Tag Archives: education

Rank Teacher Ranking

By alex | Published: 2/24/2012
There has been a little discussion on an informal email list at my university about the Op-Ed by Bill Gates in the New York Times that argues against public rankings of teachers. It’s a position that in some ways constrains the Gates Foundation’s seeming interest in quantifying teaching performance. It led to questions we have […]
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IRBs and Clean Secrets

By alex | Published: 12/8/2011
There’s a comment piece I wrote that appears in today’s issue of the journal Nature that talks a bit about the role of open data and IRBs. But I worry that perhaps in the number of iterations it made before publication the main point got muddied a bit. So here it is: Funding agencies and […]
Posted in Research | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

What makes up a badge?

By alex | Published: 12/2/2010
One of the discussions I was particularly excited about at the Barcelona Drumbeat Festival was using badges to indicate certain skills, abilities, capacities, traits, or accomplishments. The idea here is what you might find in Boy Scout merit badges, or Foursquare badges, or Stack Overflow badges: a quick way to see what a person knows, […]
Posted in Teaching, Technology | Also tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Does Adlai Stevenson matter?

By alex | Published: 6/29/2010
There is a great “fluff” piece over at the New York Times detailing the provenance of dorm rooms at a few schools. It includes a photograph of four freshmen at Princeton who, when told they were occupying Adlai Stevenson’s old dorm room replied that they didn’t know who the guy was but that “there’s famous […]
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