Jason Miles

Fusion Development 4 – Bringing it all together

Standalone tools often provide solutions to specific problems, but when these tools come together, harmonizing their individual strengths, the resulting impact is magnified. At Maple Elementary School, we’ve witnessed the transformative power of individual solutions, from Sarah’s analytical dashboards to Tom and Elaine’s intuitive apps. However, the real magic unfurls when these tools intertwine, and Lisa’s journey as a dedicated teacher is a testament to this.

Lisa’s Vision: A Holistic Reading App

Lisa, an experienced fifth-grade teacher at Maple Elementary, had been observing the digital initiatives of her colleagues. Inspired by their successes, she envisioned an app that would be a one-stop solution for her students – a place where they could set reading goals, submit reflective responses, track their progress, and be rewarded for their achievements.

Lisa’s Reading Galaxy App

With the Power Platform at her disposal, Lisa began crafting the Reading Galaxy App. Leveraging the PowerApps, she built an interactive interface allowing students to:

Set Personalized Goals: Using insights from Sarah’s dashboards, students could see their current reading levels and set progressive targets for themselves.

Submit Reflections: Drawing from Tom’s Feedback Loop, Lisa integrated a section for students to submit their thoughts and feelings on their readings.

Earn Badges: Inspired by Elaine’s emoticon feature, Lisa added a gamified element. As students hit milestones or showed significant growth, they were awarded digital badges, visible on their profiles.

The true genius of Lisa’s app lay in its connectivity. By linking it with PowerBI, data from students’ goals and reflections were fed into Sarah’s analytics, further enriching the insights. The badges, awarded based on data points from Tom’s and Elaine’s apps, ensured that they were both reflective of effort and achievement.

The Reading Galaxy App was an immediate sensation in her class. Students were more engaged, taking ownership of their reading journeys. The badge system introduced a healthy competitive spirit, motivating students to push their boundaries. The reflections not only enhanced comprehension but also fostered a deeper emotional connection to the texts.

The Power of Availability and Integration

Lisa’s journey underscores two fundamental truths:

Availability Matters: Having tools like the Power Platform readily available democratizes innovation. Lisa, like her colleagues, wasn’t an IT specialist. Yet, with the right tools at her fingertips, she crafted a solution with a profound impact.

Integration Amplifies Impact: Standalone tools have their merits, but integrated solutions harness collective strengths. By drawing from Sarah’s, Tom’s, and Elaine’s tools, Lisa’s app offered a comprehensive solution, addressing multiple facets of the reading journey.

The Future is Integrated

The success stories from Maple Elementary – from Sarah’s analytics to Lisa’s holistic app – highlight the boundless potential of integrated tech solutions:

Sarah’s Dashboard: Offering deep, data-driven insights.

Tom’s Feedback Loop App: Providing timely, actionable feedback.

Elaine’s Reading Progress Tracker: Merging academic metrics with emotional well-being.

Lisa’s Reading Galaxy App: Crafting a holistic, engaging reading journey for students.

Today, the true potential of technology lies not just in individual solutions, but in the seamless integration of these solutions. As more educators like Lisa harness the power of available tools, and synergize them to craft holistic solutions, the future of education is not just bright – it’s dazzling.

Fusion Development 3 – Citizen Developers

In a time defined by its rapid technological advances, the democratization of technology is a game-changer. The rise of ‘citizen data analysts’ is a testament to this, with individuals like Sarah leading the charge in reshaping how we approach data. Parallelly, a new breed of innovators is emerging: “citizen developers”. These are passionate individuals who, despite lacking formal IT training, are crafting solutions tailored to their specific needs, thanks to Microsoft’s Power Platform.

Tom and Elaine: The Unlikely Developers

Tom and Elaine, both members of Maple Elementary School faculty, share Sarah’s commitment to student success. Their passion for fostering reading skills led them down a path neither expected: app development. With the Power Platform’s PowerApps, they turned their visions into reality.

