Tuttle SVC

Its not Easy to Focus on the Winner

2009-11-19T09:44:00.003-05:00

Merryman:...So I was suggesting in my column that if we focus on the success of kids, which is actually the normative behavior, perhaps we can use that to further improve where we are going. Everybody loves a winner, right?

So focus on that success, even in the at-risk situations. Maybe that is sort of a way to improve without feeling sort of overwhelmed by the scale of the problem.
Public School Insights: But given that there are certain cities like Detroit, Michigan, for example, where not even half the students graduate….
Merryman: I live in LA, which is about at 30% and is considered one of the worst in the country.
Public School Insights: Yes. So can we really focus on the successes of the only 30%--or perhaps even fewer than 30% because the question of what those kids are doing once they graduate also looms large? Is there a way of creating a really strong sense of urgency there, while asking how we spread success to the more than 70% who aren’t succeeding?

The graduation rate in 2007 - 2008 in LA was 74.2%.

Of course, you can find studies that make things look much more dire -- pegging LA's "on time" graduation rate around 45%, but those studies use a ridiculously simple methodology -- comparing 9th grade numbers four years ago to the number of graduates this year -- that misses all kinds of tranfers, etc. Let me put it this way -- if "No Excuses" charters calculated their "graduation" rate this way, they'd be around 60% too at most sites.

Anyhow, I don't want to pick on Claus too much, as it is easy in conversation to flip numbers around. I did think it was pretty funny though.

And not to say drop-outs aren't a problem, but the fact that we're not really clear whether it is a 30%, 45%, or 75% problem shows just how fucked we all are.

Providence, Catch and Ushra’Khan - a primer

2009-11-18T11:38:00.003-05:00

Ombey:

I realise that people reading this pilot journal may not fully appreciate who’s who around the regions that we, the Ushra’Khan, fight in. In order to ease understanding, I thought I’d do a write up of who’s who in the area. Ushra’Khan’s history, and that of CVA’s is a matter of public record and better people than I have written about them, so I won’t cover that here...

All of the alliances in the ‘bad guy’ column are at best blue to each other, and at worst, neutral. As CVA enforce strict NRDS in Providence, this means they all get along.

At any time, we face up to 9,500 pilots in the ProviBloc.

Eve Online is a big game.

The Precedented Scale of Race to the Top

2009-11-18T10:44:00.003-05:00

Tennessee -- eligible for $150 - $250 million from RttT:

The city school board is expected to sign an agreement today with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that will funnel more than $90 million to Memphis for a plan to change how teachers are hired, placed, evaluated and retained.

Pennsylvania -- eligible for $200 - $400 million:

In what officials said would be the largest grant ever made directly to the Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has offered the district $40 million for sweeping initiatives to maximize teacher effectiveness.

Florida -- eligible for $350 to $700 million:

TAMPA — The finish line is in sight for the Hillsborough County School District, which agreed Tuesday to accept a $100 million teacher effectiveness grant if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offers it.

And remember...

AUSTIN – For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.
But it didn't happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.

Second verse, same as the first...

Killing Two Birds with Binding Arbitration

2009-11-18T09:00:00.003-05:00

Tom Sgouros:

The binding arbitration rules in, for example, Connecticut are quite clear about what are the proper reasons an arbitrator can use to rule one way or the other in a dispute. It's possible to draw those rules to favor unions, and it's possible to draw them to favor management. We should adopt binding arbitration, and then argue about what are the proper grounds for a ruling, but that's a far smarter course than just throwing the whole idea out the window.

So, right now we've got an overall impasse over teacher contracts in Rhode Island -- there is no process for resolving disputes (e.g., no strikes). The teachers' unions have finally started pushing for binding arbitration. Municipalities and the state are trying out unilaterally imposing new terms after contracts expire, or simply asserting that the state can order contractual changes based on NCLB and their interpretation of the new Basic Education Program. Burning contract law is a one-way trip though, which leaves no basis for compromise over mutual agreement going forward. The long-term implications may be grave.

Also, all of the above is currently in the courts, so who knows who will win.

But as Tom says, there is no reason the terms of arbitration can't be written out however we want. There is, in particular, no reason to think that compliance with the Basic Education Program would not and should not be considered as a basic principle of arbitration. There is no reason, thus, that binding arbitration cannot serve both consistent, steady school reform and preserve contract law as its basis going forward.

