Around the Web: Educating & Getting Educated

There's news out there, academic injustice, shifting paradigms, dragons, windmills, but my mind is somewhere else today. The news will still be there tomorrow, the same or different. 


I'm forever collecting links, more now with blogs to feed: my rss reader overfloweth with higher ed, ed tech and adjunct/contingent issue stories, my social bookmark files with links. It's time to share, but my "I'm reading" widget choices are for local Mountainair NM readers and anyone dropping by my community blogs. Not a lot of shared interests, trust me. So then... another account for another widget? In another lifetime maybe.

At the recent AFT convention, keynote speaker Bill Gates told the assembled educators that "teaching is complex." D'uh. Baby, you don't know the half of it. Bye bye one room schoolhouse, rote learning, recitation, drill to kill and Dewey. Online ed or distance learning, Edupunk, DIY education. ed tech, LMS or learning management systems, self-paced study, Constructivism, Connectivism. 


Got 'em bookmarked or on my reader ~ but where to start, how to organize the process in less than overwhelming... by topic or topical relevance... annotated or bare bones?


I'll start with this already briefly annotated collection of education links from Omnivore, The Book Forum blog:

Radical new forms of education

From The Washington Monthly, a special report on the dropout crisis. A Tale of Two Students: In middle school, Ivan and Laura shared a brief romance and a knack for trouble, then they parted ways; now he is college-bound and she isn't — how different schools shaped their paths. Areview of Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning by Paul Peterson (and more). Stanley Fish reviews Leigh Bortins’ The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education and Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System. From The Nation, a special issue on education reform, including Diane Ravitch on why she changed her mind. A review of Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Education for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neoliberalism. Ta-Nehisi Coates on helping wayward students by personalizing curricula. 

The layoff epidemic: When teachers get pink slips, who suffers most? A review of Bad Students, Not Bad Schools by Robert Weissberg. A review of The Latest Illiteracy by Christopher Ricks, Jim McCue, and Bryan Garner. A look at the 10 most important things they didn't teach you in school. A review of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us by Daniel Koretz. Why are liberals so impressed by China and Singapore’s school systems? Martha Nussbaum wants to know. 

Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education — and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera. Chester Finn on the case for Saturday school: When it comes to instruction time, longer is better. No Teacher Left Behind: When did it get to be so hard to fire a teacher? The alphabet soup of college admissions is getting more complicated as the International Baccalaureate, or I.B., grows in popularity as an alternative to the better-known Advanced Placement program.