Researchers and Grant Makers Call for More Long-Term Education Research

I strongly agree with this.  Certainly, we can show learning in short-term studies.  But the most important issues in education (e.g., motivation, attitudes, broadening participation, success in later academic career, success after graduation) can’t be studied in the standard three years of an NSF grant.

A group of education researchers and representatives of private philanthropies argued on Monday for more money for long-term studies of education. Such studies, they said, are often harder to find money to support but tend to be more effective than shorter-term projects at decisively answering key research and policy questions.

The researchers and philanthropists made their case at a gathering on Capitol Hill, titled “Payoffs of Long-Term Investment in Education Research,” that was organized by the American Educational Research Association, the Education Deans Alliance, and the National Academy of Education.

via Researchers and Grant Makers Call for More Long-Term Education Research – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

MediaComp Java from within the browser

Below is a note that Barb just send to MediaComp teachers. In-browser IDE’s are pretty important for high schools. Some high school districts we work with have draconian IT policies, e.g., by default, ALL websites are disabled from the firewall, and only certain websites are permitted. In these schools, nothing can be installed on any computer. In our children’s school district, all computers are wiped every night and reloaded from a base image. If you (as the teacher) don’t have your program loaded into the image, you either reinstall every day, or you just can’t install Scratch, eToys, Alice, etc. Thus, having tools available through the browser helps teachers to use software apps without dealing with IT.

Dr. Jam Jenkins recently made a prototype of JavaWIDE that includes the Media Computation libraries, and he would like some teachers to try it out and give feedback.  The site is at http://mc2.javawide.org.  For those who have never heard of JavaWIDE, it is an online IDE that supports collaboration, concurrent editing, and version control.

For more information:
Dr. Jam Jenkins
Faculty Administrator
Assistant Professor of Information Technology
Georgia Gwinnett College
http://www.jamjenkins.org