By the way, Tom Geoghegan's See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation does a good job of explaining business's assault on not just unions and collective bargaining, but contract law in any form.

Teach Math!

2009-11-17T21:41:00.003-05:00

One of the highly annoying problems about all education babble is the extent to which there are a number of highly bifurcated divisions, and all too often we don't even mention which half we're talking about. Elementary or secondary? e.g., reading Core Knowledge people is really confusing for a high school person -- they don't even have a high school curriculum. Low income or high income schools? Totally different situation in the US. Math vs. everything else?

These are tough times to be looking for work as a teacher.
Unless, it seems, you're hoping to become a math teacher.
That's the conclusion of a recent report, which finds that nationwide demand for teachers has fallen in all 60 fields examined over the past year. Only one subject area—math teaching—was found to be in "considerable demand,"

As you might have noticed, I tend to be TFA and alternative certification skeptic, but that doesn't really extend to math. I've personally buttonholed likely looking geeks in bookstores while looking for math teachers. I'd support math teacher press gangs. Whatever it takes. Particularly in low-income high schools we desperately need passable math teachers. It is ridiculous. My former school has all kind of strengths but it will probably never consistently make AYP because of math, and it isn't really a mystery -- they can't find math teachers! It isn't a subtle problem.

Larry Ferlazzo Listens Closely to Meet the Press

2009-11-17T13:48:00.004-05:00

Do Teachers REALLY Come From The Bottom Third Of Colleges? Or Is That Statistic A Bunch Of Baloney?

I’ve heard this kind of statistic about teachers coming from the bottom third of something or other before (though never about the bottom third of classes — I don’t know where he got that bizarre statistic from), and just ignored it. But hearing it on Meet The Press, from the director of a private school, got “my dander up” and I decided to look into where those numbers came from and how valid and reliable they were. It was quite a ride on a Sunday afternoon…

What Newt Gingrich Thinks Students Should Learn

REP. GINGRICH: Well, Jefferson said that religion, morality and knowledge being important, we need schools. That’s the Northwest Ordinance. So I’d say the first thing you need to know is about yourself and your own values and your own concerns. The second thing you have to know is a good work ethic and a ability to be honest. And the third thing you have to know is how to learn whatever you’re going to need to be successful.
Now, can he tell us how those qualities are assessed by the standardized tests used to evaluate schools now and would be used to determine the teacher merit-pay he supports?

Reform, Narrowly Defined

2009-11-17T09:21:00.003-05:00

Normal E. “Sandy” McCulloch Jr.:

To reduce the problem to its most basic form, our quality of life depends on education and jobs, and I believe one leads inevitably to the other. Since the early 1970s, my passion has focused on education — both private and public. In 1992, when I turned over the reins of Microfibres Inc. to our son Jim, my wife Dotty and I established a charitable foundation primarily to focus on educational issues. Since that time, we have distributed funds to a wide variety of schools. Our hope has been that many of the innovations and best practices at these institutions would be adopted by the larger public primary and secondary school world...
In the 17 years our foundation has focused on educational challenges, I have never seen the stars in such favorable alignment. I can almost hear that pony whinny.

I'd take September of 2000 over the fall of 2009 any day. Riding a long period of relative peace and prosperity nationally, with a forward-looking, technically astute Vice President leading in the polls, with the first and most energetic, rather than the fourth, reform superintendent in Providence, bringing in RttT sized foundation grants and an influx of administrative talent (building on homegrown administrators, like Fran Gallo (now everyone's favorite as supe of Central Falls), a growing network of successful site-based schools in the district working out sensible and innovative compromises on work rules,hiring, and innovative practices, The Met taking off as a model for cutting-edge schools around the world, and we had a clutch of promising first-generation charter schools.

We had an excellent state-wide technology training program for teachers, we had a reform-minded commissioner with an array of innovations in established under his leadership, from the SALT school surveys and school inspections, to the Rhode Island Writing Assessment (scored by local teachers, the advantages of which were discussed last Friday at the RttT assessment meeting).

Some of the above we still have, some is being phased out or ignored, some is long gone. On the other hand, now we have a superintendent in Providence and a Commissioner at RIDE who are asserting their right to abrogate teacher contracts, and a new law that allows charters to be managed by companies outside RI, free from prevailing wage and pension requirements. So check two for "innovation" in 2009, but it is a very specific type of innovation.

