"A long time ago, in Newsday for November 15, 1994, Billy Tashman said with reference to a large, government-sponsored field test of different instructional approaches: ‘The good news is that after 26 years, nearly a billion dollars, and mountains of data, we now know which are the most effective instructional tools. The bad news is that the education world couldn’t care less.’The same holds true today." James KauffmanWhen I first began teaching, I bristled with the desire to instruct, inspire, coach, and enlighten. I’d just been through Moray House College of Education, Edinburgh, where my tutors and mentors truly recognised the worth of excellent instruction.Yet for the past 30 years and more, I have felt like a disillusioned school teacher who is old fashioned, out of date and not really understanding what’s happening in education. The other day, a good friend and colleague passed on to me a recent article from Teachers College Record, by James Kauffman. It was written as an introduction to his recently published book,The Tragicomedy of Public Education:Laughing and Crying Thinking and Fixing.As I read through Kauffman's article, I recalled how I felt when I read Shelley Gare’s book,The Triumph of the Airheads and the Retreat from Common Sense.I experienced déjà vu at every page.James Kauffman is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In his review article, entitled Reforming Public Education: A Tragicomedy, he explains how some people, working within education, fail to recognise the most important factor in improving learning:"Truly ridiculous statements about reforming schools have been made by generally intelligent people who happen to botch thinking about education. Too often, their silly statements are taken seriously, making matters worse. Some would-be reformers ignore what produces most learning — instruction."Kauffman draws attention to all the areas of stupidity in education that I’ve complained about, for decades . . . . . . about improving teaching:"They might say we need better teachers without defining "better." People aren’t necessarily better teachers because they’re smarter, know their subject better, or have taken more courses. We need standardized tests, but good teaching isn’t easily measured as "value added." "Better teacher" doesn’t necessarily mean "higher average pupil gain score." Good instruction is defined by what a teacher does.". . . about pursuing change without recognising what needs to change:"On January 2, 2010, Kevin Huffman published in The Washington Post his heartfelt opinions about how to reform education, including suggestions that we recruit talented teachers and fire bad ones, base policies on student achievement, and get parents to demand what’s best for their children. He quotes a U.S. Senator from Colorado, who says that the education system must change, but he doesn’t say how. Any change will do? Sorry, Kevin and Senator, with all due respect, we don’t need just any kind of change. Unless it’s the right change, we’ll get nowhere.". . . about the misunderstanding and misuse of statistics:"One reason the "thinking" of so many earnest reformers is tragicomic when it’s taken seriously is that you can’t have all of the children (or teachers or any other group we measure) reaching any percentile higher than the first group any more than you can have all of the children (or teachers) above average.". . . about setting education goals that are absurdly unachievable:"No Child Left Behind (. . .) set the goal of universal proficiency of students by 2014. That goal is a will-o’-the-wisp that anyone else who understands the most basic mathematical-statistical realities knows is impossible.". . . about teaching methods inappropriately applied to all learners:"Direct, systematic instruction is more effective than other approaches like "discovery learning" (essentially, letting kids find out for themselves) and a lot of the other popular but failed ideas about teaching. Go to www.adihome.org/ to find out more.". . . about using test scores to judge success.Kauffman lists his criteria for judging success:effective instruction,students’ engagement in productive activity,homogeneous grouping for instruction,positive emotional climate,clear school-wide expectations,positive support for desired behaviour,involvement of parents and communities.Check out:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpAFlbncygMThe Tragicomedy of Public Education: Laughing and Crying Thinking and Fixing,James M Kauffman, FULL Court Press, 2010 - ISBN 1-57861-682-4The Tragicomedy of Public Education - DESK COPY

The US-based NGO All Hands Volunteers recently joined Eliademy’s community. Founded in 2005, All Hands Volunteers provides "immediate, effective and sustainable support to communities in need by harnessing the energy and commitment of dedicated volunteers" [1]. They intervene worldwide to … Continue reading →

