Fortnightly Mailing

Panel session about online learning with Friedman, Gates, Koller, Niazi, Reif, Summers, Thiel & Thrun

Despite some of the sentimentalism, the kowtowing, and the US-centrism, there is plenty of interest in this 68 minute recording of a panel session on 24 January in Davos. Thrun and Koller get too little of the floor, I think; and what the session generally lacks from the chair, NYT journalist Thomas Friedman - who knows how to gush - is critical challenge.

Educational research, well-summarised for teachers and learning designers

Additional paragraph added at * on 30/1/2013 picking up on an issue raised by Stephen Downes.

Above and below are two screen-shots from the Sutton Trust-EEF's Teaching and Learning Toolkit, which describes itself as "an accessible summary of educational research which provides guidance for teachers and schools on how to use their resources to improve the attainment of disadvantaged pupils" and which "currently covers 30 topics, each summarised in terms of their average impact on attainment, the strength of the evidence supporting them and their cost".

Think if it as an interactive and more practically focused version of Visible Learning by John Hattie; and note the extent to which approaches that are in political vogue in England (like setting by ability, or uniform) are judged to be harmful or ineffective rather than beneficial.  For more on the latter, see Ian Gilbert's The Research v The Government. 

* As the toolkit explains, average impact is estimated in terms of additional months progress you might expect pupils to make as a result of an approach being used in school, taking average pupil progress over a year is as a benchmark.

Value added measures - some resources

I'm a governor of a big FE college, which means I need to keep an eye on issues like value added measures of teachers' or institutions' performance.

Five items have recently caught my attention and I thought that gathered into one place they might be useful to others. [I'll consider adding more if you send them to me.]

The first two are brief rebuttals of work funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [PDF] that purports to show that there is year-to-year consistency in the "value" that individual teachers add to learners.

The third is a classy more general piece about the instability of value-added estimates, from the Albert Shanker Institute. The fourth is a recently published article by Schafer and colleagues  which challenges commonly held assumptions about value added. Finally there is a short video by the research psychologist Daniel Willingham (yes, the Daniel Willingham cited by Michael Gove in his speech in praise of tests in November 2012 - on which Willingham was himself moved to comment), which summarises the problem with value added in a particularly accessible way.

1. Gates Foundation Wastes More Money Pushing VAM - by Gene V Glass, Research Professor & Senior Researcher in the School of Education and National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado
2. The 50 Million Dollar Lie - by New York school teacher Gary Rubinstein
3. A Few Points About The Instability Of Value-Added Estimates - by Matthew di Carlo
4. Evaluating Teachers and Schools Using Student Growth Models [PDF] by William D. Schafer, Robert W. Lissitz, Xiaoshu Zhu, Yuan Zhang, Xiaodong Hou and Ying Li
5. Merit Pay, Teacher Pay, & Value Added Measures by Daniel Willingham -

The need to try lots of MOOCish things at the same time

I think Stephen Downes (picking up on analysis by Michael Feldstein) hits the nail on the head in this comprehensive well-linked commentary on developments in Californian HE relating to online learning, MOOCs etc. Specifically:

The problem, to my mind, is that the aristocrats - the professors - fundamentally don't care whether the sysem is accessable or affordable. Tha's what has to change. Feldstein proposes:

• aggressive program of experimentation and evaluation
• a data-driven and public conversation about the cost and sustainability models
• personas and use cases that help the stakeholder groups have focused and productive conversations

I think the initiatives have to reach beyond mere planning (there's always the clarion call from  professors for "more research" and a "coordinated program" and an "emphasis on quality", but at a certain point it becomes more important to do than to plan, to try a bunch of things on a larger scale and take notes about what worked and what didn't).

Worthwhile also reading Donald Clark's MOOCs: ‘dropout’ a category mistake, look at ‘uptake’? which concludes:

We need to look at uptake, not dropout. It’s astonishing that MOOCs exist at all, never mind the millions, and shortly many millions, who have given them a go. Dropout is a highly pejorative term that comes from ‘schooling’. The ‘high school dropout’. He’s ‘dropped out of ‘University’. It's this pathological view of education that has got us into this mess in the first place. MOOCs are NOT school, they eschew the lecture hall and are more about learning than teaching. MOOCs, like BOOKs, need to be seen as widely available opportunities, not compulsory attendance schooling. They need to be encouraged, not disparaged.

From the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Open Access

[16 January 2013. With thanks to Mike Taylor for a helpful comment about timings and the availability of a Windows Media Player version of the recording. I've reflected this with small revisions below.]

