… Only the naïve and uninformed considered teaching to be a simple and inexpensive proposition.
Doug Guthrie, “The Coming Big Data Revolution”
Even much of the not-so-good stuff out there represents a positive development because writing—specifically, writing for an audience, no matter how small—concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Ben Yagoda, “Is the Internet Good for Writing?”
On Writing
TechnologyOne of the challenges of designing an effective MOOC is turning the massive numbers of students from a problem into a strength.
Scale in MOOCs
TechnologyMOOCs are the Wal-Mart of higher education.
From “We’re All to Blame for MOOCs”
MOOCs are the Wal-Mart …
Higher EducationMOOCs are like the patronising uncle who has yet to have a child of his own. They are great fun for the nieces and nephews, they are inventive, playful, and the kids always look forward to them arriving. But this uncle secretly (and after a couple of beers, not so secretly) thinks he could do a better job at raising the kids than the parents. He may also think they prefer him to their actual mum and dad.
Love the “Uncle MOOC” metaphor.
– from The Ed Techie
MOOCs Are Like …
Higher EducationRobot graders raise all sorts of questions about thinking machines and thinking humans, about self-expression and creativity, about the purpose of writing, the purpose of writing assignments, the purpose of education, and the ethics of education technology and of robots in the classroom.
Audrey Watters, Hack Education
Auto-Grading
Higher EducationMOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools.
MOOCs Are Like TV
TechnologyYou can call it “Internal Advertising” if you want; I find that a bit old-school, frankly. I prefer the term “CULTURAL HACKING”- changing your company’s fortunes NOT by trying to directly change what the general public thinks of you, but by trying to change what YOU think of you.
Improving the company by improving the culture, by subverting the culture via counterintuitive means. Exactly.
“Cultural Hacking”
IdeasFor the first time since the beginning of standardized education, students who are marginalized because they don’t fit our socially privileged version of learning are lifting the veil and realizing they aren’t the problem.
Technologies Leveling the Playing Field
Higher Education…an important element to consider here is that transforming one’s pedagogical approach to what some people are calling flipped requires an increased attention to how time is used inside and outside the classroom, how activities should be paced, how activities and learning should support one another, how support structures can be used inside and outside the class, and if or how various elements of work should be assessed. In other words, the transition to something new requires an attention to detail. Is anyone examining the possibility that some of the benefits currently attributed to what people call flipping are really attributable to more intentional pedagogy, and an increased focus on the craft of teaching?
Kate Miffitt 