Clear critique by Simon Davies (a public school head) of Seldon's Spectator piece backing the scrapping of the QTS requirement. - http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeeh...
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If it makes use of (say) stuff by @donaldclark and on the @A_L_T wiki, "What Every Techie Should Know About Education" should get traction. http://goo.gl/uwu7K http://goo.gl/6CcPm - http://third-bit.com/educate...
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How much Energy do I consume? Find out with Christian Gebbe's handy web-based estimator, recommended by "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" David Mackay. - http://energy.m21.cc/energye...
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Given the current climate, the SSAT National Conference in Liverpool 4/5 December has interesting themes. And speakers who will be familiar to ALT types. - http://ssatuk.co.uk/blog...
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Article by German Lopez in Cincinnati City Beat [about US e-schools] suggesting that Internet-based education isn't living up to the hype. - http://www.citybeat.com/cincinn...
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Big Data & Decision Making. [Big PDF]. A 24 page report from the Economist Intelligence Unit - http://www.webcitation.org/69bwKav...
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The best systems “train their teachers rigorously”. Chris Husbands of IOE challenges the decision to allow state funded schools to hire unqualified teachers. - http://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com/2012...
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More MOOC links. This time from Maria Vogel. Some are links to other compilations. Searchable. - http://delicious.com/stacks...
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From the OUNL's @pbsloep a first rate set of links/articles about MOOCS (Open as well as Over-hyped), networked Learning and learning networks - http://www.scoop.it/t...
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Massively Over-hyped Online Course is a term that will probably stick. Via @guzdial. - http://computinged.wordpress.com/2012...
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There is plenty of meat in Carol Twigg's July 2012 NCAT Newsletter on large-scale TEL-supported course redesign. - http://www.thencat.org/Newslet...
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@DylanWiliam - why smart people do dumb things in education. A 38-minute canter through the research about cause and effect, exposing the flaws in past and current policy interventions. According DW the "love the one you are with" strategy (help the current teaching workforce get better) is the only game in town. Conclusions summarised below. - http://www.youtube.com/watch...!
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DW's concluding remarks. Improve your practice for as long as you are working, or go. Focus on the things that make the most difference to learning (thus "no more brain gym", "no more learning styles"). Have each teacher choose what to work on, since they know their jobs and their learners better than anyone else. We need a relentless, slow focus on continuous improvement in teacher practice. Just like in PE, there is no point in comparing teachers with each other. What matters is that teachers are "improving their personal best", bit by bit, year on year..
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Effective Workload Management Strategies for the Online Environment. 10 years on, this still cuts the mustard for some contexts [PDF]. - http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/pdf...
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Via @DianeRavitch - Gary Rubinstein picks holes in "School Of One". - http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012...
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Via @sebastianthrun. Epic 2020 is a Call to Action to compel universities to 'decouple the delivery of content and assessment through a “test out” option'. "If a student can learn online better, faster and cheaper and prove it by passing the on campus course exams then credit should be given for the demonstration of those skills." - http://epic2020.org/call-to...
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Think you've implemented Assessment for Learning? @DylanWiliam and Paul Black note that "real" AfL is rare in England's schools, which need not be so. - http://www.tes.co.uk/article...
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@dweinberger hits the nail on the head in his critique of Romney's "The Anglo-Saxon president" comment - http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger...
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"Getting out of debt by adding debt." The FT's Martin Wolf's postings are didactic, but in a good way. - http://blogs.ft.com/martin-...
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@zackwhittaker - from the archive. Piece in ALT News Online about Zack's test of relying solely on a smartphone for studying at university. - http://archive.alt.ac.uk/newslet...
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"I’m damn sure that there is no MOOC that can replace what is going on in my classrooms this summer." Mark Guzdial is clear and to-the-point in "Universities on the Defensive: What is it we do?" - http://computinged.wordpress.com/2012...
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Wonderful photos + a spare & moving interview with Gunther Holtorf, who's travelled the world by road (> 0.8m km) ever since 1989. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...
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Winning the Tour was the icing. A win at the Olympics would "add the hundreds and thousands". G. piece by @bradwiggins. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport...
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@CameronNeylon is quickly out of the blocks with "The challenge for scholarly societies" - about the impact of author/employer/grant pays Gold #OpenAccess on scholarly societies. - http://cameronneylon.net/blog...
