NCLB Fail

Posted on April 29, 2009 by stefhite

“The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.”

Rest of the NYT article here.

Orwellian Education?

Posted on April 20, 2009 by stefhite

Richard Pring‘s report published by the Nuffield Review looks at education as now “dominated by the language of management” and symptomatic of the erosion of classic learning goals and values.

“The need to measure everything and to find equivalents for different types of education arises from a natural enough desire to achieve value-for-money, and to promote different routes for young people.

But it can also be a strait-jacket, implying that all types of learning can, and should, be forced into the same model …”

More, as reviewed by the BBC.

Recently found … 04/20/2009

Posted on April 20, 2009 by stefhite

We Are Hunted – The Online Music Chart

We Are Hunted is the Online Music Chart. We aggregate social networks, forums, music blogs, Torrents, P2P Networks and Twitter to develop a daily chart of the 99 most popular songs online.

tags: music, social
DoInk.com | Draw, Animate, and Collaborate

A place to enjoy, discuss and create custom animations
A place to collaborate with others by using and sharing props

tags: animation, tools, collaboration
Taskbarn – Free Web-Based Project Management Tools

Taskbarn is a web-based project collaboration tool with a focus on ease of use, transparency, and feed-friendly updates. Taskbarn covers the basics of project management, including assigning due dates to tasks and marking parties responsible for completing them. In addition to the standard tools, each project is set up with a unique feed. Updates to the project can be published both within the Taskbarn feed and to an external Twitter account. Each feed update can be given a file attachment of up to 10MB—handy for tossing in pictures and voice messages to keep a group posted on progress. In addition to task management and publication of project updates, there is a messaging system for keeping up with your fellow collaborators and a notes section for attaching notes and files that don’t quite fit into the task list. There is a 100MB limit on file storage, so if you’re working with bulky multimedia files, you’ll need some alternate storage space. Taskbarn is a free web-based service.

tags: collaboration, planning, groups, projects
Which Date Works

Create an invitation to an event, enter the email addresses of the people you need feedback from, and send it out. You can limit the range of dates from leaving the entire year open for vote to limiting it selecting from two days. The recipients don’t need to sign up to use the service, they simply follow the link that arrives in their email and select the date that works best for them.

tags: calendar, groups, collaborative, planning

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Encyclopedic Death

Posted on April 17, 2009 by stefhite

Interesting … an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Microsoft’s Encarta, Rendered Obsolete by Wikipedia, Will Shut Down

Microsoft has announced that it will soon euthanize Encarta, the onetime encyclopedia-of-the-future that has lost much of its luster in the last decade. But the company really didn’t have much choice in the matter: For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia had fatally shivved Encarta some time ago.

And Microsoft admits that. In recent years, “the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed,” the company said in a statement on the shutdown. “People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.” So there’s really only one question left to be answered: Should Encarta be mourned?

Should it?

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Connections

Education is a global issue … and a grassroots process.

Monthly Archives: April 2009

NCLB Fail

Orwellian Education?

Encyclopedic Death