Here is a video of today's session (Silverlight-based, but there is also a Windows Media Player version) of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Open Access with Dame Janet Finch, who gave evidence for just under an hour from 11.40. (In Silverlight the time is shown in the bottom righ of the screen; in the Windows Media Player version I believe you have to slide to 57 minutes 55 seconds in.)

According to my notes, the Chair John Krebs says in his introduction:

“We are not here to question the whole Open Access agenda. We take that as a given. We are not questioning the recommendations of the report. We are very much focused on the current plans for implementation and on the concerns that have been raised with us by various stake-holders which you allude to in your written evidence.”

During the session 4 or 5 members of the committee in addition to John Krebs questioned Janet Finch. Those whose names I noted were Martin Rees, Margaret Sharp, Alec Broers and Robert Winston. All seemed variously well informed, not least Martin Rees who looks to be aware of the concerns of Humanities and Social Sciences societies.

Janet Finch gave a confident and calm account of the work of the committee that produced the Finch Report; and the effect of cross-questioning by knowledgeable and research-experienced members of the committee served to clarify and open up the thinking behind the Finch Report pretty well.

The full session on 29 January, when Research Councils UK, the Higher Education Funding Council, and Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts will give evidence, should be interesting (if you are interested in Open Access). Whatever the Committee recommends, the transcript of today's session (due next week?), along with the written evidence that is submitted (including Janet Finch's) will be worth perusing.

Aaron Swartz RIP: links

Last updated 31 July 2013. Most recent.

Here are some links to responses to the sad and shocking news of Aaron Swartz's suicide. If your time is limited, then read those by Ann Marie Lipinski, Mike Bracken, Alex Stamos, Matt Stoller, Laurence Lessig, and Rafael Reif.

Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz (part of a Remember Aaron Swartz web site, from which you can donate to GiveWell).

Alex Stamos - The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime”

Ann Marie Lipinski - Eugene Patterson and Aaron Swartz: Ghosts speaking across the page

ArchiveTeam - JSTOR Liberator - a tool rather than some writing (added 17 January 2013)

Brewster Kahle - Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies

Cory Doctorow - RIP, Aaron Swartz

dana boyd - processing the loss of Aaron Swartz

David Amsden - The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz - Rolling Stone (added 16 February 2013)

Dave Winer
- Online grieving
- Aaron Swartz was curious (15 January 2013)

David Weinberger
- Rest in peace, Aaron Swartz
- Aaron Swartz was not a hacker. He was a builder.
- Why the Net grieves Aaron (CNN 15 January 2013)

Economist - Aaron Swartz - with a very strong ring of truth (added 17 January 2013)

Elizabeth Day - Aaron Swartz: hacker, genius.... martyr? - (added 2 June 2013)

Eifl - Tribute to Aaron Swartz (added 17 January 2013)

Electronic Frontier Foundation - Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist

Ethan Zuckerman - Remebering Aaron: activism and the effective citizen - blog post 8/11/2013

Eugene Eric Kim - Aaron Swartz (personal reflection based on meeting Swartz in 2001 at the International Semantic Web Working Symposium  - 12 January 2013)

James Grimmelmann - Aaron Swartz, Was 26

John Naughton
- Remembering Aaron Swartz
- Aaron Swartz: cannon fodder in the war against internet freedom (added 20 January 2013)

Larissa MacFarquhar - Requiem for a dream - 11 March 2013 New Yorker article (added 5 March 2013)

Lawrence Lessig - Prosecutor as bully

Matt Stoller - Aaron Swartz's Politics

Micah Sifry - Democratic Promise: Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013

Mike Bracken - Standing on the shoulders of giants - on the UK Government Digital Service web site, and referring rightly to Chris Lightfoot - 17 January 2013

Mike Masnick in Techdirt - Some Thoughts on Aaron Swartz

Quinn Norton - My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved.

Rafael Reif - 13 January 2013 email from the President of MIT announcing that he has asked Hal Abelson to "lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement" [PDF]; and the 26 July 2013 report itself MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz [180p PDF], by Hal Abelson, Peter Diamond, and Andrew Gross.

Tim Wu (in the New Yorker) - Everyone interesting is a felon (from the file name this looks to be the original title of the piece, which is now "How the Legal System Failed Aaron Swartz — And Us")

Will Knight - MIT Technology Review: Why Aaron Swartz's Ideas Matter - 14 January 2013

(Echoes of the similarly gifted and motivated Chris Lightfoot, who killed himself on 11 February 2007.)

With thanks to John Naughton and Andrew Adams for some of these. Stephen Downes published a longer, overlapping set of links on 14 January.

MOOCs: influencing what the student does to learn

Small changes to ending made 5/1/2013.