The Scale of Race to the Top (in the Smallest State)

2009-11-16T20:51:00.004-05:00

ED via Eduflack:

More importantly, though, we now know how much money each state can potentially receive. Officials over at ED have divvied up our great 50 states (and DC and Puerto Rico) into five categories. The $4 billion in Race money will be divided based on the following designations:
... unimportant large states ...
Category 5 — $20-$75 million:
* Alaska
* Delaware
* District of Columbia...
* Rhode Island

Providence, September 6, 2000:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -The Providence School District, Coventry School District and The Big Picture Company will receive grants totaling $20 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the creation of smaller, personalized learning environments that help all students achieve. The three grants will be the first in a series of education grants announced by the Foundation this week.

So in Providence in particular, we already have a pretty good idea of how much, or how little, can be accomplished with RttT kind of money. We opened a nice clutch of new high schools, which have as of this year now been stripped of any unique features of their original design. I don't think there is anything left at the district level from that period. And it is not just gone, it is forgotten.

OTOH, Big Picture is chugging along. In some cases, there is a real ideological bias toward charters for various reasons, but Providence is a good illustration of why big foundations come to support charters on practical grounds as well -- you don't have to worry about KIPP being taken over by a series of itinerant superintendents who couldn't care less about the previous supe's pet projects you underwrote. Ten years from now, the only thing people may remember about RttT is the charter schools that are opened.

What's Next for Common Core in English?

2009-11-16T20:14:00.003-05:00

My read on the newly announced work and feedback teams for Common Core English Language Arts standards is that this doesn't look like a group of people who will pay much attention the College- and Career-Readiness Standards. It is too broad a group for that. If you limited the scope of the preceding curriculum to the CCRS, these folks would revolt and demand additions to the CCRS, which would throw everything off schedule.

Also, they're still calling them "English Language Arts" instead of "Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking." And I seem to recall that they were going to start at the lower grade levels rather than working backwards.

So my prediction is that we'll get some kind of national graduation test based on CCRS, but a more conventional set of K-12 standards, which, frankly, would be an improvement in this case.

My EduCon 2.2 Talk

2009-11-16T15:46:00.001-05:00

Zapping the Buzzwords: "Disruptive innovation," "the widget effect," and more:

Conversation Description: We've got a new generation of educational bureaucrats speaking to each other in management and economics informed language that they understand, but outsiders, particularly teachers, may not. We'll start with a prepared look at a few key terms, and then open up the floor for discussion of suggested buzzwords from a list provided or from the imagination of the audience.

Also, thank god Will has finally moved on to this:

The Greening of Learning: Online Networks for Learning AND Saving the World
There's no question that each of us has a role to play in overcoming the environmental challenges that face us. But while we are at a most perilous moment in our history as humans, we are also at a moment when more people are connecting and working for good than at any other time. Paul Hawken calls it "Blessed Unrest" and he suggests that our ability to use social networks online to connect globally and support local action will have a huge impact on what the future holds. Daniel Goleman talks about an "Ecological Intelligence" and the complex environmental information literacy that we'll all need to develop if we are to fully understand our impact and our ability to create positive change. Clay Shirky talks about the potential for "collective action" and the power that social tools have for forming passion based groups and movements. All of which begs the question, what are our roles as educators in preparing our kids (and ourselves) for a world where global, passion-based activism using social tools is commonplace. We'll have a conversation about using social tools for social good and what the implications are for our roles as teachers and, perhaps, activists.

Looking forward to it.

Notes on my RttT Comments

2009-11-16T13:35:00.003-05:00

The comments.

I heartily endorse FairTest's broader critique, I just felt like in this context I should try to say something narrow and authoritative. A general comment would be largely ignored.
I did almost all the specific research for the talk Thursday afternoon and evening.
As you can hopefully tell, I'm very impressed with the way NIH runs its research. The step up in quality from education discourse is striking; it is like the NIH is run by real scientists or something.
This was tough to boil down to five minutes; now I have something I feel like I can scale up to a sexy conference presentation very easily the next time Gov 2.0 rolls around.

RttT Input Meeting Impressions

2009-11-16T10:59:00.003-05:00

So I went to the public meeting in Boston for feedback and expert commentary on the Race to the Top assessment program. This is the "$350 million to get people to shut up about the fact that our assessments aren't currently good enough to serve as the foundation for the other $4 billion we're putting into RttT" part of the program.

