observations on e-Learning

 
Trials of Regents Test Foresaw Failure at a High Rate: "'The other part that is encouraging is that the panel is asking very serious policy questions, like whether the exam is supposed to be at a level that is so difficult that it competes with achievement tests or whether it is supposed to display competency at the end of a course.'

The New York City schools chancellor's office released a statement saying that it supported the State Education Department's decision to revise the scores.

Although it is too early to say how much the scores are likely to rise, the education department said that no scores would be reduced. The math committee has recommended a complicated approach that effectively will compare the ninth grade test results this year and last, and then raise this year's ninth grade scores so they will appear similar to last year's ninth grade scores "

This report is probably not the whole of the story because the urgent need is a revision of the test questions (or the curriculum, if everyone believes that the competencies needed in math are well measured by the current exam), not the scores.
posted by Frank at 2:11 AM

 
In his book "The grace of great things" Robert Grudin writes on the topic of teaching:

Since true teaching is not soon likely to be available on an institutional scale, we must seek it out in the writings and presence of isolated individuals. These teachers generally are not advertised as "notable" or "eminent" by their colleagues, and their published work is not often found on best-sellers lists or praised in book reviews. The craft they practice is out of fashion; indeed, it has seldom been in. How will we tell them from cranks or poseurs?

In the company or with the books of true teachers, I think, we always feel a kind of shock - not the shock of a brilliant expositions but of an unsettling challenge. Whatever ther subject matter or style, true teachers always convey the sense that the communication of an art demands of the student not only effort and attention but cathartic psychological change. To learn is not merely to accumulate data; it is to rebuild one's world... [Robert Grudin]

The last sentence is the most important. Most people can find many exceptions to all that goes before this, but the idea contained in the last sentence is a profound one, if you qualify the "rebuild one's world" phrase appropriately.

posted by Frank at 4:33 AM

 
McGee's Musings: "Here, for me, is the secret promise of blogs. They lower the barriers and make the practice of writing widely accessible. Which increases the chances we will begin to start thinking again.

Writing is the fundamental tool of reasoned argument and what we need as individuals, organizations, and civilization is as much reasoned argument as we can get. In the blogosphere you get to watch good writers at work as they develop ideas. Thanks to aggregators those ideas appear in a form that makes them natural raw material to kindle your own thinking. The combination of blog technical features (public distribution, short posts, chronological ordering, permalinks) with social practices (personal identification, generous linking, blogrolls) highlight the development of ideas as a social phenomenon over time." Writing can be a way of knowing, but if your audience is as uncritical as those conservatives who listen to Rush Limbaugh, writing is not any more likely to result in more thinking than whistling.
posted by Frank at 3:42 PM

 
Coherence Engine: "The failure of a business model and the failure of a technology model doesn't mean that we can't graft good annotation onto the web, though, and I think that we need to. Annotation, simply put, is the ability for a user to record a set of commentary around a web site (or page, or fragment of a page), in a way that it becomes accessible or visible to later visitors of that site. The extremely coarse-grained way to do that now is when web sites offer public comment fields, but of course those can be edited, and they are not always offered. Annotation, in my sense, has to be completely independent of the hosting web site.

Why is all this important? Because the vitality of our democracy rests on the ability to trade in the market of ideas, and to participate in vigorous debate. With the web emerging as such an important way for people to get information, it becomes more important for ideas to exist in a context where they can be challenged and possibly refuted. This is not censorship -- just the opposite. Everyone deserves the right to speak (in this age where 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of the press' are merging into one), but for that right to translate into democracy, we need to be able to collectively, that is, as a group activity, weigh and judge that speech." Excellent point. One of the benefits of using PDF as a distribution means is the ability to annotate a file, to see what made the notation, and when. Like the monks did in the scriptoriums. Perhaps less important for education at the undergraduate level, and exceptionally important for communities of practice in any field.
posted by Frank at 12:06 AM