Author: grabe

New Secretary of Education outlines Vision for Higher Education.

If you are a college student, I would encourage you to read this material and reach your own conclusions. Actually, I would encourage you to discuss issues that interest you (e.g., flat tuition fee) with your instuctors who may understand why institutions often take a different approach. Among other issues, the “vision” encourages a greater commitment to data based comparisons.

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One of our biggest challenges is a lack of compatible and comprehensive measurements???the kind of information parents have come to expect from K???12 schools. Parents see a mosaic of fine higher education institutions, each with wonderful qualities, but find it difficult to piece the puzzle together.

How do credit hours compare? Is the coursework aligned with the state’s K???12 system? Are there work-study programs? How long does it take on average to graduate, and does that differ by major course of study?

What if the student is African-American or Hispanic; what are their prospects? Is a student better off attending a less expensive state school over a five- or six-year period, or a more expensive private school that they may finish in four?

Publications like U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings are useful, but they do not tell the whole story. We need to encourage states and institutions to adopt common languages and metrics.

That way, both traditional and non-traditional education consumers can make smart choices, based on information, not anecdote.

The New York Times Week In Review contains a story focused on the importance of information literacy in using web resources (you may need to register before viewing is allowed). The story outlines some weaknesses in the way the public tends to treat online material (e.g., appearance of the page tends to influence credibility). The story also reports that ETS is developing items to measure students’ ability to evaluate online material.

Kosmo Kalliarekos offers an open letter to new Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

The letter argues for a commitment to one-to-one computing based on the following “facts”:

– Many kids have grown up digitally literate and are comfortable with and attracted to technology.

– Although teachers as a group have been slow to adopt technology, most are either comfortable using it or are open to training.

– The great success of distance learning in higher education shows that technology can help deliver a higher-quality educational experience.

– Billions of venture capital dollars have been invested in innovative educational-technology companies working on solutions to specific educational challenges, from privacy issues to security, training,communications, and data management.

– Content publishers spend more than $4 billion annually on textbooks and ancillary material.The movement to electronic content represents a major opportunity for textbook publishers to increase their growth and profitability.

The cost? Up the technology per pupil expenditure from $40 to $200.

I have commented previously on the logic of using international economic competition as the basis for promoting education in the areas of science and math.

An education week piece by Anthony Carnevale – Education and the Economy: If We???re So Dumb, Why Are We So Rich? – offers a very interesting take on this topic.

Did you wonder how cutting the budget without increasing taxes was going to work? Partly, existing programs will have to go. It appears that the $500 million Enhancing Education Through Technology state block grant program is to be cut (see eSchool News). So if this ends up happening, we now have no PT3 program to prepare teachers to use technology and we have no EETT program to assist schools in supporting technology. We do have “No Child Left Behind” (requiring highly qualified teachers and improved student performance) and we do have the National Technology Plan (expecting improved teacher training, access to broadband, etc.). In other words, we have several unfunded mandates with the most severe consequences for settings with the greatest difficulty in replacing funds at the district level (which of course would simply be a local rather than a federal tax). Seems fair to me 😉

ISTE comment on EETT cuts.

Google intends to offer a map service (maps.google.com) and it is now available in beta. The service uses an interesting interface allowing the user to zoom in or out (see location of my office below – the arrow is my addition).

I did not think the method for getting directions was intuitive. Enter a text description of start and end points (e.g., harvard and university grand forks to minneapolis).

No matter what level of education, laboratory experiences are expensive. The expense may involve the cost of the equipment, the materials, safety accommodations, etc. Even in my field, cognitive and educational psychology, this is the case. While we moved away from specialized equipment and now mostly rely on computers, there is still the matter of the software.

APA’s education directorate (American Psychological Association) and the National Science Foundation have provided resources to create an online lab for psychology. The idea is to offer opportunities to participate in “classic” psychological experiments over the Internet and then download data for analysis and discussion. The site promotes itself to secondary and small college psychology instructors. The site also encourages researchers to generate their own experiments and gather data from Intro students at other institutions.

This site is the first psychology component of the National Science Digital Library.