Fortnightly Mailing

Know Labs - looking to "change the future of education by making it more accessible and less expensive"

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Know Labs is the Silicon Valley start-up behind the Thrun/Norvig/Stanford artificial intelligence course:

"We're a Silicon Valley-based startup looking to change the future of education by making it more accessible and less expensive. We provide a high-quality online learning experience using interactive videos, intelligent software, mobile apps, and the social web.  Our initial launch is online this fall: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig in partnership with the Stanford University School of Engineering. The class is open to everyone at ai-class.com and is run by the technology we are developing for a larger site: know it."

What interests me is whether Know Labs was already involved (or even there?) when the AI course was originally advertised, or whether the scale of the response either led to the formation of the start-up, or brought it into involvement with Stanford.

See also:

• Over 200,000 people have signed up for the three free Stanford University online courses
• Questions about the AI course

Many lessons to be learned from Finland's National Plan for Educational use of ICT

Finland's school system is held up in the UK as a system to emulate, and it is often portrayed - wrongly - as one that works without much central intervention.

This well thought out, costed, comprehensive, thoroughly referenced, and just plain sensible five year National Plan [1.15 MB PDF] was over 2 years in the making, and looks like it has drawn upon a wide enough range of interests and expertises to be taken seriously.

The plan summarises, in simple language (correction - the English is simple enough to make one believe the Finnish will have been extremely clear accessible) eight areas for action, with cost estimates for each between 2011 and 2015.

1. National objectives and systemic change
2. Learners’ future skills
3. Pedagogical models and practices
4. E-learning materials and applications
5. School infrastructure, learning facilities, purchases and support services
6. Teacher identity, teacher training and pedagogical expertise
7. Operational culture and leadership at school
8. Business and network co-operation

I hope it is not too late in the English Department for Education's rethinking of the National Curriculum, for the wisdom in the parts of the this Finnish document that relate to the schools curriculum to be drawn upon. 

 

Dick Moore's guide to making short instructional videos

Dick Moore (sometime collaborator, friend, and Trustee of ALT) writes a practical and insight-rich "how to" about making short instructional videos on his Tools and Taxonomy blog. It is just this kind of useful material that gets lost (i.e. is not written) when people with knowhow to share take the easy way out and write performative snippets rather than thought-through pieces. (I am as guilty as the next person in this respect.) 

Whether next year's new year resolution will be easy to live up to is another question.

Over 200,000 people have signed up for the three free Stanford University online courses

By 26 August, well over 200,000 people had signed up for one of the three free online courses being offered by the University of Stanford. The numbers are as follows:

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - 132,469
• Introduction to Databases - 37,419
• Introduction to Machine Learning - 37,636

I've posted some questions about the AI course (which would apply equally to the other two), and several readers (Stuart Sutherland, Bob Harrison, Pabritra, John Vornle, and Dick Moore) have responded with other questions and comments. Feel free to add your own.

 

Thrun/Norvig/Stanford introduction to artificial intelligence - just short of 90,000 enrolments in 2 weeks

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Note - 20/8/2011. In the small font below I am unsystematically tracking the growth in sign-ups for the three Stanford course.

Two weeks ago I wrote something about (and signed up for) the Stanford University online introduction to artificial intelligence, to be taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun. (Stanford's Introduction to Databases [201108200619 - 23,671. 201108242232 - 35,321. 201108261846 - 37,419.] and Introduction to Machine Learning [201108200619 - 25,935. 201108242233 - 35,685. 201108261846 - 37,636.] are also available online this autumn.

Within 2 weeks - after extensive press coverage - just short of 90,000 people worldwide had enrolled on the course. [24 hours later the number enrolled topped 100,000. 201108190712 - 103,290. 201108200619 - 110,775. 201108242227 - 128,477. 201108261846 - 132,469.]

