Snippets from 18 August to 17 September

How Are Teachers in Finland Evaluated? Amanda Ripley's WSJ article appears via @dianeravitch on her driven & excellent "Site to discuss better education for all". - http://dianeravitch.net/2012...

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Interesting sections on infrastructure and on universities in this (. @xtophercook) speech by Mike Bloomberg (Mayor of New York), looking back 4 years after the onset of the financial crisis. - http://www.mikebloomberg.com/index...

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Via @DianeRavitch - Chicago 1995: 45% of teachers were African Americans. Now just 19% are. [42% of Chicago students are African Americans.] - http://dissentmagazine.org/atw...

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OECD income distribution (Gini coefficient) data by country over time that you can sort and rank. By the "late 2000s" UK was 7th least equal, with only the US worse of big countries. (Germany 20th; France 22nd). In the "mid 2000s" UK was 11th. - http://stats.oecd.org/Index...

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Via @mbrechner. Why Nicholas Negroponte hopes that kids in Ethiopia can teach the rest of us something profound about learning. "Another Way to Think about Learning" in MIT's Technology Review is worth reading, as are the comments on the piece, and Negroponte's responses. - http://www.technologyreview.com/view...

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LSE Politics and Policy Blog: Key Questions for Open Access Policy in the UK - @Stephen_Curry "distills the key questions that have emerged over translating open access policy into practice". - http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politic...

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Are we asking too much of our teachers? Alex Kotlowitz puts the Chicago teachers’ strike in perspective in the NYT. Small excerpt below. (A deal seems to be close: http://goo.gl/v0GHi.) - http://www.nytimes.com/2012...

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"As we slash services in deeply impoverished communities and reduce school budgets, how can we expect that good teachers alone can improve the lives of poor children? Poverty, of course, can’t be an excuse for lousy teaching. But neither can excellent teaching alone be a solution to poverty." -

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"Every working scientist should read this." Stephen Curry strongly sings the praises of Ronald Vale's "Evaluating how we evaluate", a "lucid and considered examination of the measures that we in the scientific community use to assess one another". - http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry...

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"7 reasons why online degree students outperform University campus-based students" @DonaldClark puts a strong emphasis on the value of asynchronous communications in this review of how the Interactive Design Institute course's (accredited by Hertfordshire University) works its magic. - http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2012...

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"Secrets of mlearning failures: confronting reality" by Thomas Cochrane won the best Proceedings Paper award at #altc2012. - http://www.researchinlearningt...

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“Socially Mediated Publicness”. Guest edited by Nancy Baym and danah boyd, this is an OA Special Issue of the normally closed Taylor & Francis "Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media". - http://socialmediacollective.org/2012...

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Clear post by Peter Suber highlighting the flaw in the new RCUK policy on OA, not that new UK policies creates funding and incentives for gold OA, but that "they do it without first mandating green OA". - https://plus.google.com/1093775...

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Interesting and accurate write-up by Pascale Colonna of talk by @Eric_Mazur at the 2012 ALT Conference #altc2012. - http://pascalecolonna.edublogs.org/2012...

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Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools - PDF of OECD report's Executive Summary, with 10 recommendations organised under 2 headings: Avoid system level policies conducive to school and student failure; Help disadvantaged schools and students improve. - http://www.oecd.org/edu...

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Where do the wealthy live? Not in Sheffield. See UK multi-millionaires mapped by the Guardian. But with 37 in Carlisle, I am cautious about the data. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news...

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Evidence-based biking. "Bicycle weight and commuting time: randomised trial" by J Groves in the BMJ via @hendrikmorkel shows that lightweight snazzy bikes are not worth the extra money. - http://www.bmj.com/content...

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Stevan Harnad explains the need for 9 words to be removed the RCUK Draft Open Access Policy. - http://openaccess.eprints.org/index...

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@A_L_T Very smart. NodeXL graph of #altc2012 twitter stream by Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues, with thanks to Natasa Milic-Frayling - Principal Researcher - Microsoft Research Cambridge UK. - http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/pages...

