First a WoPAC (Word, Phrase, Acronym or Concept often used by educators)

If you're around educators for any length of time, the word 'rubric' will always come up.

And if you're a techie, the word is likely new to your vocabulary. Or, at least it was to mine.
The first thing I always thought of when I heard the word 'rubric' was Barney Rubble from the Flinstones.
Rubble, rubric - that's the closest association I could make to anything I already had stored away in memory.

So it was on my shortlist of words to understand at the start.

Here's what Google has to define it:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&defl=en&q=define:Rubric&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title

A rubric, from what I understand so far, is a way to structure a 2 dimensional grid that lets teachers more easily assign scores to tasks to be learned, as well as categorize them by level of expertise and expectations.

The rubric helps teachers to better classify students as beginner, intermediate and expert, and what knowledge constitutes somebody being at that level, and then also assign scores within level depending on how well they are doing at that level. It's almost a 3 dimensional graph in 2 dimensions it seems.

It provides a way to structure the scoring process, for things that may be subjective, to make it easier to take all the considerations into mind while scoring, and keep it organized and flexible to help in representing just where the student is on the important aspects of whatever the rubric might be setup to measure.

Techie's might use rubrics also, without realizing it, whenever they evaluate a new product and/or service - they have certain criteria they might be looking for, and they rate the product/service based on that criteria, which results in a final score for the product/service. But, I've never heard a techie say the word 'rubric'. 'Product evaluation form' is the phrase that comes to mind for something similar in the tech world. I'd probably say a rubric is a product evaluation form on steroids.

On a different note...

A wonderful article, I thought, on the educator's mindset...
http://www.drrobertbrooks.com/writings/articles/0509.html
I don't know that it's the mindset that all teachers have, but in any case, thought it a good perception to have of their mindset, and something to help them work towards if they aren't working towards it already.

gthomson