Thursday, December 4, 2008

Name by name, Obama's Cabinet taking shape

Name by name, Obama's Cabinet taking shape
Day by day, name by name, President-elect Barack Obama's Cabinet is taking shape, and other top jobs are being filled.

School District to Bailout: We Want In

School District to Bailout: We Want In

A financially struggling suburban Cleveland school district has joined the queue of companies and local governments asking for funds from the $700 billion TARP.


Opening Up Education

Opening Up Education
Opening Up Education is an MIT Press book edited by Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar; the subtitle is "The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge." The free ebook is, appropriately, available in an open access ipaper edition (Flash format) or via pdf files. (A print version may also be purchased from MIT Press.) The book includes a useful Foreword by John Seely Brown and valuable Introduction and Conclusion sections by the editors; the core of the book contains 27 chapters by diverse authors, many of them leaders in their fields. 
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"Given the abundance of open education initiatives that aim to make educational assets freely available online, the time seems ripe to explore the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education. Despite the diversity of tools and resources already available—from well-packaged course materials to simple games, for students, self-learners, faculty, and educational institutions—we have yet to take full advantage of shared knowledge about how these are being used, what local innovations are emerging, and how to learn from and build on the experiences of others. Opening Up Education argues that we must develop not only the technical capability but also the intellectual capacity for transforming tacit pedagogical knowledge into commonly usable and visible knowledge: by providing incentives for faculty to use (and contribute to) open education goods, and by looking beyond institutional boundaries to connect a variety of settings and open source entrepreneurs."


FCAT substitute tests boost graduate rate

FCAT substitute tests boost graduate rate

Florida's improving graduation rate is strongly driven by students who failed to pass the FCAT exit exam, but still managed to get a diploma through an exemption: a high enough score on another standardized ...