brownelearning

I’m still not caught up in David’s class, but I did notice this piece from Cory Doctorow about the Kindle 2’s text-to-voice capabilities. It seems that Doctorow agrees that you can remix any content you own… you just can’t redistribute it.

1. It’s not an infringement for a Kindle owner to use technology privately to modify a copyrighted work. If you own a painting, you can take a photo of it to carry around in your wallet – without paying the painter any extra. You can rip your CDs at home without the musician’s permission.

And you can use a technology to convert an ebook to a text-to-speech audiobook in your home without paying the author or getting his or her permission. The question gets murkier if we’re talking about selling or giving away those photos, MP3s, and audio editions, but that’s not what the Guild objects to — they say that the conversion itself infringes copyright.

(Emphasis added.)

We should keep this in mind when we philosophize over nuances in license compatibility: The consumer is permitted to remix any legitimately-obtained content in any way they see fit (with rare exception); they just can’t redistribute the resulting remix.

But if a tree falls in the woods (someone remixes some content) and no one is there to hear it (and can’t redistribute it), does it make any sound (does it matter)?

A student of mine passed along the URL to this Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. E. D. Hirsch Jr. (who I confused with David Hursh when the student told me about the article) explains one method for altering states’ testing structure to improve both reading testing and reading instruction.

What he says is not new, but is also very important: Using the same reading passages throughout a state is imprudent because students in different areas will have varying degrees of familiarity with the content. If you choose a text based on country living, your urban students will be at a disadvantage. Conversely, assessing students’ comprehension of city life will lose your rural students.

Hirsch recommends selecting reading passages from texts the students will have encountered during their classroom activities. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would agree that the state tests should present students with readings that include familiar contexts, which would mean different passages for different students.

Still, it’s nice to see someone telling us to change the bathwater rather than to throw out the baby.

I’m not one to think that a child crying is the end of the world. Kids cry for a lot of reasons, many of which are really insignificant. My son cries when his friends have to leave, or when it’s time to put away his toys. So I’m not moved by sporadic claims of tests making elementary school students cry.

But that’s the premise of this article on the reaction to Indiana’s new state tests. Apparently no one told the parents or the teachers that this year’s tests wouldn’t be like last year’s.

The state teachers union called the whole scenario a meltdown, and Indiana officials are now hiring outside experts to review the test. They’ll check whether it was properly designed, and state education officials will investigate how better to communicate to teachers and children in Frankfort and around the state to let them know the difficulty level in advance.

[...]

The Indiana Department of Education wants the outside review to confirm that the test is valid and to ensure no mistakes were made, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said.

A couple of comments: First, it’s a bit too late to call in the external reviewers. That should have been part of the test’s development cycle. Second, and I’m getting tired of saying this, per the 1999 Standards for Psychological and Education Testing, a test cannot be valid or invalid. If someone from the state office actually used those words, they’re only demonstrating that they are unqualified to be crafting the assessment.

But those are relatively minor issues compared to this one:

The state has said it will be fair when it determines the scores required to pass this year and that students shouldn’t worry if they didn’t finish the test.

Huh? Aren’t state tests supposed to compare student performance to the expectations laid out in the state education standards? That’s what we call a criterion-referenced decision. How is it that they have yet to determine the passing scores? Either a student’s performance met the standards or they didn’t. The only reason not to set a cutoff score before giving the test is that they have to see how the students perform first. It wouldn’t be prudent to have 40% or 50% of the students fail.

But then they’re not really comparing student performance to the state standards at all. They’re comparing each student’s performance to the rest of the students’ performances. That’s a norm-referenced approach. Applying norm-referenced scoring techniques to make a criterion-referenced decision is beyond incompetent.

If state test scores are interpreted as criterion-references, they tell us whether students met the state’s standards. This is extremely useful for accountability and improvement. However, if we interpret the scores as norm-references, they only indicate how well students performed relative to their peers. Obviously, for accountability and improvement purposes, these norm-references are useless because there will always be students who score lower than their classmates.

It’s too bad the Indiana Office of Education didn’t bring in outside expertise during their test development. It’s unfortunate that they’re apparently not up to speed on the latest educational testing guidelines. But it is truly frightening that they openly admit to waiting until the test responses are in before declaring the cutoff scores for a crtierion-refernced test. I know of at least one other state that does this, and it’s improper there as well.

Inside Higher Ed has an article on the session my SSRC group held at the 50th Anniversary of Title VI conference last week. I’m not mentioned, but that suits me just fine: If a quantitative analysis depends on who completes it, something is wrong.

The BBC is reporting a warning from a Scottish psychologist: Adopting the American self-esteem curricula may lead to a generation of stuck-up brats (my words, not hers). It’s hard to argue with points like this:

Dr Craig told head teachers that [assuring students' emotional well-being] was not the role of schools.

“Schools have to hold out that they are educational establishments,” she said.

“They are not surrogate psychologists or mental health professionals.”

But I’ll take issue with this one:

And she warned there was a danger the more schools taught emotional well-being, the less parents would take responsibility.

“We run the risk of undermining the family as the principal agent of sociability,” she said.

Knowing that I’ll sound a bit conspiratorial, this isn’t a risk of state-run education, it’s a goal. Parents are impediments to social justice and other worthy endeavors of education – as pointed out by Stephen Downes (“Parents need to realize that they do not own their children”) or Justice H. Walter Croskey of the Court of Appeal for the 2nd Appellate District in Los Angeles:

“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare”

Getting back to the initial point, self-esteem has been a miserable failure from a psychological point of view. It’s high time more mature and useful constructs – such as self-efficacy – took a more central role in education. (Why, yes. My dissertation was on a measure of self-efficacy.)

http://xkcd.com/552/

Contrary to popular belief, science is not about certainty, but uncertainty. At least, I think it is.

So I’m here at the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (which they somehow shorten to “SITE”). This might be a bit immature, but indulge me for a moment.

I was supposed to preside over a session (basically, just tell the people when they’re out of time), and I went to the wrong room. The room numbers I had pulled from the conference’s website were not accurate, so I had to look in the paper schedule to figure out where I was supposed to be.

So then I needed to check the paper schedule for the room where I was supposed to present this afternoon. I scanned it three or four times, but I couldn’t find my presentation. For a moment I was bordering on panick because when I registered this morning, they couldn’t find my conference name tag. Had they dropped my presentation because they thought I hadn’t registered?

Well, I finally found my presentation. It was listed first, and highlighted as shown below. (Sorry for the low-quality photo.)

Why was it highlighted? And what is that little trophy on the left?

It turns out that my paper won a best-of-show award. Wholly unexpected, I assure you, but gladly accepted. I also have a request to publish the study in SITE’s journal.