The Village Green

George Siemens has posted an entry on his elearnspace blog with links to two short and very interesting PDF documents that detail some of the current practices of how people interact with different media types. Well worth taking the time to read.

http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/archives/003072.html

eSchool News is reporting that 96% of online teens (9-17) connect with their peers using social networking tools. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet close to 96% of all schools respond to social networking by blocking access. Seems like a disconnect here somewhere.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=7304

Dangerously Irrelevant has posted a new listing of the top edublogs for 2007. This is an interesting look at the process behind creating the list, which includes combining rank and authority. I think it is an interesting inside look at how data can be used in different ways to yield different results. This blog comes in at number 1944 out of 3634.

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2007/08/top-edublogs—.html

eSchool News is reporting that the Indianapolis Public Schools has accidently published confidential student data online. It will be interesting to see the financial implications for the district as a result of this accident. It also points out one of the potential pitfalls for schools as we move toward more and more data collection about our students and the educational process.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=7088

eSchool News online published an article reporting on an appearance by Bill Gates before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. He made a case for establishing an education data center to track trends, identify what works, and generally provide the long-promised data-driven instruction we all hear so much about in education these days. The call for more attention to education is laudable, and I hope good things come out of it. I’m also a little skeptical. Recently I read a book called The Future of Everything, the Science of Prediction (ISBN-13: 978-1-56025-975-6) by David Orrell, PhD. In the book, he makes a compelling case for why the fields of weather, health, and wealth have such difficulty in making predictions. He explores the historic roots of predictions and points out the impossibility of making certain types of accurate forecasts. While he does not directly address the field of education, I found myself wondering how if educational forecasts would be subject to the same limitations. I’m a firm believer in the individual nature of learning. Spotting educationally significant trends will hopefully provide some benefit to students as a whole, but I doubt that it will ever provide the necessary insight needed for each student as an individual.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=6935