Links for 6/3/10

Tom Vander Ark

Events of this week illustrate why there is so little private R&D in education. In short, the market sucks. The combination of an inefficient bureaucratic three-tiered governance structure and outright hostility to private service providers from public employee groups…

these attacks reduce private investment in education. Fifteen years into online learning, students still slog through digital textbooks when they should have their choice of engaging and adaptive learning experiences. Why would companies like K12, Connections, KCDL, and Apex spend $100 million to produce second generation content when states continue to attack their basis of existence?...

Jeffrey R. Young

One of the most difficult tasks has been changing attitudes to encourage large-scale collaborations. Not every astronomer has been happy to give up those solo telescope sessions…

"The culture shift is the sharing of data," says Mr. Lazowska. "And the astronomers have led the way."…

The typical practice in the mid-1990s was to guard data because it was so difficult to get telescope time, and scholars did not want to get scooped on an analysis of something they gathered.

One incident demonstrates the mood at the time. A young astronomer saw a data set in a published journal and wanted to reanalyze it, so he asked his colleague for the numbers. The scholar who published the paper refused, so the junior scholar took the published scatterplot, guessed the numbers, and published his own analysis. The original scholar was so upset that he called for the second journal to retract the young scholar's paper.

Mr. Szalay said that astronomers changed their minds once the first big data sets hit the Web…

Kevin Carey

colleges aren’t racing to adopt learning-focused innovations because nobody holds anybody accountable for student learning in higher education, not at the institutional, departmental, or individual faculty levels. Whose career benefits if more freshmen pass Calculus? No one, really…

Robin Hanson

frequent school scoring serves the function of making kids accept dominance and inequality...