However, if psychology is truly going to help insight change in education or itself, it needs to get over its distaste for qualitative methods and desire to distance itself from sociology.

we don’t want to fund teachers and manageable class sizes, so we outsource the plagiarism problem to a for-profit company that has a side gig of promoting the importance of the problem it promises to solve.

My engineering courses were pushed to use Matlab and Mathematica by the companies selling them, who have then successfully set themselves up for market dominance outcompeting literally free, equivalent tools despite ludicrous cost and abhorrent business models. Changing our practices and what tools we use is the first part of escaping that.

Turnitin’s practices have been ruled as fair use in federal court. But to Morris and Stommel, the ceding of control of students' work -- and their ownership over that work -- to a corporation is a moral issue, even if it's legally sound. Time spent on checking plagiarism reports is time that would be better spent teaching students how to become better writers in the first place, they argue. “This is ethical, activist work. While not exactly the Luddism of the 19th century, we must ask ourselves, when we’re choosing ed-tech tools, who profits and from what?” they wrote in the essay. “The gist: when you upload work to Turnitin, your property is, in no reasonable sense, your property. Every essay students submit -- representing hours, days or even years of work -- becomes part of the Turnitin database, which is then sold to universities.”

The internet was invented to empower collaboration and augment human intellect. The web has made these possibilities available to a staggeringly diverse global citizenry. Let's shutter our "learning management systems" and build "understanding augmentation networks" instead, moving away from educational assembly lines toward intellectual ecosystems of interest and curiosity.

and reflect on its purposes — individually and as a class. 

Drier’s final grades are based on students’ written self-assessments, which, in turn, are based on their review of items in their portfolios. 

“When school is seen as a test, rather than an adventure in ideas,” teachers may persuade themselves they’re being fair “if they specify, in listlike fashion, exactly what must be learned to gain a satisfactory grade…[but] such schooling is unfair in the wider sense that it prepares students to pass other people’s tests without strengthening their capacity to set their own assignments in collaboration with their fellows” (Nicholls and Hazzard, 1993, p. 77).

Extrinsic motivation, which includes a desire to get better grades, is not only different from, but often undermines, intrinsic motivation, a desire to learn for its own sake (Kohn 1999a). 

There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006).  In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.

n an outcomes-based regime, outcomes become central and crowd out other considerations.

Don’t squash their academic freedom unless they’re being a bigot – bigotry is not a freedom, it’s a character defect.

I have found firm ground

class, race, gender, nationality, sexuality,

“firm ground”,