“Don’t make people pay for music. Let them’

A wonderful talk by Amanda Palmer on what looks like a radically alternative approach to making a living from music. In fact, in some ways, it is not really radical at all: it is simply a return to pre-recording-industry methods (busking), that is updated to incorporate social media. But that assembly of technologies makes all the difference, transforming a millennia-old system into something quite wonderful and quite new. This is a person who has embraced the adjacent possibles of social media in a remarkably whole-hearted and inspiring way. Interesting that what the industry deemed as a ‘failure’ (selling a mere 25,000 recordings) was, in the absence of the need for the mechanisms to turn a profit for a company geared to traditional methods of distribution, turned into a spectacular success. But what is perhaps more interesting is an alternative way of thinking about success, production, economies, and trade that actually works, without the structures and strictures of the industrial age, at a very human scale. Many great stories in this talk.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.html?utm_content=addthis-custom&utm_source=t.co&awesm=on.ted.com_s4jB&utm_medium=on.ted.com-twitter&source=twitter&utm_campaign=#.UTSs47nNqAp.twitter

Nice to see that a few journals are starting to run articles on MOOCs. This is a straighforward and quite well-informed  JIME article describing the state of play in MOOCs last year (2012). 

Address of the bookmark: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/viewArticle/2012-18/html

Very well conducted research showing that, in the study sample, active learning does not produce any significant gains compared with the inactive variety. What is most interesting is the reason the authors discover for this, which fits perfectly with the model of soft/hard technologies that I have been developing and writing about in my forthcoming book on how learning technologies work. In brief, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Softer constructivist methods are extremely effective if the teacher uses them skillfully but, if not, they are pretty hopeless and may be positively harmful. Most studies of active learning have involved researchers who know what they are doing and engage with passion and enthusiasm as well as expertise, whereas this study simply grabs a random sample or people using active learning methods in their classrooms. The one and possibly the only benefit of harder formulaic methods of teaching is that they are rather more resilient to bad teachers (and/or those that do not have enough time or energy for the task as a result of other pressures). 

There are other good insights in this paper – it is well worth reading if you have an interest in education.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228657/

Tony Bates on recent events at AU, including a list of facts that are known about what may lie behind the very  sudden and unanticipated (at least by the victims) firing/resignation/termination of four of the most important and well-respected executives at AU.

We have been given almost no information about this turn of events and there is more bad news to come that I know about (and perhaps more on the way after that) so to speculate like this is all we can do right now. Bates may be completely off the mark in his final paragraph but, in the absence of any explanation from those who should be telling us much more about it, it’s food for thought. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.tonybates.ca/2013/02/25/whats-going-on-at-athabasca-university/

A post providing speculation but mainly questions about the causes of recent events affecting and affected by AU’s leadership.

Address of the bookmark: http://beaconnews.ca/blog/2013/02/athabasca-university-public-deserves-to-know-whats-happening/

Donald Clark remains one of my favourite bloggers on e-learning. In this post he discusses Mayer & Clark’s research-based principles for designing instructional content. Required reading for anyone who ever needs to tell anyone anything using multiple media.

Of course, in a learning context, such principles are only of value in putting together a few of the basic building blocks, they are not a model for creating a full learning experience. Following these principles and ignoring the overall learning assembly of which they should form a small part would be a very bad idea. But we all need to communicate content, no matter what our theoretical educational leanings might be.

Address of the bookmark: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca/2013/01/mayer-clark-10-brilliant-design-rules.html?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/dcplanb+(Donald+Clark+++++++Plan+B)

Kevin Kelly’s characteristically excellent take on Clay Shirky’s Law – “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Some nice insights into barriers to change that emerge because of the nature of human systems.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/the_shirky_prin.php

This is a great idea – a means to create 3D models by both scanning around (e.g. for sculpture) and scanning from the inside (eg. for buildings), including motion capture (interesting!) with the software to make the process pretty painless. With skill and patience you can do these things already with any cheap digital camera and some open source free software, but no one has yet built something like this that makes the process seamless and easy. Looks like the tablet-sized screen is used for rendering and rotating captured objects. Cool.

It’s a Kickstarter project (ie not quite there yet unless it gets the money) with a moderately expensive entry point (nearly $2000), but the device and its integration of software look like it might be worth it. One day soon things like this will cost $100 and 3D printers will be ubiquitous, but this looks like it could become the main game in town for now. For around $4000 including a decent 3D printer and a bit of skill and attention to detail you could basically scan and print almost any object. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/02/lynx-a/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

This is also reported on (wonderfully) by Donald Clark at http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca/2013/01/cool-research-happy-sheets-hopeless.html and the original slides are at http://www.boozallenlearning.com/whitepapers/IEL12_Failure-Triggered-Training_Bliton-Gluck.pdf

A report on a presentation by Bliton and Gluck on a fascinating and rather brilliant study of the effectiveness of training 500 people in an organization about the dangers of phishing.

The study split the subjects into three groups, a control group with no intervention, one that received some nicely presented informational text that was actually pasted from a wiki, and one that received a carefully designed pedagogically sound interactive tutorial.

Of those receiving some form of tuition, the results of post-tests were much as expected, with a statistically significant gain shown by those who got the interactive tutorial. The evaluations of the training were great which, given the creators of the training are professionals, is what might be expected. So far so good. This was a successful training exercise that proved the tuition had worked, and that interactive tutorials are a worthwhile investment as they produce better results. If most of us at Athabasca University got results like this, we would consider our job well done, and congratulate ourselves on being great educators. Such things are among the main ways that we typically measure the success of our courses.

This is where it gets fun.

What they did next was to test the effectiveness of the training by sending mock phishing emails to all the subjects. To their great surprise, there was no statistically significant difference between the failure rate of either of the two groups that had received the intervention and, more surprising still, no difference in the control group. I’ll reiterate that so that you can dwell a little more on the full import of this: the control group that had received no training did just as well/badly as those that had received the training. In fact, though not to a significant extent, those who had received no training actually appeared to do slightly better than the rest. 

What Bliton and Gluck did next was even smarter: those who had been fooled by the phishing attack were informed of their ‘failure’ and received remedial training. This recurred twice more at intervals that were based on what we know of how memory decays (spaced learning theory) and, with each run of the remedial training for those that ‘failed’ the test, the number of victims of attacks in each group in the next run reduced enormously until, in the final run, almost no one was caught out.

The notions that 1) teaching is equivalent to learning and that 2) the ability to pass a test after training translates into genuine competence without further reinforcement and reflection are bizarre, given that this is not exactly a new idea (actually it is well over a hundred years since the earliest spaced learning theories and studies showed very similar results). But it is deeply embedded in our educational systems, both in industry and academia. 

The slides are great, but I hope that Bliton and Gluck publish the full study. Apart from anything else, it’s not entirely clear what interstitial intervals were used in this case – they just say ‘over a period of months’, which is interesting given that some variants of the theme suggest that the positive effects can be gained with intervals of only 10 minutes between reinforcement (one of many good reasons to include time for reflection after the event in any learning activity).  This is exactly the kind of research that we need to shake educational traditionalists out of their complacency.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.daveswhiteboard.com/archives/4932