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Via @mhawksey. Google's Peter Norvig announces the release by Google of Course Builder as an open source project. [Course Builder provided the environment for Google's recent 155,000 "Power Searching with Google" course.] - http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2012...

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Wow. Fiona Millar absolutely nails it in "Education is in crisis and Labour needs to step up to the plate". Key excerpt below: - http://www.guardian.co.uk/educati...

The party appears paralysed by two issues: the fact that it started the reforms now being misused by the coalition; and a terror that it will somehow appear backward-looking if it doesn't come up with some shiny new ideas. But it is time to admit that the fragmentation of the school system is running out of control and the inevitable drift into profit-making schools is dangerous. We are where we are with academies and free schools, but a rigorous, fair, locally accountable regulatory structure must be put around all schools, covering everything from non-selective admissions to school improvement and standards.

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Please spread this ITT for OER studies for non-EU countries (ZA, Thai, Gulf States, Mex, Arg). Closes 25 September. - http://poerup.referata.com/wiki...

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"The teacher gives the businessman a lesson." A trite but effective story comparing blueberries to learners. (An icecream maker can send dodgy blueberries back; a state school teacher has to work with the learners as they are "big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant".) - http://www.jamievollmer.com/blueber...

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With Finland in the spotlight for the Q of its ed system, the SLS "value network" @systechlearning is probably worth keeping an eye on. - http://www.systechlearning.fi/...

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Equally applicable at "lower" levels, and in other fields @profserious cuts to the chase with this clear summary of what (engineering) students want. - http://blog.prof.so/2012...

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Mitra and Quiroga. New research suggests that OLPC-using children studied in Uruguay are as good or better at reading than the corresponding standard recommended in the UK/USA. (Children organised SOLE-style - http://goo.gl/7VKV0) - http://www.ijhssnet.com/journal...

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@SugataM - Strong, strong echoes of Mitra's "Granny Cloud" in "Unsure robots make better teachers than know-alls" in the New Scientist. "Matsuzoe and Tanaka found that the children did best when the robot appeared to learn from them. This also made the children more likely to want to continue learning with the robot." - http://www.newscientist.com/article...

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John Naughton - @jjn1 - is spot on in his "Why public universities matter", and his argument can be extended to other parts of education and to other parts of the public/ex-public sector. Libraries. FE. Health. - http://memex.naughtons.org/archive...

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via @tonyparkin - Jimmy Wales and Sir Tim-Berners Lee slam Data Communications Bill. Piece in Computer News. - http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg...

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Making researchers pay for Gold OA is the issue, and is the publishing tail wagging the research dog. Harnad - @AmSciForum - argues that "free, online, worldwide access to research is as optimal as it is inevitable and that publishers will simply have to adapt". [With sound effects.] - http://edition.pagesuite-profe...

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Useful Guardian article by Steven Harnad about what he sees as the folly of 'hybrid Gold Open Access', 'where a journal continues to collect subscription revenues but offers authors the option of paying an additional (sometimes sizeable) publication fee for the journal to make their article gold OA, along with the promise that as income grows,... - http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-...

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@dweinberger highlights Romney’s citing of Pons and Fleischman's discredited fusion study in support of his belief in basic science. - http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger...

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Peer assessment and review (PAR). Interesting piece in the NYT about a county's quality-focused mentoring, support, and yes, sacking, system for teachers. - http://www.nytimes.com/2011...

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UK Government invests £10 m. to help "research intensive UK institutions to kick-start the process of developing policies and setting up funds to meet the costs of article processing charges". - http://news.bis.gov.uk/Press-R...

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Do Laws and Fox have no sense of shame or decency? Why are these people given a voice? Fierce piece from Colin Lawson - http://www.reasonandreality.org/...

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Alan Cann - @AJCann - reports from the #eduwiki conference, from which he got a lot. Two embedded videos included. - http://scienceoftheinvisible.b...

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First, Kill All the Administrators, by Stanley Fish, is still terrific, nearly 10 years on. - http://chronicle.com/article...

