then the non-US universities that have joined these platforms over time. Please note that I have not included information about the inclusion of additional US universities - this is only a list the non-US members that were added over time. Coursera -- Established Fall 2011 | Four founding US universities as of April 2012 Princeton University Stanford University University of Michigan University of Pennsylvania EdX -- Established May 2012 | Two founding US universities Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Coursera -- Expansion on 17 July 2012 includes three non-US universities École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) University of Edinburgh (UK) University of Toronto (Canada) Coursera -- Expansion on 19 September 2012 includes five non-US universities University of British Columbia (Canada) Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong SAR) University of London (UK) University of Melbourne (Australia) EdX -- Expansion on 20 February 2013 includes five non-US universities The Australian National University (Australia) Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) McGill University (Canada) University of Toronto (Canada) Coursera -- Expansion on 21 February 2013 includes 16 non-US universities Latin America Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico) Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico) Europe Ecole Polytechnique, (France) IE Business School (Spain) Leiden University (Netherlands) Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Muenchen (Germany) Sapienza, University of Rome (Italy) Technical University Munich (Germany) Technical University of Denmark (Denmark) University of Copenhagen (Denmark) University of Geneva (Switzerland) Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain) Asia The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong SAR) National Taiwan University (Taiwan) National University of Singapore (Singapore) University of Tokyo (Japan) EdX -- Expansion on 21 May 2013 includes 10 non-US universities Asia The University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong SAR) Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (Hong Kong SAR) Kyoto University (Japan) Peking University (China) Seoul National University (South Kor

Wolf Trap Teaching Artist Amanda Layton Whiteman integrates the arts with math in preschool classrooms as part of the Early STEM/Arts Program. (Photo by Scott Suchman, courtesy of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts.) President Obama, in the 2013 State the Union address, challenged the country to move forward simultaneously on two key educational fronts — providing high-quality preschool for all four-year olds  and preparing a new generation of Americans in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects.  Teaching artists from the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts and preschool educators in the Fairfax County (Virginia) Public Schools, with support from the U S. Department of Education, are developing an innovative approach to achieving both of these national goals. The Early Childhood STEM Learning Through the Arts (Early STEM/Arts) is pioneering an innovative, research-based arts integration model for early childhood learning — one that supports math teaching and learning through active, arts-based experiences in pre-K and kindergarten classrooms.  Preschool teachers participating in the project receive professional development that enables them to apply arts-integrated lessons in their classrooms. Some report “a-ha!” moments as they work alongside Wolf Trap Teaching Artists such as Amanda Layton Whiteman (pictured above). “When I found out it was going to be math, I was saying, oh jeez, this is going to be hard,” said one teacher.  But after being involved with the artist and the arts-integrated approach, she “realized that math is everywhere.” And incorporating the arts into her everyday lessons “helps you reach every child.” With the help of a $1.15 million Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination grant from the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII), the Early ATEM/arts program will disseminate evaluation results in early 2014. In the meantime, Wolf Trap Regional Programs in 16 locations nationally are gearing up to implement the new model in the 2013-14 school year. Read OII’s “Wolf Trap Institute Unites the Arts and STEM in Early Childhood Learning” to hear more stories from those at the Wolf Trap Institute.

A few days ago, Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy wrote about supporting the Common Core State Standards—and doing whatever it takes to implement them well—simply because they reflect real-world standards. Institutions of higher education and employers have high standards. For many children from disadvantaged homes, rigorous schooling offers the [...]