“If you get unprepared students in your class and they don’t do well, how does that get explained?”

and to prove it

lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today’s workplaces

It was politically convenient to hold universities accountable for all this, rather than to scrutinize neoliberal austerity measures.

assistant vice president for assessment and institutional effectiveness at Furman University

“I do not feel threatened emotionally when presented with multiple perspectives”

analyticity

certify

skills

Compassion training—which doesn’t involve empathetic arousal to the perceived distress of others—was more effective, leading to both increased positive emotions and increased altruism.

This distinction has some support in the collaborative work of Tania Singer, a psychologist and neuroscientist, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, meditation expert, and former scientist. In a series of studies using fMRI brain scanning, Ricard was asked to engage in various types of compassion meditation directed toward people who are suffering. To the surprise of the investigators, these meditative states did not activate parts of the brain that are normally activated by non-meditators when they think about others’ pain. Ricard described his meditative experience as “a warm positive state associated with a strong prosocial motivation.” He was then asked to put himself in an empathetic state and was scanned while doing so. Now the appropriate circuits associated with empathetic distress were activated. “The empathic sharing,” Ricard said, “very quickly became intolerable to me and I felt emotionally exhausted, very similar to being burned out.”

But this empathetic distress surely isn’t necessary for charitable giving.

A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.

a more distanced love and kindness and concern for others.

The problems that arise here have to do with emotional empathy—feeling another’s pain.

Helgeson and Fritz developed a simple nine-item questionnaire, which asks respondents to indicate whether they agree with statements such as, “For me to be happy, I need others to be happy,” “I can’t say no when someone asks me for help,” and “I often worry about others’ problems.” Women typically score higher than men on this scale; Hannah would, I bet, score high indeed.

She also does not endorse a guiding principle based on compassion and kindness. Rather, Hannah is compelled by hyperarousal—her drive is unstoppable.

"A ban means policing," says Neiterman. "With larger class sizes, who is going to police students to ensure that they do not use technology?"

The majority of instructors understood that banning technology in class is not an answer.

off-task technology

Only 32 percent were bothered by the use of laptops and tablets, however, probably because they assume that laptops and tablets are used by students for class work.

While students felt that it was their choice to use the technology, they saw it as the instructors' responsibility to motivate them not to use it,

some also used it to catch up on other classes

He said he “guarantees 100%” that the system will at times misconstrue innocent behavior. But he’s more concerned about failing to catch indicators of violence, and he said the system gives schools and other facilities a much-needed early warning system.

or we can hide our fear and indifference behind a mask of “neutrality.”

Moe was a vocal proponent of the school management company Edison Schools’ initial public offering in 1999.

Metaphors matter.

But as is often the case with alarmist factoids, this one was wrenched out of historical context: since the 1960s, more students were taking the exam than ever before—and what’s more, SAT performance had actually increased among all subgroups.

Until these are common currency, students would be negatively impacted when they seek to transfer to more traditional institutions if that is the only document they present.

She said each high school would be required to come up with its own system for evaluating student knowledge and skills. "It has to vary from school to school," she said, and the idea is to move away from identifying students by some number representing their achievement.

so an admissions officer could see lab reports, essays and so forth.

but levels of proficiency in various areas.

freedom to learn

I have a problem with the idea that teachers are generic teachers. That we teach children, not subjects. Because while it is true that we teach children, it is through the introduction to subjects that we allow children access to understanding the world, and further, access to that that is beautiful in human life.

And *how* should be driven by *what* anyway.

This is shorthand for focusing on how to teach, not what to teach.

And hence they believe to focus on it you need to measure it. And if you’re going to measure it, you need to judge it.

Curriculum is in the ascendant. We’re returning to conversations about what we’re teaching. This is awesome. But curriculum is far bigger than a process. It’s what your school is.

Pedagogy was, and still is in some parts, overrated (Stuart Lock, 2017), but the how should have an interwoven, richly tapestried relationship with the what, dictated by the subject discipline.

mind-manacles of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

which is objectively impossible to quantify

in the unaugmented part of my brain

as if they were all parts of a singular ever-evolving speech.

I am not a Luddite.