Writing my comment was difficult, because you don't want to sound like a random obsessive compulsive crank, but obviously only an obsessive compulsive crank would show up at one of these things by his or her own free will. So I took a hyper-bureacratic and hyper-technical point of view, and actually ended up with something that I really like. It doesn't directly address my overall anger and dissatisfaction with the whole endeavor, but ultimately it served as some kind of emotionally satisfying, if oblique, performance art. To me, at least.

Anyhow, when I got there I immediately ran into David Niguidula, and a few minutes later the two of us were having breakfast with Linda Darling-Hammond, with David and LDH chattering away about digital portfolios and performance assessment. So immediately my expectations for the utility of the trip were greatly exceeded.

Subsequently, I sat through the long expert panel on Technology and Innovation in Assessment. It was a long miasma of boredom. Tom Vander Ark should have been forced to sit though it. I certainly didn't leave feeling like we're on the cusp of a revolution.

One thing that was talked about quite a bit was the problem of "comparability." What if your online assessments consistently produce different scores than your paper ones. How do you know if it is a bug or a feature? I'm happy to allow this to be someone else's problem.

Eva Baker from CRESST did talk about "ontologies" in assessment, which I anticipated after looking at some of her other presentations, so that helped me make my pitch in five minutes without getting hung up on trying to define the term.

For the public input section, there were about 10 of us with reserved five minute slots: David, Larry Burger from Wireless Generation, someone from some other vendor, some guy from Connecticut who made an open source/Moodle/Elgg pitch, some grad student from the Education Department at Brown who made me think they must have added a new program in being an arrogant asshole, and the balance people advocating for specific kinds of accessibility and accomodations.

Larry's talk was interesting; he talked about the need to accommodate more agile development strategies, finding the balance between openness and proprietary solutions, and the problems created by complex procurement laws. I managed to get my talk in exactly on time. Larry said "nicely done," and Dr. Baker was pleased that someone other than her was talking about ontologies for once, and didn't seem to mind that I'd tweaked CRESST a bit.

I stuck around for LDH's afternoon presentation on international perspectives on high school assessment. Her line of argument strikes me as airtight and devastating, striking right at the heart of the whole "competitiveness" premise for reform. The school systems around the world that are outperforming us (supposedly) simply aren't anything like the one that "reformers" are advocating.

When you read about the Department of Education "standing up to the establishment," understand that in practice this means "ignoring comprehensive, authoritative arguments from the established experts in the field."

Also, the thread of open source conversation was largely "We know what it is, we know we want some, but how much?"

My Public Comment on Race to the Top -- Technology & Innovation in Assessment

2009-11-16T09:16:00.002-05:00

My name is Tom Hoffman, from Providence, Rhode Island. I am a technology consultant, specializing in student information and assessment systems. I am project manager of SchoolTool, an open source administrative platform for schools. I also work with the CanDo project, which is an open source competency tracking application used by Career and Technical Centers in Virginia. I am a former English teacher in the Providence Public Schools with a Masters in Teaching English from Brown University.

I would like to recommend some specific facets of the technology platform for assessment, particularly in reference to Race to the Top Criteria:

B.(C)(2) Accessing and using State data: ...support decision-makers in the continuous improvement of efforts in such areas as policy, instruction, operations, etc...

B.(C)(3)(iii) Making the data from instructional improvement systems, together with statewide longitudinal data system data, available and accessible to researchers...

These requirements suggest a high degree of data portability, interoperability, and integration, with aspirations for complex data warehousing, business intelligence and inferencing expert systems.

One of the technical foundations of this type of platform is the development of ontologies, defined as "a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts." (1) Dr. Baker introduced this concept earlier.

The potential role of ontologies in educational research and throughout the implementation of educational technologies and data systems parallels to their growing role in biomedical research.

