museums

I just attended an interesting talk at Museums and the Web from some very smart folks from the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access. The talk, titled “Connecting Learners and Museums through Educational Metadata Initiatives,” was a great introduction to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative and some of the ways the Smithsonian is using this framework to improve the metadata of their many thousands of online learning resources. (The paper accompanying their presentation can be found here....

I keep coming back to a recent post by Nina Simon: Arts Assessment: Let’s Stop “Proving” and Start Improving. I think Nina really hits the nail on the head. Indeed, when I think of what kinds of assessment will help me improve my own practice as a teacher, it rarely looks like the kinds of quantitative educational data that funders expect. Nina’s post is a reminder to ask questions that make sense to ourselves as educators, because this is where we can really improve our own practice....