The dark forests grow because they provide psychological and reputational cover.

into their dark forests

when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving

The internet of today is a battleground.

The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.

Dark forests like newsletters

the appropriately scaled test score itself

and thus lack “face validity” for this purpose.[2]

If measures are neither reliable nor valid, indicators constructed from the measures are unlikely to be reliable or valid. But, it’s also possible that measures are reliable and/or valid, but indicators constructed from those measures are neither.

Indicators are re-expressions of measures

If we wrongly assume the measure is the underlying process, the remedy for a high temperature is simply to bathe the child in ice, an unlikely solution to whatever underlying process is actually causing the fever.

The measures we take can be referred to as “realizations” which are generated by underlying processes (all the stuff going on in school, as well as in the daily lives of the children attending and teachers working in those schools, inclusive of weather conditions, heating, cooling and lighting, home environments, etc.).

show

I handed back paragraphs at three different times: once with grades and feedback, once with grades only, and once with feedback only. At each time, I asked students to look over their work and then I took the work away. I gave them a sticky note and asked them to comment on their evaluation. Only when I gave them their work with feedback and no grades, could students explain or demonstrate their next steps in the writing process.

The reality is, when one invests in the descriptive feedback, students use the feedback and learning goes up.

A gradeless pedagogy means buying into the ideal that gradeless assessments lead to a learning mindset instead of a grade’s mindset.

I use gradeless, descriptive feedback to explain how proficient the student is in that skill area and what they need to work on next.

skills

I might as well use a letter grade if don’t explain why, offer descriptive feedback, or give the opportunity to level up.

even if I do get asked, I stand by my philosophy that they’ll find out at the end.

scale

a snapshot

What does a B mean anyways?

over-communicating your expectations

writes in an essay on Medium

if a student is struggling, they probably aren’t choosing to.

hus, my cups symbols on the learning scale was born. Woot woot! Instead of just putting the learning scale language on FreshGrade, I put the scale with the cups. I’ve had positive feedback, especially from those parents who were confused by the scale and were overwhelmed by the language. It really does help give a snapshot of the learning journey.

learning scales

This past weekend, as I was assessing these projects, I commented, on FreshGrade, using the cups analogy and gave those who gave me empty cups, to fill them’up! I love it!

The truth is that comfortable, calm connectedness with intimates is the normal resting position for most people.

Emotionally immature men who believe that autonomy is something you take, rather than something you create, may live their lives in a continual nightmare of ‘needs they can’t meet’ that they never come to understand.

in

They don’t need to do or be anything in particular to be treated this way.

I become more aware of my own feelings of autonomy, which emerge organically when we are safe.

As secure attachers do, he doesn’t determine for me when I need him; I decide that.

In order for Jordan to create autonomy, he needs to willingly and consistently meet his intimate’s needs for availability.

When the zombie apocalypse comes (or we bring it about?) we will need skills for getting along with each other and being able to work together even after we hook up. Start practicing now.

West Africa

Fulbe

The tool gives you a heatmap, as it were, of where students are commenting in a particular text, providing information which could then be used to guide discussion.

What has become distinctive now is the extreme rapidity of searching one’s own marginalia, as well the ability to see how others read.

when I finally sit down to write a chapter, I’m just building bridges between those islands, and not venturing out into an empty, uncharted sea.

starting with my book How We Got To Now 

When you hear an executive make the case for merging two different businesses and say they’ll achieve cost savings through “synergies”, that’s economies of scope they’re chasing (and likely not getting, but the investors won’t know that until management has fled the scene).

Scope can bring economies, too. This was part of the Panzar and Willig contribution. Economies of scope are more difficult and complex than economies of scale. They’re less automatic and less obvious.

Standardized inputs, processes, and outputs, all enable the great of economies or efficiencies we associate with scale.

Standardization is a virtue in scale.

More benefits is nice, but if more benefits also means an equal increase in costs, then it’s not so attractive.

This revised structure, along with the regular classroom critique of each peer’s work, will provide students with the same amount of learning without the pressure of grades penalizing quality of work.

or what a desirable outcome looks like

or assign grades based on completion.

there is an importance to implement some type of system for students to gauge their improvement.