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Very nice indeed. The Creative Commons license choosing, attribution tool, and code generator. - http://creativecommons.org/choose...
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[PDF] Joint Policy Consortium and IoE Centre for Post-14 Research and Innovation. Submission to the Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning (http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/cavtl) - http://policyconsortium.co.uk/wp-cont...
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UK plan for #openaccess to research is a golden opportunity, not a cost, writes @Stephen_Curry in the Guardian. Key excerpt below. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/science...
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"Moreover, this business is still playing out. If the research community can act in concert, there is scope for using open access to ensure that the taxpayer gets better value for money from its research spend on publishing. This is new territory, but with control of the funds, research institutions should seize this opportunity to push for open access at the cheapest possible price. I would not wish to diminish the difficulties faced by UK research institutions in the shift to open access, but it is time for them to be as bold as the government. They can start by breaking their addiction to top-tier journals, which are likely to charge the highest APCs because publishers know that researchers and university managers continue to mis-apply journal reputations (quantified as impact factors) as a measure of the quality of individual researchers or their work."
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"You don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle." Tony Bates on good form in "What shall we do about MOOCs?" - http://www.tonybates.ca/2012...
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From @conradwolfram - the Computer-Based Math Education Summit - £250, 1/2 November in London at the Royal Institution - http://www.computerbasedmath.org/events...
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Gold and Green #OpenAccess - UCL's Director of Library Services Paul Ayris writes in the Guardian. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-...
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155k enrolled, 23k started, 7k passed. Summary of lessons learned - probably sanitised a bit - from MITx’s "Circuits and Electronics" prototype course. - http://web.mit.edu/newsoff...
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The Economist on Open Access. An accessible, but overgeneralising article, with a wide range of comments (from Steven Harnad, e.g.: http://goo.gl/qvNxL) - http://www.economist.com/node...
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Signs of the "Stanford" AI course's approach reappearing in a broader more mainstream course, this time under Google's direct auspices. - http://kindalearning.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
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@sociallearn is definitely interesting. The OU launches a new "social learning" platform with many new features. - http://sociallearn.open.ac.uk/public
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What is necessary and what is contingent in MOOC design? Good early section differentiating 2 broad classes of MOOC. 48 slides from George Roberts, Marion Waite, Jenny Mackness, Elizabeth Lovegrove. - http://www.slideshare.net/georger...
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Larry Cuban argues that technology radicals "ignore the crucial and historical purpose public schools have served in a democracy". - http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2012...
Concluding paragraphs: "Tax-supported public schools have been and are social, political, and moral institutions whose job is to help children and youth acquire multiple literacies, enter the labor market well prepared, vote, serve on juries, contribute to their communities, think for themselves, and live full and worthwhile lives. A century ago, these purposes for public schools were obvious; now they remain in the shadows. Few policymakers, philanthropists, technology futurists have challenged (or are willing to challenge) the swelling embrace of online instruction, including “blended learning,” that promise transforming schools into information factories."
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What Florida's School Grades Measure - And What They Don't. Exemplary writing about a familiar set of issues. - http://shankerblog.org/?p=6248
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Learning Catalytics "Grouping Students With Software". By coincidence this NY Times piece about @eric_mazur 's brainchild was published whilst I was in the middle of interviewing Mazur in Sheffield with Graham McElearney http://tinyurl.com/d5c2dnt Excerpt below. - http://www.nytimes.com/2012...
"Mr. Mazur and his colleagues came up with a novel solution: take students out of the matchmaking. Professors can use their software, called Learning Catalytics and now used at various campuses, to force students to defend their ideas by matching them with classroom partners who have different opinions."
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And finally.... the #schoolstech summary report "Better Learning through Technology" from @a_l_t and @naace, based on the SchoolsTech Conversation run by Naace and ALT between January and March 2012. - http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2219...
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The key benefit of XML-based learning content publishing is reuse, writes Mark Berthelemy @berthelemy @a_l_t - http://www.wyversolutions.co.uk/cms...
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Open Source Software and the economy. Don't miss @timoreilly 's "The Clothesline Paradox and the Sharing Economy" (PDF with notes). Strapline "create more value than you capture". Focuses on the contribution of open source software to the economy. - http://www.slideshare.net/timorei...