I've been banging on about it for a little while now, so a lot of people will already know I've been looking into VLE minimum standards quite a bit. Well, thanks to the ELESIG (Evaluation of Learners' Experiences of e-learning Special Interest Group) Small Grants Scheme, I'll be sharing some more info.I'll probably be duplicating posts, but my primary blogging venue for sharing this work will be over at ELESIG - if you're not signed up there, then do. And then follow me :-)I think the ELESIG Small Grants Scheme is a great initiative to help us share the work we're doing more broadly so others can benefit from it. The great thing is applications are turned around really quickly so you're not playing the waiting game too much - applications are to be submitted by the 20th of each month and you find out within 4 weeks!I think I already work 'in the open' quite a bit, but this might make my work even more transparent, and of course ties in nicely with the newly formed North West ELESIG group that my colleague @Tundeva (Tunde Varga Atkins) has been so involved with.As well as blogging over at ELESIG, I've also committed to producing a 'research toolkit' (of sorts) that will offer a completely transparent view of what we've done and how, including sample questions for surveys and focus groups, as well as ethics application forms. The idea here is that other people interested in this area of work could essentially reuse what I've already done to help them get started and engaged in this area of research. I've also offered to record some video footage of students talking about what they want from minimum standards, how they access this content and why it's important, etc, etc.So... lots more to come about this and I can't wait to get going. See y'all soon!Peter@Reedyreedles$nbsp;The Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

At 12.51 pm on Tuesday, 22 February, the beautiful city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was devastated by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake.This was only one of the hundreds of aftershocks, following the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that shook the city on the morning of Saturday 4 September 2010.Miraculously, few people were injured in this huge shake for the city was asleep when it struck and despite its magnitude, its centre was 30 to 40 km west of the city centre. Christchurch was well on the way to recovering from this earlier devastation when the second major shake struck on Tuesday at a depth of only 5km.Tuesday’s shake caused devastation that reduced many of the homes and buildings in the inner city to rubble. Over 120 people so far are known to have died, crushed by falling debris or within collapsing buildings. Over 200 people are listed as missing. Hundreds are injured, many of them severely.The people of Christchurch have a strong spirit and they have a fine mayor in Bob Parker, whose civil defence leadership skills are second to none. But the people of Christchurch need you.Please help by donating to the Red Cross 2011 Earthquake Appealhttp://www.redcross.org.nz/donateor to the Christchurch Earthquake Appealhttp://www.christchurchearthquakeappeal.govt.nz/

IEEE Actionable Data Book (ADB) is an open standard for ebooks based on the ePub3 standard and the latest learning standard Experience API, xAPI, for data-driven learning design. The IEEE ADB project grew out of a paper, presented at the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in 2011, about a broadly applicable framework for building educational... Read More ›

With the beginning of a new month come new promises of improving yourself and getting out of your comfort zone. In May, take up the challenge of learning brand new things on Eliademy! At Eliademy, we’ve prepared you a selection … Continue reading →

