Fortnightly Mailing

Scaling up: a hindsight-laden reflection on the launch of the Ufi Charitable Trust

The Ufi Charitable Trust launched on Wednesday of this week. The Trust has an endowment of ~£50m. Its mission is to "to achieve a step change in learning and employability for all adults in the UK, through the adoption of 21st century technologies".

The original University for Industry (Ufi) has played a varying part in my working life for the last 15 years. So attending the launch of the independent charitable trust that is now Ufi got me thinking about the origins of the organisation and about whether well over £1.5 billion of public funding could have been better used.

Both episodes of Dylan Wiliam's "The Classroom Experiment" now available

Very good to see that both episodes of Dylan Wiliam's 2010 BBC documentary (docudrama?) about improving learning methods in secondary school are now available on YouTube, where I hope they will stay.

Bear in mind that these two one-hour programmes will have derived from many many hours of video, and that there will surely have been pressure to produce "good TV". [Added 21/5/2012] See also the helpful notes on the two programmes from David Jennings that are referenced in the comment below; and if you are interested in the theory underpinning Dylan Wiliam's approach, it is worth reading his and Paul Black's Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Some compulsory viewing/listening for leaders in post-compulsory education? Though don't bulldoze your campuses.

Below is a six minute talk by Sir John Daniel, who headed the Open University between 1990 and 2001, and who therefore knows a lot about large-scale distance learning.

Based on work by Tony Bates, Daniel's carefully summarises three key developments in online learning, focusing on the US.

In short:

• the proportion of students embracing online learning is growing fast;
• for-profit providers dominate the market because they have understood the importance (for doing things at scale and for achieving consistent quality) of the division of labour and of specialisation, and because they've understood how students need the flexibility of online learning if they are to earn whilst they learn;
• public providers wanting to get in on the act need either to do it in partnership with private providers, or they need to move to a team-based approach in which different parts of provision are done by people with different roles;
• the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is now taking off, with Governments cottoning on to the advantages of OER, and the cost savings to be had from them;
• mobile, connected technology is becoming ubiquitous and cheap and will change the face of provision because "people can now access learning almost anywhere and in many formats".

Snippets May 2 to May 18 2012

Here in one place are some largely unfiltered snippets from my FriendFeed "stream" (about 2 posts per day) for the period 2 to 18 May 2012. (Updated: 20151201)

Clayton Wright's June - December 2012 Educational Technology and Education Conferences listing

Clayton Wright - source

The 27th edition of Clayton Wright's superb conference listing [1.1 MB DOC] contains, according to Clayton "events such as 'Learning and Teaching', 'Innovation in e-Learning', 'Online Teaching', 'Distance Learning Administration', 'The World Open Educational Resources Congress', 'Mobile Health', and 'Realizing Dreams'".

He continues:

"Those seeking to improve the development and delivery of e-learning courses may find a few of the suggestions in this publication helpful: http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/11/developing-and-reviewing-online-courses-items-for-consideration/. And those working in countries with weak economies may want to refer to a discussion about distance education (http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2115/) or open educational resources http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1185/2161." 

Links for a session about technology and learning

Vielha Tunnel - South entrance - Picture by Adrian A. Lorente Grima,a geologist who worked on the tunnel's subsequent reconstruction

On Friday - my last day with ALT - I ran a two-hour session at the University of Sheffield with a group of nine students on a postgraduate module about technology in learning. The "slides" I used in the session - which on their own make little sense - are here [2MB PDF]. Below are some supporting links.

2030: Robot Competence Comparable to Larger Mammals http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/talks/revo.slides/2030.html

Maes-Garreau Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes-Garreau_Law

Boston Dynamics BigDog web site http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html

Oppenheimer/Einstein picture by Alfred Eisenstaedt http://www.photographersgallery.com/photo.asp?id=3545

Sitting in a bar with a really smart friend
Course web site - https://www.ai-class.com/home/
Small chunk #1: Unit 16, Computer Vision I,Sections 1 to 4, starting at https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/179 - work through the first four sections (~7 minutes)
Small chunk #2: Unit 5, Machine Learning, Sections 1 to 3, starting at https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/47 - work through the first three sections (~8 minutes)
Piece by Rob Rambusch of the same title http://fm.schmoller.net/2011/12/sitting-in-a-bar-with-a-really-smart-friend.html

Udacity - what the AI course has become - http://www.udacity.com/

The Wired interview/discussion with Sebastian Thrun http://fora.tv/2012/05/01/WIRED_Business_Conference_The_Intelligence_Revolution

The Internet in Britain - the Oxford Internet Institute's survey - http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/

Eric Schmidt's 2007 interview in Wired - http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/mag_schmidt_trans?currentPage=all

ALT-C 2007 keynotes - especially by Dylan Wiliam and Peter Norvig - in several different formats including text transcript and MP3 http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/

More stemming from the Lifelong and Lifewide Learning diagram - http://fm.schmoller.net/2008/11/roy-pea-at-bect.html

Walter Lewin's introductory physics lectures at MIT - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-mechanics-fall-1999/video-lectures/

Sheila Webber's "Information science in 2003: a critique" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.86.7450&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Hal Abelson's 2012 ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution acceptance talk http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2012/downloads/ha_sigcseTalk.pdf (the transcript is here http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2012/downloads/ha_transcript.txt - needs some reformatting by the user)

Lanier piece with links http://fm.schmoller.net/2010/10/jaron_lanier_asks_how_can_you_be_ambidextrous_in_the_matter_of_technology_and_education.html

The appeal of the brain in the popular press http://pps.sagepub.com/content/5/6/762.full