hacking education

Cool new site,WatchKnow.org, launched by Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, that aggregates educational videos for students ages 3-18.  Its library currently includes 11,000 videos.

Online college, Thomas Edison State College is distributing 12-week courses on USB drives.

Interesting use to help bring technology to those without the internet. .You can give students computers that they can take home, but you cannot give them the internet.

Via Computer World.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

- Margaret Fuller, Journalist

This past summer, in a sixth-grade math class, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein piloted a small program in which individualized, technology-based learning takes the place of the old "let's all proceed together" approach. Each day, students in the School of One are given a unique lesson plan — a "daily playlist" — tailored to their learning style and rate of progress that includes a mix of virtual tutoring, in-class instruction and educational video games. It's learning for the Xbox generation.

Via Time.

Created by Ryan McCallum using prezi.com.

What Teacher Merit Pay Should Look Like:

To even voice the opinion that your pay should not be reflective of your performance would be (though maybe not on-the-spot) grounds for dismal at every employer I have ever had.  In general terms, who likes pay-for-performance—those who perform. In general, who dislikes pay-for-performance—those whose salaries exceed their contributions. To voice dissaproval for pay-for-performance is to self select into the pool of people that like to be rewarded on a flat scale, at the mean rate, benefitting from those who pull that average salary up.  To voice dissaproval is to say you are not worth the money you make.  Anyone worth more than the contributions they give is not threatened by the opportunity at gaining upside from their hard work.

Teaching has been one of the safest proffessions for years—protected by iron-strong unions, on the safe side the government’s red tape, and with little fluctuation in demand. And while I suspect the current pool of teachers will continue to resist merit-pay, the implementation of such programs will in time attract the kind of talent that is not afraid of the consequences of poor performance but interested rather in the upside of their excellence.

I have such a love-hate feeling for teachers.  I believe theirs is the work of God on this earth.  I also feel the safety of their employement has culled far too many into the lulls of mediocrity and selfishness.  To fight for the established order to get paid more uniformly is to reinforce the decay and rot that lives in the system.  To base teachers’ pay on merit is to attract new life.

“The 20th century was a time of technological innovation, the 21st century must be a time of institutional innovation.” - John Seely Brown

Anyone who has worked to reform an institution will readily admit that the more people are involved, and the more they are invested in maintaining the status quo, the harder it is to affect change. Even something as small as a stepwise incremental policy change can be a multi-year battle. I can hear you now thinking, “Just burn it down and plant a new institution in the ashes,” or “Just punch out and create a new institution to compete with the first.” Sometimes these are legitimate approaches to getting things done, but sometimes they aren’t. I seem to keep finding my interests lie in problems and institutions where these more radical methods simply don’t seem to apply. This seems to portend many difficult years ahead for me.

Imposing your will on bits and bytes is “easy.” Leading an established institution through the valley of the shadow of reform and up the opposite bank toward innovation is “hard.” But it is absolutely critical work, and precious few people are in positions that afford them opportunities to provide this kind of leadership.

By David Wiley via iterating toward openness

Colleges should consider accrediting web-based programs offered at free or low-cost online schools, making higher education more widely available to populations with little access to post-secondary classes, a former official from the United Kingdom's Open University told a gathering of technology advocates Nov. 6.

Brenda Gourley, vice-chancellor of The Open University from 2002-2009 and a longtime advocate for education's role in social justice, spoke to hundreds of IT professionals at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Denver, which ran from Nov. 3-6.

Gourley, who became South Africa's first female vice-chancellor in 1994, stressed that colleges and universities that cannot afford to launch web-based classes should evaluate courses offered at ventures such as The Open University and allow students to take the class for school credit.

"Especially in these economic times, we have to find a more optimum outcome to balance with financial necessities," she said, adding that the global economic slump should spur campuses to look for alternatives to expanding course offerings as college enrollment spikes. "It may well be more sensible to accredit particular courses offered elsewhere than to provide them in house."

Gourley warned against trimming back college offerings as campus operating budgets shrink and endowments dwindle, reminding IT officials gathered at EDUCAUSE that this could be a chance to bolster online education that would keep campuses financially afloat and serve non-traditional students whose schedules don't allow for on-campus lectures.

"I don't think these . . . times should be some kind of excuse for putting that on hold while we sort something else out," she said. "Exactly the opposite. … If your strategic thinking of technology isn't combined in your holistic strategic thinking, I think you're in trouble."

Closely tracking informal web-based communities of researchers and potential students, Gourley said, should be a priority for online schools and brick-and-mortar institutions.

"What we see on the web are all sorts of people creating communities of interest," she said. "We must not underestimate the sophistication of those learning communities. … What we need to do is [understand] how we harness that energy and recognize some of that learning."

The Open University's history can serve as an example for expanding web-based learning, she said. The idea of a distance-learning program in the 1960s drew scorn and criticism from officials in higher education and government, Gourley said. But accessible education proved popular once it was introduced in Britain and eventually, to other European nations.

The school now has 150,000 undergraduates and 30,000 graduate students, about 70 percent of whom have full-time jobs. Most Open University classes require no previous qualifications, and students must be 16 or older to begin a course.

Gourley said the social and political tumult of the 1960s contributed to a desire for non-traditional forms of education -- an idea that gained acceptance in official circles in the 1980s and 1990s.

Civil rights battles and the Vietnam War "fed a yearning for a different order," she said.

Gourley said a wider embrace of education technology -- especially among the oldest, most well-established universities -- will require a dramatic shift in the traditional roles of professors and students.

"We need to go from teacher-centric to student-centric," she said. "The teacher is no longer the sage on the stage but rather the guide on the side."

Dennis Carter via eCampusNews