Improving Teaching Effectiveness: Final Report
Brian M. Stecher, RAND, 2018/06/28
This is an evaluation of a $775m Gates Foundation project to improve teacher performance. The key finding is that the program did not work. "Sites implemented new measures of teaching effectiveness and modified personnel policies accordingly but did not achieve their goals for students." But I like how Boing Boing responded to the report. More...
Orchestration Graphs: Modeling Scalable Education
Pierre Dillenbourg, Amazon, 2018/06/28
Enough of this book is visible online to be tantalizing (not that I can buy it, though; I have nothing like the budget it would take to actually buy books). The premise is as follows: "a sequence of learning activities can be modeled as a graph with specific properties." What follows appears to be a good application of graph theory to learning processes, up to and including the stochastic properties of graphs - that is, the idea that we can view a student's path through the graph as a set of probabilities. More...
JavaScript API for Face Recognition in the Browser
Vincent Mühler, ITNext, Medium, 2018/06/28
This is documentation of a script you can use on your website to classify and recognize faces. Though it's based on recognition of faces on photos, the obvious application of this is to use it as a way to identify who is looking at your website. More...
A Gullible Population Is a National Security Issue
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, 2018/06/28
Vicki Davis makes the point stated in the title in a forceful way using examples of Russian-produced social media advertisements aimed at an American audience. If I had to change anything, I would change the word "national" to "global", because it doesn't matter where the advertisements come from, nor where they're directed, they still have the intent (and effect) of making the world burn. More...
Lessons Learned From a Consortium That Fizzled
Mark Lieberman, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/06/27
This article describes what happened when four liberal arts colleges decided to form a consortium to offer EdX MOOCs together. Don't worry, it's nothing bad. But it's interesting to see how each institution found its own path forward. More...
The Coherence Theory of Truth
James O. Young, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018/06/27
A naive theory of truth would be one where a sentence is true if and only if whatever it describes is actually true in the real world. This is the correspondence theory of truth. But what if you can never satisfy this? What if you can't know enough about the real world to establish correspondance? Is there no truth, then? Not necessarily - this is where the coherence theory of truth comes in. More...
5 Critical Gaps in STEM Skills
Dian Schaffhauser, 2018/06/27
This is a different way of looking at the gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills. Sure, there's the knowledge component - or, at least, "basic mathematics, critical thinking, complex and creative problem-solving and the ability to adapt." But the gap manifests in some unexpected ways as well. More...
Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication
Richard A. Schneider, University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, University of California, 2018/06/27
This is dates from April, 2018, and was recently (?) released (via Digital Koans). It is an all-encompassing statement of author and institutional rights that draws a clear line between current predatory practices and what ought to be the academic publishing regime in the future. I strongly support this declaration. More...
Dispelling the misconceptions of online education
Jeff Vaklance, Barbara Wilson-Keates, University Affairs, 2018/06/26
This is a back-and-forth between Athabasca University and University Affairs magazine. More...
Being rational all the time isn’t going to do you any favors
Zat Rana, Quartz, 2018/06/26
This is a quick summary of some recent research from Lisa Feldman Barrett on emotions. According to Barrett, there aren't distinct emotions (like anger, sadness or happiness). More...
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