Hey y'all. In apparent EdLab fashion, here's my recap of the summer that was.

I had the benefit of coming in a week before Rebecca and Rebekah and spent that first week getting acquainted with the ins and outs of EdLab. By the time they got here I was already a veteran.

When my fellow Future of Library Interns came the fun really began. Like the previous posts, we started out by working on drumming up interest in Vialogues in the wake of it's award from AASL. Here's the video I created on Vialogues which will hopefully used for library instruction:

Shortly thereafter, we got busy working on our Moodle Courses. After initially toying around with a course on oyster farming, which I've never done (but would like to try after my midlife crisis), I created a course on Google Analytics. You'll remember our wonderful D&R presentation on Moodle Courses, from which I received useful feedback on my course (my thanks to you guys).

Some recent news coming from the world of coding education:

Firstly, Khan Academy has recently rolled out interactive coding courses, which might serve to put to rest criticism from constructivists regarding the efficacy of Khan courses. The courses are styled so users can code along with tutorials in the browser and see the output in a separate pane in realtime. Check out this example. Here is the source.

Next, we have the story of FreeCause, a loyalty rewards company, which partnered up with CodeAcademy to come up with an initiative entitled the Codinization Project, designed to teach all of it's employees to code. CodeAcademy has gone on to partner with other companies as well, though they're unable to name those companies at this time. Though employees did not necessarily use coding in their positions, the experience was generally perceived as beneficial.

Millstone, Jessica. National Survey and Video Case Studies: Teacher Attitudes about Digital Games in the Classroom. Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. 2012 May 2.

Full disclosure: I'm on the fence re: gamification. I think games primarily serve as a means of escape, and introducing real life applications based on gameplay seems counteractive. As such, I was particularly interested in the results of the author's research.

This study polled over 500 teachers who used video games in a classroom setting in order to get a sense of their experiences. The makeup of those polled vary widely; 20% of educators polled worked in special education, and 60% taught in Title I schools. 5 case studies were also analyzed and used to enrich the quantitative data. Some of the statistics that stood out are as follows:

Dear Everyone,

As of today, I will have my M.S. in Library and Information Science. With this great honor bestowed upon me, I am no longer a future librarian of the future, but rather, a bonafide librarian of the present & future. Enemies of libraries and knowledge everywhere, beware!

Did you know if Massachusetts was a country it's 8th graders would rank 3rd globally in math and science aptitude? Minnesota (shoutout to Laura, Bob Dylan, and Prince) also ranks pretty high up there. Unfortunately, these two shining examples get lumped in with the rest of our middling United States, which ranks 23rd and 31st, respectively, in science and math. So what is Minnechusetts doing differently?

As a recent article in Scientific America puts it:

they each have science standards that set a high bar for what students are expected to learn at each grade level. Such standards form the scaffolding on which educators write curricula and teachers plan lessons, and many experts believe them to be closely linked with student achievement.

While that's all well and good for those 2 states, there's also good news on the horizon for the rest of the country. 26 states, working in collaboration with various organizations, have developed new standards, called Next Generation Science Standards, "based on recommendations from the National Research Council". The plan also places a special emphasis on engineering.

Via McSweeney's Useful New Internet Messages. Reminded me of Janice's post about creative ideas for error messages.

Hoxby, Caroline and Leigh, Andrew. 2004. Pulled Out or Pushed Away? Explaing the Decline of Teacher Aptitude in the United States. American Economic Review, 94(2): 236–240.

Nothing grabs a reader like a controversial headline.

The "two main hypotheses for the decline" of teacher quality since the 1960's are, as stated by Hoxby and Leigh, more job opportunities for women as a result of the feminist movement, and compressed teacher wages due to unionization. These are termed as the pull (more attractive salaries in other fields) and push (teachers forced out by stagnant wages) hypotheses.

So, who's to blame? Data on salaries and teacher aptitude (based on college transcripts) between 1963 - 2000 were analyzed for this study. The results indicated earnings for high aptitude women did not reflect significant gains compared to lower aptitude women; however, that is to say salaries of both high- and low-aptitude women rose at about the same rate over 40 years. However, high aptitude women in the teaching profession saw their earnings go down as compared with their lower aptitude counterparts. This can be attributed to a compression in pay, a practice starting (intentionally or not) with the rise of teacher unions.

Hanushek, E. A. (2011). The Economic Value of Higher Teacher QualityEconomics of Education Review, 30(3), 466-479.

There has been a lot of talk about the qualitative value of a good teacher, but what about assigning a hard number to the value of one? There will always be debate about the methodologies used in studies that measure teacher effectiveness, but Eric Hanushek attempts to quantify the value of teachers in America by projecting the economic value of their students.

The method used is fairly straightforward and uses assumptions backed up by facts. Certain teachers consistently have students who score above average on standardized testing; students who perform well on standardized tests generally go on to earn more money over the course of their lifetime, and the number of high earners contribute positively to the nation's GDP. Hanushek suggests every effective teacher might be responsible for creating $500,000 a year to the economy.

As this blog will testify, there has been an uptick in chatter about the internet taking a bite out of higher ed.

Jordan Weissmann wrote a piece last week for the Atlantic entitled Why the Internet Isn't Going to End College as we Know It.

The author's main thrust

is that nobody has figured out how to build a cheap, high-quality online university. Not even close.

But while enrollment in for-profit colleges has kept on going up in the past decade, so too have non-profit public and private institutions. Weissman argues

What appears to have happened is that demand for higher education has pushed our traditional educational infrastructure past capacity, allowing for-profit schools to swoop in and aggressively market to students at the low-end of the market.

As for the fairly recent announcement of schools like Stanford and MIT making some course content available online, the author suggests

Zickuhr, K., Rainie, L., Purcell, K., Madden, M., and Brenner, J. (2012). Libraries, patrons, and e-books. Pew Internet and American Life Project.

As a part of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, a report on the current state of libraries & e-books was commissioned that gives us a sense of the direction libraries are headed.

Quantitative data was collected by Pew through phone surveys of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 16 and up. Qualitative surveys were completed by ~4400 library patrons regarding their e-book usage, while ~1200 librarians completed the same questionnaire.

The findings of this comprehensive study are by no means shocking, but it does a satisfactory job of providing library directors with a model to frame their long-term planning in. Among their more notable results: