Fortnightly Mailing

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.

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. 

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.

 

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.)