Hi everyone! This afternoon I went to a short seminar at NYPL on the News Challenge Grant offered by the Knight Foundation (you may recall the D&R where Laura and Meredith encouraged you all to submit ideas for grant proposals -- this is who we are submitting to!). Attendees ranged from librarians, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and coders, and NYPL's CEO & President Dr. Marx was even in attendance.

This article talks about measuring learning outcomes in MOOC settings. It does have some good points. They pointed out that current peer grading is like producing teacher clones which might not be the best approach. It is problematic that we ask peers to rate each other like a teacher would. I was thinking that instead of giving peers holistic scores, learners would simply extract features that would be helpful to predict or classify learning outcomes. It is pretty funny they mentioned "teachers grade st...

Hey everyone! METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council) announced that Code4LibNYC is hosting an event for anyone interested in libraries, coding, and systems/web services! The event is on Wed, Sep. 10, 2014 from 2:00pm - 4:00pm and Eric Glass, a GIS/Metadata Librarian from Columbia, will be discussing topics like geospatial data repositories, ebooks platforms created in Python and Django, social media integration in web development, and more! It's a great op...

A recent report by the Texas Tribune examines the Texan education system in terms of spending and ramifications. The Tribune reports that Texas has been consistently ranked among the bottom five states in spending on education yet finds its students scoring above average on national exams. Governor Rick Perry attributes this to stricter standards and accountability measures held by schools in Texas. Whether or not that is true remains to be seen. The lack of go...

According to a report in the New York Times, President Obama plans on taking executive action to provide some executive relief to individuals suffering from the heavy financial burden of student loan payments. In an event set to be held today, Obama is expected to go into details about plans to cap the payments on student loans at 10% of a borrower's income, previously only applicable to students with loans starting after October 2007 and continuing through October 2011. F...

A recent article in the New York Times brought to my attention an attempt to bring the trigger warning system to the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. For those unfamiliar with trigger warnings, they are basically warning tags people put on content popularized by the growing social justice movements on websites such as Tumblr. The premise is that content dealing with difficult subject matter could "trigger" a reader to recall a traumatic experience fa...

An interesting op-ed piece in the Huffington Post, by Jay Cross, the founder of "The Do-It-Yourself Degree." He talks about his strategy for testing out of courses and taking online classes to complete his degree faster.

I came across this piece by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, on the future of the resume and diploma. Most of it echoes a conversation Hui Soo and I had last year about long term plans for mSchool.

This week, we started work on the Paul Monroe collection of documents. In a nutshell, Paul Monroe was involved with a number of international products that tried to innovate the educational systems of countries like China and Iraq. I'm sure we'll learn more about him in the weeks to come, but for now, I want to bring your attention to a piece he wrote on practical education and theoretical education. This piece was written in the context of working on the educational system in China. The question of whether China should go with a more practical, then defined as vocational, or theoretical educa...