Applied Maths for Ordinary Citizens

A big, somewhat breathless, piece in the Scientific American about adaptive learning.

This strikes me as a good example of the opposite approach to that which we'll be taking.

The comments to this article are (mainly) more interesting than the article itself which is sort of "boilerplate": disruption is coming, first mover advantage matters, business models are thin on the ground.

Designed for use in the US (mapped against the Common Core State Standards, which groups things into six concept areas: Number and Quantity, Algebra, Functions, Modeling, Geometry, and Statistics and Probability), and designed to cover the equivalent of a year-long, traditional school curriculum. Worth poking about in. Comments from IOE and OCR particularly welcome.

A concentrated 2 page summary from Educause. Possibly a bit think on Mozilla's Open Badges system.

Interesting piece by Keith Devlin about instructional videos and the research evidence showing that they tend to reinforce preconceptions even if the learner's preconceptions are completely at variance with the instructional content.

Plenty of references to MOOCs and to Educational Technology in the BIS International Education Strategy, launched today by Vince Cable and David Willetts at Pearson's HQ in London. (I was there.)

Two interesting posts by Dan Meyer (separated by 18 8 months) that make points we'd do well to take account of. The second is this: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=17564

About 15 years ago David Wiley sort of invented Open Content and laid the foundations for Creative Commons. This post is worth reading. Concluding para, but don't ignore the one that precedes it:: "MOOCs provide an extremely rare opportunity to completely rethink pedagogy, from the ground up, for a completely new context and configuration. However, until someone gets serious about this line of thinking and looks for legitimate inspiration outside of classroom-based pedagogies-for-30, it's going to be hard times."

Personal and current piece by Audrey Watters who has just visited Seymour Papert. Introductory excerpt: "In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child."

New employees too infrequently "possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self-help, and pride in good work for its own sake". Thus a 1906 Board of Education report. So "for as long as we have evidence, employers have been critical of the ability of the education system to provide the workers they need." Concluding para: ".... the world's most efficient and effective education systems, from Finland to Singapore, have some strikingly common characteristics: they are unremitting in their focus on the core skills of literacy and numeracy, but they set those skills in the wider context of developing higher-order complex thinking. Most of all, they take equality seriously: they focus, in a way which education systems historically did not, on ensuring that all - not just a privileged few - develop the higher-order skills needed to use and analyse information, and that they have access to rewarding higher-level training. Put at its crudest, conventional subjects still matter, but they need to be taught and learnt in innovative ways."

Interesting angle on "the order in which learners should do things" that has a strong resonance with Dave Pratt's introduction at the kick-off meeting in July. "Students are better prepared to understand and appreciate the elegance of a theory or a principle when exploring the domain by themselves first."

http://www.mathjax.org/ is "a Javascript library to display math (sic) on web pages". This interview gives you a good sense of MathJax's origins and purpose.

This is the best summary of "what happened between San Jose State University and Udacity". NB the results of an NSF-funded review of the data is due in August.

This is a bit long-winded and not quite the Woodward/Bernstein exposé it thinks it is, but provides a critical assessment of whether the scaling up economies of MOOCs tend to disappear when you add back the elements that make the course equivalent to fully-fledged masters degrees

Case study describing how Indiana University integrated Drupal with Coursebuilder. There is more on this issue in my notes from the Coursebuilder workshop I attended in Zurich with Jim Thompson http://tinyurl.com/qc2u6uu

Massively Personal - How thousands of online students can get the effect of one-on-one tutoring. Short piece by Norvig, with some recent references that might be worth following up on.

Article in Nature by Sarah Kellogg with a lightweight overview of building a Coursera MOOC

Udacity's partnership with San Jose State University seems to be on the rocks.

Several angles of interest on this, from our own perspective (as prospective uses of data) and that of our prospective learners