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Students' brains are less active in lectures than in sleep. Stunning EEG data in @eric_mazur presentation [8MB PDF - data on page 102] - http://mazur.harvard.edu/sentFil...
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MOOC Hysteria aka Universities Reshaping Education on the Web by Downes, with pic by Alan Levine. - http://www.downes.ca/post...
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"UK Government Goes For Broke on Open Access". Lucid overview from @stephen_curry. - http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry...
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Is Queen Mary University of London trying to commit scientific suicide? A gripping and by the look of it influential piece by UCL's David Colquhoun, FRS, about QMUL's REF-led redundancy selection criteria. - http://www.dcscience.net/...
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Class Central is a complete list of free online courses offered by Coursera, MITx, Hardvardx, and Udacity. Could rapidly get a bit out of hand, but useful overview for now. For those with long memories this is a sort of "US eUniversity", but done in a different way to the doomed UK eUniversity. Source code sitting behind Class Central is at... - http://www.class-central.com/#learnm...
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UKSG report. Humanities and social sciences monograph authors are pretty indifferent to financial compensation and keenest on "Releasing information for social progress and knowledge in society". - http://uksg.metapress.com/content...
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UN Media Release, 13 July. UN Secretary-General appoints Gordon Brown as UN Special Envoy for Global Education. - http://www.un.org/News...
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#OpenAccess: Return to the origins of modern science, writes Neelie Kroes - VP of the EC - in this piece about today's newly announced policy that all publications and all research data from EU-funded research be open access. - http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/neelie-...
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Where do you sit in the UK's income distribution? Find out with this very simple online tool from IFS http://www.ifs.org.uk/wheredo...
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Alan Cann is writing a lot of thoughtful stuff about "MOOCs", including a critical piece about his experience on Udacity's ST101 course. - http://scienceoftheinvisible.b...
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"Publication Fees in OA Publishing: Sources of Funding and Factors Influencing Choice of Journal" preprint [PDF] of article by Solomon and Björk. Excerpt below. - http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc...
Excerpt: "Fit, quality, and speed of publication where the most important factors in the authors’ choice of a journal. Open access was less important but a significant factor for many authors in their choice of a journal to publish."
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Sunspot numbers and global temperatures. Nice animation from "without the hot air" David MacKay FRS showing that "there is no obvious or strong association at all between sunspot numbers and global temperatures". - http://withouthotair.blogspot.co.uk/2012...
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Keith Burnett's resources are well worth a look. He teaches maths post-16 in Birmingham UK. - http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/
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FE colleges should be "training for the upturn" - as is the case in Scotland @CForLearning - writes Mick Fletcher - http://campaignforlearning.blo...
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PDF - UK Research Councils' new policy on Open Access. The media release is at http://goo.gl/MNFml. - http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documen...
PDF - David Willetts's letter to Janet Finch welcoming the Finch Group Report “Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications” - http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets...
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Via @figshare UK research funders announce liberated open access policy + Govt response to Finch. The Nature News Blog explains. - http://blogs.nature.com/news...
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Meet-O-Matic, the "World's Simplest Meeting Scheduler" has had a pleasing facelift. - http://beta.meetomatic.com/calenda...
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Inside the 'slum' camp for Olympic cleaners, where 25 people share each toilet, 75 each shower. This Daily Mail piece comes across credibly. - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news...
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An "evidence-lite" piece in the Economist about the success of charter schools and academies provokes plenty of well written responses, and some less so. - http://www.economist.com/node...
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#OpenAccess "The inevitability of open access", by Stuart Shieber, director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communications. - http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphle...
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"Scholarly publishing is broken." Aimée Morrison - @digiwonk - writes from bitter personal experience in LSE's British Politics and Policy blog. - http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politic...
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Judge Posner via @jjn1: "Apple's argument that a tap is a zero-length swipe is silly. It's like saying that a point is a zero-length line." - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technol...
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Don't miss the "Science as an open enterprise" report from the Royal Society. [Six areas for action excerpted below.] - http://royalsociety.org/policy...
1. Scientists need to be more open among themselves and with the public and media 2. Greater recognition needs to be given to the value of data gathering, analysis and communication 3. Common standards for sharing information are required to make it widely usable 4. Publishing data in a reusable form to support findings must be mandatory 5. More experts in managing and supporting the use of digital data are required 6. New software tools need to be developed to analyse the growing amount of data being gathered.
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