Fortnightly Mailing

Very enlightening study for the BBC about media literacy

Thanks to Nick Shackleton-Jones for publicising the Media Literacy: Understanding Digital Capabilities [archived version of big PDF] about UK citizens' media literacy. There is plenty of meat in it, including clear evidence that upping Internet users' appreciation of and good habits in internet security is a high priority, and striking data about different categories of users' relative willingness to learn. Worth reading in conjunction with the OII's 2011 Internet in Britain report, by William Dutton and Greg Blank [big PDF].

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Daphne Koller's London talk “The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone”

I made some small amendments to this post on 14 August.

Here is Daphne Koller's 2 July 2012 University of London talk “The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone”, the focus of which, according to the organisers, was particularly on "the pedagogy/platform that sits behind Coursera".

See also:

1. the comment below from Laura Czerniewicz from Cape Town University on what Daphne Koller says in her talk about South Africa;
2. this link to MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera.

As an aside, it is a pity that the recording's dovetailing of Daphne speaking with her powerpoint presentation and its video-clips is a bit patchy. As a partial remedy for this, you may find it helpful to have on screen the slides used by Daphne's collaborator Andrew Ng during a similar presentation he made in Toronto around the same time, though these do not contain the video clips.

You have to take your hat off to Diane Ravitch

For the last couple of weeks I've been following Diane Ravitch's blog - A site to discuss better education for all in the US.

Diane is an American educational researcher, historian of education, and public intellectual who has held public office for both Republican and Democratic administrations.  She has a prodigious list of publications to her name, and - born before WW II - she is old enough to have experienced and observed the huge changes in US society - including desegregation - from the mid 1950s onwards.  Diane is using her blog to wage an astonishingly energetic personal campaign - averaging 200 posts per month - to protect public education, and to challenge what Pasi Sahlberg memorably calls the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement)  ideology that asserts that schools will improve if there is competition, standardization, school choice, and test-based accountability. If an average of ~5000 page downloads per day is anything to go by, Ravitch is hitting a chord with her readers.

What makes Ravitch's work all the more interesting is that she is someone who has changed her views.

MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera

ALT has just published a timely and informative "from-the-sharp-end" article by Jeremy Knox, Sian Bayne, Hamish MacLeod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair from Edinburgh University's MSC in E-learning Team about their experiences of and reflections on developing the E-learning and Digital Cultures Coursera course. Related to this from the ALT Open Access Repository, you can access a presentation PDF by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller of Stanford University and Coursera. "The Online Revolution: Education at Scale" was used by Andrew Ng for his 23 July 2012 Invited Talk "Teaching Machine Learning to 100,000 Students" at the 2012 conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Note that a June 2012 TED talk by Daphne Koller and a July 2012 talk at the University of London cover similar ground.

[Disclosure: I have a minor paid relationship with ALT.]

An interview in Sheffield with Eric Mazur

On 18 July, with help from Graham McElearney, I interviewed Eric Mazur when Eric was in Sheffield. The interview concentrates on: Eric's research into peer-based instruction; large group teaching; closing the gender gap in STEM; and "learning analytics". It ends with some observations for people running institutions. Some of the questions I used were provided by members of ALT.

Here is the transcript of the interview [14 pages, 100 kB PDF]. You can also download the interview as an MP3 file [1 hour, 20 MB MP3]. Eventually both will be published on the ALT web site, with the transcript appearing as an article in ALT News Online.

Eric Mazur will be a keynote speaker at the 2012 ALT conference in Manchester, UK, in September.

Raising money for Barnsley Hospice whilst trying to win a world championship

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On 18 August I will ride in a team of veterans in the Brompton World Championships, a surprisingly intense and serious event for users of Brompton folding bikes, involving 750 competitors, including a few world-renowned riders, run on a hilly, narrow, winding course at Blenheim in Oxfordshire.

In 2010 mine was the fastest team of veterans.

Last year we were pipped to second by a cumulative total of 38 seconds, spread across three riders.

You can motivate us to "regain the crown" by sponsoring us in aid of Barnsley Hospice, in whose colours we will ride.

Snippets from 14 July to 3 August

Clear critique by Simon Davies (a public school head) of Seldon's Spectator piece backing the scrapping of the QTS requirement. - http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeeh...

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If it makes use of (say) stuff by @donaldclark and on the @A_L_T wiki, "What Every Techie Should Know About Education" should get traction. http://goo.gl/uwu7K http://goo.gl/6CcPm - http://third-bit.com/educate...

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How much Energy do I consume? Find out with Christian Gebbe's handy web-based estimator, recommended by "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" David Mackay. - http://energy.m21.cc/energye...

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Understanding the weak overall performance of K12 Inc. virtual schools

Gary Miron's and Jessica L. Urschel's A Study of Student Characteristics, School Finance, and School Performance in Schools Operated by K12 Inc. [PDF], from the school of education at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a substantial and critical study of K12 Inc., the largest private provider of virtual schooling in the US. Education Week reports that the value of K12's stock fell by over 30% within three days of publication.

The study is broad in its focus. Here are three "stand out" findings: 

Innovating Pedagogy 2012

Photo of William Gibson by Frederic Poirot; original source; file licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Mike Sharples sent me a link to this pre-release version [PDF] of Innovating Pedagogy 2012, which he has written for the Open University with Patrick McAndrew, Martin Weller, Rachel Ferguson, Elizabeth FitzGerald, Tony Hirst, Yishay Mor, Mark Gaven, and Denise Whitelock.

The report gives an accessible overview of ten new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, and it has been written for non-academics. It looks to have been inspired by the EDUCAUSE Horizon Reports, but with a focus on learning and teaching.

Three things struck me about the report:

New insights into Udacity, its learning and business models, and Thrun's thinking

This 3 July 40 minute interview by Jason Calcanis with Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun is, how shall I say? very "West Coast", even setting aside the advertisements.

I found myself feeling greater empathy with the interviewee than the interviewer, though you do have to admire Calcanis's interview technique, apart from his tendency to interrupt a bit too much.

Thrun has a very clear vision; his heart is in the right place; and he has understood in a deep and serious way how online learning, done on a really big scale, and organised and supported in the right way, can and will change things for the better. The kinds of changes that Thrun envisages (to models for learning, to what it means to be a teacher, to the educational establishment) will -- if they are done right -- be worth it from the point of view of learners and the world at large. But if you were now setting out on a career as a teacher, especially in post-compulsory education, wouldn't you have to take seriously Thrun's points about the fall in the proportion of the workforce in the developed world involved in farming, once modern mechanised methods took hold?

[By way of a counter-argument, see Jordan Weisman's Why the Internet Isn't Going to End College As We Know It in The Atlantic, via Mark Guzdial.]