How do you connect the entire world to the Internet. Evidently, the first step is to create a web site – Internet.org. While those without access often have far more serious problems, part of the idea is to find ways to provide access without taking resources away from attempts to provide more basic needs.
Teachers are often told to set expectations early. Since many will begin next week, here is a post identifying social media rules of conduct.
I was thinking about the items on the list. College profs might take notice. Do you announce expectations for cell phone use?
It is being reported that the Google 20% perk may be a thing of the past. The idea that employees would contribute in creative ways if given independence was a unique feature of the company and argued by some as a model for education. Now, the principle may be sacrificed to increase progress on core projects.
I do not think of Larry Cuban as an optimistic person. To me, he is mostly about explaining why things don’t work and why nothing in education changes.
I was surprised today when he made the claim that Common Core standards may work. The explanation is more typical – CC will work because it is better than standards based on alternatives such as textbooks, tests, and other similar methods for setting expectations.
National, state, and local opinion-makers in the business of school reform know that what matters is not evidence, not research studies, not past experiences with similar reforms–what matters is the appearance of success.
I did find a quote that keeps my world spinning in the proper orbit. Too bad I already have the Curmudgeon Speaks URL reserved. Others may be more deserving of the description.
This piece from Edudemic caught my attention because it fits with my annoyance in the simplistic thinking that so often permeates the debate over productive instructional practices. The Edudemic post ends up mostly arguing for the use of classroom use of questions to promote learning (e.g., Socrative), but it did illustrate the dangers of not differentiating the issues in high stakes testing, purposes for the use of methods that evaluate understanding, and how learning happens.
The blog post does not offer a link the research study that is indirectly cited frequently (through another online post that also does not include the full reference) so I ran it down. The research study demonstrates that “properly constructed multiple choice items” can improve retention of the information required to answer the questions. What this means in translation is that a “quality” MC item includes plausible distractors (the wrong answers). The appears to create an active cognitive experience in which the learner must recall and evaluate multiple items of information in order to determine the best answer. Hence, quality items generate active cognitive processing and not passive recall.
IMHO – it always comes down to getting the learner to think and there are many ways to do this.
Little, J.L., Bjork, E.L., Bjork, R.A., & Angello, G. (2012). Multiple-choice tests exonerated, at least of some charges: Fostering test-induced learning and avoiding test-induced forgetting. Psychological Science, 23, 1337-1344.
During my three-week trip to Russia, I took exactly 1325 photos. I understood that this trip was likely to be a once in a lifetime exeprience and I was very concerned that I would lose some or all of the photographic record of the experience. As a consequence, I was very concerned that I backup and offload images as I went along. I stored the images on a Macbook Air and I upload images as I went to Flickr. Many of these upload sessions were conducted from unreliable wifi connections. I ended up with a mess – missing images and many duplicates resulting from multiple attempts to restart a batch upload procedure. Since, I do have all the images on the Air, I have decided to transfer the collection to a desktop machine and use iPhoto to reprocess all everything and then upload the collection to Flickr a second time. However, I did learn some things about Flickr from the first attempt and I thought I would share one of these insights here.
What to do when you have duplicates in Flickr
When you review images from the Flick photostream, you see your images based on the sequence in which they were uploaded. To my knowledge, Flickr has no built-in provision for identifying duplicates and will accept the same image as many times as you want to send it. I had hundreds of duplicates scattered throughout my photostream. Here is how I located and removed these duplicates.
There are a couple of settings within Flickr that allow a user to sequence images by the date/time an image was taken. Sequencing images in this fashion will reveal duplicates. For example, Archive allows images to be sequenced by date taken or date uploaded. A calendar view than allows all images on a date to be viewed. This works fine for showing the duplicates, but reviewing images displayed in this fashion was not practical because the process of displaying had to be repeated each time an image was deleted.
The process I ended up using was based on Flickr’s system for organizing images. Typically, you use this feature which displays images from the photostream to build sets. You select individual images from the stream and pull them into a space representing the set you want to construct. I read that the stream of images of images when using the organization system could also be sequenced by date taken. This option is a little difficult to locate (upload sequence is the default). With the batch organize window open, look for a more options link that should appear just above the sequence of thumbnails. One of the options should be organize by date taken. With this option selected, the redundant images should appear next to each other in the stream.
Here is the tricky part. To get rid of duplicates, drag the unnecessary images from the stream into the area intended to create a set of images. Instead of creating a set (which does not remove the images from the stream), select the bulk option “delete” and the duplicates will be removed. Obviously, you will want to do this carefully. I would also only do this if I had a complete backup of all images.
The images in this collection are available for public viewing.
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