Blurts

Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker columnist, will be the opening speaker at NECC. I have read a couple of his books (Outliers, Blink, Tipping Point). I wasn’t that impressed by Blink, but I found many of the concepts advanced in Outliers to be interesting and well reasoned. It has taken me a while to identify the approach – I have decided that it reminds me of Freakomomics – the type of logical analysis that makes sense in hindsight, but that only some folks are capable of seeing when looking forward. For whatever reason, Gladwell seems to address educational topics from time to time and I guess this is what prompted the invitation to address NECC. Not a researcher. Not an educator. Gladwell is an individual with some challenging ideas and an entertaining way of presenting them. 

As an example, take a look at a recent New Yorker article regarding the futility of predicting performance at the next level (pro quarterback and classroom teacher). As I understand the argument the skills necessary to succeed are difficult to teach, but they can sometimes be spotted in the wild. The proposal then seems to be to LOWER the barriers to trying, offer a low starting salary with heavy mentoring, but heavily reward those who seem to have IT because IT can make a larger enough difference in student achievement to be worth the process and the extra incentives. I hope I have caught the gist here. This type of article frustrates me. Not because the conclusion seems to indicate that what those of us who work to prepare teachers matter little, but  because the logic of the analysis relies on positions offered by individuals in fields I do not follow (e.g., economics) without citations. I have no way to evaluate whether it is true that a great teacher is worth a year and a half in student achievement compared to a poor teachers generating half year gains without the opportunity to evaluate the data. Am I to believe that the Journal of Educational Psychology and the American Educational Research Journal would not be all over carefully measured effects of this magnitude? Is this supposed to be some kind of conspiracy? Perhaps someone will send me the references.

P.S. – This post popped up several weeks later – comprehensive summary and interesting discussion

LastFm has denied reports that it shares data on who plays what music with record companies. The allegation surfaced about a week ago in reference to reported information on an unreleased U2 album. It seemed to me that LastFM would certainly have knowledge of the type described. The assumption being that anyone playing such music must have obtained it illegally. It seems very plausible that LastFM would have data linking individual users with specific songs played. The issue is whether these data would be shared. LastFM has asked users who cancalled their accounts to consider reinstatement.

A more enthusiastic denial.

Charlie Rose interviews Marc Andreeson – comments on Ning, Twitter, social networking, and Internet resources and strategies.

I have done my part to promote Last.FM. I am fascinated by online social networking and take ideas I pick up in one area (i.e., music) to inform my thinking about others (education). As a promoter of this service, I feel I should share the following  information. It appears that Last.FM may share information about your music collection with the RIAA. No, I do not have an illegal copy of the soon to release U2 CD as mentioned in the TechCrunch post. Last.FM uses scrobbling if you want to keep track of music you place on your computers and ipod. As I understand it, scrobbling means various programs send a little data to a centralized database and these data are accumulated to provide a picture of activities conducted with these programs (the music you play). You can share these data with othes and perhaps use common interests to learn about related, but new music. However, if you do this, it appears the recording industry may also be exploring your music collection. I guess anyone can look.

If you care, here is the record of the last 68,000+ songs played on my various devices.

Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking site, has evidently lost all user content. I think I have recommended this service in offering options to delicious (insert your own periods), diigo, etc.. The operation evidently had a crash – this happens. Why was there no backup?

I picked this up through Twitter – a NY Times article on student expectations and grading.

If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.

The concerns raised in this article rings true with me – when students ask How many pages does it have to be? How many references? – I am not assuming that by providing an answer I am explaining what it should take to earn an A.

I do understand the potential of rubrics and accept some responsibility for identifying standards. However, what ever happened to doing the best job I can in the hopes I might learn something.

Why is this framed as an issue regarding how teachers establish expectations?

There are several issues here:

1) The student is paying for an education. Would you rather spend $5 and get a hamburger or a steak? I guess it depends on whether you consider the steak an A or the mastery of skills and content.

2) Do students really see their performance as the equivalent of that demonstrated by others? Are they unable to see the differences or do they think such differences are inconsequential? Do they understand that it is possible that we are all good at different things and it is helpful to understand our strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps an important aspect of an education is to find realistic answers to these questions.

In our concern for students, there is one category of student i have grown to feel is being ignored. What do we have to offer to the student who knows more, does better, etc.? We belittle their accomplishments by awarding the same grade to everyone. Differentiating levels of quality is a major responsibility of accepting the role of educator and it is so easy to make it easy on yourself by ignoring quality performances.