I had the pleasure of waking up to find out this blog has been nominated for #ukedchat 's top 100 blogs.Bit surprised but very pleased that someone out there likes something I've said at some point in time - thanks :-)If my blog finishes bottom of that list, I really don't care! The nomination in itself feels very rewarding.Firstly I would like to thank..... (What, it's not an oscar?).Head over and see who else has been nominated and leave your vote before it closes on the 9th April. I've got my eye on a few blogs there:I like some of the work by blog.yorksj.ac.uk/moodle by @YSJTEL (or as I know that blog, @PhilVincent).Obviously dontwasteyourtime.co.uk by @hopkinsdavid is one of my faves and has to be in there for a high nomination;As well as the unbelievably popular @stevewheeler / @timbuckteeth's - steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.uk. I know Steve get's a ridiculous number of views to his blog, but I suspect we all blog about slightly different things. We're all HE Edtech I guess, but many of the other blogs on the list vary, including school/college focussed blogs.Steve posts some really good overview posts on a range of topics such as pedagogy; David has a popular series on the role of the learning technologist (which I've chipped in with) as well as mobile learning topics such as eBooks (not strictly mobile I know) and QR Codes. Phil's often discusses organisational issues related to edtech, and well, mine probably does a bit of all those, with some openness stuff thrown in for good measure.There are loads of blogs that I'm surprised are not in there - I started to list my favourites but there was too many, and I was scared in case I left any out :-)Vote Vote Vote!!!Peter@Reedyreedles$nbsp;The Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance. - Kofi AnnanThere is a principle behind and beyond the words of Kofi Annan: that effort towards eliminating any form of inequality must start and work in tandem with effort to overcome gender inequality.We live in interesting times and there never was a time needier of united humanity than today. I was much moved by Emma Watson’s United Nations speech on gender equality.She made me think again about this fundamental and hugely important humanitarian principle - "the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities". Emma approached this principle from the standpoint of feminism: "the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes . . .  it is not the word (feminism) that is important, it's the idea and the ambition behind it."Inequality is any difference that may lead to disadvantage, however slight, experienced by an individual or group of people. In many instances, the complete elimination of inequality is not possible, through factors that are simply beyond human control. Complete elimination of inequality is often a fictional, utopian state. However, the word inequality used here refers to the practical circumstances where inequality can be diminished or eliminated by human thought and action. There are two general types of inequality, one occurring when individuals or groups in the same or similar circumstances are treated differently and the other occurring when individuals or groups in different circumstances are treated the same way. Either of these inequalities results in a disadvantaged position for an individual or group.Many barriers will be met in any attempt to achieve equality, to whatever aspect of humanity that equality applies. A lot can be controlled by human thought and action. However, for most people, there are many barriers that are extremely difficult to moderate or remove. Prejudice is one such a barrier.Prejudice is a preconceived notion that is often the root cause of discrimination, committed either deliberately or unconsciously, in ways that can result in inequality. This happens specially when exercised by and within social groups. Such destructive partiality exists in individuals and is fostered in social groups throughout the world. It can exist in seemingly subtle ways that are nevertheless still expressions of prejudice or partiality. Gender partiality leads to gender inequality.  Emma Watson mentioned in her UN speech that gender inequality is a matter for men too. I post links here to two videos as examples of one aspect of gender partiality in relation to violence. They show recent social experiments on how bias can influence the actions of individuals among groups in certain situations.video 1 - Bryant Park,  New Yorkvideo 2 - Fitzroy Square, London Unmistakably, preconceived opinion about gender difference is a factor in how both men and women react differently according to the situations shown in the videos. They depict a measure of benevolent sexism that exists within societies everywhere. That aspect is among the many thousand manifestations of gender inequality that occur in societies throughout the world. The horrific statistics presented by Plan International USA for the International Day of the Girl, 11 October 2014, puts into perspective the magnitude of inequality experienced by girls and women worldwide as a result of gender prejudice.Over a period of half a century, affirmative actions taken to redress the recognised effects of gender prejudice in society have yielded limited success. Often, affirmative action made matters worse and tended to polarise opinion rather than consolidate desired principles. Emma Watson has told us "it is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals".The HeForShe movement is one that permits men and women to unite unashamedly and work towards the elimination of gender inequality. Please take this opportunity to visit the HeForShe site and register your support for this honourable cause.HeForShe is a solidarity campaign founded by UN Women for gender equality.#BAD2014 #Inequality #BlogAction #HeForShe 

Technically, beacons are devices that transmit signals that enable other devices like smartphones(can recognize the signals) to determine their relative proximity. The smartphones run apps that deliver content(trigger an action such as opening a website, playing a video or sound and more) to the users based on that proximity. Beacons go by various names including... Read More ›

We are very glad to welcome on Eliademy Premium the Torbay National Coastwatch Institution. This institution relies on a network of volunteers who keep running the Torbay Station and keep a visual safety watch around Torbay. The Torbay Station is … Continue reading →