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The main focus of Fortnightly Mailing is on online learning, sometimes discussing related issues like open access, and educational and economic policy more generally.
Here is Clayton's covering note (which I've taken the liberty of reproducing in full, with one samll change at the end in the attribution of an article by Clayton that appeared in the Association for Learning Technology's Newsletter in 2011).
Conferences that May Be Worth Your Time
Frequently, I receive requests from those new to the field of educational technology to suggest conferences that would be worthwhile to attend. It can be a difficult request to fulfill as the response:
Caulfield draws points from the discussion astutely, but you'll need to watch it for its many "aha" moments (as Caulfield says, you can safely skip the first 10 minutes).
The video is very relevant to current discussions about MOOCs, equity of access and provision, "hard-to-teach/hard-to-learn" subjects, and professional development.
Unusually the discussion focusses simultaneously on schools (Cremin) and on HE (Mayer), which adds greatly to its value.
The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste plays a key role in training physicists from developing countries. Some readers will remember Enrique Canessa and Marco Zennaro's terrific presentation in London in May 2011 about ICTP's elegant low-tech automated lecture capture system, which allows archiving and sharing traditional lectures and talks carried out using, for example, very large chalkboards found in classrooms and/or using more modern presentations systems. ICTP has just released EyApp which is an iPhone app that applies the same principals. From the media release:
EyApp enables your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to make a video composed of a series of captured images along with simultaneous audio recording. With just the press of a button, the App automatically captures images at intervals ranging from 5 to 20 seconds (or manually by the user) and then synchronizes the images with a continuous audio signal.
The resulting recording is a smaller size compared with traditional video (HD or standard resolution) because the still frames can be processed by the highly-efficient compression algorithms used by the H264 movie format found in modern mobile i devices.
The film is then ready to be shared immediately or, when saved on a device's photo/movie gallery, can be further edited with other Apps, shared by email and rich-media messaging systems or via social networking Apps, or transferred to a computer. EyApp makes it easy to create personal recording archives as well as to share them via YouTube.
An Android version is follow, and EyApp is available now for download from the iPhone App Store. My feeling is that combined with a Swivl to hold the recording device, EyApp would have specially good potential for low-cost systematic capture of workshops and speaker sessions.
In this 50-minute session from the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael J. Sandel gets his audience (and viewers like me and you) thinking about the adverse civic and moral consequences of market mechanisms being introduced into so many areas of public and working life. At the same time he exemplifies a (very difficult to carry off) approach to large group learning.
Here is a rough transcription of Sandel's conclusion, which probably owes its impact to what came before it in the talk:
I think it is no accident that two things have been happening over the past 30 years. One is that what we've discussed today: the tendency to rely more and more on market mechanisms without any public debate. And something else that's been happening which is the hollowing out of public discourse in general. What passes for political discourse these days consists mainly of shouting matches on talk radio and cable TV, and ideological food fights in congress. People are frustrated by this. I think one of the reasons for this is our reluctance to engage in serious public debate about big and controversial moral questions.
But the result of that reluctance is that we have a public discourse that is either managerial and technocratic, which inspires no-one, or, when passion enters, we have shouting matches. People want a better kind of politics.
People want to elevate the terms of our public discourse. People want to address big things in public. So I think that the hollowing out of our public discourse, and the market triumphalist faith that has gone unexamined even after the financial crisis have a common solution. It's not an easy solution. But it's a new kind of politics of the common good that admits, that welcomes into public debate moral engagement on big tough controversial questions, not because we will all agree: we won't; but because it may teach us to listen and learn a little bit better, and it will also lift our sights from the rancour that inflicts our politics, to what I think is a more strenuous kind of citizenship; but also a more satisfying democratic pulic life.
Despite some of the sentimentalism, the kowtowing, and the US-centrism, there is plenty of interest in this 68 minute recording of a panel session on 24 January in Davos. Thrun and Koller get too little of the floor, I think; and what the session generally lacks from the chair, NYT journalist Thomas Friedman - who knows how to gush - is critical challenge.
Above and below are two screen-shots from the Sutton Trust-EEF's Teaching and Learning Toolkit, which describes itself as "an accessible summary of educational research which provides guidance for teachers and schools on how to use their resources to improve the attainment of disadvantaged pupils" and which "currently covers 30 topics, each summarised in terms of their average impact on attainment, the strength of the evidence supporting them and their cost".
Think if it as an interactive and more practically focused version of Visible Learning by John Hattie; and note the extent to which approaches that are in political vogue in England (like setting by ability, or uniform) are judged to be harmful or ineffective rather than beneficial. For more on the latter, see Ian Gilbert's The Research v The Government.
* As the toolkit explains, average impact is estimated in terms of additional months progress you might expect pupils to make as a result of an approach being used in school, taking average pupil progress over a year is as a benchmark.
I'm a governor of a big FE college, which means I need to keep an eye on issues like value added measures of teachers' or institutions' performance.
Five items have recently caught my attention and I thought that gathered into one place they might be useful to others. [I'll consider adding more if you send them to me.]
