Fortnightly Mailing

A well-balanced, cautious yet optimistic view about MOOCs from Keith Devlin

[Small edits made on 21 August]

This Huffington Post piece by Keith Devlin (whose Coursera Introduction to Mathematical Thinking course I completed and reported on - 1st report; 2nd report - earlier this year), hits several nails on the head, though Phil Hill criticises the piece rather bluntly for what he sees as three types of factual error.

This extract gives you a flavour of the article.

"Teaching and learning are complex processes that require considerable expertise to understand well. In particular, education has a significant feature unfamiliar to most legislators and business leaders (as well as some prominent business-leaders-turned-philanthropists), who tend to view it as a process that takes a raw material -- incoming students -- and produces graduates who emerge at the other end with knowledge and skills that society finds of value. (Those outcomes need not be employment skills -- their value is to society, and that can manifest in many different ways.)

On privacy, secrecy, and surveillance

Here are some links to well-written (or spoken), interesting or challenging pieces about privacy, secrecy, and surveillance.

Last updated 8 November 2013

I'll inconsistently update this as I come across (or am sent) others.

Danielle Allen - "The NSA unravels a civil rights-era win" - Washington Post, 30/8/2013

James Ball - "Protecting journalist sources: Lessons in communicating securely" - Journalism, 26/7/2013

James Bamford - "They Know Much More Than You Think" - New York Review of Books, 17/7/2013

Yochai Benkler - "A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate" [PDF] - Harvard Civil Liberties Law Review, August 2011