Bringing Back Integrity

NYT: How Superstars' Pay Stifles Everyone Else

Old Story: looks like we need game designers to rethink our reward systems to make everyone play nice. Is game design the new HR?

The Foolishness of Grades

This reminds me of the concept of "passing" and "passing with distinction" - why do administrators not appreciate grades as potentially measuring one's actual ability to perform a task or answer a question???

NYT: A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean

Here the problem is easy to define: grades are used in a relative sense, not to describe a skill, but to differentiate students from their peers - but if you play at this game you should be curving your grades to a normal distribution - if not, they come to lack meaning completely.

It seems that the brilliant new business model for universities is grades as "you did it!" badges a la facebook games. Universities do not sell education, but they don't sell entertainment either. Their marketing groups sell the prestige of education with the cultural expectation that drunken parties and hookups will happen on the weekend.

By my reckoning, they don't deliver on any account. Instead, they rely on group memories of what is good that are quickly fading.

Balance between Compromise and Zombie Ideas

NYT: When Zombies Win

This piece details the repeated failure of Democrats' compromise strategy, but raises a more general point about when comprise hurts more than it helps; specifically, its implications for holding back learning from experience - otherwise known as the empiricism of science - when old ideas are clearly wrong. I'd say this concept is relevant to any intellectual venture where social systems i.e. bureaucracies are involved.

In Pisa Test, Shanghai scores stun experts

Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators

""...for me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.”
“Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations,” "
- Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program

Urgent Evoke Review

What went right? What went wrong?

And interesting resource for social good games. As far as settings go, I wonder what one of these would look like using Shadowrun?

Standards Education & Citizenship: Apparently not the same!

NYT: A's for Good Behavior

At first I felt pissed off about this, but then I began to think that the split between standards and citizenship in grades is a split that needs to happen for the good of everyone. If we don't seriously try to properly teach our current standards, how will we come to the proper conclusion that they are not enough? (Or even possibly that they are useless? See: Science for Everybody?!)