New blog location
I've moved this blog over to wordpress: http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/
The feed and blog homepage should redirect there.
developing educational technology
I've moved this blog over to wordpress: http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/
The feed and blog homepage should redirect there.
The National Academies (of science, engineering...) have produced a number of educational books over the past decades, and it has been harder to keep track of them all, so I'm copying descriptions of some recent ones below. The nice thing is that you can read the full text of any of these books online for free. These are very useful for better understanding the problems of STEM education, especially when preparing grant proposals.
How People Learn (1999) examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system. How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005) builds on the discoveries detailed in the bestselling How People Learn.
Engineering in K-12 Education (2009) reviews the scope and impact of engineering education today and makes several recommendations to address curriculum, policy, and funding issues. The book also analyzes a number of K-12 engineering curricula in depth and discusses what is known from the cognitive sciences about how children learn engineering-related concepts and skills.
Tech Tally: Approaches to Assessing Technological Literacy (2006) determines the most viable approaches to assessing technological literacy for students, teachers, and out-of-school adults. The book examines opportunities and obstacles to developing scientifically valid and broadly applicable assessment instruments for technological literacy in the three target populations. The book offers findings and 12 related recommendations that address five critical areas: instrument development; research on learning; computer-based assessment methods, framework development, and public perceptions of technology.
Educating the Engineer of 2020 (2005) is grounded by the observations, questions, and conclusions presented in the best-selling book The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century. This new book offers recommendations on how to enrich and broaden engineering education so graduates are better prepared to work in a constantly changing global economy. It notes the importance of improving recruitment and retention of students and making the learning experience more meaningful to them. It also discusses the value of considering changes in engineering education in the broader context of enhancing the status of the engineering profession and improving the public understanding of engineering. Although certain basics of engineering will not change in the future, the explosion of knowledge, the global economy, and the way engineers work will reflect an ongoing evolution. If the United States is to maintain its economic leadership and be able to sustain its share of high-technology jobs, it must prepare for this wave of change.
What is science for a child? How do children learn about science and how to do science? Drawing on a vast array of work from neuroscience to classroom observation, Taking Science to School (2007) provides a comprehensive picture of what we know about teaching and learning science from kindergarten through eighth grade. By looking at a broad range of questions, this book provides a basic foundation for guiding science teaching and supporting students in their learning.
Learning Science in Informal Environments (2009) draws together disparate literatures, synthesizes the state of knowledge, and articulates a common framework for the next generation of research on learning science in informal environments across a life span. Contributors include recognized experts in a range of disciplines--research and evaluation, exhibit designers, program developers, and educators. They also have experience in a range of settings--museums, after-school programs, science and technology centers, media enterprises, aquariums, zoos, state parks, and botanical gardens.
Learning to Think Spatially: GIS as a Support System in the K-12 Curriculum (2006). Spatial thinking is a cognitive skill that can be used in everyday life, the workplace, and science to structure problems, find answers, and express solutions using the properties of space. It can be learned and taught formally to students using appropriately designed tools, technologies, and curricula. This report explains the nature and functions of spatial thinking and shows how spatial thinking can be supported across the K-12 curriculum through the development of appropriate support systems.
Knowing What Students Know (2001) essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored.
Technically Speaking (2002) provides a blueprint for bringing us all up to speed on the role of technology in our society, including understanding such distinctions as technology versus science and technological literacy versus technical competence. It clearly and decisively explains what it means to be a technologically-literate citizen. The book goes on to explore the context of technological literacy the social, historical, political, and educational environments.
Relying on a comprehensive review of the research, Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood (2009) lays out the critical areas that should be the focus of young children's early mathematics education, explores the extent to which they are currently being incorporated in early childhood settings, and identifies the changes needed to improve the quality of mathematics experiences for young children. This book serves as a call to action to improve the state of early childhood mathematics. It will be especially useful for policy makers and practitioners-those who work directly with children and their families in shaping the policies that affect the education of young children.