Tom’s Feedback Loop App

Tom always believed in the power of timely feedback. However, he noticed that the conventional feedback mechanisms were often delayed, causing students to miss out on timely course correction. Drawing inspiration from this, Tom ventured into PowerApps. Using its intuitive interface, he pieced together the Feedback Loop App. The drag-and-drop functionality allowed him to design an interface that was both visually appealing and user-friendly. With the app’s built-in connectors, he integrated it with the school’s database, ensuring real-time data synchronization.

The app transformed the feedback process. As students read aloud, teachers could immediately record observations, categorizing them under fluency, comprehension, and pronunciation. By week’s end, the app auto-generated a comprehensive report, bridging the communication gap between parents and students. By providing this immediate feedback, Tom ensured that students could adjust swiftly, fostering a more agile learning environment.

Elaine’s Reading Progress Tracker

Elaine, deeply attuned to her students’ emotional and academic needs, envisioned a tool that would capture more than just reading metrics. PowerApps became her platform of choice. Elaine utilized PowerApps’ template library, selecting one tailored for progress tracking. She then personalized it, adding unique fields for daily achievements, word logs, and emotional reflections. The emoticon-based emotional check-in was a masterstroke, letting students choose from a variety of emoji’s to record how they were feeling at a particular time of day.

The Reading Progress Tracker became an instant hit. Students enjoyed the gamified aspect of logging their progress, and the visual representation of their reading journey motivated them further. The emoticon feature proved invaluable, offering Elaine insights into students’ emotional states. If a student consistently logged negative emotions post-reading, Elaine could provide timely emotional and academic interventions.

Collaboration: The Power Trio

Sarah, recognizing the potential of her colleagues’ innovations, wanted to integrate them in with her dashboard. Using PowerApps’ connectivity with PowerBI, she brought in the data from Tom’s feedback app and Elaine’s tracker into her dashboard. This not only streamlined her data gathering process but also enriched her insights.

Together, the trio’s tools offered a 360-degree view of the students’ reading journey. Tom’s app provided actionable feedback, Elaine’s tool tracked progress and emotions, and Sarah’s dashboard synthesized this data, offering rich, data-driven insights. This tools ensured that students received comprehensive support, both academically and emotionally. After Sarah, Tom, and Elaine had used the suite of tools enough to be confident that they were workable and stable, they even published them to the other members of the Maple Elementary School faculty.

The Power Platform’s Potential Unleashed

The success stories of the Feedback Loop App and the Reading Progress Tracker underscore the boundless potential of the Power Platform:

Feedback Loop App: Transforming feedback into real-time, actionable insights.

Reading Progress Tracker: Capturing the holistic reading journey, merging academic metrics with emotional well-being.

Tom and Elaine, empowered by the Power Platform, have transcended their traditional roles, becoming pioneers of tailor-made, impactful solutions. Their journey symbolizes the promise of the Power Platform, proving that with the right tools, passion can indeed translate into innovation. In this tech-driven era, citizen developers like Tom and Elaine are not just the future; they’re the present.

Fusion Development 2 – The Citizen Data Analyst

In today’s digitized world, the significance of data is clear. However, the true power lies in effectively harnessing data. While IT Departments and Data Teams may be big players in making those harnesses, it’s up to the end-user, who sometimes has minimal IT experience, to use those tools and make them meaningful, resulting in people who aren’t just consumers of data but who can interact with it fluently to make better decisions. But these people need the gateways and tools to make this happen.

Enter data products, the unsung heroes of our digital realm, offering targeted solutions that transform vast data troves into actionable insights. The magic of data products is their ability to empower ‘citizen data analysts’, individuals who might not boast a deep data analytics background but carry a wealth of domain-specific knowledge. They have the curiosity, passion, and background to make the most of the available data, and they may have individual ideas about how best to use it.

