Verkauf von Trauer politics: the exhaust-the-listener poll
Fordham’s Gadfly blog is starting to flack a bad poll on public-employee collective bargaining, focusing on Ohio. I skimmed through the national poll results and the Ohio poll results, and the basic question I have on first reading is which masochists stayed on the phone through the end of the call? You don’t see any questions […]
“Credentialized badge” is an oxymoron?
A few additional thoughts on the Digital Media and Learning Competition badges for learning competition this year: ((On Friday I had a little Magritte-ish fun with the open badges idea, and in May I explained why badges may not be a great idea for students moving between institutions; think “credit transfer problem” multiplied many times […]
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 […]