Idea: make learning best practices, coding standards, etc. more engaging by converting standard documentation into interactive quizzes and games. This would also provide feedback to the instructor on which topics were understood and which need reinforcement. We could use this as a part of the onramp process for new Code Poets to reduce the number of basic issues (like validation vs. sanitization vs. escaping) we’re currently communicating over and over.
Cultural artifact: Tonight’s class homework is to go register an account with Khan Academy and add your teacher as a coach. But what if they want a different coach? Easily done.
Thirty-seven percent of children between Kindergarten and Year 2 have their own mobile (of some sort), with one fifth having access to a smartphone. By Year 8, that figure has risen to eighty-five percent, with fully one-third using smartphones.
[...]
The next years are an interregnum, the few heartbeats between the ‘before time’ – when none of us were connected – and a thoroughly hyperconnected afterward. This is the moment when we must make the necessary pedagogical and institutional adjustments to a pervasively connected culture. That survey from last year found that even at Kindergarten level, two-thirds of parents were willing to buy a mobile for their children – if schools integrated the device into their pedagogy. But the survey also pointed to opposition within the schools themselves:
“When we asked administrators about the likelihood of them allowing their students to use their own mobile devices for instructional purposes at school this year, a resounding 65% of principals said “no way!”
Mark Pesce — Hyperconnected education
The case against college. This is the sound of a huge falling tree.
Khan thought he could offer teachers crucial new insight into how students learn. He envisioned a dashboard system that would track students’ individual statistics, showing them and their instructors how many videos they’d watched, how many questions they’d answered, and which ones they’d gotten wrong or right. Normally, of course, teachers fly blind. They use quizzes, homework, and their own observations to try to figure out how much their students understand, but it’s a crude process. Day to day, it’s hard to know what a student is and isn’t learning. A dashboard, Khan says, can change all that.
[...]
Cadwell has already gotten so used to these metrics that she feels unmoored in her other classes, where they’re not yet using the system. “In those, I get to a quiz or a test and I’m blindsided when they don’t know something—or when they ace something.”
[...]
But by being able to target her students for special help exactly when they needed it, Cadwell saw stunning results: The class’s test scores improved more than 106 percent in half a year. One girl I met in the classroom had advanced an astonishing 366 percent. “I hated math,” the girl tells me cheerfully. “But now it’s actually fun.” She began the year unable to do basic fractions; during my visit, I watched her plow through complicated long division, carefully working problems on the Khan software.
How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education. Whether or not the Khan Academy ultimately succeeds, the trend is very real.
Web strategy defined: The translation of the organizational objectives and values into high-level management directives for the web. This will be Jay Collier’s focus for this morning.
Common principles for web strategy:
Not often is there one sponsor for web strategy; there are generally multiple. Question how long your web strategy is going to be in place, and whether that’s an appropriate timeline. Thinking about why you’re doing it, vision and principles, and figure out what exactly you’ll do and how to measure it.
In determining which platform to deploy, or functionality to implement, Jay recommends having stakeholders list features and prioritize on a 1-10 basis.
A “domain architecture” map will help you understand all of the requirements by department, and how they interrelate.
Lafayette College has integrated WordPress in all aspects of their publishing.
Queen’s College in Australia has gone as far as focus their homepage entirely on prospective students. All other content lives elsewhere on the site, and is accessible after community members receive a login.
Atlanta’s public schools: Low marks all round. A recently released report from Governor Nathan Deal revealed systemic cheating throughout Atlanta’s school system, not by pupils but by teachers. Of 56 elementary and middle schools examined, 44 had cheating. In total, at least 178 teachers including 38 principals. The scope included everything from giving students answers to pointing to answers while standing over students to letting the low-scoring kids copy from the high-scoring kids to having a “test-changing party” to improve answers.
In other words, my theory is: Cheating (on a systematic level) happens because students try to get an edge over their peers/competitors. Even top-notch students cheat, in order to ensure a perfect grade. Fighting cheating is not something that professors can do well in the long run, and it is counterproductive by itself. By channeling this competitive energy into creative activities, in which you cannot cheat, everyone is better off.
Panos Ipeirotis — Why I will never pursue cheating again. A computer scientist teaching in a business school details a year of trying to combat cheating on assignments. Overall, he spent 45 hours addressing the problem during a 32 hour lecture course, and 22 of 108 enrolled students admitted cheating. Solutions could include:
Takeaway: If plagiarism is your biggest worry, you’re doing it wrong.
But not knowing what plagiarism is isn’t really the problem. It’s unfortunate that right now the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism. And the reason the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism is because their product is less and less valuable these days. When students plagiarize, there’s an implicit recognition that “I’m just doing this for the grade.” That’s why they do it. And that’s the way that the majority of students look at the university, and have been for some time now. At my college, the frats had rooms full of file cabinets full of plagiarized papers. Plagiarism is old news. It’s really not just that plagiarism is getting easier to do, with the Internet. The problem is now that the grade doesn’t even get you the job.
The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers. (via Andrew and Robin)
Annotum. Project to build an open-access scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress.