A free online version of Stanford University's introduction to artificial intelligence

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Between 26 September and 16 December, with 10 hours study needed per week, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig will teach a wholly online version of the "standard" Stanford University "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence".

The course - CS221 syllabus - will be taught "concurrently around the web", with short videos, on-line marked quizzes, a mid- and end-term exams, and eight automatically graded homework assignments. Students taking the online version will therefore be graded according to the same grading criteria as students taking CS221 at Stanford.

I am tempted, partly because I am particularly interested in whether mathematics-based courses, where the medium is not the message, can be successfully delivered on line. But the question is: will what I can remember of A and S level mathematics from 1970, and from the first year of the physics part of a natural sciences degree in 1972 (I then switched to economics....) suffice for the stated prerequisite that "a solid understanding of probability and linear algebra will be required"?

I shall find out soon enough.

The future of learning and technology

Here is a candid, authoritative and reflective 25 minute talk by BP's Nick Shackleton-Jones, with plenty of memorable lines that will stick in your mind. The focus is on "corporate learning", but Nick's views are relevant much more widely.

Blackboard agrees to be acquired by an investor group led by Providence Equity Partners

In April 2011 announced that it was considering proposals from would-be buyers, appointing Barclays Capital to help it decide what to do. I was away on holiday for two weeks from late in June, and have been reading some of the commentary about Blackboard's decision to be acquired i.e. to move from being a publicly quoted company to a privately held one. Providence Equity Partners have wide interests in education, media and telecommunications businesses. Some are complementary, for example Sungard and Ascend Learning; others are rather less so, for example Warner Music Group, AutoTrader, and the World Triathlon Corporation.

Here are three informative posts commenting on the change, which, if it goes through, will take effect later this year:

2 July 2011 - Investment bankers and Blackboard's Future - by Jim Farmer;

7 July 2011 - Blackboard's Next Chapter - by Ray Henderson, president of the company's teaching and learning division, Blackboard Learn;

14 July 2011 - The Blackboard acquisition - two views - by Michael Feldstein.

Stopping link rot - keep your posts useful with the "WebCite this page" gadget

I've been writing Fortnightly Mailing since 2002. I've long ago stopped keeping to the discipline of publishing a fortnightly list of posts; and @sebschmoller and FriendFeed have got a bit in the way of writing proper posts such as this one. Occasionally vanity gets the better of me and I look at the access statistics for Fortnightly Mailing. Yesterday I noticed several hits from Google to a 2006 posting highlighting an article by Paul Black and Christine Harris.

When I looked at the posting - here is an archived view of it - all of its links were broken, making it worse than useless. All readers will have experienced this problem when searching and finding an apparently relevant piece about something they are interested in, but with key links broken. 

I've since fixed things in the orignal by going through the fiddly and time-consuming process of finding extant versions of the three documents in question and linking to these.  Instead of storing up trouble for the future, I've linked to archived versions created in moments with the service provided by WebCite, using the free "WebCite this page" gadget that I had already installed on my browser toolbar. The gadget allows a user, in seconds, to:

• go to a URL;
• click on the gadget;
• copy and paste the WebCite archive's URL of the orginal resource to wherever they want to use it.

Obviously it is a matter of judgement when to take this approach. My ground rule is going to be: if I am linking to a resource that I think others may want to use long term, or which I fear is likely to be short-lived at its current location, then I will include a WebCite link to the resource instead of or in addition to a link to the resource itself.

Comments on the feasibility and value of this approach are welcome.

Salman Khan - turning learning inside out with video / building "a global one-world classroom"

Here, Salman Khan gives a jaw-dropping TED talk, chaired by Bill Gates in March 2011.

Below the talk I've included as text a striking extract from the talk, from 12.5 minutes in:  striking because of Khan's emphasis on data and on teachers' need to use it, because of the ambitious conclusion (I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom .... that's essentially what we're trying to build), and most importantly because of Khan's comment about the dubious concept of giftedness.

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible.