I think this is cool!

Some girls born into affluent families may have been educated at home by parents, a live in governess, tutor, or may have gone off to a private boarding school. Since women did not go on to have careers in this day, education and knowledge was something reserved primarily for boys.

Domestic trainings were a more appropriate education for a woman to receive. "For women of the 'genteel' classes the goal of non-domestic education was thus often the acquisition of 'accomplishments,' such as the ability to draw, sing, play music, or speak modern (i.e. non-Classical) languages (generally French and Italian)" (The Republic of Pemberley, "Education, Women's Education, and Accomplishments")

Although I wouldn't overstate it's importance to contemporary rhetorical practice, "Reflection" is the third, and kind of also the final, step in the Ignatian paradigm of teaching. It's very much a process of looking back at past experiences and actions and reassessing them, and I'm interested in how those practices work with Boyles' warning that excess metacognition can become a bad habit of division.

Dhawal Shah, founder of class-central.com, outlines the price schemes of the major MOOC providers. Courses from these providers started out free in 2011, but have gradually put more content behind paywalls. (Some of them haven't really been MOOCs for a long time now.)

https://twitter.com/grandeped/status/855435067400826881 Matt Crosslin points out that they were never completely free. You can't take one without a fairly new computer and fast Internet connection.

There is still very little thinking about digital education from a policy/discourse/politics-of-education perspective. Interesting work by Ben Williamson, Greg Thompson, Ian Cook.

amen.

Informal and open education has been largely overlooked, probably due to social and cultural stigmas attached to learning from places besides traditional campuses. Our education system ends where autodidactism (self-learning) commences: we are content with spoon-feeding our students from textbooks, with no focus on extensive learning. Students learn from topics, as opposed to problems (problem-based learning). It cannot be emphasised enough that research stems from problem-solving buttressed by necessary instruction.

difines education dually, as the process of giving and receiving systematic instruction (education) and as an enlightening experience (‘an’ education). Enlightening-giving greater understanding.

frances bell on purpose of education

https://connectedlearning.uci.edu/

new Connected Learning Lab (CLL) at UC Irvine, an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to studying and mobilizing learning technologies in equitable, innovative, and learner-centered ways.

Now every student will have one.

On the importance of social skills for PhD candidates -- and anyone, actually.

Many of the most productive and accomplished scientists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians do most of their work in no more than 4-6 hours per day. The musicians break that time up into shorter sessions. During that time, they are focused, and engage in deliberate practice. They tend to take a nap during the afternoon.

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of lay people lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.

Counting those who transfer, I wonder?

time change long

When asked to explain a topic, students often realize that they don't understand it as well as they thought. The same thing happens when someone is asked to explain the consequences of a government policy. They tend to realize they don't understand the issue very well, and moderate their opinion.

Seems that Distill is a perfect candidate for integrating Hypothes.is / web annotations by default.

This is such a great idea!

Yep. Not everyone who goes can benefit from this aspect...

Very sad.

Cool idea!

Official FERPA text

Also relevant for Spencer, but we don't really teach the figures of speech so much. If I recall correctly, they were a big deal for Ramus, because it allowed more classification and division, so it might be due to his relative influence.

I have never heard of this before. Not entirely sure why'd you do it? Googling isn't turning up all that much except other people talking about how to do it. Did turn up a program for automatically converting the other direction, which is pretty interesting.

Yes. Because publishers will always be able to beat OER on price as they mine new business models. Not hard to image where the content becomes the loss leader for the publishers in order to get faculty buy-in into tools that have the real gold - data.

But think about how this creates a divide in rhetorical understanding between class (and other socioeconomic divisions i.e. gender and race), especially in regards to the question of rhetorical definition. If one group of people is learning about language, philosophy, religion, etc. in the Classical sense and another in the vernacular sense, then will they end up having the same understanding of rhetoric? I would guess not. It would seem that rhetoric at the end of the eighteenth century (and onward) cannot be properly examined without considering a certain dimension of economic influence, especially in regards to class tension.

I do wonder what the reasoning was for this (I mean, besides the blatant "women and the lower class are too stupid to understand our Great Books and/or will lead lives that do not require a 'polite' education"). We've already read arguments that the "polite" education supposedly improved the virtues as well as the mind, right? Wouldn't all of society benefit if women and the lower class were virtuous, as much as possible?