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According to this testing service, my harmless and possibly quite useful blog seems to be blocked in China. - http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index...

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System Upgrade. A very striking web-based overview of the results of the EPSRC/ESRC Technology Enhanced Learning Programme. - http://telit.org.uk/

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"To accelerate growth" says CEO @JohnBakerD2L - Desire2Learn raises $80 m of "first-time" venture capital - Phil Hill in today's e-Literate. - http://mfeldstein.com/desire2...

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Charter middle schools "did not have a statistically significant impact on middle school student performance" "in math, reading, science, or social studies". US Institute of Education Sciences 339kB PDF - http://ies.ed.gov/ncee...

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California has reportedly passed "Open Source" textbook legislation, creating a competitive Request for Proposals process inviting faculty, publishers, and others to develop high quality digital open source textbooks and related courseware. Link to report in Sacramento Observer -> - http://sacobserver.com/2012...

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Is Gove suffering from 'Bad Faith'? via @teseditor Loic Menzies challenges Gove's repeated use of the "evidence gambit". - http://lkmco.org.uk/article...

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Dialogue with the Gates Foundation: "What happens when Profits drive Reform?" strong piece by @AnthonyCody, focusing on the role of markets in pushing forward education improvement and innovation. - http://blogs.edweek.org/teacher...

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George Osborne is like Paul Ryan without the Ayn Rand, according to Paul Krugman in the NYT. "Instead of a real policy rethink, what Cameron and Osborne apparently have in mind is <strike>rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic</strike> a set of basically minor twiddles...." - http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012...

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Umair Haque - "the express-train to sociopath city" Wonderful quote via @downes: "One common misinterpretation of management theory goes thus: pit your best people against one another, like dogs in a fight, and the wondrous power of 'competition' will unleash vital energies heretofore unseen in the history of great endeavour..... [see below] - http://blogs.hbr.org/haque...

"One common misinterpretation of management theory goes thus: pit your best people against one another, like dogs in a fight, and the wondrous power of 'competition' will unleash vital energies heretofore unseen in the history of great endeavour. Taking a hard look at the organizations that practice this style of management-by-Mordor, my guess is that the unbridled exaltation of aggression is more like the express train to Sociopath City."

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The North East Child Poverty Commission - engaged in the uphill struggle to improve the lives of poor children in the North East. - http://northeastchildpoverty.w...

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More & stronger references to technology in learning in the '12 Ofsted Handbook for FE Inspection than in the '09 version. - http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resourc...

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Guardian's R Ramesh writes that Housing Minister Grant Shapps “founded company selling software that breaches Google code” - http://www.guardian.co.uk/politic...

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John Naughton @jjn1 extracts the bleak nub of a study by the US military into what lies behind "green-on-blue" attacks. - http://memex.naughtons.org/archive...

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"More Venture Capital for Higher Education". Another clued-up e-Literate piece by Jim Farmer, who has written several guest contributions in Fortnightly Mailing over the last few years - http://fm.schmoller.net/jimfarm.... - http://mfeldstein.com/more-ve...

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GCSE ebacle – a brilliant piece af restrained anger from John Tomsett a school head in York via @teseditor Gerard Kelly - http://johntomsett.wordpress.com/2012...

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Via @JohnRentoul Gene takes apart Clint Eastwood's "analysis" of Afghanistan and the Republican delegates' reaction to it. - http://hurryupharry.org/2012...

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NEET numbers. LSE blog post by Bart Cammaerts shows the UK trailing Bulgaria Italy Greece Ireland Spain Romania Cyprus Latvia with > 3 x the prop of NEETS as Holland > 2 x Denmark and > 1.5 x Germany. - http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politic...

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GCSE English fiasco. Thought provoking post by the FT's Chris Cook, with a long insert from Sally Coates, head of a leading "Ark" academy. Excerpt follows. - http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata...

