education
Student loses suit over school ID requirement
Student loses suit over school ID requirement
Wired's David Kravets reports that:
The girl’s father, Steven, wrote the school district explaining why removing the chip wasn’t good enough, that the daughter should be free from displaying the card altogether. “‘We must obey the word of God,” the father said, according to court documents. “By asking my daughter and our family to participate and fall in line like the rest of them is asking us to disobey our Lord and Savior.”
Unfortunately, in the modern American climate of violence, it’s hard to support someone who refuses to wear an ID, especially with the the tracking removed by the school. You can download the 25-page ruling as a PDF document here.
Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon
Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon
This is wonderful stuff: with a shortage of STEM talent these days, it’s imperative to involve all those who are interested, and this project serves to reduce the barrier to entry for deaf students.
(Via Evening Edition)
John's Tumblr: We can do better than lecture videos
John’s Tumblr: We can do better than lecture videos
What I meant to say about this article about online education: MOOCs are a breakthrough in distribution of educational content, but not really a breakthrough in the way that we learn. What this article points out is that there are more important developments in the way we teach and learn…
Mr. Lilly makes some great points. There is a great opportunity here for colleges to partner with coworking organizations to integrate local “MOOC clubs” into the surrounding community.
Secondary market for class notes: copyrighted free speech or lazy cheater's dream?
"Do Students Have Copyright to Their Own Notes?"
This is a decent article by Tina Barseghian of KQED’s Mindshift blog, but unfortunately it isn’t cynical enough for me. It talks about school policies banning the sharing or selling of class notes. It sets up the dichotomy of a professor’s right to be free from unvetted transcriptions of their lecture and a student’s copyright in the original bits of their notes, touching on free speech implications along the way.
Some school policies (and the criticisms attacking them) may confuse these issues. Most, however, appear to ban sharing or selling any part of your notes, whether you transcribed the lecture or only wrote down your own thoughts on the material.
My problem with the article itself is Barseghian doesn’t mention one of the most important caveats to the professors’ reputations/students’ copyrights/students’ free speech conundrum: that not all students sharing and selling notes are innocently “sharing knowledge” or innocently trying to get their First Amendment on.
Some students “borrow” or buy notes because they are lazy or cheating, or both. Sure, somewhere in the middle there are students who do their own work and choose to supplement it with third-party notes. But I’m too cynical to believe the lazy cheaters aren’t in the majority.