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.

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

Reading on screen - classy and thoughtful resources from the University of York

York University has set up Reading on screen, a pleasing web site to help students (mainly but not only) read on screen to better effect.

The site is the work of Matt Cornock from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, and Blayn Parkinson of York University's Elearning Development Team.

Here is the text from the site's about page:

We’re really pleased to launch this site available in direct response to student feedback at the University of York.

More than ever before, students have such a vast amount of digital literature available to them via the University Library and resources their teaching staff have posted on the Yorkshare VLE to support their studies.

We find that the techniques used for paper-based study are different from those required to engage with digital resources. What we have found from discussions with students is that these techniques are not taught, and are often unknown. Annotation, as one example, is a different process using digital devices than with pen and paper. At first, digital annotation may seem laborious, but, as with all things, practising the skill makes it easier. Similarly, the way documents are presented on screen can be improved with a few simple tricks such as using full-screen view or reading views built into software.

Our aim is to help students discover these tricks, tell us which ones work, and encourage comments and contributions with your suggestions and approaches to reading on screen.

 

MOOCs - achieving high quality at scale: nice quote from David Wiley

Getting on for 15 years ago I put an "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course in which I played a role. I'd read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist or possibly in a digital version of Time Magazine. The Open Content licence was the precursor of Creative Commons, and Wiley  is still very active and justifiably influential in this field. This post [via Stephen Downes] has an incisive observation in it about personalisation:

"There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs [link added by Seb] permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."

I agree instinctively with the emphasised section, though:

• it maybe too focused on content and not enough on the process of learning;
• there is also a role for software-driven personalisation of various kinds, including a role for software (in a centralised rather than decentralised way) doing background organisation of things like peer-assessment or ranking and filtering of user-contributions.

Some also argue that there is great scope (I'm less confident about this) for software successfully to shape adaptively which content and which learning activities are presented to which learners, when, taking account of their past performance, in a way that gives learners to feel that their learning has been personalised.

[Links to previous posts touching on personalisation.]

 

Online courses in community colleges - important research resources

The Community College Research Center is based at Columbia University. It describes itself as the US's "leading independent authority on the nation’s nearly 1200 two-year colleges".

Since 2009 CCRC has been doing (amongst other things) a range of interesting and important qualitative and quantitative research about online courses in community colleges (which sit somewhere between FE and HE in a UK context, overlapping with both), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and led by Shanna Smith Jaggars.

This page has links to abstracts and presentations, which highlight general and specific disparities in outcomes between face-to-face and online provision, and which point to action that can be taken to deal with these problems. (Instructor presence seems to be key.....)

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: