This short video chronicles the rise of credit default swaps and the subsequent impact on the financial industry better than anything else I’ve seen.
Through financial engineering – not value added – the Wizards of Wall Street were able to create a financial black hole that ultimately – well watch the video. You’ll see.
What does this have to to with education? Our industry is going to suffer along with everyone else as we work our way out of this one.
Piping hot education related blog topics served here! The debate over formative assessment, the top 10 sites for educational games, crowd-sourcing the next great novel, controversy around Microsoft’s new ads, the relationship between quality and advertising, and a hilarious spoof of Politicians all get the nod this week.
Education Week has a very interesting article about Formative Assessment. Given the burgeoning mantra that formative assessment makes the biggest difference in outcomes it is revealing to see how little consensus there is on what it really is. Is it a practice or is it a product?
John Rice has a list of the top 10 sites for free EduGames. It is worth a peek and linking through to get a sense of what kids are actually playing. This should dispel the myth that EduGames need to rival commercial games in graphics and sound. What matters most is fun game play.
Barack Obama is proposing significant new investments in early childhood education. More attention has been focused on his drive to recruit an army of new teachers but I believe the early childhood focus is equally important.
Why? As students age the gap between low performers and even average performers gets so wide that it becomes much harder to bridge it. The chart below illustrates this concept.
[This chart is for illustrative purposes only]
As print and technology products in education blend together the distinctions between textbook publishers and ed-tech providers are blurring in some very interesting ways.
A recent report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press on how on-line and traditional news media are blending together raises some provocative questions for how this will play out in education.
Several years ago schools bought technology and print products from completely different budgets and with very different purchase processes. As educators have become more sophisticated about what technology can do and what it can’t do they are demanding that providers blend the best of technology with the best of print.
Hot sizzling education publishing and ed-tech related links here! Obama’s call for more teachers, kids media preferences, 2.0 de jour, and assessing 21st Century skills all get a nod in a short week.
Eduflack talks about Obama’s call for an army of teachers. I confess that I worry about federalizing education too much, we don’t need more Reading First scandals. Having 50 laboratories is better than 1. Another wag noted a contradiction on the right – if the free market knows best and if education is the foundation for economic growth why aren’t conservatives fighting to pay teachers more? That would bring higher quality candidates into the profession via market forces.
Kids 10-14 prefer the internet to TV. AHCI Lunch has commentary on a New York Times article that revealed this finding about teens media preferences. Here is my question – why didn’t TV take off in the classroom given the power it holds over our culture? One of the core arguments about why internet tools, social media, and virtual worlds should be in classrooms is that they are where the kids already are. The same could be said for TV at any time in the last 50 years.
Fresh hot blog links to education topics here. These are some of the posts that caught my attention recently – enjoy.
Facebook for Teachers. This article is sad – lots of promise and money invested by people who just don’t get it. One district can not support their own social network – it takes hundreds of thousands of users to make these communities vibrant. How about we look at what is actually happening on Facebook for teachers? I Am Teacher – a Facebook plugin from We Are Teachers – already has almost 10,000 active users and over registered 50,000 users.
Video Games Improve Cognitive Skills. The title says it all. Go read about it on Richard Carey’s blog.
My prior post on iTunes and Textbooks started with this iMix. As I mulled the educational implications over I realized that this was exactly how teachers should be sharing instructional materials.
As a musician and music aficionado I listen to a lot of new music. My tastes range across genres – what draws my interest is solid musicianship, great lyrics, and a good tune. Over 2-3 months I probably listen to 200-300 new songs inspired by recommendations from friends, recommendations from iTunes and Pandora, and stuff I hear randomly. Oddly, I find some of the best stuff on political blogs (Juan Luis Guerra below). I rank the songs using iTunes and from the short list of 5 star songs I create a mix to share. I also toss in a couple of old favorites that I haven’t listened to in a while (like Cocker on this mix).
My musical adventures are not typical – but I hope that is why playlists like this are valuable to others. I’ve done the leg work of culling through a lot of new stuff to find the best (for my ears).
Are you interested in how video games and simulations support teaching and learning? Then the 4th annual GLS is where you should be this week. For my money it is the lowest signal to noise event that I attend all year. Oh – and you get to play some really fun games.
Here are a few random observations from day one – by no means a comprehensive review of the event or the topics covered.
In the opening session Cory Ondrejka noted that all the interesting questions about games and learning are interdisciplinary. This is a real challenge because in the institutional structure of a university there is no political base to sustain research.
Information overload is one of the defining trends of the last 10 years. The explosion of email, social media, and cellular technologies have created 24/7 leashes that drown us in information.
As publishers (and citizens) we have a responsibility to help today’s kids build good information habits in this new world.
I’ve written elsewhere about how our old behavior patterns make this worse than it needs to be. The question for today is – are you managing your information diet or is the information managing you?
It has been a while since I did a round up of blog articles, time to clean a few items out. Rather than dump a long list I’ve picked four articles I’ve found particularly interesting in the past few weeks.
Matt Mihaly over at The Forge notes that MMO’s/Virtual Worlds are some of the most valuable private tech firms in the world. I would add to Matt’s observation that 3 of the 4 firms he cites in the top 20 are for kids. Silicon Alley Insider’s original article is here.
Chris Anderson over at The Long Tail has an interesting take on the decline of the newspaper industry that is directly relevant to education publishing. Sure, readership is down, but at $45b it is still twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined. The money quote:
The Education Business Blog