Interesting that these topics of study were made available to women even before they were granted the right to vote in the United States (the beginning of the paragraph says "By the end of the nineteenth century," and the 19th Amendment was not passed until 1920). I wonder how the women's suffrage movement affected the types of education that were made available to women? In turn, how did rhetoric influence women's suffragists and their strategies to gain the right to vote? How did the suffrage movement influence rhetoric?

I thought this was interesting in connection with Hume and taste. For Hume, it's important to approach things in an unbiased way in order to properly judge the quality of something. But education is also important for Hume in being able to judge something. Grimke here is pointing out that education itself is biased, as it has privileged white men, meaning that texts will be read through a sexist lens.

It's odd how the completely abhorrent racism lends particular credence to the argument in favor of the humanities. "Even the worst people imaginable grasp the importance and liberating power of education!"

We've had a number of authors advocating for education (Vico, Astell, etc.), so it's also good to see someone threatened by and terrified of it.

Morris Pelzel on Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

the presentation and arrangement of symbolic data is crucial, and any given arrangement may be more or less conducive to discovery. That is why Engelbart’s observation about “playing” with and “rearranging” the materials we are dealing with strikes such a resonant chord. Even if we are only dealing with text, the ease of recombining and manipulating our words and phrases enables our writing to more quickly reach a suitable form of expression.

as we are social animals, our intellects work most effectively, not in isolation but in connection with others. When thoughts and ideas are externally represented, they thereby enter to some degree a public space,

Gardner Campbell on Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

even as modes of comprehension increase for some, modes of incomprehension increase for others. The person who sits with “Joe” as Joe demonstrates his new symbol-manipulating capacities reacts in ways that many of us may recognize

...

It takes humility, and hospitality, to spend time with new ideas ... to go deep and go long with concepts that ask us to re-examine many things we take for granted.

So, middle school is rough for parents also. I think we should get rid of it...

I hadn't realized this. Interesting...

Great to see Hypthesis used in class!

So it sounds like writing, speeches, teaching, other forms of communication are supposed to elevate individual taste or establish some sort of standard in taste.

These are new example of open pedagogy for me.

This seems like a really cool program that could benefit students all across the country.

See this talk: "Changing Education Paradigm"

Again, with Sheridan and Austin, education that builds up the disadvantaged, as opposed to Vico, a rhetoric that reaches down to the masses.

Though "standard" English is still important, it seems that there was more anxiety about standardization and prescriptive language/grammar during the Enlightenment than there is now. What accounts for this concern? Does it have anything to do with expansion in education, or leaning more towards the vernacular in school?

Building on my note with Vico, who emphasized Rhetoric as the tool that enables reaching the bodily-minded vulgus, Sheridan thinks the issue is that we need to elevate the generally-prevailing taste. The dynamic here is simple: how much can you expect to be able to shape your audience?

Fact sheet on DeVos: https://www.aclu.org/other/betsy-devos-facts.

Lots of data for who is attending HE.

Thomas Edison. Love his quotes

There is still very little thinking about digital education from a policy/discourse/politics-of-education perspective. Interesting work by Ben Williamson, Greg Thompson, Ian Cook

The level of access--I guess that's scale--seem quite different.

It doesn't have to be just student feedback about the operations and mechanics of the course, or as a replacement for a course survey tool. You can also use the platform as a way to engage students on the content relevant to the learning outcomes of the course. And use the platform to connect learners with people in the field of study.

Parents and students in the Mountain View school district consider their use of math software called Teach to One to be a failure.

The Mountain View school district apparently budgeted $521,000 to implement and operate this new-fangled math program in two local schools. Had they adequately beta tested the program beforehand, the school district might have discovered that Teach to One teaches math (we’ve found) in a disjointed, erratic, and non-linear fashion that leaves many students baffled and disenchanted with math. The program contains errors in the math it teaches. Parents end up having to teach kids math at home and make up for the program’s deficiencies. And all the while, the math teachers get relegated to “managing the Teach to One program rather than to providing direct instruction” themselves.

