Come see me at #ISTE11

I am fortunate to have the opportunity for the second year in a row to be presenting two formal sessions at the ISTE Conference as well as be involved in one ISTE Unplugged session. Unfortunately, I have to miss Edubloggercon as well as the first day of the conference but I will be arriving Monday afternoon and will be able to take in at least two full days of the conference on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you are attending I hope to see you there. So, here is my speaking schedule:



Tuesday, June 28th, 5:00-5:30 (Eastern)
Title: Phantom Power: The Art of Education Reform
Description: For many educators, the fundamental notion of teaching as an art, and with it the sense of joyful creativity that first brought them into the profession, has been nearly extinguished. The relentless, linear logic of teaching as a science dominates, as evidenced by our current culture of high-stakes testing, data, standards, research. Thinking like an artist---as Emily Dickinson says, ‘telling it slant”---- is a possible pathway to reclaim teaching as a creative act. Social media afford new ways of telling it slant, of inviting new “slants” and diverse points of view, making possible networked collaborations within and beyond classrooms. In the session, experience examples of technology-mediated participatory art across a range of media and forms and explore their usefulness as engines of creativity in teaching and learning. Further, the session proposes an “arts ethos,” with teacher and students as artists and learning as artifact---part of a viable, balanced path to education reform.
Presenters: Scott Schwister & Carl Anderson
Email: sschwister@gmail.com , anderscj@yahoo.com
Links: Phantom Power
Watch and participate in this session live at: http://www.elluminate.com/support

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The Fix Is In: Social Mobilization and School Reform Add to Planner
[Concurrent Session: Model Lesson]
Wednesday, 6/29/2011, 10:15am–11:15am , PACC 119B
Digital-Age Teaching & Learning : English Language Arts
Carl Anderson, East Metro Integration District 6067 with Scott Schwister and Gary Stager

Citizen journalism is a growing phenomena empowered by Web 2.0 technologies. Learn how to use it in your classroom to empower students.

Session Wiki: http://the-fix-is-in.wikispaces.com/

If you can't make it to the session or would like to follow this session remotely, follow #thefixisin on Twitter. Someone will post a live stream of the session shortly after it gets started.

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BW318 Formative Assessment: Technology-Enhanced Approaches to Increase Student Achievement Add to Planner
[Concurrent Session: BYOL] Sold Out!
Wednesday, 6/29/2011, 1:15pm–2:15pm , PACC 118A
School Improvement : Student Assessment & Data Analysis
Vivian Johnson, School of Education - Hamline University with Carl Anderson, Cara Hagen and Scott Schwister

Increase teacher and student use of formative assessment with digital tools such as quiz generators, polls, and surveys to support formative assessment in your classroom.

Session Wiki: http://formativeassessment-technology.wikispaces.com/

This session will be recorded and available later for video on demand from http://www.isteconference.org.

Gapminder - Education Statistics

I spent a few minutes today playing around with Gapminder World to see if the data they had could show anything interesting regarding education. Perhaps such a powerful infographic/data visualization tool could show us clearly what factors have definitive correlations between math and literacy rates. I wish they had statistics that measured how happy people are, or data that showed the breadth of study (i.e. how many of them had access to art, music, theater, culinary arts, philosophy, or other classes). But, I'll have to do with what has been measured, which by-the-way is an interesting set of data in itself. What gets measured is a direct indicator of the values of those collecting data. This act in itself contains an important bias. It means that the values of those who do not put much faith in data and statistics are always under-represented in data and statistics. Therefore, naturally data and statistics will more likely support the values of the "data-driven" rather than those who are not.

That said, here are some of the more interesting data sets I found:


What was interesting about this graph was when you animate it there doesn't appear to be any correlation between GDP/capita and math achievement in 1995 but as time goes on over the 12 years of the data set all data sets come to convergence upon an emerging diagonal line indicating that the world is trending toward income being an indicator of math achievement level but perhaps it didn't used to be.

Another place where GDP/capita appears to have a direct correlation is with adult literacy rates as shown here:


But, the correlation is not nearly as strong when it comes to those only between the ages of 15 and 24. Odd. I wonder why this is.

While the GDP/capita data seems to show a strong correlation on math achievement and literacy rates, what seems to be a stronger indicator is fertility rates. Gapminder clearly shows an inverse relationship between math proficiency & adult literacy and the number of children per family.



When it comes to wealth distribution the results are less clear. Gapminder has many different data sets that could be used to draw this comparison but none of them are absolutely conclusive. By looking at who the outliers are in these it seems how nations acquire the majority of their wealth matters as much as how it is distributed. It seems like we could derive from these statistics that the more stable and sustainable the nation's wealth combined with how evenly distributed it is determines the level of math achievement and adult literacy.