I would specifically propose funding the creation of a National Center for Educational Ontology, modelled on the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"The goal of the Center is to support biomedical researchers in their knowledge-intensive work, by providing online tools and a Web portal enabling them to access, review, and integrate disparate ontological resources in all aspects of biomedical investigation and clinical practice." (2)

The Center is funded by the NIH Roadmap for Biomedical Research's Bioinformatics and Computational Biology initiative. The Roadmap "was launched in September, 2004, to address roadblocks to research and to transform the way biomedical research is conducted by overcoming specific hurdles or filling defined knowledge gaps... These are programs that might not otherwise be supported by the NIH ICs because of their scope or because they are inherently risky." (3)

With a consistent, ongoing commitment to the development and use of ontologies, the National Institute of Health's Recovery Act fund is already supporting 61 current research projects using or contributing to biomedical ontologies. (4)

By comparison in education, despite contributions from a disparate set of actors including the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA and Jes and Co., a 501c3 education research organization, there is no central hub for research, development and use of ontologies, individual projects tend to emerge and disappear, and in particular there is no commitment to the kind of open and collaborative environment that now typifies biomedical ontology.

For example, the National Forum on Educational Statistics at the Department of Education has created a National Educational Data Model. It is similar to an ontology, but the data model is more constrained and potentially much less rich and powerful than an ontological approach. However, it would be an obvious foundation for development of a subsequent set of educational ontologies.

CRESST has developed several detailed domain ontologies for specific subjects such as Algebra as part of their research, however, unlike their peers in biomedical research, publishing, collaborating and promoting those ontologies does not seem to be a priority, which limits their influence and impact.

Similarly, I can see from their presentations that CRESST have developed a tool called CRESST Knowledge Mapper that looks quite useful, but does not seem to be publicly available, either commercially or for free, and thus does not contribute to or promote further development of domain ontologies in education. In contrast, the National Center for Biomedical Ontology's Protege editor is an active and prosperous open source software project that has become an industry standard application.

As was the case in the biomedical field, an investment in educational ontology is relatively high risk and does not fit obviously into existing programs. If we don't start the process while we have this unique stimulus windfall, I don't know when we will.

Be assured, however, that this is essential foundational research. Given the vast ambition for educational data systems, ontologies will become as integral to educational research as they have become in the biomedical field, and sooner or later the value of our solutions will be bottlenecked by the quality of our ontologies.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ontology_(information_science)&oldid=324836821

(2) http://www.bioontology.org/about-ncbo

(3) http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/about.asp

(4) http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter_SearchResults.cfm

The Problem with Teachers' Self-Reporting on their own Innovativeness

2009-11-12T14:02:00.003-05:00

Larry Cuban really nails a real annoyance-slash-structural-problem with teacher blogging about practice, particularly their own, particularly about technology:

Over the years, I have interviewed many teachers across the country who have described their district’s buying computers, deploying them in classrooms while providing professional development. These teachers have told me that using computers, Smart Boards, and other high-tech devices have altered their teaching significantly. They listed changes they have made such as their Powerpoint presentations and students doing Internet searches in class. They told me about using email with students.Teachers using Smart Boards said they can check immediately if students understand a math or science problem through their voting on the correct answer.
I then watched many of these teachers teach. Most teachers used the high-tech devices as they described in their interviews. Yet I was puzzled by their claim that using these devices had substantially altered how they taught. Policymaker decisions to buy and deploy high-tech devices was supposed to shift dominant ways of traditional teaching to student-centered, or progressive approaches. That is not what I encountered in classrooms.

I'd add that there seems to be a corollary to this theorem, that I've always thought progressive-leaning but essentially hybrid-model teachers *cough Glogowski *cough* Richardson *cough* unconsciously overstate how traditional they were prior to the introduction of the-new-technology-that-changed-their-practice. It isn't a huge problem but it does skew the discourse.

Tautology Much?

2009-11-12T10:15:00.005-05:00

RttT Guidelines:

In response to commenters’ concerns pertaining to “unproven” interventions in the Race to the Top program, there is ample evidence, for example, that high-performing charter schools can significantly improve the achievement of high-need students. Likewise, the research supports that effective teachers and principals are essential to improving student achievement; accordingly, the Department believes that identifying, recruiting, developing, and retaining effective teachers and school leaders is critical to creating high-performing schools and a world-class education system.

Given that they define "high performing schools" and "effective teachers and school leaders" as those that "improve student achievement," this isn't saying much. Anything really.

It is like saying "high performing abstinence programs substantially lower the rate of teen pregnancy among participants." Yes, but how many are "high performing" and do we know how, why, or how to make more?

And yes, that's the entire response to the substantive critiques over the lack of evidence for the efficacy of RttT's approach.

