You have GOT to be kidding me! Yet again, I'm glad we homeschool. While I agree that there's a huge need for education reform and I'm thankful for those like you and your hard work - I'm that (often perceived as narrow minded - which couldn't be further from the truth) parent who thinks that it shouldn't come at the expense of my own children. We do what we can from the outside, but I'm SO happy not to be on the inside!
It's also worth adding that this issue of surveillance goes way beyond Pearson. See for example www.cnn.com/2013/11/08/living/schools-of-thought-social-media-monitoring-students. And surveillance of students is one manifestation of bigger societal trends.
As for testing, this also just came out today, and might interest you -- education professor Yong Zhao's take on more meaningful forms of assessment and accountability: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/how-should-learning-be-assessed/
I find this monitoring quite disturbing. As teachers we are required to sign confidentiality agreements when administering tests. That's part of our job, whether we like it or not. But kids don't. They should be able to talk about whatever they want to talk about. They have to take the dang test, they should be able to talk about it.
As for Bob Braun's website, it appears what actually happened wasn't an attack of any sort, but simply such a significant amount of traffic that the site couldn't handle it. Given how many people were sending others to the site, that isn't too surprising.
@Jenny . . . This is from Braun's FB page: "I got an email from my webhost saying the site was under a "denial of service" attack. The webhost itself then suspended the site to stop the attacks and to give it time to repair the problem and install fixes to prevent future attacks."
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7 comments:
You have GOT to be kidding me! Yet again, I'm glad we homeschool. While I agree that there's a huge need for education reform and I'm thankful for those like you and your hard work - I'm that (often perceived as narrow minded - which couldn't be further from the truth) parent who thinks that it shouldn't come at the expense of my own children. We do what we can from the outside, but I'm SO happy not to be on the inside!
It's also worth adding that this issue of surveillance goes way beyond Pearson. See for example www.cnn.com/2013/11/08/living/schools-of-thought-social-media-monitoring-students. And surveillance of students is one manifestation of bigger societal trends.
As for testing, this also just came out today, and might interest you -- education professor Yong Zhao's take on more meaningful forms of assessment and accountability: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/how-should-learning-be-assessed/
This is scary. Are Pearsons the same as the publishers too?
Glad I live in N.Z.
I find this monitoring quite disturbing. As teachers we are required to sign confidentiality agreements when administering tests. That's part of our job, whether we like it or not. But kids don't. They should be able to talk about whatever they want to talk about. They have to take the dang test, they should be able to talk about it.
As for Bob Braun's website, it appears what actually happened wasn't an attack of any sort, but simply such a significant amount of traffic that the site couldn't handle it. Given how many people were sending others to the site, that isn't too surprising.
@Jenny . . . This is from Braun's FB page: "I got an email from my webhost saying the site was under a "denial of service" attack.
The webhost itself then suspended the site to stop the attacks and to give it time to repair the problem and install fixes to prevent future attacks."
Wow. Thanks for sharing that. I clearly missed it.
If a test's effectiveness can be undermined by sharing less than 140 characters of information, how effective is it?
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