America's Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science (2005). Laboratory experiences as a part of most U.S. high science curricula have been taken for granted for decades, but they have rarely been carefully examined. What do they contribute to science learning? What can they contribute to science learning? What is the current status of labs in our nation s high schools as a context for learning science? This book looks at a range of questions about how laboratory experiences fit into U.S. high schools.
They also published the national science education standards in 1996 and a 2003 follow-up report on their influence.at 10:37 AM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: education, learning sciences, research
at 11:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: children, research, technology
One thing I've been waiting 6 years for is for blogger to allow rss/atom feeds for particular categories (tags) for their blogs. So for example you could subscribe to just the drupal-related posts or java-related posts or so forth.
Well apparently it is possible in blogger now and it has been for 2 years. It just isn't documented or supported with an interface. You have to go to your blog settings, edit the layout, then click 'edit HTML' then check the 'Expand Widget Templates' checkbox.
Now search for "data:labels" to find the relevant code (this assumes you have the categories widget enabled on your blog layout). It is in 2 sections, one if you have your categories displayed as a list and one if displayed as a cloud.Now somewhere after this loop part in each section:
<b:loop values='data:labels' var='label'>Add this line for Atom category feeds: (double-click to select whole line)
<link expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl + "feeds/posts/default/-/" + data:label.name' expr:title='data:label.name + " Atom Feed"' rel='alternate' type='application/atom+xml'/>and/or this line for RSS category feeds:
<link expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl + "feeds/posts/default/-/" + data:label.name + "?alt=rss"' expr:title='data:label.name + " RSS Feed"' rel='alternate' type='application/rss+xml'/>Now if you click the RSS icon in Firefox, it shows the main feed followed by feeds for any category.
You can also add an <a href... tag after each item to display a link to the RSS or atom feed in the categories widget box. (adapted from the instructions here and here)
Here are some category feeds for my blog:at 9:03 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: technology
Well this has little to do with education, other than Android is the only smart phone platform that you can quickly and for no cost develop educational software for I suppose. The other platforms such as iPhone and Palm Pre are either not free and open source, and/or take forever to make your app available for others to use and cost money to develop for. There is still the J2ME platform too, but I'm limiting this to newer generation smart phones.
There are now (in the U.S.) 4 Android phones to choose from. Well, 2 of them are not yet released but will be soon. All are basically identical under the hood: processor speed, touchscreen, camera, bluetooth, wireless, GPS, etc. This engadget post compares the technical features of the different Android phones, but I wanted to mention a bit more about these 4 options:
Some popular third party Android software includes ShopSavvy (scan barcodes to compare prices), Pandora (listen to music online like the Pandora website), and Repligo (read pdfs).
at 11:04 AM 2 comments Links to this post
Labels: technology
Three years ago when I started to look for a faculty position I began paying closer attention to research on college teaching. The picture is not so good. I kept a folder filled mostly with negative examples of college teaching and learning. Below is what I have in roughly chronological order, starting with the negative examples (some aren't specifically about college) and followed by some examples of approaches aimed at improving college teaching. This is an expansion of a previous post about the state of college teaching.
Some illustrations of the problem:

at 9:33 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: edtech, education, learning sciences, research, teaching
We're using many of these modules on our newly upgraded to drupal 6 department website at http://itls.usu.edu/.
Even if you're experienced with Drupal, you may not have heard of some of these modules. I encourage you to check them out to see if they are of use to your site(s). I've marked the ones I consider essential.
If you'd like to know how we did some of the features on our site just contact me, or wait a few weeks and I'll be releasing a generic version of our site (called "Department 2.0"). For example there is a job board, upcoming calendar events block, slideshow, customized listing of people, and our groups have numerous custom views and blocks and features (see my Foundations of Educational Technology class group page for example).
I haven't tried this for real yet, only tested it with a local xampp-based drupal site, but here's a shell script that quickly creates drupal sub-sites, say, for students. The sub-sites use the same database as your main drupal site, but each has its own table prefix.
So basically if you already have drupal installed, say at http://your.drupal.host/ , the script below makes it easy to create sub-sites like http://your.drupal.host/student1 and http://your.drupal.host/student2 . This uses drupal's multi-site feature.