Granting Commit Rights

2009-11-11T13:07:00.002-05:00

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

Django’s open source debut was in the summer of 2005. At that point, we had three full and one partial committer. Since then we’ve had major contributions from hundreds of developers, bug fixes and patches from thousands, and input and engagement from tens of thousands. Yet last week we added only our fifteenth full committer.

A "full committer" is someone who can add/change/delete code to any part of the project by themselves. This illustrates how collaboration around a major open source project is different than, say, a wiki, where often everyone is a full committer.

I think open educational content should be handled more like software than a wiki.

Shipping Software Appliances

2009-11-10T15:33:00.004-05:00

Miguel de Icaza:

Today is a big day for the Mono team, we just released the Mono Tools for Visual Studio. The goal of this release is to make it simpler for Visual Studio developers to deploy their applications on Linux. ASP.NET, Windows.Forms, server and console applications are supported...
And finally, one of the most exciting features in this tool: go from shipping applications into shipping appliances in minutes:
You use our wizard to prepare your appliance, select a base operating system template (Server, Client, and base operating system) and off you go.
Once your appliance is built, you can test it and apply the finishing touches over the web (using a Flash applet that connects to our virtual machines in our data center) and when you are happy with the results, you can download and redistribute your appliance to your users
Appliances
Earlier this year I wrote about Novell's SUSE Studio our hosted service that helps developers create ready-to-run appliances.
Today, as a .NET developer, when you distribute your software to your users and customers, you probably have a list of requirements that goes like this:
Install Windows XXX, Reboot.
Install security updates A through Z, reboot as many times as needed.
Install .NET runtime, reboot as needed.
Install SQL server, reboot as needed.
Populate database, reboot as needed.
Install third party tool, reboot as needed.
Just to be sure, reboot.
Then your users can start installing your software. At that point, you initiate a series of support calls that go like this:
Did you make sure that .NET xxx.yy was installed? Ah, so do that and resume the steps.
Wrong databases, uninstall, reboot, reinstall database, reboot.
And repeat the above process for every single one of your users.
Basically, every user has to repeat the same steps. Everyone has to assemble the solutions made up of the operating system, various pieces of dependencies that you have and your software, like this:
The experience today is like trying to buy a car by buying the individual parts:
We believe that for a class of developers there is a better way.
We believe that we can help you put together the full car, and deliver the car in a single piece.
With appliances you can ship a pre-configured operating system, pre-configured database and every service pre-configured and installed together with your software to deliver a full package, so you prepare your software for distribution once, you configure the database once, and then you give your users a ready-to-run virtual machine, CD-ROM or USB stick:
SUSE Studio has been used to build Linux based appliances (over four thousand per week), and now we are making it easy for .NET developers to take advantage of one of Linux's strengths: it is free, it is open source, you can shrink it, you can grow it and you can ship your own version (and yes, we do provide the updates for all of the core components that you pick).

This is essentially my vision for distributing SchoolTool on Ubuntu, albeit with a less slick toolset. We're not literally an appliance yet, but closing in on it. The recommended way to install SchoolTool is to create a new Ubuntu instance on a real or virtual machine, add our package repositories, and 'apt-get install schooltool' That gets you a running instance on an environment identical to our developers'.

The Kind of Thing to Keep in Mind if you think WoW is a Model for 21st Century Schools

2009-11-10T13:33:00.001-05:00

tobold:

The influence of time spent on rewards and thus social status in MMORPGs has led to a curious reversal of how people regard time spent: In other forms of entertainment the time spent in the entertainment activity is a gain, in a MMORPG time spent is often considered a loss, a cost. If you paid $15 for a movie ticket, you'd be seriously annoyed if the movie lasted only 5 minutes, because you counted on having paid for something like 90 minutes of entertainment. In MMORPGs, if it would take 90 minutes of killing monsters to do a quest and get a reward instead of just 5 minutes, you'd complain about "the grind". Any time spent in a MMORPG in an activity that doesn't give a reward is considered pointless, and any addition of a reward even as silly as an "achievement" to a previously pointless activity will make players pursue it.

One Million Dollars

2009-11-10T10:53:00.004-05:00

OregonLive.com:

Oregon math experts predict middle school math achievement will continue to surge now that new textbooks are in place. Most middle schools chose a widely praised series called Oregon Focus, written by six Oregon math teachers specifically to teach Oregon's new math standards to middle schoolers.

