Fortnightly Mailing

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.

 

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:

MOOCs and educational TV - an insight-rich 1989 discussion

If you've the time, do watch this insight-rich 1989 discussion between Mara Mayer and Lawrence Cremin about technology in learning (via Stephen Downes and then Mike Caulfield).

Caulfield draws points from the discussion astutely, but you'll need to watch it for its many "aha" moments (as Caulfield says, you can safely skip the first 10 minutes).

The video is very relevant to current discussions about MOOCs, equity of access and provision, "hard-to-teach/hard-to-learn" subjects, and professional development.

Unusually the discussion focusses simultaneously on schools (Cremin) and on HE (Mayer), which adds greatly to its value.

New from ICTP: an app that compiles images and audio into video-like recording

The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste plays a key role in training physicists from developing countries. Some readers will remember Enrique Canessa and Marco Zennaro's terrific presentation in London in May 2011 about ICTP's elegant low-tech automated lecture capture system, which allows archiving and sharing traditional lectures and talks carried out using, for example, very large chalkboards found in classrooms and/or using more modern presentations systems. ICTP has just released EyApp which is an iPhone app that applies the same principals. From the media release:

EyApp enables your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to make a video composed of a series of captured images along with simultaneous audio recording. With just the press of a button, the App automatically captures images at intervals ranging from 5 to 20 seconds (or manually by the user) and then synchronizes the images with a continuous audio signal.

The resulting recording is a smaller size compared with traditional video (HD or standard resolution) because the still frames can be processed by the highly-efficient compression algorithms used by the H264 movie format found in modern mobile i devices.

The film is then ready to be shared immediately or, when saved on a device's photo/movie gallery, can be further edited with other Apps, shared by email and rich-media messaging systems or via social networking Apps, or transferred to a computer. EyApp makes it easy to create personal recording archives as well as to share them via YouTube.

An Android version is follow, and EyApp is available now for download from the iPhone App Store. My feeling is that combined with a Swivl to hold the recording device, EyApp would have specially good potential for low-cost systematic capture of workshops and speaker sessions.

Drifting from "having a market economy to becoming a market society" - Michael Sandel

In this 50-minute session from the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael J. Sandel gets his audience (and viewers like me and you) thinking about the adverse civic and moral consequences of market mechanisms being introduced into so many areas of public and working life. At the same time he exemplifies a (very difficult to carry off) approach to large group learning.

Here is a rough transcription of Sandel's conclusion, which probably owes its impact to what came before it in the talk:

I think it is no accident that two things have been happening over the past 30 years. One is that what we've discussed today: the tendency to rely more and more on market mechanisms without any public debate. And something else that's been happening which is the hollowing out of public discourse in general. What passes for political discourse these days consists mainly of shouting matches on talk radio and cable TV, and ideological food fights in congress. People are frustrated by this. I think one of the reasons for this is our reluctance to engage in serious public debate about big and controversial moral questions.

But the result of that reluctance is that we have a public discourse that is either managerial and technocratic, which inspires no-one, or, when passion enters, we have shouting matches. People want a better kind of politics.

People want to elevate the terms of our public discourse. People want to address big things in public. So I think that the hollowing out of our public discourse, and the market triumphalist faith that has gone unexamined even after the financial crisis have a common solution. It's not an easy solution. But it's a new kind of politics of the common good that admits, that welcomes into public debate moral engagement on big tough controversial questions, not because we will all agree: we won't; but because it may teach us to listen and learn a little bit better, and it will also lift our sights from the rancour that inflicts our politics, to what I think is a more strenuous kind of citizenship; but also a more satisfying democratic pulic life.

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 -