The first two are brief rebuttals of work funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [PDF] that purports to show that there is year-to-year consistency in the "value" that individual teachers add to learners.
The third is a classy more general piece about the instability of value-added estimates, from the Albert Shanker Institute. The fourth is a recently published article by Schafer and colleagues which challenges commonly held assumptions about value added. Finally there is a short video by the research psychologist Daniel Willingham (yes, the Daniel Willingham cited by Michael Gove in his speech in praise of tests in November 2012 - on which Willingham was himself moved to comment), which summarises the problem with value added in a particularly accessible way.
Gates Foundation Wastes More Money Pushing VAM - by Gene V Glass, Research Professor & Senior Researcher in the School of Education
and National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado
Mark Guzdial's excellent Computing Education blog has an interesting, growing and already long discussion thread about MOOCs (of the "x" rather than "c" variety) and what they do or do not do, and about the extent to which they can substitute for or embody (good) teaching - prompted by Mark's own forceful MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how teaching works.
My immediate reaction to reading Mark's post (before the comments began to flow) was to look once more at CMU's Learning/Teaching Principles where Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon's axiomatic
takes pride of place.
The key question for me is whether it is or will be possible to build MOOCs to influence "what the student does to learn" as or more productively overall than in a well run, reasonably but not lavishly resourced face-to-face course.
These are early days. My instinct and experience tells me that it is premature to assert now that it is not or (more importantly) will not be possible. The challenge, surely, is to put a effort into:
seeking to make it work;
scientifically assessing impact;
understanding the affordances of subject, level, learner-characteristics, and so on.
This excerpt from Blake Morrison's fictional memoir The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (taken from this review: I've not read the book) struck me as apt:
"The
press would not stand firm or bed down flat. The type kept breaking
off. The hand-mould would not fit right. The characters we made were
blurred or twisted, and impossible to align. The ink ran like a stream
or stuck like mud. The paper creased and tore."
From a MOOC learner's point of view things are already nothing like this bad. In fact, for many MOOC learners, things are already pretty good.
Millions of Lessons Learned on Electronic Napkins [via Stephen Downes] is a candid, informative and well structured 36 minute joint presentation by Wernicke - who is the designer/teacher of Udacity's Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science course - and Loviscach - who is the designer/teacher of Udacity's Differential Equations in Action course. The presentation was given in Hamburg on 30 December 2012 at the Chaos Communication Congress (an annual conference on technology, society and utopia). The optimistic and clear abstract for Loviscach and Wernicke's session is well worth reading.
Peter Norvig uses this 14 November 2012 talk at Stanford University (~34 minute talk; ~22 minutes of discussion - questions just about audible) to reflect candidly on what he learned from making and running the mass online AI course with Sebastian Thrun last year.
The screen-shot below has Norvig's concluding slide, which he uses to support the idea that in the future online learning will i) feel to learners like 1:1 instruction, ii) be organised with cohorts of 100,000, and iii) use analysis of the "big data" flowing from masses of peer:peer interactions to shape formative feedback to individual learners and/or determine how a learner is "routed" through their studies.
For more on how this might work, see Norvig's responses - optimistically to the question that is asked at 39:10, and more cautiously to the question asked at 51:40. See also his answer to the question asked at 53:10 for an interesting insight into how Google itself has been testing the impact of its own online search course (which, like the AI course, attracted over 150,000 learners) on the actual search behaviours of users.
As an aside, it is worth considering Norvig's comments on Carnegie Mellon University's efforts to create a mathematics tutoring system alongside observations made by Dylan Wiliam in Scaling up: Achieving a breakthrough in adult learning with technology a report I wrote earlier this year with Adrian Perry, Clive Shepherd and Dick Moore. Here is an excerpt:
A particular barrier to successfully creating software that helps learners develop
their conceptual understanding is the great difficulty in building a solid proficiency
model or map of a knowledge domain. For example, a well-funded team of
expert researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed an effective tutoring
system (now called the Cognitive Tutor56) for a relatively small proportion of the US
equivalent of the Year 10 algebra curriculum. Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor
of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London,
explains: “The Cognitive Tutor has been very well researched and it’s very effective.
It’s probably better than 90% of teachers that are teaching this part of the
curriculum. But one of the reasons it is so effective is that its focus is on such a very
constrained domain. And it still took the Carnegie Mellon team 20 years to work out
what are the knowledge structures that are involved in this domain.” In short, whilst
the computer science behind the tutoring system is robust and getting even more
so, the proficiency models of learners’ cognition are neither well developed nor easy
to create.
Clayton Wright's Educational Technology Conference Listing, June to December 2013
Clayton Wright - source
The 29th Educational Technology & Education Conferences Listing [1.1 MB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.
Here is Clayton's covering note (which I've taken the liberty of reproducing in full, with one samll change at the end in the attribution of an article by Clayton that appeared in the Association for Learning Technology's Newsletter in 2011).
Conferences that May Be Worth Your Time
Frequently, I receive requests from those new to the field of educational technology to suggest conferences that would be worthwhile to attend. It can be a difficult request to fulfill as the response:
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