We need to get to the point where the obvious next step, particularly if scores do continue to go up with these new texts (whose quality I cannot comment on), is the state or federal government stepping up and just offering a big check to the authors to make the texts open content. They seem to be more or less self publishing anyhow. They could continue to sell printed books, consult, further develop the texts, whose influence would expand even more than if they were selling them one by one, and get a nice fat lump sum. I don't know how much money they stand to make selling copyrighted books, but I think the government could make them an offer they could not refuse -- and "incentivize" other teachers to take the same approach.

One Problem with the "No Excuses" College Prep Strategy

2009-11-10T09:45:00.002-05:00

Matt Yglesias:

Interactive feature from The New York Times lets you see the unemployment rate for different demographic subgroups. The feature is labeled “The Jobless Rate for People Like You” so I checked and saw that white men aged 25-44 with college degrees have an unemployment rate of just 3.9 percent. Even if I reclassify myself as Hispanic it’s just 4.8 percent. Fortunately, I’m also allowed to see how people who aren’t like me are doing. Thus we learn that for African-American men aged 15-24 the unemployment rate is a staggering 30.5 percent. Even for the subset of young black men who have college degrees (which has to be a pretty tiny slice of the 15-24 set) the unemployment rate is 12.7 percent. (emphasis added)

At a certain point, you have to give up on wrapping social services into charter schools and improve social conditions in general.

How Little $300 Million Will Get You: a Race to the Top Preview

2009-11-09T08:47:00.002-05:00

Dallas Morning News:

AUSTIN – For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.
But it didn't happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.

Repeat that a few times across the country on a somewhat larger scale, there goes your $4 billion.

This is Strangely Similar to my Ideal System of Teacher Preparation

2009-11-05T16:14:00.003-05:00

Martin van Creveld:

The organization of training in the German Army had a threefold purpose; namely to relieve the Field Army of this task; to simulate, as closely as possible, the actual conditions of the battlefield; and to constantly introduce the most recent combat experiences into training practice.
To achieve the latter two of these aims, very great emphasis was laid on maintaining close connections between the army's two parts: not only were officers constantly being rotated between front-line duty and training units, but each of the latter was in addition tied to one or more divisions. Officers of the training unit and its parent division were expected to know each other personally and to exchange frequent visits and correspondence. Often it was recently wounded personnel, recovering from their wounds, who trained the replacements of their own division.

Well, except for the wounding part. Perhaps you could substitute "maternity" there.

Creveld:

The U.S. Army, by contrast put technical and administrative efficiency at the head of its list of priorities, disregarded other considerations, and produced a system that possessed a strong inherent tendency to turn men into nervous wrecks.

That's just how we roll.

Maybe it is the Technology

2009-11-05T09:35:00.003-05:00

I ruminated a bit over these Scott McLeod questions over at Doug Johnson's blog, and basically, if we still need this kind of technology boosterism in 2009, we have to consider that the problem might be in the technology and its implementation. That the reason teachers apparently require more exhortation than other professionals is that, compared to other enterprises, they have been uniquely failed by industry, government, taxpayers and administration. Also, they are a somewhat stubborn lot. But let me know when every teacher has a laptop, like any other comparable worker in America, and then you can re-start the exhortations.

Now I've Gone and Done It...

2009-11-04T15:40:00.002-05:00

I've got a (first come, first served) five minute slot of time to make a public comment about technology and assessment in Race to the Top, next Friday in Boston. Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to say. I might take a passing shot at the Common Core ELA standards, but I'm really there to talk about technology. I'll probably focus on the need for a "National Center for Educational Ontologies," modeled on the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies, and then talk a bit about open source strategies and possibilities.

New Duvolle Laboratories Website

2009-11-04T10:45:00.002-05:00

getaclone.com:

Duvolle Laboratories is a leading provider of advanced technology systems, offering robust product solutions in drive engineering, weapons systems, and biotechnology.
Our award-winning Cloning Services Division has been ranked highest in product quality and customer satisfaction for the last five years. Whether serving military, diplomatic, or civilian applications, Duvolle Labs will create a custom, state-of-the-art, and confidential solution to meet your needs.

Full disclosure: I am a satisfied customer of Duvolle Industries, but received no compensation for this post.