Group items tagged

Saw it in H561's discussion! Interesting idea! 

Nothing is hotter in the education world right now than the massive open online course, or MOOC. MOOCs make an elite education available to anyone, typically for free but without course credit. But how completely can online courses reproduce the college experience? Lexington writer and entrepreneur Jonathan Haber wanted to find out.

If computers can score writing, of course the first use will be for assessment. No surprise there. But how might we use this more creatively?

I tried to bring an scoring software program into my school. Nobody liked it except for myself. I thought the objective measure would be more motivating to students. But the other teachers thought that the students should have more practice with rubrics themselves. My school focused heavily on peer editing and scoring. Also, when teachers see such a large number of average scores they tend to disbelieve the results. For example, when I score the essays, there may be a lot of 'B's but I've sees the difference in between Betty's 'B' and Joe's 'B'. The grade is more of a reminder of my experience scoring Betty's writing. When the software scores it, I haven't necessarily seen the essay therefore the score doesn't mean as much. Of course the scoring makes much more sense for official assessments. Open Ended Responses are a much better measure of a student's understanding than multiple choice, if the software is able to distinguish the nuance of language. Some programs are scoring grammatical patterns, sentence length, and paragraph length; therefore, a student can be totally off topic and get a high score. I'm curious if this latest software corrected for this.

The new "open university" collaboration between Princeton, Stanford, UMich and Penn.

They have some interesting offerings with some impressive people!

I tried taking a course on there, and noticed that 1) offerings are very limited and 2) you have to wait until the course officially "starts", just like an in-person class. I think there are 3 starting April 23rd and all the rest are either this summer, next fall, or "TBA"...I thought the whole idea is that you could take them anytime!

I am posting two articles: 1) Apple's recent announcement about getting into digital textbooks (article/link below) and 2) the criticism (this link) by Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters. Education needs to rethink the need for textbooks altogether. Digitizing them is not the answer. She states, "You can disassemble, reassemble, unbundle, disrupt, destroy the textbook. It is truly an irrelevant format."

Hi Emily - thanks for your thoughts! Bloggers (especially those who use the name Hack in their title) are going to be provocative (one-sided) in their writing... but it helps raise questions about standard practices. I too agree that eTextbooks or iBooks are going to be tremendously more engaging and up-to-date than the ones that weigh down kids bookbags. But now take a look at the other article I posted: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/flow-digital-textbooks that suggests how publishers are not open to new and niche ideas that might be incredibly beneficial to education. The publishing market has a hold on education. Is it possible that the textbooks will not be available across a range of platforms, but only on a few that the publishers agree to work with? Maybe it is time we push for a more open source model... that could also work towards digitizing textbooks... or would innovate other ways for students to access "textbook"" knowledge.

Thanks for the nudge to read the other article that you posted as well! It was a nice counterpoint to Watters and the FLOW platform seems like a promising stab at digital textbooks from an open-source standpoint.

This longer gamasutra article talks about Macro Flow and Micro Flow, complete with Csikszentmihalyi's flow diagrams. "Macro flow is the constant rise in difficulty to compete with the player's increasing skill level, maintaining the balance between boredom and anxiety. Macro flow refers to the entire gameplay experience from the beginning of the game until the end, and having a good macro flow will likely result in constant interest and intrinsic motivation on the part of the player throughout the course of the game." "Micro flow is short intense periods of flow that happen frequently, as well as the constant adaptation of the game's challenges to the player's increase in skill level. It is perpetuated by repeated successes in rapid succession, which provides positive emotional and tangible feedback encouraging the player to continue in the micro flow; this is known as a virtuous cycle."

Thanks for posting, Stephanie. I wonder if these instances of "micro flow' interfere with a gamer's chances of experiencing macro flow. I'm imagining instances of micro flow to be like interesting pit stops along a road trip, while macro flow would be equivalent to the exhilaration of cruising down an open road without any interruption. Not sure if that's the right way to think about it though...

Chronicle of Higher Education Q&A with researchers from Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities. Highlighted are many of the more recent technologies, as well as their effects on higher education's future.

Related to the Pew Foundation Study on Tagging we read earlier in the course... Topic models provide a simple way to analyze large volumes of unlabeled text. A "topic" consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together. Using contextual clues, topic models can connect words with similar meanings and distinguish between uses of words with multiple meanings. Coupling the use of such tools with blogging allows students (plural) to spot trends in their collective writing. The key is to "share-out" their pieces in weekly class review sessions. This "ups" the level of engagement.