Applied Maths for Ordinary Citizens

Nice open approach by Duke University to reporting on the development and running of Duke's first MOOC, with data about costs and operational issues.

Just published. I really liked this section: "Rather than data-driven-decision making, it seems to me we need a culture of decision-driven data collection-the data are collected only after a clear theory of how they are to be used has been developed, to be certain that they will be usable. The argument I am making here is that for instructional guidance, teachers simply do not need or find useful (and certainly do not want to wait, or to pay, for) the precision that the educational measurement community is used to providing. All this may seem like a counsel of despair, so perhaps it is appropriate to conclude these reflections by saying that I am actually very positive about the role that assessment can have in improving schooling. First, as Haertel points out, often the unit of action is the instructional group rather than the individual student. For this reason, Caroline Wylie and I have been exploring the use of single items that can be embedded in instructional episodes (Wiliam, 2011; Wylie & Wiliam, 2006, 2007). The response of one student to one item is not particularly meaningful, but the response of a class of 30 students to a single item does give the teacher useful information about whether to move on, or to review an instructional episode."

US oriented & UK relevant. 50 min talk about inequity in maths learning by Uri Treisman. Data in 36 page PDF of Treisman's slides at http://tinyurl.com/cn85gp6. Keith Devlin writes " This month's column is short, but I am asking you to set aside 51 minutes and 36 seconds to watch the embedded video. It is a recording of the Iris M. Carl Equity Address given on Friday April 19 at this year's NCTM Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado. The title of the talk is "Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize" and the speaker is Uri Treisman, professor of mathematics and of public affairs, and director of the Charles A. Dana Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. I was not able to be at NCTM, but on the recommendation of several colleagues, I watched the YouTube video. I simply cannot write a column on mathematics or mathematics education in the same month as Treisman's immensely more important, profound-and powerfully articulated-words became part of mathematics education history. As a community, we now have our own "I have a dream" speech."

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This book will familiarize you with the Scratch visual programming environment, focusing on using Scratch to learn computer science. The book is structured as a collection of tasks. Each chapter teaches a new concept, but the concept is introduced in order to solve a specific task such as animating dancing images or building a game. Each chapter starts with a simple task, but as soon as we solve one task, we add additional tasks to extend the existing task. The sequence of tasks will require a new construct of Scratch or the use of constructs you know in new ways.

Public page showing Coursera's operational status, with service updates and "uptime/outage" charts. Worth emulating if we possibly can.

You can sign up here for a Udacity 10 minute "mini-MOOC", which from the fact of its target audience, is likely to have been very carefully implemented by Udacity. The promotional video gives some pointers to why Udacity withdrew (their focus is increasinly firmly on "higher" stuff). The min-MOOC should be seen in the context of Udacity wanting to attract Google-focused programmers onto its just launched $7000 Computer Science Masters, done in partnership with Georgia Tech.

Not the clearest learning experience I have known.

I particularly resent the "happy-clappy" over-enthusiastic tone of the feedback

I haven't really looked under the bonnet of this yet, but it seems interesting in terms of market positioning alone (though note: aimed at school level/context).

A new @coursera #MOOC. Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University? Proposed in Open Letter from Bob Meister (President of University of California Faculty Associations) to Daphne Koller (Coursera Co-founder). It concludes: "Would you be willing to co-teach this course with me? I'm sure that together we could reach a very large audience indeed."

Scratch is an object-oriented programming language from the MIT Media Lab. It is now much easier to get started in Scratch thanks to a new release of the platform that "lives entirely in the browser".

Article based on an interview with one of the authors of a new study about the importance of teachers' understanding student misconceptions. [The full paper is available here if you have access to the journal http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/06/0002831213477680.full.pdf+html] Excerpt from the paper:"An intriguing finding of this study is that teachers who know their stu- dents' most common misconceptions are more effective than teachers who do not. This particular component of PCK may allow teachers to construct experiences, demonstrations, experiments, or discussions that make students commit to and then test their own ideas. A teacher knowing only the scientific ''truth'' appears to have limited effectiveness. It is better if a teacher also has a model of how students tend to learn a particular concept, particularly if there is a common belief that may make acceptance of the scientific view or model difficult. This finding, too, has practical implications. In PD programs, an emphasis on increasing teachers' SMK without sufficient attention to the preconceived mental models of middle school students (as well as those of the teachers) may be ineffective in ultimately improving their students' physical science knowledge."

MOOCs can make up for much of the damage resulting from putting 21st Century students through a 19th Century school system. And we can do it on a global scale.......

Comprehensive overview by Paul Stacey of MOOC learning methods. (I do not wholly agree with his assessment of the AI/Udacity learning methods.)

Worth checking for a pretty nifty way to learn a language. Lots of interactivity; personalised; and with absolutely no explanations. For how it works and its business model see this 16 minute talk by its inventor https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/massive-scale-online-collaboration.