2015 archive
Center for Digital Education (CDE)
real-time impact on curriculum structure, instruction delivery and student learning, permitting change and improvement. It can also provide insight into important trends that affect present and future resource needs.
Big Data: Traditionally described as high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information.
Learning or Data Analytics: The measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.
Educational Data Mining: The techniques, tools and research designed for automatically extracting meaning from large repositories of data generated by or related to people’s learning activities in educational settings.
Predictive Analytics: Algorithms that help analysts predict behavior or events based on data.
Predictive Modeling: The process of creating, testing and validating a model to best predict the probability of an outcome.
Data analytics, or the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data, is driving decisionmaking in many institutions. However, because of the unique nature of each district’s or college’s data needs, many are building their own solutions.
For example, in 2014 the nonprofit company inBloom, Inc., backed by $100 million from the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, closed its doors amid controversy regarding its plan to store, clean and aggregate a range of student information for states and districts and then make the data available to district-approved third parties to develop tools and dashboards so the data could be used by classroom educators.22
Tips for Student Data Privacy
Know the Laws and Regulations
There are many regulations on the books intended to protect student privacy and safety: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
— as well as state, district and community laws. Because technology changes so rapidly, it is unlikely laws and regulations will keep pace with new data protection needs. Establish a committee to ascertain your institution’s level of understanding of and compliance with these laws, along with additional safeguard measures.
Make a Checklist Your institution’s privacy policies should cover security, user safety, communications, social media, access, identification rules, and intrusion detection and prevention.
Include Experts
To nail down compliance and stave off liability issues, consider tapping those who protect privacy for a living, such as your school attorney, IT professionals and security assessment vendors. Let them review your campus or district technologies as well as devices brought to campus by students, staff and instructors. Finally, a review of your privacy and security policies, terms of use and contract language is a good idea.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Students, staff, faculty and parents all need to know their rights and responsibilities regarding data privacy. Convey your technology plans, policies and requirements and then assess and re-communicate those throughout each year.
“Anything-as-a-Service” or “X-as-a-Service” solutions can help K-12 and higher education institutions cope with big data by offering storage, analytics capabilities and more. These include:
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Providers offer cloud-based storage, similar to a campus storage area network (SAN)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Opens up application platforms — as opposed to the applications themselves — so others can build their own applications
using underlying operating systems, data models and databases; pre-built application components and interfaces
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): The hosting of applications in the cloud
• Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS): Mix all the above together, upscale the amount of data involved by an enormous amount and you’ve got BDaaS
Suggestions:
Use accurate data correctly
Define goals and develop metrics
Eliminate silos, integrate data
Remember, intelligence is the goal
Maintain a robust, supportive enterprise infrastructure.
Prioritize student privacy
Develop bullet-proof data governance guidelines
Create a culture of collaboration and sharing, not compliance.
more on big data in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=big+data&submit=Search
Register for Wednesday’s Free AAEEBL Webinar with Darren Cambridge, one of the most influential members of the eportfolio field; 1 pm US EDT. The URL for the webinar will be displayed on your screen right after you complete registration. You do not need a password to login at that URL. Topic: “ePortfolio is a Genre.” Helen Chen and Trent Batson will moderate.
more on on eportfolio in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=eportfolio&submit=Search
Formula for a Winning Presentation Design
http://www.slideshare.net/PGi/formula-for-a-winning-presentation-design-53420241
more on presentation techniques and applications in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=presentation&submit=Search
Response: Personalized Learning Is ‘a Partnership With Students’
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2015/09/response_personalized_learning_is_a_learning_partnership_with_students.html
building relationships with students so I can better connect lessons to their interests, hopes and dreams; providing them with many opportunities for organizational and cognitive choice; and creating situations where they can get positive, as well as critical, feedback in a supportive way from me, their classmates and themselves.
Response: Personalized Learning Is ‘Based On Relationships, Not Algorithms’
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2015/09/response_personalized_learning_is_based_on_relationships_not_algorithms.html
Too often, the notion of “personalized learning” means choice-based programmed rather than truly personalized. This comes from the tech world, where “personalization” is synonymous with user choice. It’s the idea of giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down on Pandora. It’s the idea of having adaptive programs that change based upon one’s personal preferences. It’s the Facebook algorithm that tells you what information is the most relevant to you. It’s about content delivery rather than user creation.
While tech companies promise personalization, they often promote independent, isolated learning. True personalization is interdependent rather than isolated. True personalization is based upon a horizontal relationship rather than a top-down customization. True personalization is based upon a deeply human relationship rather than a program or an algorithm or a set of scripts. True personalization is a mix between personal autonomy and group belonging. It’s a mix between what someone wants and what someone needs. It’s a chance to make, rather than simply a chance to consume.
http://lwveducation.com/the-prize-who-is-in-charge-of-americas-schools/
podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fresh-air/id214089682?mt=2&i=352838278
The Prize is a story about good intentions gone awry. They turn into political struggles, condescending and arrogant management policies, and money wasted. They are thwarted by community mistrust which led to rebellion. Note that none of this mentions the children. It may be an opportunity lost for them. If their parents stay involved, workable strategies to improve schools may emerge.
The Prize gives little insight into what works in schools to break the cycle of poverty. The Newark example explains what did not work. Individual teachers, given adequate support, are effective. Some lessons learned about charter and district collaboration have emerged. Small steps are being taken. I will post them next. What we do know is that, in the last analysis, parents own the schools. Without them, nothing good will happen.
