January 2012
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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...