“Phil Piety’s book employs insights from the learning sciences to illuminate policies and practices for using information to improve American education. His analyses reveal deeply-held convictions by educators concerning uses of data and why some of the test-based policies of…
Blog Archives
What is Digital Personalization?
Excerpt from the book Assessing the Educational Data Movement to be published in April, 2013 One of the issues to emerge in policy discourse and from funders as the educational data movement was taking hold involved personalized learning. While education…
Posted in Information infrastructure, Signs of the times
What is Big Data For Education?
Big data is a new term that can imply both new forms data and new analytic techniques. While big data is routine for many businesses and some sciences, it is new to education. Two characteristics of big data (in addition…
Posted in Big ideas & theories, Information infrastructure, Signs of the times Tagged with: #big data
Can Education Data Reforms Learn from Business Experience with IT?
The past decade has seen increasing use of data collection and use in education along with principles from business for its use. The data were initially driven by high-stakes test scores following federal NCLB legislation and related programs around evidence.…
What Does the Increase in the Federal Digital Footprint Mean in a Post-NCLB World?
As bolts are being taken out of the structure of NCLB, one area I have been thinking about is how over the last decade the Federal government has been expanding its role in the area of digital technology. What does…
How can we make online educational content findable and usable?
How can we make online educational content findable and usable? Albert Einstein famously said that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Open Tests….is he CRAZY?
In a recent post in EducationNext, Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution asked why not have open tests? An open test would mean publishing online and in advance items that might be on an accountability test. IS HE CRAZY? This…
How Can Infrastructures Affect Teachers & Systemic Improvement?
A recent discussion between David K. Cohen of the University of Michigan and the Fordham Institute’s Chris Tessone used the term infrastructure. Cohen, in an earlier post on ShankarBlog (from the American Federation of Teachers’ Shankar Institute), argued that individual…
Are All Teacher-Student Linkages Created Equal?
Across the nation educators and their technologists have been working to implement what is a seemingly simple information systems enhancement: linking the records for teachers with the records for students. This should seem to involve a matt of linking two…
