User:ASnieckus

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. Both of my sons are now in college: oldest is studing electrical and computer engineering (in Massachusetts) and second son is a plebe midshipman at the United States Mercant Marine Academy.

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.

In 2010 I became involved with the Princeton Learning Cooperative, a personalized learning community for teens. The center now has 11 students participating, and we are looking to move our meeting place to a larger space.

In 2009-2010, I taught a hybrid course in Introductory Statistics to 5 secondary students who homeschool. The online portion of the course is provided by Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative. We met once per week to do collaborative activities. The goal of the course is to encourage students to think statistically, to communicate acurrately and comprehesively about data, and to use a critical framework to evaluate studies.

In Fall 2010 and Fall 2011, I taught Statistical Methods II for the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The course is required for students seeking a Master's in Education in the Educational Psychology department. Rather than the usual computational, grade-focused approach to teaching statistics, I endeavored to create an environment for students to try out, learn about and apply basic statistical concepts..."let the software do the calculations and focus on learning how to interpret the results".

OK, enough about statistics. A theme runs through all of the work that I do: advocating for an educational system that better recognizes and values the rich potential of individual variation among human beings. Why do we think that all children should be force-fed a curriculum based on a narrow set of common standards, devised, largely, at the beginning of the last century? Every child (and certainly every teenager) deserves the option to self-direct his/her own education with the help of caring adults.

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


 * Dana Bennis of The Institute for Democratic Education in America suggests that our goal should be "to change the national culture and practice of education to one that values a broad definition of learning and success and that provides all young people with meaningful involvement in their learning."


 * 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

 * WE mathematics community - if you are reading this page and are interested in math, please check out our fledgling community. Let's find ways to work together to build open resources.
 * /Intro biology labs/ - integrated into study of biology by local high school students who do not attend a traditional high school. The 8 or so labs are experiments and demonstrations which can be done without expensive lab equipment.
 * Open Content Licensing project - started out with offering to do the language review of the 4 modules....now I'm helping to facilitate the 2012.01 workshop with 800+ participants.
 * GSE Stat Methods II review notes - as part of teaching Statistical Methods II for the Rutgers University, Graduate School of Education, I developed these notes for use in class review sessions.
 * Introductory Statistics Course - course offered Sept 2009 - May 2010 to local high school students who do not attend a traditional high school. The course combined 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 severely 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.
 * Workgroup:Categories, a project to create a functional category structure for WikiEducator.
 * /Category-related communications/
 * /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).

Happenings
4 Jan 2010, First student joined Intro Stats class on moodle.snieck.us.

27 Nov 2009, Installed moodle on snieck.us, to be a collaborative online learning center for secondary students in central NJ.

31 May 2009, Moved to working in Ubuntu, although I still need Windows now and then.

Some content that's perhaps better suited to a subpage
/My sandbox/

/My Quotebox/

/Learning- and education-related books/, including inspiring direct quotes and any thoughts that occurred to me at the time

Notes from my WikiNeighbours
I love getting messages from neighbours, but my preference is for you to leave a message on my discussion page.a To leave a message for me, click the "discussion" tab above, and then click again on "Start a new discussion".

aThe reason for my preference is that I am using the LQTemail gadget (available on the "Gadgets" tab in "my preferences") to send me an email whenever I have a new message. You can read more about this option at WikiEducator:Liquid Threads.

Archive of notes from my WikiNeighbours