{"id":5154,"date":"2012-07-18T17:52:27","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T21:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=5154"},"modified":"2012-07-18T18:31:11","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T22:31:11","slug":"new-education-acronym-needed-yasba-yet-another-silver-bullet-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=5154","title":{"rendered":"New education acronym needed: YASBA (yet another silver-bullet approach)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Summertime, and everyone&#8217;s all a-Twitter over <a href=\"http:\/\/udemy.com\">Eau de Me<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/udacity.com\">You the City<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coursera.org\/\">Corps Ser\u00e1<\/a>, and other MOOC platforms (MOOC = massively-open online courses, <a href=\"http:\/\/opencontent.org\/blog\/archives\/2436\">though they aren&#8217;t<\/a>). ((For employees of these enterprises upset with my making fun of your names, please remember that <em>your own choices gave me the straight line<\/em>. And the folks at <a href=\"http:\/\/digitalcampus.tv\">Digital Campus<\/a> agree with the silliness of these names.)) That pounding has become even louder now that UVa joined Core Ser\u00e1 (okay, Coursera) just a few weeks after the UVa Board of Visitors tried to push Teresa Sullivan out because &#8230; they weren&#8217;t happy with how fast UVa was moving in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bogost.com\/blog\/moocs_are_marketing.shtml\"><del>High-Profile Branding<\/del><\/a> online space.<\/p>\n<p>I like\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/blogs\/innovations\/going-public-the-uva-way\/33623\">Siva Vaidhyanathan&#8217;s column on the UVa choice<\/a> for a down-to-earth explanation of what involvement with Coursera means. He speaks the truth even though he&#8217;s a kid from Buffalo who acquired a Texas accent. And I think we need an easy way to identify silly arguments about what a policy or practice can do, both to puncture overinflated egos and bring discussion back to reality: Yet Another Silver-Bullet Approach, or YASBA.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>When someone says MOOCs will bring the end of universities &#8220;as we know it,&#8221; they&#8217;re using YASBA.<\/p>\n<p>When someone says TFA will revolutionize teaching, they&#8217;re using YASBA.<\/p>\n<p>When someone tries to sell a particular textbook series as bringing everyone to &#8220;100% proficiency&#8221; (whatever that means), they&#8217;re using YASBA. Same with assertions that a textbook is somehow &#8220;college- and career-ready&#8221; or &#8220;Common Core ready.&#8221; All YASBA.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As Vaidhyanathan observes, MOOCs (even misnamed) are interesting and justifiable without having to claim they&#8217;ll solve the world&#8217;s problems. I think TFA is justifiable in some cities to address specific teacher shortages, but this week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theonion.com\/articles\/my-year-volunteering-as-a-teacher-helped-educate-a,28803\/\">The Onion prod<\/a> is on the money on its limits. And some textbooks are clearly better than others. But to reinterpret small, partial solutions as YASBA is to damage both the idea you&#8217;re boosting and the way we discuss education policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summertime, and everyone&#8217;s all a-Twitter over Eau de Me, You the City, Corps Ser\u00e1, and other MOOC platforms (MOOC = massively-open online courses, though they aren&#8217;t). ((For employees of these enterprises upset with my making fun of your names, please remember that your own choices gave me the straight line. And the folks at Digital [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-1l8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5154"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5160,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5154\/revisions\/5160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}