February 2012
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“Placing big bets might sound risky but given the pace of change, we think it’s...”
– Full Transcript: Eric Schmidt’s Edinburgh Festival Keynote | paidContent:UK
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“There’s certainly an important role for technology in the classroom. And...”
– Hyping classroom technology helps tech firms, not students - latimes.com
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Web 3.0 revisited
…the next big trend in the evolution of the Web, and the next big opportunity for entrepreneurs, is data. — Anthony Ha reporting on Reid Hoffman’s SXSW 2011 preso
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Technology and Educational Progress
Despite the celebratory hype, there’s no guarantee that a hyper-technologized education system is synonymous with genuine progress….
[ergo]
In lieu of empirical data, why are schools rushing into this brave new world of technology?
— David Sirota
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Facilitating Online Trust
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“Scholarly workflows are moving online, leaving traces that can be documented—not...”
– As Scholarship Goes Digital, Academics Seek New Ways to Measure Their Impact - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 2012
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Designing Online Communities
To design your online communities, as a starting point you need to understand the broader context of how your customers use your services. What are their unmet needs? How might online interaction among customers themselves help to address these unmet needs or opportunities? — John Hagel & John Seely Brown (2012)
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The Invisible College Redux
This newly emerging system of knowledge organization has implications for all higher education institutions, in that colleges and universities have been the dominant organizational forms for knowledge work since at least the days of the Republic of Letters. The networked paradigm represented by the new invisible college—global in scope, managed through self-organization and emergent...
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“INFORGRAPHIC: American teacher salary figures compared to teachers in other...”
– American Teachers Do More Work for Less Pay Than Their International Peers - Education - GOOD
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“The highest form of worship, he said, is the remix: ‘You use other people’s...”
– Spiritual leader of Sweden’s Missionary Church of Kopimism Isak Gerson, as reported by Rollo Romig (via newyorker)
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Good Teachers = Lasting Gains
All else equal, a student with one excellent teacher for one year between fourth and eighth grade would gain $4,600 in lifetime income, compared to a student of similar demographics who has an average teacher. The student with the excellent teacher would also be 0.5 percent more likely to attend college.
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Social Media 2012: Early Prospects
I expect the excitement and hype in 2012 to be in the social game companies, newfangled B2B technology plays, and cloud computing. These will be the next bubble. Soon after, we’ll see the Big Data bubble. All of this is good because it spurs investment and innovation. That’s the beauty of Silicon Valley—it moves from one fad to another as if nothing ever happened.
-Vivek...
December 2011
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Next Steps: Tightening Feedback Loops
In this new market, it will make sense for teachers in different regions to share curriculum materials and formative assessments. It will make sense for researchers to mine data to learn which materials and teaching strategies are effective for which students - and then feed that information back to students, teachers, and parents.
- Joanne Weiss - Innovations in Education - Harvard Business...
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Widening Circles & Widening Intelligence
While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe. Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.
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“There are personal social networks (Facebook and Twitter) and there are business...”
– Coursekit Aims To Overhaul How Teachers Run Their Classrooms | Co.Design
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The "e-" That Satisfies...
The technology is a cool technology, the appeal is obvious. As readers, we tend to be more subject, more prey to the need of instant gratification. Readers are greedy. It’s a benign greed, and I think e-books have the potential to satisfy that greed.
_ Michael Chabon (2011)_
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College Football & Guys' Grades
[C]ollege male’s grades tend to go down when their university’s football team wins games, new research finds. And it happens as a direct result of the boozy culture surrounding football programs. More victories means more celebrating which means less studying….[T]he research doesn’t bolster the argument that winning university sports programs enhance the academic side of...
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Teaching a Computer to Paint
The vast majority of us,” Cohen said, “follow rules that somebody else taught us when we were growing up and going to art school. Nobody really invents art from scratch. The computer can in principle enact whatever rules you’re capable of enunciating, but enunciating those rules in a computer language is a nontrivial issue.”
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This Is Not MIT Light
MIT is announcing that for the first time it will offer credentials — under the name “MITx” — to students who complete the online version of certain courses, starting with a pilot program this spring.
Brain responses to nouns, verbs and... →
Research on how our brains store and use information associated with lexical items in context.
[E]ven when they [nouns and verbs] are used unambiguously in context they engage different neural resources for processing.
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“If individual professors can begin to certify student competence, that begins to...”
– Stanford’s open courses raise questions about true value of elite education | Inside Higher Ed
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Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education
How do we scale the human interaction to tens of thousands of students?
- Daphne Koller, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab
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Redressing Educational Reform
The federal government can make states, localities and schools do things — but not necessarily do them well. Since decades of research make it clear that what matters for evaluating employees or turning around schools is how well you do it — rather than whether you do it a certain way — it’s not surprising that well-intentioned demands for “bold” federal action on school improvement have a...
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Education Innovation Begins with Instruction
The key message was a challenge to us to question all our strongly held assumptions, including getting our faculty to think differently about teaching,” said Jared L. Cohon, the president of Carnegie Mellon University, which has developed online classes that provide instructors real-time information about each student’s progress. “I personally get very uncomfortable when people start talking...
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Learning = Creation not Instruction
At the Media Lab we focus on learning through creation instead of instruction. We are empowering individuals to experiment, create, and iterate. We produce demos and prototypes and share and collaborate with the rest of the world through the Internet and a distributed network of connections and relationships. We are not about centralized instruction but rather a node in a broad network of...
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Supply and Bandwidth
[A]ccording to Benoît and Herman’s data, the vast bulk of bandwidth during the times when bandwidth is scarce (= peak hours) is not taken up by the Very Heavy users. Thus, punishing people for downloading too much inhibits the wrong people. Data consumption is not a good measure of critical broadband usage. Put differently: “42% of all customers (and nearly 48% of active customers) are amongst...
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Why Professors Need To Join Student Protests
“Student loans are among the most lucrative you can make because the borrower has no protections and the creditor is afforded extraordinary powers,” noted Andrew Ross, NYU professor and labor expert, at the student debt press conference. Ross spoke, too, of the need for professors to work in solidarity with the students on this issue since their salaries are paid through the debt of their...
November 2011
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Looking Beyond Your Imagination
“When it comes to innovation the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it.” — Cynthia Barton Rabe, The Innovation Killer
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WatchA GPS drawing illustration made in Cutteslow Park, Oxford, Hugh Pryor and Jeremy Wood, 2006. Music: Btoum Roumada by Aphex Twin
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That's How... Explanations for How Things Work
(via Christoph Niemann & brainpickings)
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Daily Papert: Change or Die
“It is obvious that schools are lagging behind deep changes in our society. They are still organized on the model of production line factories. The deepest reason for the lag is neither the lack of physical technology nor the ability of educators to understand its meaning. The biggest reason is the built-in self-preservationist conservatism of the education system. To my mind the best analogy is...
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Regulating Your Own Success
No matter the ability — whether it’s intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism — studies show them to be profoundly malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot. So if you were a bright kid, it’s time to toss out your (mistaken) belief about how ability works, embrace the fact that you can always improve,...