You just copy the below script to a file and make it executable (chmod 700 makesite.sh), edit some of the settings in it (like change "nobody" to "www-data" if using debian/ubuntu, and "localhost" to "your.drupal.host" or whatever), and then on the command line change (cd) to your drupal root folder and run:
sudo /path/to/makesite.sh student1Of course replacing 'student1' with whatever site name you want to use, and then you or your student/user can visit http://your.drupal.host/student1/install.php to finish the drupal installation.
Of course, backup your main site's database before using this (see the backup and migrate module).
For other related options see aegir, densite (both of which use separate databases per site), and domain (in which multi-sites not only share the same database but the same tables as well).
This script doesn't handle sub-sites with their own domain names (see densite or aegir instead), and it doesn't create cron jobs for each drupal site (see densite or just enable poormanscron on each site). Of course any modules or themes installed under sites/all/modules or sites/all/themes can be shared by all the sub-sites, so you only need to install them once. If you want a module or theme just for one particular subsite, install it under sites/your.drupal.host.student1/modules or sites/your.drupal.host.student1/themes or whatever the names are. Those sub-folders and the files folder are already created for you with the right permissions by the script.
I'll also probably be using modules like theme_editor and zenophile so that students won't need command line or ftp access to edit the look of their sites.
#makesite.sh ##About this script: ##This script will create a drupal sub-site using table prefixes. ##It assumes you already have a main drupal site running, ##and can be used to create sub-sites, such as: ## http://yoursite/subsite ##The database tables will have prefix: subsite__ ##The script also assumes that your main drupal site has ##no prefix ''. If that's not the case, edit the sed line below ##To run it: ## -First change the options below (apache user, site host) ## -cd into your root drupal folder (cd /var/www, etc) ## -run: sudo /path/to/makesite.sh subsitename ## 'subsitename' should have only have letters/numbers ## also it should not duplicate an existing sub-folder ## -then visit http://yoursite/subsitename/install.php ## to finish the drupal install ##### CHANGE THESE 2 or 3 TO MATCH YOUR CONFIG: ##### #what user does apache2/httpd run under: APACHEUSER="nobody" #www-data on debian/ubuntu #what is the root hostname/url of your main drupal site: SITEHOST="localhost" #root hostname for main drupal site #where to find the settings.php we'll base sub-sites on: DEFAULTFOLDER="default" #main sites/default/settings.php file #########Stuff below shouldn't need editing:######## if [ $# -ne 1 ] then echo "Usage: sudo $0 directoryname" exit 1 fi if [ $(whoami) != "root" ]; then echo "You need to run this script as root." echo "Use sudo $0 directoryname" exit 1 fi if [ -d $1 ] then echo "$1 already exists, please use a different name" exit 1 fi echo "Creating symlink from $1 to ." ln -s . $1 NEWSITEDIR="sites/$SITEHOST.$1" echo "Creating sub-site folders at $NEWSITEDIR" mkdir $NEWSITEDIR mkdir $NEWSITEDIR/files mkdir $NEWSITEDIR/themes mkdir $NEWSITEDIR/modules chown -R $APACHEUSER $NEWSITEDIR echo "Copying settings.php" OLDSETTINGS="sites/$DEFAULTFOLDER/settings.php"; if [ ! -f $OLDSETTINGS ] then echo "Cannot find default settings.php file: $OLDSETTINGS" exit 1 fi NEWSETTINGS="$NEWSITEDIR/settings.php" cp $OLDSETTINGS $NEWSETTINGS chown $APACHEUSER $NEWSETTINGS PREFIX="$1__" echo "Using table prefix: $PREFIX" sed -i "s/\$db_prefix = '';/\$db_prefix = '$PREFIX';/" $NEWSETTINGS echo "FINISHED: Visit http://$SITEHOST/$1/install.php to finish"
at 10:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: drupal
I was emailing our library about purchasing some recent books and thought I'd cc the list here, along with some other recent books our library does have but you may not be aware of.
at 4:38 PM 1 comments Links to this post
Labels: embodiment, learning sciences, research, teaching
I've already commented on this before here and elsewhere, but I'd be a bit cautious about separating certification assessments from learning support ("disaggregating education"). The example I gave before was programming certifications, which some people just cram for (test preparation), and it has devalued the worth of those certifications to the detriment of the people (with a CS degree or not) who need these jobs and the employers who need those people.
