I’ve had to— as they say in scoring large scale writing assessments— “recalibrate.” I’ve recalibrated my attitude toward IRBs and their need when it comes to evaluating interventions designed to better communities. I attended a session today at Light Hall on “IRB issues in community-engaged research” and sponsored by the Vanderbilt IRB. I had no [...]
“Joinery” refers both to the craft of a joiner, someone who makes things by joining together pieces of wood, and to the premises from which the craft is practiced.
Evaluation
Government site lists our work with CSO as part of science stimulus spending
An entry from yesterday’s Slashdot discussions- Accountability of the Scientific Stimulus Funding- tipped me off to hunt for a mention of the NIH grant to the Center for Science Outreach and, tacitly, our work with it.
Sure enough. Just a little while ago, I went the the federal government site mentioned, ScienceWorksForUs, clicked on the [...]
Brief explanation of narrative fragments given in SenseMaker ad
One of David Snowden early, but recent, videos is this rather extended ad on the Sensemaker suite for analyzing “narrative fragments.” We saw what the software will do when we were in Raleigh at the end of October for the Cognitive Edge course.
Listen to the intro to get an idea of the value and usefulness [...]
Final Bracey report takes to task push for “high-quality schools,” mayoral control of schools, & higher standards
Just received an email from the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder announcing the 2009 edition of the Bracey report:
BOULDER, Colo. and TEMPE, Ariz. (November 9, 2009) — The 2009 edition of the annual “Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education” offers a sober assessment of [...]
Gerald W. Bracey, defender of public education…
This afternoon I returned home from a work session. Had some more forms to fill out and return to Vandy. Then I turned to my email that had accumulated since this morning. Read the notice from the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado that Jerry Bracey died Tuesday night in [...]
Resurrecting IDEF0/ICOM modeling work
In the last half of the 90s I worked in the Indianapolis field office of PRC, Inc., a high tech “Beltway” defense contractor with headquarters in McLean. Our office, though, was geared toward servicing educational clients. We had a ESEA Chapter 1 (or Title I, depending on which political party occupied the White House) [...]
Frank Smith’s Learners’ Manifesto
The irritating, provocative Frank Smith included the manifesto on Page 62 of his book, Insult to Intelligence. It struck me as relevant when I first read it and I’ve had a copy posted on my bulletin boards ever since. It is not perfect and there are a couple of points with which I quibble. Nonetheless, [...]
Been re-reading Ramalingam, et al’s Exploring the science of complexity…
to identify some measures and descriptive information we could use and gather for an evaluation project. Measurement methods such as sociograms— to see who is connected to who, particularly in terms of feedback and feedback processes; social network analysis (SNA)— to look at possible emergent properties of the networks; questions to use in structured [...]
Here are some biases I am aware that I fall prey to …
Information bias and Planning fallacy. Big time for the latter. I know evaluators and researcher often succumb to Confirmation bias, Déformation professionnelle, and Experimenter’s or Expectation bias. We, evaluators, often interview and survey others as to why they chose or did certain things. They may select among the options given, when, in reality, their decisions [...]
Decision-making & behavioral biases: How are you affected?
Here’s the list from Wikipedia. It has grown since I studied them years ago in speech com at West Virginia University. I more or less specialized in what was called then, “receiver” biases. If we do have four “systems” operating in our brain and, as Kahneman suggests, we lean toward the intuitive first in making [...]