Sarah’s Journey of Data Empowerment

Sarah, the reading intervention specialist at Maple Elementary School, starts her day with her favorite tool: her personalized dashboard on PowerBI. This dashboard isn’t just any dashboard; it’s one she crafted, merging data from various data products to provide a holistic view tailored to her needs. It offers her an overview of reading scores, resource allocations, student engagement metrics, and collaboration notes, all in one unified space, and even available to her on her tablet as she moves from room to room to work with various students – or even to find a quiet place to do her planning.

From her dashboard, Sarah can deep dive into the Student Performance Tracker. Here, she gets a detailed visualization of reading scores from multiple assessments, allowing her to pinpoint patterns and identify students needing intervention.

By midday, as she’d identified a struggling student who needed some specialized resources, she turned to the Resource Allocator. Resource Allocator is a tool she uses to find the best resources and books to recommend for a particular student. It has access to the student’s assessment results, the school’s library catalog for reading books, Sarah’s inventory of intervention tools, and the district’s recommended interventions. After analyzing a student’s profile, Resource Allocator recommends appropriate resources for that student. Sarah has compiled her inventory in a spreadsheet, tracking what she has available at any given moment. By linking the spreadsheet with resources in the school library that are also available, she’s making her task much more streamlined and efficient, allowing her to pick up some appropriate books before meeting with the student.

In the afternoon, her PowerBI dashboard alerts notify her of changes in student engagement. Curious, she taps into the Engagement Monitor. This tool, integrated with Microsoft Office365 and Maple Elementary’s learning management system and intervention systems, offers her a granular view of how students engage with their allocated resources.

Ending her day, Sarah reflects on her insights and strategies, readying herself to collaborate with peers and parents.

Sarah’s PowerBI Mastery: No IT Training Required

With her background focused primarily on reading intervention rather than IT, one might wonder how Sarah manages to create such a comprehensive dashboard on PowerBI. The answer lies in the user-centric design of the data products and PowerBI.

Each data product developed by the IT department of Maple Elementary resides in individual PowerBI workspaces. These workspaces are structured containers designed with clear naming conventions and organized datasets. They serve as dedicated hubs for each product, making data discovery and exploration intuitive.

When Sarah decides to create or update her dashboard, she doesn’t need to write complex code or queries. Instead, she utilizes PowerBI’s user-friendly interface to:

Connect to Workspaces: Sarah can access the desired data product workspace with a few clicks. The intuitive layout means she doesn’t have to hunt around; she selects the workspace corresponding to the data product she wants to integrate.

Drag-and-Drop Functionality: Sarah drags relevant data fields onto her canvas. Whether it’s a chart showing reading scores from the Student Performance Tracker or a table of resources from the Resource Allocator, the process is visual and straightforward.

Customize Visuals: PowerBI offers a plethora of visualization options. Sarah can choose bar graphs, pie charts, heat maps, or any other visual that best represents her data. Plus, she can ensure the dashboard aligns with her aesthetic preferences with easy-to-use formatting tools.

Set Alerts: Sarah can set alerts on specific metrics to stay updated on significant changes or trends. This way, she’s immediately notified if, for instance, a student’s engagement drops significantly.

Share and Collaborate: Once satisfied with her dashboard, Sarah can easily share it with other stakeholders directly from PowerBI. They can then provide feedback, which she can incorporate in real-time.

The marriage of well-organized data product workspaces and PowerBI’s user-centric design enables Sarah to be an autonomous data analyst, crafting insights without needing constant IT intervention.

A New Dawn with Data Products

Sarah’s routine is a testament to the transformative nature of modern data products:

Student Performance Tracker: A detailed lens into student assessments

Resource Allocator: Smart recommendations at her fingertips

Engagement Monitor: Offering a pulse on student interactions

Collaboration Hub: Bringing stakeholders together on Azure

By putting the power of custom dashboards and data products into the hands of domain experts like Sarah, we’re paving the way for more informed, agile, and relevant decision-making processes in every field.

Fusion Development – Introduction

The roles of technology, data, and systems are rapidly transforming, leading to democratization in data and development within organizations. This shift introduces Data Products and Citizen Developers and Analysts, empowering individuals without IT backgrounds to create and analyze data-driven solutions. A collaborative approach called Fusion Development maximizes these roles, breaking silos and encouraging shared problem-solving. These trends can potentially reshape the digital world across various sectors and industries.

How we interact with technology, data, and systems is transforming significantly. Traditional boundaries that define roles and responsibilities are blurring, leading to new opportunities and challenges. One of the most fantastic opportunities is democratizing data and development within organizations. The ability to translate something you imagine into a computer program or data visualization is no longer limited to people with computer programming backgrounds and the education and training that go with them.

Data Products are tools that transform intricate data into intelligible and actionable insights. They process and render data into a more palatable format, thereby bestowing individuals — regardless of their technical acumen — with the power to make data-driven decisions. By presenting data in a user-friendly manner, data products serve as bridges that connect raw data to meaningful insights. They democratize data, making it accessible not just to data aficionados and specialists but to everyone, fostering a culture where data-driven insights become the cornerstone of decision-making processes.

Citizen Developers are individuals who, despite lacking formal IT backgrounds, take the initiative to create applications or solutions tailored to address specific needs. Propelled by the advent of user-friendly platforms, like Microsoft Power Platform, these professionals venture into realms traditionally reserved for programmers, democratizing the software development process. They translate ideas into functional solutions, bridging gaps and fostering innovation without being encumbered by the intricacies associated with traditional software development. Their endeavors often reflect a pragmatic understanding of the problem, coupled with creatively utilizing available resources to devise solutions.

Similarly, Citizen Data Analysts are individuals from diverse professional backgrounds who leverage data products to interpret and analyze data, amalgamating their domain knowledge with analytical tools to extract meaningful insights. Unlike traditional data scientists, who specialize in statistics, data processing, and analysis, Citizen Data Analysts bring their professional background and experience to analyze data in any role. By harnessing the power of data products, they can transcend the technical barriers that often surround data analytics, delving into data-driven inquiry to uncover actionable insights that can inform decision-making within their respective domains.

The essence of Citizen Developers and Citizen Data Analysts lies in their ability to lower the barriers to entry in software creation and analytics, empowering a broader spectrum of individuals to contribute to the digital solutions landscape. This ability, in turn, accelerates problem-solving and cultivates a more inclusive and innovative development ecosystem. Through their efforts, professionals not only contribute to the rapid prototyping and deployment of solutions but also to the broader digital transformation narrative, reshaping how organizations approach software development, analytics, and problem-solving.

Fusion Development encapsulates a collaborative approach where professional developers, citizen developers, and citizen data analysts converge to collaborate on projects. By combining the technical prowess of trained developers with the practical insights and domain expertise of citizen contributors, fusion development aims to cultivate solutions that are both technically robust and practically relevant. This collaborative ethos enables a richer understanding of problem domains and fosters a more inclusive, innovative environment for solution creation.

In the fusion development paradigm, synthesizing diverse skill sets and perspectives engenders a more holistic approach to problem-solving. Professional developers bring their technical acumen, coding skills, and understanding of software development lifecycles. In contrast, citizen contributors, with their understanding of end-user needs and domain-specific challenges, contribute practical insights that ensure the development of solutions tailored to real-world needs.

The beauty of fusion development lies in its ability to break down the traditional silos that often exist within organizations between technical and non-technical personnel. It fosters a culture of collective problem-solving and shared ownership of projects, thereby accelerating the pace of innovation and ensuring that solutions are both technically sound and user-focused. Through this cross-functional lens, fusion development not only augments the quality and relevance of digital solutions but also cultivates a more inclusive, dynamic environment for technological innovation, ensuring that the digital solutions produced are well-aligned with user needs and organizational goals.

Over the next four weeks, we will look at these ideas in depth in the context of an elementary school and how various citizen developers and data analysts can increase their productivity and impact. While the series uses an elementary school as a backdrop to illustrate these concepts, the lessons, and principles are applicable across various sectors and industries. The goal is to provide readers with a clear understanding of how these trends are reshaping the digital world and the potential they hold for organizations and individuals alike.

How Not to Need to Kill it with Fire

Over the holidays, I tried to do a bit of professional reading to keep my mind fresh and help me be a bit more productive with some work that I’m currently doing. To this end, I read Marianne Bellotti’s Kill it with Fire: Managing Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones).

I’m not sure what I expected, but I got much more. The book provides excellent case studies, tips, and history to keep everything grounded in modernizing computer systems. This is a critical skill in a world where any time we walk in a new door, we may see infrastructure and codebases between fifty years and five minutes old. Bellotti gives tools for both the technological and strategy and the critical parts of building team morale and driving stakeholder buy-in on modernization projects.

One of the book’s first points is that technological development is highly cyclical and that if you wait long enough (or live long enough), the wheel always returns to the same ideas. The critical thing to remember is that those ideas never recombine in the same ways. Hence, modernization efforts are complicated even when the ideas rhyme, much less when they’re on opposite sides of the pendulum swing. This is increasingly an important realization, as the nature of cloud computing can appear deceptively similar to older ideas of shared compute, such as mainframes and minicomputers that we are often modernizing today. Still, all of the supporting technologies and ideas are so very different.

The book continues into the almost eternal conversation about “why modernize and why is it so risky?” One of the points made throughout the book is that technological modernization should only happen when it makes business sense, not simply because there is a new technique available. There is a tendency among so many engineers and developers to try to perfect every problem, even the ones that are already solved. So often, when these kinds of technology modernizations are divorced from the business, it leads to failures. Many times, these are not just failures of the project but the underlying tools that the organization had come to rely on, causing disruptions and outages. Bellotti reminds us, “[a]dopting new practices doesn’t necessarily make technology better, but doing so almost always makes technology more complicated, and more complicated technology is hard to maintain and ultimately more prone to failure.” These failures are damaging, not only for the organization, but for the reputation of IT, as memories of broken promises, downtime, and loss of functionality last far longer than delivered problems and months, years, or decades with minimal downtime.

Other discussions of use are on how to deal with technical debt, how to migrate to a services architecture, and handling performance issues. Each of these topics is covered from a strategic and business perspective, including the “why” of each and how to recognize when that is the problem. There are also techniques for breaking these problems down into incremental development as used in a modern development process – that also is easier for the business to understand.

Finally, a large chunk of the book approaches what to do when, as a leader, you gain a modernization project in progress and how to go about dealing with the many common problems that crop up inside a failing modernization process. This section is instrumental in identifying ways to avoid the typical “spiraling” issues that occur when a poorly executed or planned modernization program starts to go off the rails.

This book is excellent, and I’d recommend it to anyone who has to deal with or touch legacy systems, and by that, I mean any system that’s already in production.

CITE 2022 – Conference Review

As some of you may know, I made the jump from K-12 to private-sector consulting in late July. It has been an incredible transition for me and one that I hope will rejuvenate this blog (especially considering how long my last attempt lasted). I do plan to broaden the topics that I talk about, but I will still remember where I came from, especially regarding the very academic world of Learning Analytics. This post can be considered a bit transitionary and is a review of the 2022 CITE Annual Conference in Long Beach.

The 2022 CITE (California Information Technology in Education) conference was a different one for me. For the first time ever, I was attending not as an educational member but as an attendee. It took more than a little adjustment, but I think that I learned as much, and as much that’s immediately relevant to me as I did when I was focused on K-12. It really is amazing how much the CITE team does to focus the conference not simply on technology but on leading in a technological world.

The first thing that I want to do is congratulate the members of CTO Mentor Cohort 16! I hadn’t realized how many of you I knew, and I’m sure that all of you are going to be leaders in CiTE in the coming years. Speaking of CTO Mentor, I had a great time catching up with my own Cohort 15! I continue to recommend this program to anyone in or reaching for a position of senior technology leadership in K-12 education. There’s no better way to acquire a firm grounding in all the different skills a technology leader needs. I know that I use the skills I gained every day, even now that I’ve left K-12.

