Fortnightly Mailing

Links for two talks at ICTP and one for ETUI about MOOCs

Small edits made 16 February 2014. Small changes made to first presentation 9 October 2013

On 30 September and 1 October I gave two talks during "Science Dissemination and On-line Certification for All" at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. On 20 February 2014 I will do a variant of one of these talks in Brussels at a meeting of the European Trade Union Institute's Pedagocical Committee. Below are some links that are (loosely) relevant to the presentations, two of which are:  An introduction to massive open online courses [0.5 MB PDF]; and What I learned from being a MOOC learner [0.5 MB PDF].

Luis von Ahn - "Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Computation: Luis von Ahn at TEDxCMU 2011" - a 17 minute video about the origins of Duolingo in reCaptcha.

ALT - "Lecture capture: doing it well and at scale" - presentations, including by ICTP's Marco Zennaro and Enrique Canessa, from a conference in 2011.

JD Bernal - "Anticipating the Web - information available 'in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance'" - extraordinary 1939 foresight.

BIS - "The maturing of the MOOC" [PDF] - a literature review for the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (a UK Government Department).

Carnegie Mellon University - "Principals of Teaching and Learning" - a highly structured web site about learning and learning.

Donald Clark

• "MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC" - 16/4/2013.
• "Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises" - 21/5/2013. Parsing Edinburgh University's report on its six Coursera MOOCs.

 

Syria-related readings

Here are some "readings" about the Syria situation.

They vary widely in style and position (Fintan O'Toole's piece about Seamus Heaney is there because of the way Heaney shows that "uncertainty may simply be the human condition") and several of them, including O'Toole's, result from some back-and-forth with John Naughton.

I've highlighted eight that I think are particularly illuminating.

[Last updated 22/9/2013]

Editorial - "Syria: the neglected health crisis deepens" - The Lancet, 31/8/2013 

Matthew d'Ancona - "A nauseating, preening and grubby carnival of inaction" - Daily Telegraph, 31/8/2013 l

Uri Avnery - "Poor Obama. I pity him." - Gush Shalom, 31/8/2013

Aaron Bady - "The Sovereign Double-Standard" - The New Inquiry, 31/8/2013

Our Newfound Fear of Risk

Security expert Bruce Schneier has published a terrific article about risk, and our fear of it, with a focus on the fundamental difference between human-instigated and other risks.

The article, which I have added to my list of pieces about privacy, secrecy, and surveillance, is well worth reading. Here is an excerpt:

We also expect that science and technology should be able to mitigate these risks, as they mitigate so many others. There's a fundamental problem at the intersection of these security measures with science and technology; it has to do with the types of risk they're arrayed against. Most of the risks we face in life are against nature: disease, accident, weather, random chance. As our science has improved -- medicine is the big one, but other sciences as well -- we become better at mitigating and recovering from those sorts of risks.

Security measures combat a very different sort of risk: a risk stemming from another person. People are intelligent, and they can adapt to new security measures in ways nature cannot. An earthquake isn't able to figure out how to topple structures constructed under some new and safer building code, and an automobile won't invent a new form of accident that undermines medical advances that have made existing accidents more survivable. But a terrorist will change his tactics and targets in response to new security measures. An otherwise innocent person will change his behavior in response to a police force that compels compliance at the threat of a Taser. We will all change, living in a surveillance state.

When you implement measures to mitigate the effects of the random risks of the world, you're safer as a result. When you implement measures to reduce the risks from your fellow human beings, the human beings adapt and you get less risk reduction than you'd expect -- and you also get more side effects, because we all adapt.