"Of those 26 students, 17 are on free school meals, which gives a good indication of the demographic hardest hit by these changes. I don’t set lower targets for those children but I recognise that many have to achieve far greater rates of progress every year from 11 to 16 than pupils who start year 7 at higher attainment or have English as their first language – and that is what our interventions are designed to overcome."

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~ the same amount of computing answers 1 search query as all the computing done for the entire 11-yr 17-mission Apollo program, according to this short piece by Udi Manber and Peter Norvig in Google's "Inside Search". - http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2012...

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BBC News - Northern Ireland Education Minister launches review (in NI) of English GCSE grades - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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Via @brembs. Swiss-based journal publisher Frontiers and its "Tiering System" provides an additional peer review layer for "top" articles. Excerpt below. - http://www.frontiersin.org/about...

"The system is purposely designed to gradually distil the most outstanding research through the succession of the Frontiers tiers, evaluated democratically for its academic excellence and social relevance. While climbing up the tier journal system, the research gains more and more visibility and addresses an increasingly broader public."

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Improving student success using predictive models and data visualisations, by Alfed Essa @malpaso and Hanan Ayad #rlt - http://www.researchinlearningt...

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Tax expert Richard Murphy points to 5 simple tax changes that would increase tax revenue and reduce wealth inequality. - http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog...

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@cliveshepherd picks up on http://www.peopleperhour.com/ through which you can buy others' and sell your own services by the hour - http://clive-shepherd.blogspot.co.uk/2012...

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 "From 2013, there will be no National Health Service in England". Fierce and sad piece by Allyson Pollock, QMU's Prof of Public Health Research and Policy in the The Guardian's Comment is Free. [Excerpt below.] - http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment...

Since 1948, the NHS has been the model for universal heathcare on the basis of need and free at the point of use. In 2012, parliament in England passed a law effectively ending the NHS by abolishing the 60-year duty on the government to secure and provide healthcare for all. From 2013, there will be no National Health Service in England, and tax funding will increasingly flow to global healthcare corporations. In contrast, Scotland and Wales will continue to have a publicly accountable national health service.

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UK 4th, US 24th. Via @dylanwiliam Economist Intelligence Unit ranking of preschool provision across 45 countries using a newly devised index based mainly on Availability, Affordability and Quality - http://www.webcitation.org/6AIRteS...

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Everything You've Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong - terrific piece by Kristina Rizga. It is not the same in the UK, but there are parallels nevertheless. - http://m.motherjones.com/media...

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The chances of edX, Coursera, Udacity et al reaching "Facebook numbers" should not be lightly discounted - http://fm.schmoller.net/2012...

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OER Usage - this survey from @audreywatters deserves widespread completion. Explanation at http://hackeducation.com/2012.... - https://docs.google.com/spreads...

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@Udacity contrasted interestingly & favourably with @Coursera in "Udacity and Online Pedagogy: Players, Learners, Objects" by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel. Concluding para below. - http://hybridpedagogy.com/Journal...

"The content in a Udacity course is tidy, structured; but the learning environment -- from forums to meetup groups -- is interpretive, allowing students the opportunity to more fully inhabit their own learning, and this is the direction in which we must continue to innovate. We must create learning environments that are not just about the right learning objects, but about the space around those objects. For learning to happen online, content must be presented with enough space around it to allow for dialogue -- for mediation, inflection, and disruption. Like the improvisation and music of jazz, learning happens when we pay attention to what’s rising, what’s falling, the staccato and the silent."

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The new HE fees regime is likely to damage economic growth in the UK, according to economist Paul Whiteley in the LSE Politics and Policy blog. Nor is more STEM the answer - excerpt below. - http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politic...

"The analysis shows that once enrolments in general are taken into account, additional students in the STEM subjects have no impact on growth. It is higher education in general which matters not specific subjects. The science lobby has been pretty effective in convincing decision-makers that subjects like maths, physics and engineering boost growth and this explains why these subjects have been protected in the new funding regime. But there is no evidence to support this claim."

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How has ICT access changed across the world between 2005 and 2010? - http://fm.schmoller.net/2012...

