Electing the Howard County Board of Education by districts makes no sense

Yes, this is another post promoting ranked choice voting.

2020-05-15 · 9 min · Frank Hecker

How do schools and parents matter?

I explore the ideas of Judith Rich Harris as they apply to the roles of parents and schools in Howard County and elsewhere.

2019-03-03 · 20 min · Frank Hecker

Online competency-based education

Following up from my previous post on my experience with Coursera, here are a few links of interest (mostly) relating to online education, with a focus on “competency-based education,” i.e., education directed specifically at teaching people to become competent at one or more tasks or disciplines: “Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution” (Michelle Weise and Clayton Christensen). Clayton Christensen is famous for his theory of “disruptive innovation,” which I think is useful not so much as a proven theory but rather as a way to structure plausible narratives about business success or failure....

2014-09-28 · 3 min · Frank Hecker

Adventures in online education

The last three months or so I’ve been in school (which is why I haven’t been posting as much lately). Not a real bricks-and-mortar school—I’ve been participating in the “Data Science Specialization” series of online courses created by faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and offered by Coursera, a startup in the online education space. It’s been an interesting experience, and well worth a blog post....

2014-09-09 · 5 min · Frank Hecker

Is there something you’d like to learn (that I can teach)?

As some of you know, I like to learn new things. For example, I’m trying to re-learn some of the statistical knowledge I’ve forgotten over the years, and as a side project to that I’m learning the computer programming language Python (partly because it’s used by many folks who do scientific programming, and partly because it’s useful for other reasons). I’m also learning some about mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) as a follow-on to my research on Howard County Council redistricting....

2012-04-10 · 4 min · Frank Hecker