Assessing Affective Characteristics in Schools

Another book summary in partial fulfillment of my independent reading assignment for graduate school.
Brief Review
I was assigned to read Assessing Affective Characteristics in Schools by Lorin Anderson and Sid Bourke.  I found the text to be less technical than Summated Rating Scale Construction, but often more detailed in its advice.  (This shouldn’t be particularly surprising, since Anderson [...]

Summated Rating Scale Construction: An Introduction

A summary of Summated Rating Scale Construction: An Introduction by Paul E. Spector.  This summary is provided in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my independent reading course this semester.  
Brief Review
Spector uses the Work Locus of Control Survey throughout this work to exemplify the process of constructing summated rating scales. I found it more [...]

A Whole New Mind

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Another of the books that I finished toward the end of last year was A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future byDaniel Pink.  The central argument of A Whole New Mind was that our global society has transformed from a society in which left-brain skills were dominant to one where [...]

The Long Tail

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It’s Friday night and my poor, sick husband fell asleep before 9:00 PM.  Not wanting to waste time, but also not wanting to violate my long-standing (dating back to high school) personal rule of no homework (or work-work) on Friday night, I decided that I might tackle an unfinished blog post.  So . [...]

The Social Life of Information

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I recently read the  The Social Life of Information by Brown and Duguid.  Compared to the technology-related books that I have read lately, Brown and Duguid are less enthusiastic about the promised blessings of technology.  They are skeptical of the tendency, which they name “endism”, to predict the end of everything [...]

Focused Conversations for Schools

The Art of Focused Conversation for Schools describes a questioning method for facilitating classroom (or faculty meeting) discussions.  I found the book pretty light-weight. It only takes a few pages to describe the method, which revolves around four levels of questioning: objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional.  Most of the book’s pages provide detailed templates of [...]

Learning Networks

During the winter semester of this year, I took a course on distance education and discovered Learning Networks: A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning On-Line by by Linda Harasim, Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Lucio Teles, and Murray Turoff.  I finally finished reading the book earlier this month.
I was excited by the title, “Learning Networks”.  [...]

Envisioning Information

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I was hoping to get my hands on a copy of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Second Edition because I wanted to read his perspective on presentations before designing a lesson on teaching with presentations.  When I discovered that the copy at my local library was in the [...]

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

When I was traveling to and from Asia, I had a lot of time on planes and trains and I used most of that time to read.  I’ve already posted reviews of some of the other books that I read and I decided to give Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, [...]

The networked nature of information

Sometimes I follow The Learning Circuits blog and its monthly “Big Question”.  This month’s questions were borrowed from the Work Literacy blog, which I’ve also been following lately.  The questions that Tony Karrer asked on The Learning Circuits blog are leading questions:
Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?  Shouldn’t [...]