Mark Guzdial's excellent Computing Education blog has an interesting, growing and already long discussion thread about MOOCs (of the "x" rather than "c" variety) and what they do or do not do, and about the extent to which they can substitute for or embody (good) teaching - prompted by Mark's own forceful MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how teaching works.

My immediate reaction to reading Mark's post (before the comments began to flow) was to look once more at CMU's Learning/Teaching Principles where Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon's axiomatic

takes pride of place.

The key question for me is whether it is or will be possible to build MOOCs  to influence "what the student does to learn" as or more productively overall than in a well run, reasonably but not lavishly resourced face-to-face course.

These are early days. My instinct and experience tells me that it is premature to assert now that it is not or (more importantly) will not be possible. The challenge, surely, is to put a effort into:

• seeking to make it work;
• scientifically assessing impact;
• understanding the affordances of subject, level, learner-characteristics, and so on.

This excerpt from Blake Morrison's fictional memoir The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (taken from this review: I've not read the book) struck me as apt:

"The press would not stand firm or bed down flat. The type kept breaking off. The hand-mould would not fit right. The characters we made were blurred or twisted, and impossible to align. The ink ran like a stream or stuck like mud. The paper creased and tore."

 

From a MOOC learner's point of view things are already nothing like this bad. In fact, for many MOOC learners, things are already pretty good.

Jörn Loviscach and Sebastian Wernicke talk about designing and running Udacity courses

Millions of Lessons Learned on Electronic Napkins [via Stephen Downes] is a candid, informative and well structured 36 minute joint presentation by Wernicke - who is the designer/teacher of Udacity's Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science course - and Loviscach - who is the designer/teacher of Udacity's Differential Equations in Action course. The presentation was given in Hamburg on 30 December 2012 at the Chaos Communication Congress (an annual conference on technology, society and utopia). The optimistic and clear abstract for Loviscach and Wernicke's session is well worth reading.

Futurelearn - an OU-led response to Coursera, Udacity, and MITx

UK reaction to the launch last year of the precursor to Udacity tended to be sceptical, with what seemed to be a rush to early judgement that free massive open online courses were not going to be a game-changer. Had the ill-fated UK eUniversity burned UK Higher Education's fingers? [Links to BBC report, and to Paul Bacsich's "lessons" report.]

Futurelearn - with a website that is so sparse that it looks to have been "scrambled" (and, via @DougClow, the company was only incorporated on Monday of this week) - seems to be UK Higher Education's eventual response to Coursera, Udacity, MITx and their siblings.

From what I can glean Futurelearn will be driven from and by the Open University, led by Simon Nelson (an ex-BBC executive); and from 2013 it will offer free learning from a slew of English, Welsh, and Scottish universities including Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick.

Here is an excerpt from the briefing sheet on the OU web site [DOC]:

Futurelearn Limited will bring together a range of free, open, online courses from leading UK universities, in the same place and under the same brand. The courses will be clear, simple to use and accessible. Futurelearn will not replicate class-based learning online but reimagine it, realising the potential offered by digital technologies. The Company will be able to draw on The Open University’s unparalleled expertise in delivering distance learning and in pioneering open education resources. These will enable Futurelearn to present a single, coherent entry point for students to the best of the UK’s online education content. Futurelearn will increase the accessibility of higher education, opening up a wide range of new online courses and learning materials to students across the UK and in the rest of the world.

Links, which I have begun to update, some of which involve rather lazy reuse of Futurelearn's own media release:

• UK reactions in 2011/early 2012 to MOOCs - Rhodri Marsden in the Independent, 12/9/2011; Emma Barnett in The Daily Telegraph, 18/8/2011; mine, 7/11/2011; John Naughton's Observer piece, 5/2/2012.
• About Futurelearn - Daily Telegraph; BBC; TechCrunch; launch media release [PDF]; supporting material from the Open University; posts by OU staff members Tony Hirst and Doug Clow; Times Higher; JISC; Guardian; Financial Times (registration required); Kings College London; The Higher Education Chronicle.

 

Do TIMSS and PIRLS tell us as much as media and political reaction imply?

[Note - added 14/12/2012] - here, by courtesy of Diane Ravitch, are Finn Pasi Sahlberg's similarly veined comments on TIMSS and PIRLS.]

Yong Zhao is a very interesting US-based educational researcher, whose work I first covered covered almost exactly six years ago.

His Numbers Can Lie: Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything? strikes me as an excellent, thought-provoking counter to standard reactions to the slew of comparative data that has just been published, such as this one from English Education Minister Elizabeth Truss, or this report from the BBC. After an interesting discussion about why it might be that learners in some of the countries that score well in maths at the same time have very low confidence in maths, and place a very low value on maths,  Zhao asks, if America has been doing so badly in comparison to many other nations, why is it not falling apart economically? Here is an excerpt: