- Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America | Vanity Fair – Let's be clear: It's not about the restaurant. – (review trump )
- Measuring Proficient Teachers Codifies Bad Teaching | the becoming radical – Proficiency is adherence to the rubric, as competency is adherence to the rules. But when rubrics are mandated, when their use is made a required part of evaluation, then the mandators are over-extending their reach into teaching and learning. I'm looking at you, HLC.
> Rubrics, they argue, ultimately fail complex human behaviors such as writing. While rubrics facilitate statistical aspects of measuring human behaviors (such as teaching and learning), by doing so, they also tend to erode the quality of the very behaviors being measured.
> As a writing teacher, I can confirm Wilson’s and Kohn’s critiques that student writing conforming to a rubric and thus deemed “proficient” or “excellent” can be and often is quite bad writing. Rubric-based labels such as “proficient” reflect compliance to the rubric, not writing quality. – (rubrics educationasproduct assessment_as_sham assessment )
- It’s Trump’s America now. Time to get over our attachment to facts | Richard Wolffe | Opinion | The Guardian – What you assert bites back. – (polemic politics rhetoric )
Tag: assessment
- Language Log » Gertrude Trump – Yep: Donald is channeling Gertrude Stein in his prose. – (rhetoric modernism )
- Is “The Web As a Tool For Thought” a Gating Item? | Hapgood – > The first, biggest, and most important step is to get people to think of the web as something bigger than just conversation or expression. Once we do that, the reasons why things like annotation layers, linked data and federated wiki make sense will be come clear. Until then, we’ll stay stuck in the DMV parking lot. – (wikity wiki wikiway annotation notetaking fedwiki )
- [toread] How One Professor Is Trying to Paint a Richer Portrait of Effective Teaching – The Chronicle of Higher Education – – (assessment_as_sham assessment )
- Storyspace 3: index to articles – The Eclectic Light Company – Story space is back, and so are tutorials and notes. – (DH Storyspace tinderbox hypertext en3177 )
- The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature, Himmer – – (en3177 blogging )
- E-Portfolios Are Not the Fitbit of Higher Education – I'm forever dubious of e-portfolios, esp as they tend to be forever trumpeted by those who don't use them. Students: get your own domain, keep a blog and a wiki, set your own terms. "e-portfolios come to represent the Fitbits of higher education, then we will have utterly failed our students." – (efolios assessment corporateculture corporatecrawl )
Categories
What I’m reading 7 Jan 2016
- [toread] How I got excited about teaching again – – (assessment coursedesign )
- [toread] Media for Thinking the Unthinkable – – (dh InfoDesign infographics semiotics )
- Simulating The World (In Emoji) – A primer for DH students in understanding procedures and getting a sense of what's possible. By making. In open source. It's playtime. – (dh oer procedural_rhetoric digital_literature )
- Fitzpatrick – The Pleasure of the Blog: The Early Novel, the Serial, and the Narrative Archive – Nifty thesis:” “All blogs, for Himmer, are in some sense literary, because of the nature of their readers’ interactions with them. … Such a claim begins to suggest that the reasons we read blogs may be slightly different than we have often imagined; through this understanding, blogs offer not simply a voyeuristic peek into someone else’s life — though, obviously, that numbers among their pleasures, too — but they also offer a form of writing that engages the reader by requiring her not simply to consume the content presented but also, in some sense, to produce that content, to complete what is present through a knowledge of what is past, an exploration of the ways that that present is situated, and a commitment to return in the future.” – (blogging narrative identity genre reading )
- Can the Student Course Evaluation Be Redeemed? – Takes a broad look at student evals across the country and across fields. Seeking an alternative to student evals: “He cast doubt on their validity and reliability, proposing that instead, professors complete an inventory of the research-based teaching practices they use.” Looks at IDEA student ratings system, and critiques it lightly. Comments support IDEA.IF the idea is to guide the faculty in develop=ing a better course, then IDEA would make a fair model to use. But if that’s how it’s used, there is no reason to report to administration semester by semester. – (student_evaluation assessment )
- Peer 2 Peer University – Because anyone who's looking in should get a link to p2pu. [insert fork pun here]. – (courseware p2p )
- Harmonizing Learning and Education -e-Literate – large OV in response to Cormier, Downes, et al concerning active learning, course design, lib Ed. The title says it all, but here's some more: "This is partly a workplace argument. It’s an economic value argument. It’s a public good argument. If Dave is right, then people who care about learning are going to be better at just about any job you throw at them than people who don’t. This is a critical argument in favor of public funding of a liberal arts education, personalized in the old-fashioned sense of having-to-do-with-individual-persons, that much of academia has ceded for no good reason I can think of. The sticky wicket, though, is accountability which, as Dave points out, is the main reason we have a schism between learning and education in the first place – (pedagogy assessment coursedesign culture )
- Building a Place for Community: City Tech’s OpenLab – Report on CUNY's OpenLab, designed in part to align a dispersed community. Come together by way of a leaning community. – (OER openaccess open_learning digitalhub )
- [toread] Rhizomatic Learning – A Big Forking Course | Dave’s Educational Blog – – (none)
- Alternatives to the Growing Corporate Model of Education and Educational Assessment – With corporate assessment comes corporate devaluing. Faculty write the book ok. "In addition, and this is rather odd, assessment places an extremely high value on conformity. This is odd because we’re seeing it arise right now in a culture that, at the same time, is on the verge of deifying the concept of individualism–of doing it all on one’s own." – (assessment corporatecreep )
- The limits of the digital humanities, by Adam Kirsch | New Republic – The New Republic trots out the old standards. Gotta love it when the old is the measure of the new. We've been here before. – (dh pedagogy )
- Academic assessment gone mad | Times Higher Education – No, seriously. When a trend becomes so easily satirized, it's time to abandon it. Emperor and clothes. – (assessment )
- Open Data: A case study using IPEDS for online education – On the heels of Big Data and Writing Assessment comes this for the summer. – (howto BigData )
- Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis | Visualising Information for Advocacy – Read it along with Tufte – (visual_rhetoric data_visualization )
- Tutorial: How to explore a network graph of electronic literature in Gephi – – (de )
- The Two Cultures of Educational Reform – Stanley Fish – Fish weighs in on evaluation kulture, with "Not only is there no right answer when the subject is Melville, there’s no right question, just the undesigned and often circuitous process of turning the object of your attention this way and that way until something arresting emerges, and then you do it again, without the programmed prompting of any deus ex machina. How can you measure or preplan that? You can’t, and so much the worse for Melville, who will just have to be left behind, along with a great deal else that belongs to the culture of art and intuition." Actually, the piece is gracious in critique – exemplar – (fyc assessment DH pedagogy )
- Machine Scoring Fails the Test – Damn. NCTE makes more work for students and teachers by finding – surprise – that computers can score accurately only texts written to the computer's algorithm. And so now we even have to adapt our human assessment to human possibilities. Just when I thought we could simply teach Best Practices and call it a day. – (machinegrading assessment )
- Writing History in the Digital Age – – (DH )