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

The 2013 International Workshop on 
Social Computing, Network, and Services 
(SocialComNet 2013)

http://www.ftrai.org/socialcomnet2013

September 4-6, 2013, Gwangju, Korea

(in Conjunction with FutureTech 2013)

For the past couple of months I have sporadically been playing with the Microsoft Surface RT. The fully castrated version, not the one they are hoping will work better soon. If it were worth the effort I might go into a lot more detail than I am about to go into but, frankly, this is a piece of landfill that is not worthy of such exertion. I will just highlight some examples of why this is probably the worst tablet or worst PC on the market today.

I did have some hopes for this. I thought it might be a laptop replacement, I thought it might be a grown-up tablet, I thought it had some interesting and creative ideas, especially in the interface, that separated it from the pack. Those hopes have been soundly dashed.

I’ve tried hard to find something to like about it but have so far failed. Compared with Android and Apple alternatives, it is uniformly worse by every measure I can think of. The hardware is ugly, heavy, unintuitively and unergonomically organized, the battery life is mediocre, the screen is average, the power brick is poorly designed, the keyboard lid is very disappointing (doubly so because I ordered both the standard and clicky versions but they sent two standard versions and would not take the wrong one back because I had opened the packaging).  Compared with even a two-year-old Android tablet it is slow, limited and clunky. Compared with my newer Nexus 7 or recent iPads, it feels like a stammering sloth. The lauded kickstand is pointless if you use the device vertically and useless unless you are working on a table or desk. Of course, much of the time, you cannot use it vertically anyway. Logging in, for example, insists that you hold it horizontally, and a fair number of apps seem to know nothing about the second dimension. Despite efforts here and there to allow for the form factor, the mindset of all the designers seems firmly fixed on the PC model and the classic horizontal screen, with the addition of a touch screen. 

And that is problem number one. This device cannot make up its mind about whether it is a PC or a tablet. It wants to be both and fails on both counts. The Metro interface is interesting and innovative. I can see that it might have some value on a cellphone, though it is not a patch on the newer Android flavours in terms of functionality, and it lacks the elegance and sheer usability of the iPhone. However, this is the first tablet for which I’ve needed a manual before I could even use it. For those who are stuck at the first hurdle, the thing to remember is that actually doing anything involves swiping from different sides of the screen. I was still floored for a while by the problem of logging out, but got there in the end. I’m still a bit puzzled about the odd things that happen if you try to drag the tiles around, especially off the screen. They can wind up in the oddest of places.

Metro is quite pretty but, after a very short time, I realized that it had been designed by the makers of Spongebob Squarepants. If you don’t already have attention deficit disorder, you will after a day or two of using this machine. It might be almost acceptable if it distracted me with things I actually want to see but, frankly, I really don’t want to see pictures of random contacts moving across my screen, or know the temperature in degrees farenheit (I did eventually figure a way to stop this, but not before setting it and failing several times) or have what MSNBC thinks is news scrolling irritatingly on the screen while other things move around it. Actually, I don’t even want news from my own feeds in that form, unless I specifically ask for it. But, in a pattern that repeats throughout the system, there is no obvious way to have a choice in the matter, apart from deleting the offending tiles. Which is a pain in itself and, again, is not intuitive. Actually, having not done it for a while, I just tried to do it and couldn’t work it out again. It’s not memorable either.

But I could live with Metro if I had to. Unfortunately, a full-blown Windows interface (but not Windows in the sense that you can run Windows programs) is a tap away at any time. Some things work as Metro apps, others as Windows applications. There are no clues about what you are likely to get when you tap their tiles. And of course, many of the Windows applications know little or nothing about being on a tablet. It’s a similar sensation to using a virtual PC running a different operating system. It works, but everything works differently.

Once you are in the old Windows environment, the thing is truly appalling. For running Windows, the screen seems tiny, often unreadable, and touch is a nightmare on an interface designed for a mouse. On many occasions, even using a stylus and carefully pressing in the right place I’ve got something different appearing as a result. And it’s absolutely impossible if you are on a plane or bus. Of course, you might be inclined to use the awful touch keyboard case to try to use it that way, but it is hopeless to type on and, again, totally useless if you are moving around. Compared with equally slim, elegant keyboards available for Android and iPad devices for less than $100, this feels like a piece of dull cardboard. Compared with using my Macbook Air, which may be marginally heavier and slightly larger in some dimensions in real life, it is like a clunky, useless toy. The RT is slightly cheaper, of course, but not by the orders of magnitude that the gap in functionality between them would suggest. The Air is just as portable (fits in an iPad pocket) feels barely if at all heavier because it is well balanced and ergonomically designed and, above all, it actually works. I can even run Windows 8 on it at high speed with all apps working, unlike the RT. Which is of course another major problem with the RT device. Even things like browser plugins do not work unless they are compiled for the device, and hardly any are. The range of apps in the Microsoft Store is put to shame even by the Blackberry Playbook, which was the previous contender for dumbest tablet of all time. At least the Playbook kind of made sense in a weird way, even if a few minor apps that no one would ever need (like, say, email) were skipped early on in its unhappy career.