Sounds like they would have been much better off to just use http://khanacademy.org or http://schoolyourself.org So why are they using this expensive, seemingly untested service?

Sara Holbrook had two of her poems used on the Texas state assessment tests. She verifies what I thought as a student. The questions are ridiculous. The test makers seem to think that their interpretation of a work is the only interpretation, and that they can read the author's mind and know their intent.

"Texas paid Pearson $500 million bucks to administer the tests". Is that right? Was that for just one year? What else could we do with $500 million?

She mentions a study showing that the results of another standardized test could be predicted pretty well using just three data points about families in the community: the percentage with income over $200K; the percentage in poverty; the percentage with bachelor's degrees. So the standardized test tells you nothing that you can't guess by looking at local incomes and education levels.

What a scam.

The question that I think we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that my culture is preventing me from seeing?

...

It seems that education is more about filling brains, than teaching people to think.

Education ought to be about drawing something out, not putting something in. One of the things that people should be taught at school, is to think critically about the things that they consider most indisputably correct.

-- Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World)

http://iainmcgilchrist.com/

Since there is no proven “right way” to assess and track student learning, the most effective option is to turn this responsibility over to the students. Because learning should stem from intrinsic motivation, teachers can spend time showing students how to track the feedback and their progress from long-term learning experiences. This way students will learn to reflect on their growth, set better goals, and be accountable for their own growth.

-- Starr Sackstein<br> http://hackingassessment.com/<br> http://hackinghomework.com/

Deborah Meier points out that democracy has to be learned, and we aren't teaching it adequately. Most schools are authoritarian environments where students are taught, explicitly and implicitly, to do what they're told. We need to give kids experience with democracy -- productive debate, compromise, trial and error, and acknowledging one's own mistakes.

Hypothes.is nicely bridges the worlds of social media and formal education.

Go to Chapter 18

Good advice for mentors and mentees, and why it's usually hard for a manager to be a mentor to the same person.

To me this is the heart of it, especially in so far as this use case overlaps with the educational/classroom one.

The less we expect of our people, the less democracy we have.

Technologies & education system changing in recent times tutors should consider educating students with the latest technologies available. In the evolution of technology with apps, projector screens, Digital media, and last but not the least online learning platforms some fundamentals of teaching remains as it is, so if tutors can implement these basic ideas in his/her tutoring style with students can cope up with the evolution of digital education.

According to the report of the UK Government, Department of Education (published on January 10, 2014), there were altogether 24372 public schools comprising of 16818 State-funded primary schools, 3268 State funded and 2420 other Secondary schools and 4476 independent schools. There are also 1039 special (state funded) and non-maintained schools. The same report says that there were 438000 teachers in state-funded schools in England on a full-time equivalent basis in 2012. The numbers at both ends have naturally increased at the time of writing this article. But the big question that is looming over the education system of England is whether, even after the best effort by the UK Government and the State schools, the public school system is successful in educating their children properly or not.

The education sector is witnessing the immense boom in the UK. It has various elements like schools, universities, institutions and nowadays the tutoring classes have been increased tremendously. It all creates the strong educational structure within the UK. The demand for the tuitions is increasing.http://blog.selectmytutor.co.uk/demand-for-extra-tuition-is-rising-as-britishers-are-likely-to-pay-high/

The education in the 21st century has offered a lot of predictions, and the future imperatives have also been utilized by the education in the 21st century which was obviously not done in the education strategies in the 19th century.http://blog.selectmytutor.co.uk/education-level-in-21st-century-from-19th-century/

"Wikity is social bookmarks, wikified." -- Mike Caulfield<br> http://rainystreets.wikity.cc/<br> https://github.com/michaelarthurcaulfield/wikity-zero/

as far as I can tell, Wikity is the simplest way to run a personal wiki on top of WordPress. But the focus is a hyperlinked bookmarking and notetaking system, because after a year of use and 2,000 cards logged, I can tell you that is where the unique value is.

I see similar patterns with print books. You can't rely on the bookstore (or library in many cases) to value true/false, enduring/ephemeral. They're both providing, to varying degrees, the stuff people want.

I'd disagree strongly with the idea that authors on the Internet don't have varying levels of credibility. That's done in so many ways.

So this first one is a technical distinction whereas the second and third are more pedagogical. But what occurred to me in reading this list of rationales was the way in which those pedagogical choices are effected by the tech we choose.

Sunil Singh asks us to stop promoting mathematics based on its current applications in business and science. Math is an art that should be enjoyed for its own sake.

This reminded me of A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart. This is a 25-page essay which was later worked into a 140-page book. (And Sunil Singh has read at least one of them. He credits Lockhart in one of the replies.)

It also reminds me of this article on the history of Gaussian elimination and the birth of matrix algebra. Newton's algebra text included instructions for solving systems of equations -- but it didn't have much practical use until later. (Silly word problems are as old as mathematics.)

We should let people learn at their own pace. We should neither rush them, nor hold them back. If they show a talent, then encouraging them to push themselves is fine.

Math isn't for everyone, and that's fine. The same is true of any other subject. We should help people learn what they are interested in learning.

"Germany proves tuition-free college is not a silver bullet for America's education woes"

How so?

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Khan Academy announces their goal to offer internationally-recognized diplomas.

our long-term goal is to develop internationally-recognized diplomas that provide direct access to economic and educational opportunities.

...

We will develop the diplomas in close partnership with educational institutions and employers to ensure relevance. In addition to academic skills, we will recognize metacognitive skills, like perseverance, not measured by traditional degrees. Unlike other offerings, we will track job placement and performance to measure the efficacy of the diplomas and continuously improve them.

This could hugely impact the education of children negatively.

Good questions. Is information literacy as ill-defined as the open in open ed?

This may not be as much schooling as America, but that is still pretty good compared to other countries.

For a skepticasl discussion of growth mindset: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growth-mindset-yet/

To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.

To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.

Sign of the times? One part is about economics as the discipline of decision-making. Economists often claim that their work is about any risk/benefit analysis and isn’t purely about money. But the whole thing is still about “resources” or “exchange value”, in one way or another. So, it could be undue influence from this way of thinking. A second part is that, as this piece made clear at the onset, “education is big business”. In some ways, “education” is mostly a term for a sector or market. Schooling, Higher Education, Teaching, and Learning are all related. Corporate training may not belong to the same sector even though many of the aforementioned EdTech players bet big on this. So there’s a logic to focus on the money involved in “education”. Has little to do with learning experiences, but it’s an entrenched system.

Finally, there’s something about efficiency, regardless of effectiveness. It’s somewhat related to economics, but it’s often at a much shallower level. The kind of “your tax dollars at work” thinking which is so common in the United States. “It’s the economy, silly!”

Ha! The Chronicle’s summary framed these categories somewhat differently. Interesting. To me, the “application” part is really about student retention. But maybe that’s a bit of a cynical reading, based on an over-emphasis in the Learning Analytics sphere towards teleological, linear, and insular models of learning. Then, the “representation” part sounds closer to UDL than to learner-driven microcredentials. Both approaches are really interesting and chances are that the report brings them together. Finally, the Chronicle made it sound as though the research implied here were less directed. The mention that it has “the potential to influence institutional practices and interventions” may be strategic, as applied research meant to influence “decision-makers” is more likely to sway them than the type of exploratory research we so badly need.

Useful breakdown. Research, predictive models, and recognition are quite distinct from one another and the approaches to data that they imply are quite different. In a way, the “personalized learning” model at the core of the second topic is close to the Big Data attitude (collect all the things and sense will come through eventually) with corresponding ethical problems. Through projects vary greatly, research has a much more solid base in both ethics and epistemology than the kind of Big Data approach used by technocentric outlets. The part about recognition, though, opens the most interesting door. Microcredentials and badges are a part of a broader picture. The data shared in those cases need not be so comprehensive and learners have a lot of agency in the matter. In fact, when then-Ashoka Charles Tsai interviewed Mozilla executive director Mark Surman about badges, the message was quite clear: badges are a way to rethink education as a learner-driven “create your own path” adventure. The contrast between the three models reveals a lot. From the abstract world of research, to the top-down models of Minority Report-style predictive educating, all the way to a form of heutagogy. Lots to chew on.