You have unlocked the Cynicism Achievement and earned the Jejune badge!
I have watched the discussion of the Mozilla Open Badges project and this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition‘s badges competition with some interest and a little skepticism about this and other proposed fragmented “gamification” of higher education. It turns out the Digital Campus podcast crew are even more skeptical. I forget who on this […]
Waivers move ahead: Dorn fails at predicting the future
Three months ago I predicted that whatever the legal issues involved, the Arne Duncan proposal of swapping waivers for state policy promises was doomed politically. Now that the waivers are happening (I gather Obama will talk about them tomorrow), it’s time to acknowledge my political instincts were wrong this summer. Instead of sinking beneath the […]
From the “to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail” files
E.D. (Don) Hirsch in this morning’s How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores column: … the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal [SAT] score of 17-year-olds. Like Hirsch, I am worried about the narrowing of the curriculum that often comes from hypertesting policies, but this […]
Duncan’s bus-tour myth about history of education classes
From an article September 8 about Arne Duncan’s bus-tour stop at the University of Michigan School of Education: One “big thing I hear consistently” from young teachers is that they spend too much time in college studying educational theory, history and philosophy and did not receive enough hands-on experience in actual classrooms, Duncan said. I don’t know which students Duncan […]
The family stretch, and a question
For the first time in a number of years, I found myself the caretaker for a sick family member this weekend and early this week. Our children are 16 and 19, so they’ve been out of the catch-every-cold years for almost a decade, and for the most part they have been independent even when sick […]