We’re giving a panel on Redefining Data Driven at SXSW EDU this year. If there’s any chance you’re in Austin and can sneak in, or are coming to the event, come check us out. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the meme creator this morning.

Our talk has been listed twice on the top 5/10 unmissable talks of SXSWEDU!

Please use hashtag #dataftw to ask questions.

The following guest post is from educator Jac De Haan of TechWithIntent.com

As the US Department of Education moves to rebrand No Child Left Behind and increase the significance of high-stakes testing, there is a counter-movement growing in the teaching work-force to provide relevant educational experiences that encourage students to do more than just memorize and recite facts.

National policy-level decisions are mobilizing teachers to speak up about what works (and what doesn’t work) in education:

• active student engagement with content,
• recognition of failure as a valid and essential component of learning,
• teacher role as a facilitator & guide, not just a content-expert,
• exposing the learning process as a fluid, sometime murky experience,
• recognition that real-world experiences are often stickier than rote learning,
• learning environments that reflect the complex and connected nature of our planet,
• opportunities to practice soft-skills that aren’t necessarily quantifiable: compromise, active listening, synthesis, etc,
• learning outcomes that aim for the higher order thinking skills identified in Bloom’s Taxonomy (see illustration).

Many schools are working to capture, re-create & scale these successes into a mission statement. Curriculum designers and Web 2.0 companies are using adjectives that reflect these best teaching practices in their marketing to teachers, families and students. As words such as “collaborative”, “creative” and “innovative” find their way into more and more written materials – from iPad apps to book lists – teachers should not lose sight of the day-to-day actions required on the path to these abstract descriptors.

Kevin Carey, talking about Innovation in the Higher Education sector, talked about changes brought about by technology and policy.

I wonder when Pay for Performance (popularized by its use in healthcare) will be instituted in higher ed.

A new book from the University of Chicago, called Academically Adrift elucidates the alarming fact that educational institutions don’t need to share information about outcomes in order to receive governmental Pell funding.

The book cites data from student surveys and transcript analysis to show that many college students have minimal classwork expectations — and then it tracks the academic gains (or stagnation) of 2,300 students of traditional college age enrolled at a range of four-year colleges and universities. The students took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (which is designed to measure gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other “higher level” skills taught at college) at various points before and during their college educations, and the results are not encouraging:

Here’s the most pertinent part of the video, discussing use of technology, 5 minutes in.

Via the library of economics and liberty & Reihan Salam

We’re proud to announce our collaboration with Flip-Lab.

What is FlipLab?

The growing interest in digital learning tools has sparked inquiry into how educators can utilize time-shifted content delivery to enhance teaching. At FlipLab, we are committed to actualizing the potential of a flipped classroom, but creating online-accessible content is only the first step.

In Spring 2012, twenty educators (five each from Math, English, Science, and History) will come together for a two-day workshop to explore the potential positive impacts of flipping their classrooms. The cohort will build common core aligned video content and then design classroom experiences that engage 21st century skills and provide higher-order thinking opportunities.

Why?

We believe that teachers are in the best position to learn from research, innovate in their classroom and develop quality educational experiences. By coming together to immerse themselves in theory, develop new practices, and share what works, FlipLab attendees will be drafting the road map for other teachers interested in flipping their classroom.

Experience a true 21st century learning workshop. For more information, please visit www.flip-lab.com

For more information, contact Jac De Haan (@techwithintent), our “Creative Edtech Guru”, who writes at the blog: TechWithIntent.com.

A great startup quote to live by, from Ingvar Kamprad.

I (Ash) was reading this post about the history of software version control and was amazed by the types of innovations that we have seen in the past several years.

In order to understand the article, you’ll first need to understand version control — It’s the way that individual and groups of developers maintain versions of software and code that they’re writing.

Here’s my favorite part of Francis’ commentary:

Have a quick look back up at those decades of progress. Yes, some of the advances were also enabled by increasing computer power. But mainly, they were simply made by people thinking of cleverer ways of collaborating.

