An Open Letter to the Education System: Please Stop Destroying Students
By John Warner. Dear Education System:
Do you know whose voice I don’t hear very often in the great educational reform debate?
Students.
But why should we listen to students? They don’t know what they need, do they?
Maybe not, but they do know what’s happening to them. They know that school makes them miserable. Read more...
The silent "e"
By G. Rendell. Now that I've spent (too much) time and effort denigrating the right-hand side of the IPAT equation (environmental Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology), it strikes me that the biggest problem isn't over there on the right (and this from someone rarely reticent to blame the Right for just about anything). Sure, Population is mathematically a non-factor and sociologically an attractive nuisance. Technology is just the handmaiden of Affluence; it can be no more until and unless society rethinks some fundamental assumptions. And Affluence is just a euphemism for consumption. Read more...
A Slight Tangent About Time and Learning
Twitter Users Tweet About the Death of Twitter
So Goes California
For privacy laws, many have borrowed it to suggest that “…as California goes, so goes the country…” It was true for data breach notification, and with the addition of new attributes that constitute those laws, for example birth date. A significant new variation relevant to higher education has just been published: Privacy and Information Security Initiative Steering Committee Report to the President. Read more...
It’s About Time
By Tracy Mitrano. Since most of the country – including students and teachers – don’t even know what the Family Rights Education Privacy Act is, it probably won’t mean all that much to mainstream journalists that the White House today released a review that called for a revision of FERPA. But to K-12, and colleges and universities across the country, it is a big deal. Not just because school district and institutional counsel will have to interpret the proposed regulations and their respective associations begin lobbying the Department of Education. But because the reasons for this revision are good ones, and one hopes that the advocates of Big Data will not intervene so forcefully or effectively in only the way that their lobbying money knows how to gut the purpose of these revisions. Read more...
The Degree Vertical
By Steven Mintz. The number one challenge facing public higher education is to exponentially improve rates of student engagement, persistence, and graduation, especially among those demographics, such as commuter, working, and part-time students, with historically low retention and completion rates. The standard explanations for student failure focus on high schools (and their supposed failure to provide students with the preparation and study skills necessary for post-secondary success), college professors (who allegedly prioritize scholarship over teaching and mentoring), and the students themselves (who purportedly privilege work and campus life rather than their studies). Read more...
Spring Books
I’m curious about what you’ve been reading in the last couple of months, and I have some recommendations for you:
Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Sava. Read more...
Can Book Lovers Stand Up to Amazon?
On the one hand, Amazon has been the best thing that could have happened to book geeks. Amazon’s development of the Kindle and Audible ecosystems has ensured that we can get new books in digital formats, at prices closer to what we used to have pay for paperbacks. Read more...