This is already happening in other areas of K-12 and higher education to some degree, however. Dan Hickey (professor at Indiana) explains why test preparation in K-12 schools is "is educational malpractice, because that knowledge is useless for any other purpose" in his post What participatory assessment is NOT on a new "re-mediating assessment" blog devoted to assessment issues:Test prep programs raise achievement scores by training students to recognize hundreds or even thousands of specific associations that might appear on tests. Because of the way our brain works, we don’t need to “understand” an association to recognize it. All test prep programs have to do is help students recognize a few more associations as being “less wrong” or “more correct” to raise scores. Because of the way tests are designed, getting even a handful of the more difficult items correct can raise scores. A lot. And this is the root of the problem this blog is dedicated to solving. We believe that the way knowledge is remediated for tests makes that knowledge entirely worthless for teaching, and mostly worthless for classroom assessment. Specifically, we believe that training kids to recognize a bunch of isolated associations is mostly worthless for anything other than raising scores on the targeted tests. Test preparation practices and the politically motivated lowering of passing scores (“criteria”) on state achievement tests is why scores on state tests have gone up dramatically under No Child Left Behind, while scores on non-targeted tests (like the National Assessment of Educational Progress) and lots of other educational outcomes (like college readiness) have declined. Here is an article referencing some of the earlier studies. We are particularly distressed the so many schools find their computer laboratories locked up and their technology budgets locked down by computer based test preparation and interim “formative” testing. Despite a decade of e-rate funding, many students in many schools still don’t have access to networked computers to engage in networked technology practices that are actually useful.That's not to say 'disaggregating education' is wrong or a bad idea, necessarily, but there are some tough issues such as these. One solution might be to include performance assessments in the disaggregated certification and assessment services, but I'm not sure how to formalize performance assessments in all areas of K-12 and higher education (or perhaps formalizing is itself part of the difficulty). Another issue is that most recent research is showing that assessment works best for students when it is integrated with instruction and is a part of learning support, as in formative assessment. Perhaps formal certification PLUS for example a portfolio of work related to one's learning is a step towards solving that issue. As the Carnegie Foundation and Lee Schulman have stated, the first step toward improving teaching is making it public (creating a 'teaching commons'), and perhaps the same is true for learning and instruction as well. Alfred Thompson struggled with a related issue on his blog, too, in regards to AP tests in high school computer science education:
There is a lot of debate about consequences of test preparation for achievement and its impact on other outcomes. We think that any programs that directly train students in specific associations on targeted tests is educational malpractice, because that knowledge is useless for any other purpose. This is because we think that knowledge is more about successful participation in social practices. And these practices have very little to do with tests scores. So, in summary, test preparation is the epitome of what participatory assessment is not. Our next post will try to explain what it is.
I see a lot of great success in the computer science field on the part of students who did not even pass the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam. The students who did get 4s and 5s on the exam have also done well. So what does the APCS exam tell me about my students future success? Nothing.Also on the re-mediating assessment blog is a post by Jenna McWilliams about mediation and re-mediation. Mediation "refers to communication technologies that we use to mediate, frame, and scaffold our social relations with one another and with our material worlds," and re-mediation "is a complete reorganization of thinking--new ideas that are mediated in new ways."
....for the teachers who are not readers and for the teachers who worry about the multiple choice questions I’m not sure they get a lot of value from their students taking the exam. And there is that nagging problem of “teaching to the test” that gets to some of us.
I’ll leave you with one more thought. Real life is an open book test. I strongly believe that. It is one of the great lessons I have learned in my life. Some people never do well on the “read and regurgitate” sort of test that makes up so much of standardized testing. It is just not the way their minds work. They learn well. They know how to find things out. They are willing to work hard to find a way. They’re just not test takers. On the other hand the kids who do well on standardized tests so what? If the real world is really an open book tests how do standardized closed book tests reflect how the test takers will do in real life?