"Social Networking: does it bring positive change to education?"

The third debate sponsored by the economist is open. (click here for the link). I think the evaluation of Web 2.0 in education is on all of our interests, so I hope many will take advantage of this debate.

From their webpage: Last October, readers of The Economist selected three education-related propositions for debate:

1. The first proposition, "The continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education", was rigorously debated and OPPOSED.
2. The second, "Governments and universities everywhere should compete to attract qualified students, regardless of nationality or residence", was overwhelmingly ACCEPTED.
3. Now we address the final proposition: "Social Networking: does it bring positive change to education?"

Your comments shape the debate and your votes decide the winner

Assessing the Economics Program

At the AEA meetings my colleagues and I presented a paper on assessing the economics program (Assessing A Proficiency Based Economics Program: Weathering The Perfect Storm While Thriving In A New Environment). It has had some nice recognition by Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd.com (Jan 7, 2008) and David Glenn at the The Chronicle of Higher Education (News Blog Jan. 5, 2008).

This paper has three goals: (1) to describe the general guidelines for programmatic assessment, (2) to describe our experience in requiring our majors to meet the Hansen Proficiencies and (3) to report results of a national survey of economics program assessment.

Sixty five percent of 208 economics department chairs report that they have a formal assessment plan for their economic program. Our survey results suggest strong confirmation for the actual stated Hansen proficiencies in the discipline, but not necessarily a strong awareness of the work of Hansen.

Help us with our digital ink survey

Dan Talley and I are preparing a digital ink survey of department chairs and faculty in economics nationwide. We are going to try to determine the extent of use of digital ink and how this may effect our pedagogy. If you are a digital ink user (or would like to be) can you reply directly to Dan and I with the questions that interest you, both research questions and the survey questions that should be asked to ascertain the effect of digital ink on our teaching. Click on this sentence to reply to us directly.

If you know of other surveys of use and pedagogy in other disciplines let us know as well. Thanks.

ASSA meetings coming up

Finally this semester is over and the national meetings in New Orleans are just two weeks away. I will be presenting two papers, one on Assessment of the Economics Program and one on PBL in econometics. The first paper reports on a national survey of department chairs... pretty cool results. If you read this and see me there ...say hi.