The Promise of Performance Assessments: Innovations in High School Learning and Higher Education Admissions
Roneeta Guha, Tony Wagner, Linda Darling-Hammond, Terri Taylor, Diane Curtis, Learning Policy Institute, 2018/01/18
"Like doctoral candidates with university dissertations," write the authors, in performance assessments "students often defend their projects and papers before panels of judges, who rigorously evaluate them against high standards; students typically revise their work until they meet the standards." The suggestion in this report (42 page PDF) is that performance assessments can (and should) replace more traditional (and test-based) assessments of high school graduates. More...

Adaptive Learning: The Premise, Promise, and Pitfalls
Petr Johanes, Larry Lagerstrom, American Society for Engineering Education, 2018/01/18
This is a review paper intended to "explain what adaptive systems are and what kinds of data they require,... to categorize the main use cases and possibilities of adaptive systems [and] to outline the current limitations and concerns surrounding adaptive systems." In two paragraphs it deftly summarizes the landscape, listing new companies (Acrobatiq, Knewton, CogBooks, Cerego, Realizeit, LoudCloud, Smart Sparrow) as well as the work of publishers, LMS companies and universities. More...

2018 Map of the Complexity Sciences
Brian Castellani, 2018/01/18
This is a great visualization of the major streams of thought in the field of complexity theory. I like the way it shows the links between the different strands, and also that ti is an interactive graphic - click on an area and be taken to the relevant Wikipedia page. More...

No Way, JOSE! Javascript Object Signing and Encryption is a Bad Standard That Everyone Should Avoid
Scott Arciszewski, Paragon Initiative Enterprises Blog, 2018/01/17
I have no position on the issue described in this post because it's all new to me. But because it's all new to me it's inherently interesting, and the discussion perhaps points the way to the future of signing and encrypting Javascript objects (such as data or executable code). The argument here against Javascript Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) is that it is often abused, and that it makes forgery trivial. More...

What Oberlin reveals about higher ed’s vulnerable business model
Alana Dunagan, Christensen Institute, 2018/01/17
This post almost makes me feel sorry for a university that has an $800 million endowment and charges $70K tuition per year. Almost. The argument is that if the school falls even 2.8 percent short on enrollments, it leads to a $5 million budget gap. Lowering prices or lowering spending threaten the school's prestige status. More...

American Views: Trust, Media and Democracy
Gallup, Knight Foundation, 2018/01/17
According to the Knight Foundation and Nieman Report summaries, "Americans say greater access to news sources is actually making it harder to stay informed." The analogy in education would be that greater access to educational resources makes it harder to become educated. More...

A New Impact Investing Model for Education
Rahil Rangwala, 2018/01/17
This post describes a funding model for private schools in India where owners can get loans and, if the students achieve certain educational outcomes, they can get rebates on those loans. More...

Coffee, communities, and condescension
Harold Jarche, 2018/01/17
Harold Jarche uses a Twitter discussion to make the point that networks are not the same as communities. "Our networks are great places for serendipitous connections," he writes. More...

What Will You Do When They Come for Your Proxy Server?
Lisa Janicke Hinchcliffe, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/01/16
This article begins on a negative note about the RA21 authentication project, but reconciles itself by the end. The premise is that IP-based access to paywalled scholarly publications is coming to an end and will be replaced by (something like) RA21, which is an identity federation. More...

Google Memory Loss
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2018/01/16
My experience is oddly the opposite: I am constantly setting Google to search only the last year because I keep getting irrelevant results from 2002. This is because the things I am searching for are often truly obscure. More...