Once you reach the apps, they are wan shadows of the equivalents on Android and iOS machines. The thing that most enormously bugs me is the almost total inability to move things between apps. iOS’s send-to functions or Androids ability to send to any receptive app are sorely missed when you don’t have them. They are what makes small, limited-purpose apps such a great idea. It means you can send the output of one to form the input of another, so you can assemble the functionality you need. But Microsoft is lost in the world of monoliths that are supposed to do everything, or complex COM components that seem largely absent on this underpowered dog of a machine. At least, I’m guessing that’s the case, because apps that are delightfully interoperable on iOS and Android, if they are available at all, are crippled on the RT.

It crashes and freezes. Well, it is Windows after all. But you’d think that, if they were in control of all of the hardware, that this wouldn’t be as much of an issue as normal. But it is. It is not helped by the fact that the emasculated versions of the main Office programs are still in beta (or ‘Preview’ as they coyly put it). They really want to suck you in to the Microsoft ecosystem with this, trying to encourage you to keep your files on their cloud servers and making it quite tricky to avoid it. There are other painful consequences of this avaricious and blunt bullying that make Apple (who are demonic in this regard) seem almost saintly. Of course, Bing and IE are omnipresent. Goes without saying. But I could not even test Skype without linking my newly minted Microsoft account with it – it would not allow me to log in with my old Skype ID, even though I had studiously avoided linking it despite nags on at least 7 other devices before that. Thankfully I was not so careless as to use the Hotmail account I’ve owned since before Microsoft purchased and demolished it or I would now have amalgamated Skype and Messenger accounts. I keep them separate for a reason. That is and should be my choice. Of course, Microsoft are now retiring Messenger so it’s no big deal. Just means I have to find a good alternative to Skype such as Google Voice, though I will be sad to lose my UK SkypeIn number that is a local call for friends and family in the UK.

The RT is (kind of) futz central. However, unlike the old Windows machines, the machine does all the futzing for you so that you can sit back and wonder about life, the universe and what the hell was going on in the heads of the people who came up with this disastrous machine. I think that, so far, I have spent as much time waiting for it to reboot, to unfreeze itself and (this is a big one) to install large updates as I have actually using it. I should mention that it does not always give you a choice as to whether and when those updates happen. You get a countdown, after which it will start the process even if you are in the middle of something important that cannot be interrupted. It can be 15 minutes or more (over half an hour on one occasion) before you can use the device again. 

I could go on, but I think I’ve almost made my point. There have no doubt been some talented and creative people involved in the design of this and you can see occasional good isolated ideas that might come to something if they were consistently integrated and thought through more clearly, but these creative people appear to have no more say in the design than dullards and narrow-minded people who still wonder what the fuss is about – isn’t everything a PC and why did we have to stop using DOS? With which, of course, this stupid machine is incompatible, which means it is truly the worst of all possible worlds. I have forgiven Microsoft in the past for the layer upon layer of workarounds, patches and fixes that they have had to string together to retain backwards compatibility with devices originally released nearly 30 years ago. It is one reason that Windows PCs are cranky, slow and insecure. Its not a good reason, but it’s an understandable reason. Apple were in a similar position at the end of the 1990s and threw all that away in order to build the elegant machines they make today, a move that some people saw as suicidal. But Apple didn’t forget their existing user base, and provided Rosetta to run sandboxed versions of old Mac apps (at least for a while – no longer there in the latest version of OSX). But I can’t even run an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer on this new machine. I can’t run DOS programs. In fact, I can’t even find the command prompt. 

I have no doubt that, given time, I could figure this horrid patchwork out. There probably is a command prompt, there may well be ways to stop that horrible flashing movement on the home screen, deleting tiles is probably really simple once you know how. But why should I bother? There are no benefits at all, as in NONE, of this machine compared with a modern Android device or an iPad, while there are enormous disadvantages. It doesn’t work properly, consistently or well. It’s difficult to use beyond some very limited use cases. It’s expensive. It has very few apps, most of which are far worse than the same ones on Android and iOS. It’s a half-baked bastard child of a PC and a mediocre phone, only without the phone and without the PC. It feels like stepping back in time 10 years then running through history again in an alternative universe in which the iPad and Android never happened (apart from a couple of borrowed ideas like a magnetic power cable and snap-on cover) and in which Microsoft still dominates the market.

As a software company, Microsoft rose to prominence by producing software that didn’t quite work yet and was poorly designed, but that was packed with features people wanted and that was good enough to be getting on with. Most importantly, this process meant they could chuck this stuff out years before companies like IBM, Lotus and WordPerfect, who (in retrospect) foolishly wanted to produce reliable software that worked, could get to market. I’m wondering whether that is something like the model they are using here, albeit having arrived very late to the party. It’s an abysmal and resounding failure, but so was Windows 1 and so was Windows 2. I’d like to be able to say that they can’t get away with it with hardware because patches are not so easy to produce but, on reflection, I think they might. Replacement cycles for tablets are beginning to look much like those for phones so, while a few people may be put off this rubbish now, Microsoft might get another chance later. I kind of hope not. It’s an evil company but, till now, has never been as evil as Apple in terms of intentional lock-in and cynical market manipulation. Now it looks like they want that too.

In summary…

What’s hot: nothing I could discover

What’s not: everything