As for the conference itself, I felt that the content was the best that CITE’s had in years. There was a diverse range of sessions aimed at technologists of all levels. I particularly enjoyed Ben Markley’s improvement science session and Brianne Ford and Erick Steelman’s presentation on board presentations (also great advice for any leadership presentation). I think that IT organizations, in general, are excellent places to leverage improvement science (especially organizations that embrace the Agile mindset), and it is great to see more people talking about it. I think I’ll be adapting some of Ben’s protocols for my own use.

CITE has a history of tremendous keynotes, ranging from Kate the Chemist to Steve Wozniak, and this year was no exception. Danielle Feinberg, the visual effects supervisor from Turning Red, spoke about resiliency in the face of challenges, overcoming adversity, and her own journey from tech, to art, and back. It was a moving speech, marred only by an unexpected interruption of a fire alarm, which Danielle handled perfectly. I regret not being able to attend John Sileo’s keynote, but I heard that it was great as well. Finally, at least on the subject of the general sessions, Antonio Romayor’s MCing of the closing raffle was amazing, and I think that he may have another calling in comedy.

Anytime you attend a conference, especially one for a community as close-knit as the K-12 technology community, the conversations between the sessions are going to be at least as important and enlightening as the sessions themselves, and this year at CITE was no exception. I’ve been thinking a lot about data strategy, data leadership, and data governance lately, and especially how they intersect with technology and organizational leadership. In addition to talking about my new chapter, several conversations really helped me focus on these ideas and realize that over the next few years, we’re going to be meeting an inflection point with data strategy and data governance. They aren’t going to be “nice to haves” anymore. The reason for this is that citizen and self-service analytics tools are being released at a remarkable pace, and they’ve reached the point that anyone can be a data analyst, so we (as technology leaders) are going to have to accept and support that, rather than attempting to hold back the tide with a bucket.

Of course, no conference review would be complete without mentioning swag, and here again CITE has been ahead of the trend toward less swag and – for lack of a better phrase – better swag. The conference bag was minimal but reusable (as it has been for the last several years, a small “grocery” type bag), and the “conference swag item” was a very nice heavy-duty laptop sleeve that I can see myself using. As for the vendors, some have really upped their game, with INVZBL having what is probably the best piece of swag that I’ve ever seen and something guaranteed to be either used or passed on to someone else. It was a combination hand sanitizer bottle and dog bag dispenser, with the clip being strong enough to survive on a leash!

Distance Learning (Or: Getting Back in the Saddle)

I want to talk a bit about some of how I think the incredible challenges this year are going to affect the way we operate as educational data scientists.

Wow! It’s been almost three years (be nice) since I updated this.

I wish that I could say that it’s been busy (though it has) or that I haven’t had anything to say, but it’s more that I’ve been letting my tendencies towards procrastination get the better of me. I’m going to try to make this a more regular thing, though, in the future.

Thanks to current events, my group at work has largely moved to working from home, and don’t click away thinking this will be another piece telling you how to work (or teach!) from home, I’m the last person in the world to be giving advice on either one of those topics. I want to talk a bit about some of the ways that I think these changes are going to affect the way we operate as educational data scientists.

Continue reading “Distance Learning (Or: Getting Back in the Saddle)”

Introduction to Data Visualization

Hi Everyone,

Here’s the first video on my YouTube Channel. Its a bit rough, but what do you think?

EduDataSci YouTube Channel

So, I’m launching a YouTube Channel.

So, I’m launching a YouTube Channel. For the most part, I’m going to be hosting introductory videos on Data Visualization, Programming and Data Science on it.

I’m a big believer in the idea that you don’t have to have a ton of experience or tools to get started in this field, so my current thought is to target this at people with very little experience in data science, and build up individual skills.