I was intrigued that the ones that have happened in the last decade or so have been ones that are oriented around collaboration with other people. In the last 7 years, we’ve learned how social networking can help connect us to other people.

It’s clear to me that social networking is a precursor to connecting with other people for a more specific intent or purpose. This is very different from the timid, klugey, and “forced” ways we connect with each other today. I think we’ll look back at the “Like” on facebook and “Share” on twitter and wonder how we ever survived with them exclusively. The same user interface (UI) patterns and metaphors that we use on these networks (like activity feeds) will eventually fade into the background and pave the way for more collaborative, action oriented networks with new user interfaces.

Last week I (Marilee) spent some time at The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence, Rhode Island. For three days I followed one student, her advisor, and her mentor around, trying to discover the core activities BetterAt needs to support in order to be successful in a school like The MET.

I found five:

1. Creating templates.
2. Viewing all students’ progress at a glance.
3. Suggesting activities or resources to a student.
4. Capturing real-time reflections on the go.
5. Enabling dialogue and feedback between students, advisors and mentors.

These are all very important activities. But my hunch is that the most important core activity is enabling dialogue between student, advisor and mentor, because without dialogue learning slows and relationships falter. I got a blindingly-obvious glimpse of this truth last week as I watched Diana, Dennis and Dave go about the serious business of learning.

Diana is a sophomore. She plays the flute. Diana wants to pursue a career in music, but she is still sorting out what that means. She thought teaching music might be a good idea, so she got an internship with her own music teacher, teaching little kids how to play the flute. Turns out, it wasn’t a good fit. Her music teacher is a good teacher, but she wasn’t the right mentor. And Diana didn’t enjoy teaching little kids. So Diana looked for another internship. She followed her gut and approached a local theatrical venue with an idea. That’s how she met Dennis.

Dennis is Diana’s mentor. Dennis is the Building Manager and Technical Director at The Stadium Theatre in Woonsocket, RI. He’s new to the mentoring game officially, but he has been giving back to his community nearly his whole life. He agreed to be Diana’s mentor after she walked in off the street—literally—and asked for an internship.

Here is what you need to know about Dennis. Remember the Tom Cruise movie, Jerry Maguire? Remember Jerry’s mentor, Dicky Fox? He was the old-school sports agent who loved getting up in the morning, loved his family, loved his life, loved his work. Dicky was wise. He shared his wisdom with Jerry. Without Dicky Fox, Jerry Maguire would not have become Jerry Maguire. He would never have figured out that the key to success is not showing people the money, but building—and honoring—relationships. Dennis is Dicky Fox.

Dennis is teaching Diana how to engineer sound for live performances. Diana loves this. It gave her another idea—how cool it would be to engineer sound in a recording studio. But sound engineering is not the only thing that Dennis is teaching Diana. Last term, Diana organized a performance of local bands that raised $700 for local charity.

Then there is Dave. Dave is Diana’s advisor. In a regular school, Dave would be called a teacher. At The MET, he is called an advisor. The difference is important. Dave has been Diana’s advisor since 9^th grade. This is also important. He will be her advisor until she graduates. Dave spends a lot of time with Diana, guiding her, challenging her, celebrating her progress. Dave knows Diana really well. Sometimes Diana thinks that’s not such a good thing. But Dave knows that his relationship with Diana is the foundation on which she learns. Diana knows this too. She just won’t admit it to Dave.

Diana is on a great path. She has ideas and determination, and a talented team of caring adults to guide her. Diana’s future is glowing. How much of that is due to her talents and drive? How much is due to Diana’s parents and family? How much is due to Dave and Dennis’s guidance? We can’t know. But what we can see, what is obvious, is that none of Diana’s success has happened alone.

Here’s a quote from a Steve Jobs interview from 1995:

Many companies get the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people here’s this great idea then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want.And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

At BetterAt, we’re lucky that every day brings a new learning about a problem or an opportunity to fit these things together differently. It’s been a fun journey that’s starting to get a lot more interesting.