Clarence has a brilliant post on thinking about change:

Remote Access: Thinking About Change
Thinking About Change

All year I’ve been trying to teach the kids in my class to question things and look at possibilities. I always try to push them to see how things can be. I do not want them to accept things as they are, but to wonder instead about how they can be.

The biggest challenge we face in reorganzing the schools is in our unconscious assumptions about the nature of school.

Now, can we talk Clarence into putting his brainstorming tool into a wiki so we can ALL play along?

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May 19, 2006 — “Accountability Plus Standards Equals Success” appeared in the Poughkeepsie Journal.
FACT SHEETS, OP-EDS
Accountability Plus Standards Equals Success

I read this op-ed piece and the EducationWonk’s take on it and seems to me like EdWonk and SecSpell are both missing some components in their equation. Human Performance Technology (HPT) holds that there are six factors that lead to success. Secretary Spellings got two of them — standards and accountability — and EdWonk got part of a third — the involvement of the right people.

What is missing from this equation?

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“The Internet changes everything.” We think we know what that means but I’ve come to believe that we’ve overlooked an important characteristic of everything.

We’re becoming more and more aware of the effect of the internet on geography. The meta-verse erases space. Online, everybody is the same distance from anybody else. The corollary of that has been slipping by us. If the meta-verse erases space, it must also erase time. For those who spend many hours each day onlne, I don’t mean that kind of time. Einstein gave us the models for non-Euclidean space-time and we’ve projected the web into space without paying attention to the effect on time.

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Posted in Observations, Education, Distance Education | 1 Comment »

Teachers don’t like to go to school.

This probably seems self evident. I suspect this is because they know what goes on in school and are less interested in subjecting themselves to the same kinds of activities that they subject their students to. This is probably doubly true of online classes.

And I’m also being quite righteously “tongue-in-cheek” here.

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Posted in Online Community, Education, Distance Education | 3 Comments »

Grants are a fact of life in higher ed. People who can write grants and get them funded are valued above those who merely engage in daily discourse with students. It’s getting harder to have grants funded because of the rules on defining “rigorous evidence” in educational research. Basically, it’s the medical “clinical trial” model. The reference document is a how-to guide for selecting interventions based on the quality of research behind them. Remember that NCLB REQUIRES that interventions be supported by relevant research.

First: The research MUST use randomized control experimental designs. This is not optional.

Second: The research MUST be done in at LEAST two schools, one of which is “similar” to the proposed application site.

What does that LOOK like when you’re trying to do the research?

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