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Fight the MOOCopalypse! « Computing Education Blog - 1 views

computinged.wordpress.com/...fight-the-moocopalypse MOOCs education technology futures opinion
shared by Ed Webb on 06 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Education is technology’s Afghanistan — school-conquering technology keeps charging in, and the technology limps out defeated:
  •  Education is way harder than handheld personal computing.
  •  If we do teach more with MOOCs, we should be the harshest critics of MOOCs
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Flip This: Bloom's Taxonomy Should Start with Creating | MindShift - 0 views

blogs.kqed.org/...omy-should-start-with-creating education creativity BloomsTaxonomy opinion
shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • The pyramid creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity — only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it’s not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students.
  • Here’s what I propose: we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.
  • I’ve come to realize that it’s very important for my students to encounter a concept before fully understanding what’s going on. It makes their brain try to fill in the gaps, and the more churn a brain experiences, the more likely it’s going to retain information
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  • I think the best flipped classrooms work because they spend most of their time creating, evaluating and analyzing. In a sense we’re creating the churn, the friction for the brain, rather than solely focusing on acquiring rote knowledge. The flipped classroom approach is not about watching videos. It’s about students being actively involved in their own learning and creating content in the structure that is most meaningful for them.
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The Promise and Peril of Ed-Tech Democratization - WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...29413 education technology future opinion edupunk
shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • the Indians I heard in London accepted the following premise: university education, at least in part, involves seasoned, well-educated people determining what less seasoned, less well-educated people should know, then proceeding to teach them. By contrast, at the Palo Alto gathering there was much more talk of “hacking college.” This worldview, though certainly not universal, reflects a certain disdain for hierarchies of knowledge and expertise. Instead, it embraces a radically individualistic approach to higher ed, one based on the idea that it’s always a great thing when students create their own education, piecing together courses and educational materials, free from the confines of convention.
  • Lots of students who want a college education, whether at the elite or mass-access end of the spectrum, either want to study a curriculum that has been proven, need support because they don’t have the tools to educate themselves, or both.
  • The edupunk aesthetic certainly has some appeal – why not blow up some traditional assumptions about the structure of education? And it is so varied that it wouldn’t be fair to say its proponents are all blind to questions of giving students the guidance they need to succeed. But its anarchistic edge risks leaving students to their own devices so much that oversight and quality control goes out the window
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  • There’s no reason we can’t use disruptive tools to teach an established body of knowledge, in a particular course sequence, to more people, more effectively.
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Universal broadband should be about control, not just access. - By James Losey and Sasc... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all internet mobile mobilephones censorship US USA politics regulation
shared by Ed Webb on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The Internet is a democratizing technology not because users have access to services like Twitter and Facebook but because it supported the development of these tools in the first place. Ignoring this distinction has led to the United States' unfortunate decision to craft public policies that focus primarily on expanding Internet "access" with too little attention paid to the fact that not all access is created equal (PDF). By focusing on access, disregarding the mounting threats to the openness of the Internet, our politicians and regulators are ignoring a growing divide between users with control over digital technologies and those without.
  • protect the rights of users to create
  • the iPhone is part of a new class of devices that actively keep the end user from having control
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In effect, mobile carriers have created a second-class Internet connection. This spring, Verizon demanded that Google remove free tethering applications from the Android Market so that it can charge users a monthly fee to turn their smartphones into mobile hotspots. Combined with restrictive data caps—often a low two to five gigabytes per month (for comparison, the typical Blu-ray disc containing your favorite movies can hold 50 gigabytes of data)—mobile connectivity severely limits user options.
  • When compared with the freedoms still present on other types of broadband connections, mobile networks' demands offer fewer opportunities to think differently or to innovate. This is particularly problematic because it disenfranchises those (such as minorities, people in lower income brackets, and young adults) who are more likely to depend on smartphones to access the Web. In fact, Pew Internet and American Life Project found that smartphone ownership is highest with minorities, and nearly one in five young adults only access the Web on mobile networks. The increasing limitations on the Internet craftsman means these groups do not have a voice in how the Web evolves.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 16 Aug 11
       
      Note also that in the developing world the vast majority of web access is via mobile phones
  • Policies addressing the digital divide must embrace the Internet Craftsman and confront the deep and growing chasm between users of restrictive technologies and those free to innovate without gatekeepers. The Internet's potential to empower is strongest when users are free to turn their imaginations into reality, not when innovation is confined by increasingly restrictive policies of network operators. The future of democratic communications depends on the ability of network participants to have control over the technologies we use every day.
  • If everyone with a 3G unlimited plan started tethering and using their phones for home internet (instead of the relatively limited bandwidth things you tend to do on a cell phone), pretty soon nobody would have speeds faster than dial-up. This is a difficult problem with no easy solution. I don't like the fact that mobile data costs so much, and I do think that mobile companies could certainly be more consumer friendly, but it's a myth to think that we can all have cheap, fast, unlimited mobile internet access - you can probably have any two of those, but not all three.  
  • I really think you're kind of off base on the "mobile is second-class access and that's inherently unfair". Mobile is limited because cellular bandwidth currently is limited and you therefore have to pay more for it. To extend your craftsman analogy, anyone can buy wood and a hammer, but access to a five-axis lathe is limited by complexity and associated price. I don't especially want to have trouble checking my email at lunch because some guy is ripping the collected works of Orson Welles through bittorrent on the same cell. Different tools for different uses. I seriously doubt anyone with a strong interest in programming really can't get access to cheap or free broadband these days...say, at every library I've been to in the last 10 years? Open access is a necessity, but so is working within the limitation of the existing tech.
  • I worry that as consumers become accustomed to (more or less justified) mobile caps and limits, landline providers will get away with implementing caps that are significantly less justifiable, and done more from a profit motive than from a desire or need to provide improved service.  
  • There would be no problem if carriers wanted to restrict the volume of traffic, but that's not the issue. Instead they want to restrict how you use that volume. They're happy to let you use gigabytes of bandwidth watching YouTube on your phone, but start threatening you or force you to buy an outrageously expensive tethering plan if you want to do some casual browsing on your laptop/netbook while it's connected through your phone.
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