Over creditors' objections, a bankruptcy court in Ohio discharged the student-loan debt of a single mother of two who was living below the poverty level.
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I’m sharing four different reasons why the world desperately needs Infobitt. The first was that we have a right to edit the news—that hard, front page news needs input from “we, the people.” And now:
Reason #2. The most important stories of the day are hard to find. Look at CNN.com, FoxNews.com, even NYTimes.com. I frequently find myself disagreeing with what they have as their top stories and disgusted at too much clickbait, emotionally manipulative stories, and other time-wasters. It’s even worse on primetime news broadcasts. (So, I’m agreeing with Bill Maher.) And then of course there’s the fact that newsrooms are generally limited in what they can cover, and they’re going to lead with whatever story they’re most proud of or they think will get the most clicks. Of course, they won’t lead with a very important story if they aren’t covering it themselves.
Aggregators like Google News do a better job of hitting all the highlights than the news sources themselves. But even there, there are problems. Some stories—the admittedly important ones—stay up for a couple of days, long after we’ve heard about them. Also, sometimes, the big stories of the day are far down on Google News one day, only to make it to the Top Stories the next. Journalists are a special breed (for whom, again, I have great respect); what they choose to write about sometimes represents a judgment, or taste, that many of the rest of us don’t share. Many journalists indulge in sensationalism; they seem to be drawn to dramatic stories which have little to no chance of making any difference in the world. The stories are just dramatic. Too often, our time is wasted—and that’s true even when journalists’ work is aggregated together.
Infobitt works differently. It matters how how many people participate, but it doesn’t take many. When we have over, say, 15 bitt writers and 30 people ranking the news, then in my opinion we typically do better than the aforementioned sites when it comes to picking and ranking the stories that matter. These numbers shouldn’t be that surprising. There aren’t that many “top stories” candidates at any moment; based on my experience on Infobitt, I estimate the number is not much more than 50. Then how many people does it really take to summarize the basics of that number of stories, and to rank them in order of real importance? Again, not that many.
With on the order of 100-500 active daily users—still not many—we’ll produce something that has never existed. We’ll have an exhaustive, non-redundant, beautifully ranked set of news stories, complete with excellent and well-fleshed-out summaries from many sources, updated all the time.
Already the news on Infobitt is usually pretty fresh. We aim now to make it fresh all of the time and to have covered all the main stories in a timely fashion. Do you want that? Join us and help make it happen! If we haven’t covered an important story yet, please add it. In our system, it’s called a “bitt.” And we always need people ranking new bitts, giving their opinion of whether a story belongs in the top 10 in Top Stories (or a category of interest).
Given psychologists' inability to reach a consensus on the appropriate definition of intelligence and the modest correlations between intelligence test scores and professional success, the author advocates for the potential benefits that could occur when teachers and schools drop the words intelligent and smart from classroom and school discourses.
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This commentary examines the failings of American high schools.
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Introduction to the special issue on data-driven decision making and the components needed to enculturate data use in education. The article briefly examines the landscape of existing literature and positions the papers for the special issue.
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This article summarizes some significant insights of articles in this issue from the perspective of public policy, emphasizing their potential resonance in today's policy environment in using data for program improvement as well as accountability purposes.
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This article presents a conceptual framework for a new construct, data literacy for teachers, laying out the knowledge and skills teachers need to use data effectively and responsibly. The framework emerges from a domain analysis, but the complex construct requires additional discussions to refine and reorganize it.
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In this article, authors draw from document analysis as well as interview and focus group data in three school districts to examine teacher needs specific to building data use capacity.
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This article proposes a conceptual framework for school and district data use practices based on an analysis of current research. The author outlines considerations for professional learning for each of the five framework elements and closes with a set of questions that may help to highlight future research needs in the area of school-level data use.
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This essay describes the habits of mind that underlie data literacy courses offered by the Data Wise Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and how those preparing educators can incorporate these habits into instructional design.
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This paper explores the development of data use capacity in an elementary school through a social network approach. Findings reveal that data use networks are influenced by the larger professional structure of the school and may be productive in developing shared practices. This study illustrates several ways in which this approach can be valuable in understanding individual and school capacity for data use.
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This study focuses on the factors influencing a professional development intervention for data-based decision making: the data team procedure. In this article, authors discuss how data characteristics (e.g., access to data), school organizational characteristics (e.g., shared goal), and individual/team characteristics (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge) influence the use of data in data teams, and how these factors are interrelated.
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This article reports on a three-part study about how schools of education are preparing teacher candidates to use data effectively and responsibly. The study consisted of a survey to a nationally representative sample of schools of education, a review of select syllabi, and an examination of state licensure and certification requirements.
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Drawing on data collected in six middle schools, this article finds that coaches and professional learning communities (PLCs) played an important role in mediating teachers’ responses to data. We find that dialogue and the dynamic relationship between two types of expertise may help explain the ways in which PLCs and coaches facilitated deeper-level changes in pedagogy, and that school leadership and district-level context shaped the possibility for such changes.
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