Fortnightly Mailing

John Hattie interviewed for Radio 4 by Sarah Montague

Snipped from www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dmxwl

I don't know how long the BBC web-site will carry this 28 minute interview with John Hattie, author of Visible Learning, and respected authority on school-effectiveness.

But in case you cannot access the interview, here is a professionally created transcript [12 page 40kB PDF - not sure what is any IPR issues pertain to this.....].

Taken in the round, Hattie provides a calm and witty counter to many of the ideas used by what Pasi Sahlberg memorably describes as the Global Educational Reform Movement. [See also this 2012 interview with Pasi Sahlberg by John Hattie.]

 

Citizen Maths - an open online level 2 maths course

Over the last 18 months, more-or-less since getting stretchered off a mountain in Norway, I've been leading work funded by the Ufi Charitable Trust to create Citizen Maths which is an open online maths course for adults.

In contrast to many (most?) open online courses the course is at what in England is known as "Level 2", which is the level that 16-year olds are expected to achieve.

The Citizen Maths web site went live on Wednesday, since when people have been signing up on the course, which is built in/on the cloud-based Google Course Builder. If adult education, the learning or teaching of mathematics, or online learning interest you, have a look at Citizen Maths, which tries to put into practice some of the things I've learned about open online courses since doing Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun's AI MOOC three years ago. 

You may also be interested in some of the supporting material on the Citizen Maths "Information Hub", for example this piece written with Dave Pratt [also this BBC report] about the thinking behind Citizen Maths, or these informal reflections by me and Dick Moore from an excellent 2-day workshop organised in June by Google in Zurich.

As an aside, my involvement in Citizen Maths, and in the creation of another and very different open online course, seem to have interfered with my ability to write Fortnightly (sic) Mailing. I don't fully understand why this is, and it is only partly explained by the "easy-way-out-that-is-Twitter" - see @sebschmoller and, latterly, @citizenmaths.

I think the probable reason is that if you are responsible for building something when the stakes are quite high, and when you are working with partners (true in both projects), it does not feel quite right to be public about how things are going or about what you are learning from the work. Or, perhaps it's the case that the additional care needed in how you frame things, decide what would and what would not be prudent or fair to say etc., makes writing "too complicated".

And the connection with being stretchered off? There is one. But it's complicated.

Clayton Wright's Educational Technology 31st Conference Listing, June to December 2014

Clayton Wright - source

The 31st Educational Technology & Education Conferences Listing [93 pages, 1.3 MB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.

Here is Clayton's covering note to the list.

The 31^st 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 December 2014 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from January 2015 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 or an OpenOffice format is used to enable people with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference abstracts or proceedings.

New research on how MOOC video production affects student engagement

Just at the point where we are "going firm" on video production for the first phase of Citizen Maths, [25/8/2014 - Citizen Maths is now live and open for registrations], I come across this 10 page research report [PDF] which substantially develops some earlier findings, and which reinforces nearly all my mainly experience-based knowledge of what kinds of instructional video are most effective. (The report is oddly silent on whether there is a relationship between audio quality and learner engagement, which has always struck me as being also of crucial importance.)

The list of seven main findings:

1. Shorter videos are much more engaging - engagement drops sharply after 6 minutes
2. Videos that intersperse an instructor’s talking head with PowerPoint slides are more engaging than showing only slides
3. Videos produced with a more personal feel could be more engaging than high-fidelity studio recordings
4. Khan-style tablet drawing tutorials are more engaging than PowerPoint slides or code screencasts
5. Even high-quality prerecorded classroom lectures are not as engaging when chopped up into short segments for a MOOC
6. Videos where instructors speak fairly fast and with high enthusiasm are more engaging
7. Students engage differently with lecture and tutorial videos

and seven main recommendations:

1. Invest heavily in pre-production lesson planning to segment videos into chunks shorter than 6 minutes
2. Invest in post-production editing to display the instructor’s head at opportune times in the video
3. Try filming in an informal setting; it might not be necessary to invest in big-budget studio productions
4. Introduce motion and continuous visual flow into tutorials, along with extemporaneous speaking
5. If instructors insist on recording classroom lectures they should still plan with the MOOC format in mind
6. Coach instructors to bring out their enthusiasm and reassure that they do not need to purposely slow down
7. For lectures, focus more on the first-watch experience; for tutorials, add support for rewatching and skimming

are not a substitute for the report itself. Hats off to Philip J. Guo (developer of the particularly impressive pythontutor.com), Juho Kim, and Rob Rubin for doing the research, and to edX for publicising it through this short summary.

"The Facebook" Kyle McGrath's August 2005 assessment

Kyle, whom I used to work with at The Sheffield College, reminded me today of an email she'd sent me in August 2005, with her assessment of "The Facebook". If you've got anything similar in your email archives, feel free to paste it in as a comment to Kyle's piece.

From: Kyle McGrath

Sent: 11 August 2005 00:51

To: seb@schmoller.net'

Subject: the facebook

Hi Seb,

Hope all is well with you...

I don't think you've mentioned *the facebook* yet in your fortnightly mailing? *the facebook* was brought to my attention a couple of months back by my niece, Sara, a high school Senior in N.Y. - headed towards SUNY Purchase as a freshman in September. Through *the facebook*, she has, over the past couple of months, already met the students that she will be living with and studying with in September, and they've formed a social community, and she is also in a developing learning community (of nerds)...

Not only do they know who is bringing the iron and who is bringing the ironing board - Sara tells me that they know a lot more interesting stuff that she's not prepared to divulge even to her favourite aunty.

FYI, the facebook concept is a development of the American high school Yearbook concept. The Yearbook is about who you are saying good-bye to (High School), whereas the Facebook has, over the past few years, been produced by some colleges to introduce (College/Uni) freshmen to each other.

I gather that *the facebook* serves both functions - Sara is in a community of people she is saying goobye to as well as in a community of people she is saying hello to.

*the facebook* doesn't translate particularly well to the U.K. - in America, kids normally have a firm College/Uni offer by April of their Senior year, so there is a six-month window for community building. Here, they dont' know until August (which, of course, sucks - what is going to happen to them between April and August, that is going to impact on their ability or aptitude?).

Nonetheless, from what I've seen *the facebook*, it is a shining example of how social networks can develop to support learning.

These days it takes a lot to impress me - and I'm impressed. http://www.thefacebook.com/

Kyle

[Used with the permission of the author]

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.) 

New data about Internet uptake in "Measuring the Information Society"

Via Clayton Wright, here are two excerpts from Measuring the Information Society [254 page PDF], produced by the International Telecommunication Union.

1. From the Forward by Brahima Sanou, Director, Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) of the International Telecommunication Union:

"Over 250 million people came online over the last year, and almost 40 per cent of the world’s population will be using the Internet by end 2013. Mobile technology and services continue to be the key driver of the information society, and the number of mobilebroadband subscriptions is close to 2 billion. Mobile-broadband networks are allowing more people to connect to highspeed networks and benefit from a growing number of applications and services.

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).

Up to six minutes: optimal MOOC video length for student engagement?

Updated on 21/12/2015

Interesting brief post on the edX blog by Philip Guo about video usage, obtained from initial analyses of some edX maths and science courses. The chart below shows "median engagement times versus video length, aggregated over several million video watching sessions". What is not clear from the analysis is whether viewers of long videos may be watching them to completion in short segments. If they are, then the "up to six minutes" point is not so strong.