An “A” becomes a sort of seal of congratulatory approval: “Congrats! You nailed my design aesthetic on the head!” while a “B” or “C” becomes a sympathetic foreboding: “Better luck next time.” Not only does this hinder the creativity of students, but it unknowingly forces us into cookie cutter approaches to design.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, beef is graded according to two methods of evaluation: yield grades for the amount of usable lean meat and quality grades for flavor. I see this as a dual system of objective grading (a quantifiable amount)

the amount of technical refinement in a piece

objective artistic standards

By failing, we learn from our mistakes.

Speaking as a student in Virginia Tech’s graphic design program, more often than not students’ capabilities are limited when their minds are oriented towards getting an “A” on a project rather than testing new strategies.

grades prove more harmful than beneficial because they are heavily subjective.

While peer review is invaluable to my undergraduate composition and literature courses, I was disappointed that, in my own graduate education, it wasn’t more explicitly incorporated into our seminars (of course, my friends and I constantly exchanged work outside of class).

Rather than treating our course solely as a form of individual investment, I wanted to challenge students to make their learning useful to an audience beyond our classroom and, in so doing, to think about education as a collective societal project and an opportunity to contribute to the public good.

While I selected four short units ahead of time - genealogies of women of color feminism, speculative fiction, feminist pedagogy, and comedy - the remainder of the semester was designed and led by the students.

But instead, after suspiciously confirming that he could build whatever he wanted,  here is what happened

transcend bounds of time, space, location, course, and curriculum

promote creativity, play, exploration, awe

In this sense, our focus as educators should be on emergent situations, where complexity gives rise to ‘new properties and behaviours… that are not contained in the essence of the constituent elements, or able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions’ (Mason 2008, p.2).”

Davis and Sumara (2008) argue that “an education that is understood in complexity terms cannot be conceived in terms of preparation for the future. Rather, it must be construed in terms of participation in the creation of possible futures” (p. 43).

letting them

What’s interesting is that when monitoring these projects and discussions, it appears initially as ineffective.

Suppose college tuition was free and every first-year had a guaranteed job lined up for after graduation. This parallel universe does exist at military-service academies—and at West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, humanities majors are at about the same level as they were in 2008.

Being the type of person inclined to view a college major in terms of return on investment will probably make a much bigger difference in your earnings than the actual major does.

Instead, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying—in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market.

to spend elective credits

I’d rather see information about the type and level of courses that undergraduates take.

By now it should be clear that dialogue mapping is a technique that promotes collaboration

indicates how they might connect up with the rest of the discussion – but connection is neither required nor always desirable.

Conklin refers to the last move – challenging the context of a discussion – as “grenade throwing.”

Once on the map, it is no longer associated with any person – it is objectified as an element of the larger discussion.

In an organisation, these moves have a certain stigma attached to them: anyone making arguments for or against an idea might be seen as being opinionated or egotistical.

Challenging the context of the entire discussion.

Conklin identifies seven types of questions:

Criterial: These questions ask about the criteria that any acceptable ideas must satisfy.

A side benefit of interrruption is that it slows downs the dialogue.

Conklin emphasises that it is OK to do so as long as it is done in the service of listening. Another important point is that when capturing a point made by someone, the technographer will need to summarise or interpret the point. The interpretation must be checked with the speaker.  Hence validation – and the  interruption it may entail – is not just OK, it is absolutely essential.

guess at the intended meaning

n real-time, on a shared display which  is  visible to all participants.

skilled facilitator

the man who coined the term wicked problem.

(Issue Based Information System)

fragmentation

the traditional, process driven world is partially  blind to the non-technical aspects of complexity.

how would our education system change to take advantage of this new external symbol-manipulation capability of students and teachers (and administrators)?

assess

a quick and rough scaffolding than a carefully engineered structure

we would recommend turning loose a group of four to six people (or a number of such groups) to develop means that augment their own programming capability

industrial engineering (e.g., motion and time study)

and later it is easy to merge their contributions

data

There are, of course, the explicit computer processes which we use, and which our philosophy requires the augmented man to be able to design and build for himself.

