Student Led Conferences: Sick and Tired of Blogs & Reflection?
Silvia Tolisano, Langwitches, April 22, 2014

I really like the idea of student-led conferences, though I think they should be used more imaginatively than to "present to their parents about the state of their learning." Why can't they be real conferences about real things, presenting original work and research they devised on their own? This would allow them to appeal to all students (one wonders how many lives would have been changed were the industrial arts students' work valued and presented as just as important as academic work (or for that matter were academic and industrial arts work valued and presented as just as important as athletics)). But more to the point, we have to get away from this: "I am writing what my teachers want to hear, but not really what I think." Why not create student-led conferences that are genuine examples of students' interests? (p.s. the name of the blog is finally explained here).

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The plot to kill the password
Russell Brandom, The Verge, April 22, 2014

Interesting look at the use of fingerprints for identification. The concept depends on two things: first, something called zero-knowledge proof, wherein the system knows that the fingerprint-based login was successful, but never has a copy of the fingerprint itself, and second (and related) the use of local devices to log you into remote services ("You’ve always got a finger and a phone, so logging in isn’t a problem, but the combination makes the security much, much harder to break"). The specification is being promoted by the FIDO Alliance, which includes most major vendors (except, of course, Apple, which never plays well with others). As for me, I would not mourn the passing of the password.

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How much should we be willing to pay for a use?
Doug Johnson, Blue Skunk Blog, April 22, 2014

Doug Johnson asks, "How do you determine if you are getting your bitcoin's worth of use from a paid resource - whether it is a reference source, full-text database, e-book subscription, or set of teaching products?" That's a tough question. It's harder because value changes with format - and with use. I remember the World Book fondly because I read the multiple volumes cover-to-cover while I was in high school. Infinitely valuable! But if it's just a reference library, costing 70 cents a search, it's not nearly the same. $5K for an annual subscription seems like a lot (it's way more than the paper copies on the shelf in the library could have cost). Why not just use Wikipedia (or better - have the students create their own encyclopedia using Wikipedia and other sources)?

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AHELO: The Ontario Experience
Mary Catharine Lennon, Linda Jonker, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), April 22, 2014

The purpose of this study was to determine whether standardized international learning outcomes assessment were possible. The study concludes it is possible: "Experts and faculty agreed on shared learning outcomes and assessment questions, and the project management and execution followed a common protocol across the globe." But there's a lot of slack around the margins. "The data are not representative of the jurisdictions or the institutions," reports the study, and "The tests themselves were not found to be accurate." Moreover, "student recruitment for low stakes testing is extremely challenging." And many of the institutions did not obtain the ethics clearance to study their own data. 49 page PDF.

As an aside, I found this interesting, as I've commented on it many times in my talks but rarely see it instantiated in practice: "Rather than assessing content knowledge, both discipline-specific assessments focused on the application of knowledge (i.e., can a student 'think like an engineer')." This is a departure from what a lot of people think about when they think about standardized tests. But it's an approach that recognizes that knowledge isn't an accumulation of facts in the brain, but rather, is a reflection of an overall brain-state: to 'know' is to see the world in a certain way, to recognize things in a characteristic way, to 'think like an engineer'.

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Blinded by scientific gobbledygook
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen, April 22, 2014

This really should spell the end of the 'gold' model of 'pay-for-publication' open access scientific publishing. It may be the end for the journal system generally, beyond a few well-known journals. In this case a badly-written mostly-plagiarized paper was accepted for publication by numerous journals (the acceptances came, of course, with a request for a publication fee). Of course, it's not just the publications. “The other problem is that scholarly writing is just dreadful and has become more and more dreadful over the past 10 years or so."

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Competencies Come to Campus
Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, April 22, 2014

The problem I have with competency-based prior assessment is that they're essentially loss leaders. It is very rare to see a university accept more than a small percentage of credits by assessment. They are even typically stingy on credit transfers from other institutions. In the boxed inset accompanying this article, for example, the student is able to apply 21 credits toward a 107 credit degree. In exchange for some lower-cost assessments up front, the university now has him on the hook for $20K in tuition for additional courses (it would be even more without the additional transfers from other institutions). Nice recruitment strategy. A proper competency assessment program would put everything on the table. But universities will resist this until the end.

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