Prepare For ‘The End Of College’: Here’s What Free Higher Ed Looks Like
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/03/390167950/prepare-for-the-end-of-college-heres-what-free-higher-ed-looks-like
a future in which “the idea of ‘admission’ to college will become an anachronism, because the University of Everywhere will be open to everyone” and “educational resources that have been scarce and expensive for centuries will be abundant and free.”
why the majority of American college students decide to go to college
partly this [is] being driven by the fact that people need to go to college in order to make their way in the world and get credentials for, frankly, not the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars that colleges charge today.
the use of social media, personal versus institutional, or personal in the context of an institutional repercussions, is a complex and thorny issue. How much can one criticize the institution in their personal social media? And if the institution responds, when does it become silencing the social media as expression of free speech?
Is the article below touching only a specific [political] issue, or academia, as an institution, goes beyond this issue in imposing on freedom of speech?
Why I Was Fired
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Was-Fired/233640
My tweets might appear uncivil, but such a judgment can’t be made in an ideological or rhetorical vacuum. Insofar as “civil” is profoundly racialized and has a long history of demanding conformity, I frequently choose incivility as a form of communication. This choice is both moral and rhetorical.
Academics are usually eager to contest censorship and deconstruct vague charges of vulgarity. When it comes to defending Israel, though, anything goes.
Students are capable of serious discussion, of formulating responses, of thinking through discomfort. They like my teaching because I refuse to infantilize them; I treat them as thinking adults. My philosophy is simple: Teach them the modes and practices of critical thought and let them figure out things on their own.
Professors are often punished for disrupting convention in informal ways, however. My case is interesting because administrators ignored the de facto standards that regulate our behavior and exercised their power directly. This should be worrisome to any scholar who isn’t a sycophant.
The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here.
Benjamin Ginsberg points out that in the past 30 years, the administrator-to-student ratio has increased while the instructor-to-student ratio has stagnated. The rise of untenured, or non-tenure-track, faculty exacerbates the problem; a significant demographic in academe lacks job security or the working conditions that allow them to maximize their pedagogical talent. Over a recent 10-year period, spending on administration outpaced spending on instruction. At American universities, there are now more administrators and their staffers than full-time faculty. In the past 10 years, administrative salaries have steadily risen while custodians and groundskeepers suffer the inevitable budget cuts — as do the students whose tuition and fees supplement this largess.
When so much money is at stake, those who raid the budget have a deep interest in maintaining the reputation of the institution. Their privilege and the condition of the brand are causally related. The brand thus predominates. Its predominance often arrives at the expense of student well-being.
critical thinking is a terribly undesirable quality in the corporate world, much more damning than selfishness or sycophancy. Let us then be honest about critical thinking: On the tongues of cunning bureaucrats, it is little more than an additive to brand equity, the vainglorious pomp of smug, uptight automatons who like to use buzzwords in their PowerPoint presentations.
Critical thinking by faculty is even more undesirable. In research institutions, we are paid to generate prestige and to amass grant money; in teaching-centered colleges, we enjoy excess enrollments according to fine-tuned equations that maximize the student-teacher ratio. (In elite liberal-arts colleges, we pamper the kids with simulations of parental affection.) Critical thinking is especially harmful to adjuncts, reliant as they are for income on the munificence of well-paid bosses who cultivate a distended assemblage of expendable employees.
more on social media in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=social+media&submit=Search
Brown v Board of Education
http://www.zaption.com/listing/56084403166dfb052590efd6?utm_source=New+Weekly+Email+List&utm_campaign=06016b7bcc-Weekly_Email_10_6_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_27210ebe27-06016b7bcc-168938797
The Digital Revolution in Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities for Today’s Universities: Webinar
http://campustechnology.com/Webcasts/2015/10/Cisco-The-Future-and-Present-Challenges-of-Education-100815/Asset.aspx
There is a phenomenon taking place in higher education today. It is nothing short of a revolution regarding the advances in technology and how institutions of higher learning along with nontraditional organizations are utilizing powerful new tools to change the delivery of higher education . These new tools include new mobile devices, enhanced and feature-rich learning management systems, data-feeding sensors, 3D printers, smart classrooms, smart buildings, and collaboration tools allowing students and faculty to collaborate just about anywhere face-to-face, virtually.
The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL.org) is nearly 7 years old. It is the North American professional association for the global eportfolio community of practice and research field. “ePortfolio” is an idea about how technology can be implemented to best advantage in our world today. The eportfolio idea is that the learner is the anchor and center for the record of learning — the eportfolio is owned by the learner and the eportfolio stays with the learner between courses, between institutions and into life. It is a powerful idea and the growth of eportfolio technology in higher education around the world suggests educators understand that power.
At the Conference at the University of Georgia November 9-10, you will attend sessions that demonstrate how 10 different institutions have deployed eportfolio technology in ways appropriate to initiatives on their campuses. Kathleen Yancey of Florida State University, a founder of the U. S. eportfolio movement, is keynote.
AAEEBL is writing The Field Guide to ePortfolio to be published by AAC&U in 2016. This is a timely publication. Each conference and each webinar that AAEEBL holds contributes to the ideas in the Field Guide, being created by a team of 60 AAEEBL members. You can find out more about this project at this conference.