He maintained that about ten percent of the little steps we took all day accounted for ninety percent of the progress toward the goals we claimed to pursue -- that is, that ninety percent of our actions and thoughts were coupled to our net progress in only a very feeble way.

From what we've been through so far, you might expect it to be like that. What I did, though, was to treat the matter as a process that I was going to execute the process of giving you a lecture demonstration.

perhaps you know about 'teaching machines?'

If he is interested in only one type of appended substructure, he can request that only the cues associated with that type be displayed.

It is a lot like using zones of variable magnification as you scan the structure

Joe picked out one of your sentences, and pushed the rest of the text a few lines up and down from it to isolate it.

So far the structure that you have built with your symbols looks just like what you might build with pencil-and-paper techniques

You are quite elated by this freedom to juggle the record of your thoughts

He's a nice enough guy, but he sure gets preachy.

I want you to notice first how hard it is for a person to realize how really unquestioning he is about the way he does things.

3. Single-Frame Manipulation

only here the proofreader is always looking at clean text as if it had been instantaneously retyped after each designation had been made.

The text would all still look as neat as if freshly retyped.

Joe could reinstate it instantaneously with one stroke of his left hand.

light pen

He claimed that he could comfortably rattle off about 180 words a minute -- faster than he could comfortably talk.

Some of these signals were used as abbreviations for entire words. It seems that, for instance, the 150 most commonly used words in a natural language made up about half of any normal text in that language.

At any later time (until he chose to discard that particular abbreviation from his working vocabulary) the typing of the abbreviation term would call forth automatically the "printing" on the display of the entire object string.

Synonyms or antonyms could just as easily be brought forth. This also seemed sort of trivially obvious, and Joe seemed to know that you would feel so. "It turns out that this simple capability makes it feasible to do some pretty rough tasks in the upper levels of the capability hierarchy -- where precise use of special terms really pays off, where the human just couldn't be that precise by depending upon his unaided memory for definitions and 'standards,' and where using dictionary and reference-book lookup in the normal fashion would be so distracting and time-consuming that the task execution would break down.

that is, assemble a bunch of symbols before your eyes in order to portray something which you have in mind.

1. Background

time sharing

(human scale of large and simple)

It is plain that even if the equipment (artifacts) appeared on the market tomorrow, a good deal of empirical research would be needed to develop a methodology that would capitalize upon the artifact process capabilities.

the value of some sort of copying device

Right off the bat I noticed that there were two distinct groups -- some ideas were about what the memo ought to accomplish, what time period it should cover, when it should be finished, what level and style of presentation should be used, etc., and some ideas were about the subject of the memo.

It's not unreasonable to assume that establishing a link would take about three seconds, and tracing a link to the next card about three to five seconds.

needle sorting

An Existing Note and File System

Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people.

Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.

In so far as feasibility is concerned, speech production poses less severe problems of a technical nature than does automatic recognition of speech sounds.

In large part, the interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type.

Automatic Speech Production and Recognition:

Computer-Posted Wall Display

Nowhere, to my knowledge, however, is there anything approaching the flexibility and convenience of the pencil and doodle pad or the chalk and blackboard used by men in technical discussion.

It is clear that, working within the loose constraints of predetermined strategies, computers will in due course be able to devise and simplify their own procedures for achieving stated goals.

Men appear to think more naturally and easily in terms of goals than in terms of courses.

By examining the storage at a given level, one can determine what thus-far similar items have been stored.

The trie memory scheme is inefficient for small memories, but it becomes increasingly efficient in using available storage space as memory size increases.

5.3 Memory Organization Requirements

trie memory

Implicit in the idea of man-computer symbiosis are the requirements that information be retrievable both by name and by pattern

part indelible memory and part published memory.

Published memory will be "read-only" memory.

but it will accept a clearly secondary status in those areas.

or in several alternative ways if the human operator is not sure what he wants

SAGE System

It seems likely that the contributions of human operators and equipment will blend together so completely in many operations that it will be difficult to separate them neatly in analysis.

I could find nothing comparable to a time-and-motion-study analysis of the mental work of a person engaged in a scientific or technical enterprise.

At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses.

charged with creating a framework for measuring the value of each college in the U.S