dannypage

Here we spent the year reading books and emulating great writers, constructing leads that would make everyone want to read our work, developing a voice that would engage our readers, using our imaginations to make our work unique and important, and, most of all, being honest. And none of that matters. All that matters, it turns out, is that you cite two facts from the reading material in every answer. That gives you full credit. You can compose a “Gettysburg Address” for the 21st century on the apportioned lines in your test booklet, but if you’ve provided only one fact from the text you read in preparation, then you will earn only half credit. In your constructed response—no matter how well written, correct, intelligent, noble, beautiful, and meaningful it is—if you’ve not collected any specific facts from the provided readings (even if you happen to know more information about the chosen topic than the readings provide), then you will get a zero.

I don’t get why writing, OF ALL THINGS, is graded algorithmically. It would be like failing a painter because their painting, while being as beautiful as the Mona Lisa, because it lacked brush strokes of a certain width. That weren’t mentioned in the rubric.

Bullshit. If you have experts (in this case, English teachers) grading the tests, let them grade subjectively. It is not math. There is no one right answer, and I can’t believe someone would think that was a good idea to do it that way. 

Last weekend was Startup Weekend EDU in Washington D.C. While I didn’t get a chance to go see the presentations, it sounds like the Education vertical of the Startup Weekend model is going extremely well. DC will have another SW in late November; I encourage anyone interested in entrepreneurship to check it out. 

infoneer-pulse:

“Education,” scholar and writer Ralph Ellison once said, “is a matter of building bridges.” And perhaps, no bridge is more important than the bridge to the future. As educators, it’s our responsibility to prepare students for the world of tomorrow. Yet tomorrow isn’t what it used to be.

The timeline from the Gold Rush to Google spans just beyond 150 years, but if you look at the rate of change during this period it feels more like a geologic epoch. We’ve gone from transcontinental railroads to robotic rovers on Mars. Today an iPhone has more computing power than the entire North American Air Defense Command had in 1965.

Conversely, our system of universal education, which is about the same age, has changed more glacially. In fact, in recent decades glaciers have changed more rapidly than our schools. And this highlights the tip of a rapidly morphing iceberg: The world is undergoing foundational shifts. Universal education was designed to meet the social and economic needs of the industrial revolution. The social and economic needs of today are emerging within a digitally networked society, and the rate of change doesn’t appear to be slowing down. According to Cathy Davidson, chair of Duke University’s Digital Futures Task Force, 65 percent of today’s grade schoolers will end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

How do we prepare students for work that hasn’t been invented yet? While it’s difficult to predict what the social and economic climate will be like in the years to come, we can analyze trends and extrapolate future scenarios.

» via MediaShift

The Lessons, but click through to see it all!

1. Make it easy to start the task. 
2. Show, don’t tell.
3. Give useful and immediate feedback.
4. Make it easy to recover from failure.
5. Complicate the task gradually (As you master the task in steps)

Vivek Wadhwa: “China, India and why Peter Thiel is wrong about education,” The Washington Post  (via oninnovations)

(via adventuresinlearning)