My first video is going to be a short introduction to the general idea of data visualization, with some history. After that, I’m hoping to release one a week. Let me know if there’s anything that you think would be a good idea to include!

EduDataSci’s Quarter 2 2017 Reading List

So, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything, and I’d like to say I’ve got a great reason like having been on some sort of burn-before-reading secret mission to discover the source of all knowledge, but the truth is, I just got busy.

One of the things that I started neglecting was my reading, and when I started back up, I thought that it might be worth putting out a list of what I’m reading at the moment and why. So without further ado, here’s what I’m planning on reading for the next three months or so. (Yes, this is a lot of reading. No, it’s not really unusual, I read a lot.)

“Latent Factors in Student-Teacher Interaction Factor Analysis” (JEBS – April 2017)

Thu Le, Daniel Bolt, Eric Camburn, Peter Goff, Karl Rohe

This article looks really interesting. The authors are discussing a technique that they’ve developed to predict the quality of previously unpaired student teacher interactions based on existing interactions. If this is proven to work, there’s tremendous implications for student scheduling. Being able to place students with the teachers that they’re likely to be able to work the best with could be a great way to improve student outcomes, not to mention reducing student and staff frustration and stress.

Latent Variable Models: An Introduction to Factor, Path, and Structural Equation Modelling (Fifth Edition)

John C. Loehlin and A. Alexander Beaujean

One of the few books I found on latent factor analysis specifically, I’m putting this on my list on the assumption that I’m going to have a few questions about the above.

Educational Measurement for Applied Researchers: Theory into Practice

Margaret Wu, Hak Ping Tam, Tsung-Hau Jen

I’ve managed to acquire a little bit of knowledge on test theory for various reasons, and it’s been enough to really interest me in the statistics of it. In particular, this area seems like it can be a minefield for educational data science practitioners if they don’t at least acquire a sense of when they need to go to an expert for advice. I’m a big fan of the Springer Series on Statistics, so when I saw this textbook on Amazon, I decided to grab it and try to digest a chapter at a time.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardener

I’m a big fan of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, and a number of reviews have indicated that this book is another in that same vein. The title makes it seem like this is going to be something on analytics, but it’s actually about developing critical thinking skills to enable people to become better at forecasting the future and also better at recognizing bad forecasts.

On Your Mark: Challenging the Conventions of Grading and Reporting

Thomas R. Guskey

Our district is currently using standards based report cards, and that’s gotten me interested in the best way to represent and use standards based marks, both from the standpoint of communicating with parents and other stakeholders and predicting future student performance. Guskey is one of the leading advocates of this reform (and was recommended by a fellow education stats enthusiast), and this book looks like a good introduction to the history and current status of standards based grading.

Programming Microsoft Office 365

Paolo Pialorsi

Custom SharePoint Solutions with HTML and JavaScript

Brandon Atkinson

We’ve decided to use SharePoint as one of our primary delivery methods for our business intelligence system. Because of that, I’m feeling like my fairly basic “create a list,” “access the list through one of the APIs,” “modify the list” pattern of working with SharePoint should probably get a little more advanced. In order to do that, I’m going to have to brush back up on my JavaScript.

So that’s it for professional reading, but everyone has to relax, right? I’m on a bit of a non-fiction kick lately, and here’s what I’m reading for fun:

Dreadnaught

Robert K. Massie

Castles of Steel

Robert K. Massie

I love the way Massie approaches history, it always feels like reading a serial. It makes it easy to pick up his books, read a chapter, then put them down again. These two books examine the run up to WWI and WWI through the context of the politics and diplomacy surrounding the buildup of the Royal Navy as it shifted from sail to steam. Massie’s style of writing biographical sketches inside the larger context also gives a great look at some of the colorful characters of this period.

British Battleships: 1889 – 1904

A. Burtz

British Battleships of World War I

A. Burtz

Pictures, diagrams, and technology to go with the above.

Pyramids: A Novel of Discworld

Terry Pratchett

Continuing my journey through Discworld. I’m not sure much more needs to be said about this one.