Fortnightly Mailing

Are schools like strip-fields?

Dean Ashenden's Inside Story piece about the technology in learning - Coming, ready or not -  is worth reading in full. This quote from the piece is particularly striking:

"A combine harvester will not make medieval strip-field agriculture more productive, yet an assumption of just that kind can be found in many ways of using (and researching) technology in schooling. When computers are added to classrooms and nothing changes the conclusion is that technology doesn’t work. In fact, it is schooling’s strip-field system that is not working."

(The agricultural comparison is probably worth extending when considering how innovation in education spreads.) 

Clayton Wright's Educational Technology Conference Listing, January to June 2014

Clayton Wright - source

The 30th Educational Technology & Education Conferences Listing [28 kB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.

Here is Clayton's covering note to the list.

The 30^th edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until June 2014 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from July onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next.  

An explanation for the content and format of the list can be found at http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/08/why-distribute-documents-in-ms-word-or-openoffice-for-an-international-audience/. A Word 2003 or an OpenOffice format is used to enable people who do not have access to Word 2007 (or higher version) and those with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference abstracts or proceedings. 

Bizarre and unhelpful BBC blocking policy

Here are two views of how the URL http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131029-we-can-build-the-perfect-teacher looks from inside and outside the UK. With thanks to Jan Velterop for providing the second image, and Audrey Watters for tweeting the BBC piece (which she could see from the US).

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

Second report from Keith Devlin's and Coursera’s Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC

Notes 1. Small post-publication edits made on 14 June to improve flow and clarity. 2. This post has been republished on the London Mathematical Society's De Morgan Forum, and as an Education's Digital Future reading by Stanford's Graduate School of Education.

About a month ago I finished Keith Devlin’s 10 week introduction to mathematical thinking course. This report supplements the one I published in April, which I’d based on my experience and observations during the first six weeks of the course.

In what follows I will not repeat the earlier report's description of the how the course worked.

Comments, questions and corrections welcome.

1. The numbers. With commendable openness, Keith Devlin reported the following data in his 3 June 2013 The MOOC will soon die. Long live the MOOR:

 Total enrolment: 27,930

Clayton Wright's Educational Technology Conference Listing, June to December 2013

Clayton Wright - source

The 29th Educational Technology & Education Conferences Listing [1.1 MB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.

Here is Clayton's covering note (which I've taken the liberty of reproducing in full, with one small change at the end in the attribution of an article by Clayton that appeared in the Association for Learning Technology's Newsletter in 2011).

Conferences that May Be Worth Your Time

Frequently, I receive requests from those new to the field of educational technology to suggest conferences that would be worthwhile to attend. It can be a difficult request to fulfill as the response:

A report from Keith Devlin's and Coursera’s Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC

Attempting to prove that the square root of 2 is irrational

I’m six or so weeks into Keith Devlin’s 10 week Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, along with some tens of thousands of others. [NB. I published my second and final report on the course in June.]

Here is a longish thumbnail sketch of the design of the course, followed by two appendices. Appendix 1 concerns peer review. Appendix 2 is what the course web site has to say about grading and certificates of completion.

Comments, questions and corrections would be most welcome.

1. The course is advertised as needing about 10 study hours per week. This is about right: though in my case I had to skimp a lot while I was on holiday, other than wrestling unsuccessfully with a proof that had been set as course work, the non-fruit of which is shown above.

Of avalanches, tsunamis and the longer view

Cornice avalanche East of Slettningsbu, Norway, April 2012

Written in March 2013. Video PS added in November 2013. Broken links fixed in March 2020.

Tsunamis and avalanches kill. They are so vile and fearsome that I think it is almost in bad taste to compare social and technical phenomena to either of them.

IPPR's use of one of the terms in its An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead[1.8 MB PDF] (written by Michael Barber and colleagues from Pearson) caught my eye, and reminded me of a talk - Universities, eLearning and The Internet Tsunami [PPT] - that I heard at the 2000 ALT Conference by Jack Wilson, then of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

I've only skimmed the two documents so far, but the fact that quite similar things are being said now as were being said 13 years ago probably shows that these kinds of apocalyptic visions are a bit wide of the mark, and that what is really going on is better viewed as a rather slower "tectonic" movement, that peppers the landscape with very big but patchy bursts of change.

I believe that looking back in 20 years we will see that over the previous 40 years technology's impact on learning, teaching and assessment will have been very profound indeed. In effect there will have been several big step changes. But I do not think that apocalyptic metaphors - which in some respects play into the hands of the naysayers - are helpful for organisations needing to take wise decisions about what to do next. Jack Wilson's much more recent talk at the 2012 Sloan Consortium conference - Evolution or Revolution? The relentless advance of online learning - Neither hype nor negativity can stop it [PPTX] - is of a very different ilk.

PS - for an effective, angry, sweeping and affecting critique of the ideas in IPPR's report, watch this 24 minute video by David Kernohan, narrated by Mark Styles:

Maths MOOCs

For various reasons I'm keeping a close eye on maths MOOCs (or, strictly speaking, xMOOCs, in the jargon explained here by John Daniels [PDF]).

I've been dipping in and out of the Udacity/San José State University College Algebra course, and I am about to start Keith Devlin's Coursera/Stanford Introduction to Mathematical Thinking course, which starts on Monday 4 March. In the latter case I intend to do the course thoroughly, Easter holiday permitting, and to write about it as I go along, though probably not as systematically as I did in 2011 during the Norvig/Thrun AI course.

Keith Devlin, who hails originally from Hull - almost close enough to Sheffield to feel an affinity - is writing regularly about the practicalities of MOOC design, with a particular focus on "the question of the degree to which good, effective mathematics learning can be achieved at scale, over the Internet". Here are two examples:

• MOOCs are So Back to the Future from MOOCtalk, which Devlin describes as "A real-time chronicle of a seasoned professor who is about to give his second massively open online course";
• Can we make constructive use of machine-graded, multiple-choice questions in university mathematics education? from Devlin's regular column for the American Mathematical Association.