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"The future of education in Africa is mobile" http://www.webcitation.org/6AFZF1U... allows UK based people to read this interesting BBC Worldwide piece.

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.@pbacsich The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss is "on the case" of online learning, with guest posts from Karim Kai Ani (stingingly critical of Khan) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs... and Roger Shank (his standard line against algebra) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...

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"The Finnish Alternative: Reclaiming Public Education From Corporate Reform." Impressive graphic journalism by Dan Archer and Adam Bessie. - http://truth-out.org/news...

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Worth reading> "Blackboard Inc.: The Rise of the New “Online Learning” and the Race for Profits" by Jim Farmer http://www.webcitation.org/60jyUoC... on Michael Feldstein's e-Literate blog. - http://mfeldstein.com/blackbo...

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The Best and the Brightest. Someone with a long political memory - @DianeRavitch - points out how a term first used ironically is now getting used in education policy to ill effect. - http://dianeravitch.net/2012...

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Scary & interesting piece by Leon Wieseltier via @jjn1 in The New Republic about Paul Ryan's "nasty ideal of self-reliance". - http://www.tnr.com/article...

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Human Trafficking Awareness. I stumbled across this new and interesting-looking on-line course from The Sheffield College. - http://www.online.sheffcol.ac.uk/index...

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Analysis by (a renamed..) @danielstucke drawn on in "Watchdog acts after furore on GCSE pass-rate" from today's IoS. [Please excuse the baked in image below.] - http://www.independent.co.uk/news...

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Almost 12 years to the day since it was written, Joel Spolsky's "The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code" still has a strong ring of truth. - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/article...

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PLoS ONE: Domestic Ferrets, Unlike the Wild Forms, Show Evidence of Dog-Like Social-Cognitive Skills. See also Scientific American http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thought... - http://www.plosone.org/article...

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@mattseaton, the Guardian's former cycling writer: "Armstrong all but concedes he won his seven Tour de France titles by doping" - http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport...

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OpenLearn video. How statistics make machine translation possible. Hans Rosling talks to Google's Franz Och. Peter Norvig provides comments. - http://www.open.edu/openlea...

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"What went wrong in Mali?" Bruce Whitehouse (anthropologist back from ~1 yr of field research) explains. LRB, 30/8/12. - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34...

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@dianeravitch picks up on IOE study by Chris Watkins in her "Pressuring Students to Get High Scores Produces Worse Outcomes". It is a pity the study is not freely available for download. - http://dianeravitch.net/2012...

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Worth reading. Institute For Fiscal Studies piece "GCSEs - in need of reform?" - http://www.ifs.org.uk/publica...

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Via @timoreilly TechCrunch piece by Mike Butcher: "Mendeley’s Open API Approach Is On Course To Disrupt Academic Publishing" - http://techcrunch.com/2012...

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Paying for computers by cutting teachers? @pasi_sahlberg Nuanced comment on @HuffPost piece from North Carolina "parent and employee" about Mooresville Graded School DIstrict. - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social...

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Battery-powered cars. Trickle down vs. central planning contrasted in this Scientific American piece about the Chinese, European and US approaches. - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observa...

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Important for policy-makers: understanding low and discontinued Internet use amongst young people in Britain - http://fm.schmoller.net/2012...

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Via @D_Blanchflower Bad policy is to blame for UK’s lack of growth. (Think how utterly understrength the transport infrastructure will be when and if the economy picks up.) NIESR's Jonathan Portes in the Telegraph. - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance...

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Adrian Perry's (grumpy) guide to committee language is worth keeping to hand. - http://adrianperry.blog.com/committ...

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"Raining on the Silicon Valley parade" - interesting (but mistitled?) post by @jjn1 about whether and if yes why tech innovation will dry up. - http://memex.naughtons.org/archive...

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What is Google's rationale for Google Plus? Google's straight talking Bradley Horowitz (he's got overall responsibility for G+) explains in this 10 minute July 2012 talk. - http://www.youtube.com/watch...