Archive for the ‘college application’ tag
Calling Out the College Board and ETS: An Educators’ Campaign for 2008?
In my last post, I made a couple sins of omission when giving thanks and measuring the success of Students 2.0.
Sin 1: Thanks to Stephen Downes for supporting the launch by featuring it in his (very influential, and rightfully so) OLDaily.
Sin 2: I didn’t mention what is, to me, the most valuable aspect of the Students 2.0 blog: the comments. Without them, we’d have a handful of students writing to the void. With them, we have the type of peer-to-peer, “student” to “adult” conversation on equal footing, that I dreamed would happen if this thing was done right. One more comparative stat:
- Number of posts:comments ratio: Students 2.0: 13 posts: 310 comments = 1:23 ratio. Beyond School: 424 posts: 995 comments = 1:2.3 ratio.
(–it’s enough to make me simultaneously weep with joy and gnash my envious teeth. It says so much for the educators who are leaving their own soapboxes to converse in the s2oh comment salons. Gives me hope, really.)
A delicious postscript / tempting call to action
I’m learning so much simply browsing my RSS feed for s2oh comments.
I’m also gaining occasional inspiration. To wit: Bill Fitzgerald’s idea about taking on the College Board for its hijacking of education and perverting it into a competition for points on SATs, AP Exams, and so forth. Here’s Bill’s comment, in response to Lindsea’s “One Sweet Dream” post:
The test prep companies drive a lot of the hype behind college pressure, as their profits depend on your parents getting worried enough to shell out mucho greenbacks so you can sit through classes designed to get you extra points on the SATs/APs.
(As an aside, I would love to see an entire high school class, nationwide, boycott the SATs/APs. The Educational Testing Service would suffer an enormous loss of revenue, as they would not take in the testing fees from a few million students (aka, the captive audience, aka, you). If enough students boycotted the exam to affect the statistical significance of the test, colleges would need to find a different way to evaluate students — and colleges would find a way to evaluate and admit students, because, while they also don’t want you to know this, colleges need you — and your tuition dollars — to continue to exist.)
Whether the specific tactic Bill envisions is the most effective is secondary to the idea of simply putting pressure on the College Board and the educational system to change. We’ve seen what an educators’ Twitter - del.icio.us marketing blitz could do with s2oh. Why stop there? Why not “man the tweets” again?
Anybody want to play with this idea? It could be powerful, seems to me.
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