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User:ASnieckus
From WikiEducator
 Alison Snieckus | |||||||||
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| Blog: | Savor the Differences | ||||||||
| Occupation: | Educator, Measurement Statistician | ||||||||
| Nationality: | American | ||||||||
| Languages: | English (sadly, only this one) | ||||||||
| Country: |  United States of America | ||||||||
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News Flash The long awaited day is here--I've moved to Ubuntu. 31 May 2009
Contents |
Profile
I live in the USA, near Trenton, New Jersey. I am trained in educational measurement, and worked at Educational Testing Service (ETS, the makers of the famed SAT, TOEFL, GRE....) from 1986 to 2000. But when my oldest child became discontent in public school, we decided to go it alone, to "homeschool," without any particular specified curriculum. And so, I gave up my job at ETS, happily because I disagree with yearly standardised testing in elementary and secondary schools as the primary measure of accountability, which was just coming into fashion. My oldest child is now in college (in Massachusetts) and my second (and youngest) son directs his own education at the secondary level.
When we started homeschooling, a fellow homeschooling parent and I founded a local group for teens to have the opportunity to study and collaborate together: E-cubed: Experience, Explore, Educate. Our once per week sessions are designed around teen-led activities. The group has grown over the years. We now maintain a waiting list.
 “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” --Albert Einstein |
My interests/passions:
- freedom in education (is personal choice in education any different than personal choice in religion?)
- self-directed, student centric learning for secondary school students
- statistics, visual display of data, unintended consequences, misuse of data
- fostering seeing eye puppies until they're old enough to go into guide dog training
My WE projects
 This User collaborates with: | |
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- Introductory Statistics Course - course to be offered Sept 2009 - May 2010 to local high school students who do not attend a traditional high school. The course combines delivery of course content via Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiatives (OLI) with once per week in-person meetings. The OLI statistics course exemplifies many wonderful design elements -- clear writing, regular self-assessment, integrated hands-on activities, emphasis on interpretation rather than learning formulas. There are two big drawbacks -- OLI courses are not truly open (use is limited to non-commercial) and their LMS severly limits adaptability of use. The idea behind the Statistics Content project (see next bullet) is to create content as good as the content in OLI's statistics course, but which is open and infinitely adaptable.
- Category mapping
- Project to Create Modular Statistics Content
- Open Computing for the development and promotion of learning materials related to using a computer, in particular free computer software.
- Working with Spreadsheets in OpenOffice.org Calc adapts CCNC Module 4 for use with Calc 3, running on Ubuntu 9.04. The Calc 3 tutorial is located as a subpage of OpenOffice. See Learning Design and Content Design for overview of work plans.
- Workgroup:WikiEducator_Workgroups, a project to provide guidelines for future workgroups charged with creating policy, guidelines, tools, processes,... that impact the whole WE community.
- UPDATE: decided to leave this project as is.Commonwealth Computer Navigator's Certificate, Module 4: Spreadsheets Using OpenOffice 3.0 - just getting involved with this; would be useful to offer parts of this content for pre-work prior to Introductory Statistics Course (to begin Sep 2009).
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On evaluating on-line learning materials:
A couple of my favorite resources about interpretation of data:
Some useful sites for creating statistics content: |
Some content that's perhaps better suited to a subpage
Learning- and education-related books, including inspiring direct quotes and any thoughts that occurred to me at the time
Notes from my WikiNeighbours
- Dear Alison, Thanks for the help. I thought that was the problem.keep on helping.Your Wiki friend from the West Indies.
- Hi Alison, you're doing a great job on the Math Glossary, I deeply appreciate your important contributions. Gladys Gahona. --chela5808 04:49, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
- I'm loving your Statistics Project. Learning... learning... learning... =) Gladys Gahona--chela5808 19:40, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
- hi Alison , thank you so that you telling me about Math Glassary , its nice and i began doing some job on it =) Nedal Shatat --Nedal 12:00 , 2 April 2009
- Hi, Alison--Interesting story. I am also an ex-professional educator who is homeschooling my son. However, he is only 10, so we are a bit behind you. However, I'm interested in combining a wiki with some of the courses I'm planning for the coming year. By the time he is in middle school, I want to have a year-long "symposium" or something for middle schoolers where they work all year on a real-world topic (I'm thinking about food, a la Michael Polin, for the first year), and using technology to communicate and extend the learning. So I look forward to learning more about your experience in these matters. Thanks, Carol Cross User:Ccross
- Excellent content on this page. Thank you for sharing, Alison. --Nellie Deutsch 13:03, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
- You got me in the first 5 seconds with the two beautiful dogs on the beach which is our own daily duty. Instructional design, education, and related measurement are professional interests of mine. I like your clear and concise approach in creating very appealing page content and design. -- Jim
- Hi, Alison. Thanks for visiting me. It's nice to meet you and read your page. I love hearing about collaboration of any sort. Congratulations on your very successful homeschooling collaboration group, E-cubed! Sounds like it could be model for many other groups. -- Bruna Ori
- Alison, Hi from New Zealand. I was thrilled to get your comment especially as it is my first as a newbie - many thanks for the encouragement. As a school teacher I often reflect on the suitability of schools as places of learning for teenagers so I was interested to read your page and especially what you say about you own chidren's education. I have two girls in their early teens, both at local schools. For them, learning is such a social experience that I feel I could never home school them.--Robin 09:48, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
- Hi!Alison, Thx a lot for your nice words of appreciation.i feel i'll be learning a lot from you. --Yanubha 14:13, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
- Hi Alison, thanks for visit my page. I am very interested in colaborate with you in categories workgroup. Now I am helping to translate WE tutorials into Spanish language in my free time and I know is important to categorize pages since the begining. Statistics shows that Spanish instance for WE has 1784 registered users with 4 active users and 103 content pages. By the other hand, I found in your page interesting topics regarding to education in special about homeschooling. Thanks for share your knowledge. --Jorge Vidals 14:33, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
