Interesting article overviewing a range of uses of analytics (including learning analytics) raising some slightly fuzzily-articulated but very real concerns about the use of statistics to guide behaviour.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ipad_apps_for_kids_measure_increase_learning.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29
Social digital storytelling radio station
Address of the bookmark: http://ds106.us/
I’m sitting here listening to Barbara Means giving the keynote on blended learning in K-12 in the US at E-Learn 2011. The audience is a little thin on the ground this morning as the conference is in Waikiki this year. The people on the beach missed a wonderful traditional chant and greeting – wonderful.
Barbara is telling us that, in meta-studies and in quasi-experimental studies, blended learning is equally or (often) more successful than face to face equivalents. And, the second point, as she observes, is that course completion rates are lower, of course (so the ones that survive are better). For the latter insight it is reasonable to consider the ‘e’ element of it – one absolutely distinctive feature of online learning is that it is much easier to ignore, so less motivated or well-organised students or those who have not learned online learning skills are at a disadvantage (something Barbera rightly observes). For the former, it is not at all.
The problem with these kinds of studies is a failure to understand and cater for the nature of the technologies they are examining. If we are looking at outcomes, it is almost nothing to do with whether people use online teaching or not, it’s about how the technologies (notably including pedagogies as well as organisational systems and the physical and virtual systems) fit together and how it all relates to things like motivation, time on task and the passion of the teacher, which together account for a good 80% of the reason for success or failure in most educational interventions.
It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. A bad teacher is a bad teacher no matter what model is used (though good technologies such as sensible pedagogies, amongst others, can reduce the harm), while a good teacher, as long as the physical and organisational constraints are not too limiting, is good no matter what model is used. Technics matter, but caring, art, sensitivity and skill matter more. Good teachers can and often do use bad pedagogies and other bad technologies and yet they still succeed. Similarly, teaching things that people want to learn, when they want to learn them is more useful than almost any other factor.
Some interesting insights into what happens when technologies are incompatible – like insane state legislation requiring students to sit in class when there is nothing for them to do there because they are working online, or when students learn to learn using one technology but no one notices that the same approach doesn’t work when you use another. Inevitably, she is talking about flipping the classroom (a trendy name for what good face-to-face teachers have done for millenia) with some encouraging stats to suggest that an approach of teaching rather than telling is becoming more fashionable as a result.
This is a bit scary, especially given that some systems put a limit on the size of passwords you may use. Of course, they need to get hold of the encrypted (or hashed) password in the first place so that should provide a basic line of defence, but it is a remarkable feat, using incredibly cheap hardware. Time to make my passwords longer and stronger, I think. Recent reearch suggests that the strongest are not those that have weird and wonderful mixes of letters and symbols and numbers (easily forgotten), but that use sentences (but not obvious ones that can be found with a web search – poems and song lyrics are not a good choice!)
Address of the bookmark: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/10/04/248075/GPU-cracks-six-character-password-in-four-seconds.htm
Stuff about learning, education and teaching
Stuff about technologies, mostly ICT but also other things
Links relating to social software and social media
I was introduced to Viber the other day – a neat and very elegant alternative to some parts of Skype, Google Talk etc, run on Amazon servers, that uses your real cellphone number to make and receive free calls and messages to and from other Viber users (Android and iPhone only, Blackberry client will follow). Incredibly easy to use: just install and go, that’s it, no registration, no noticable setup. It gives excellent sound quality (even over 3G), no ads, uses your existing address book, has a really clear and apparently very ethical privacy policy (except that it is in the US, so suffers the usual serious concerns about US government agencies being able to access data). If the person you are calling/texting is not on Viber, it just falls back on your normal cellular provider to dial the number. It even passes through most firewalls. Seems pretty faultless, as far as I can tell.
Apart from the issue of privacy in the US, I only have one puzzling concern: with no ads, no hidden connection charges, no premium services, no selling of personal data, strong controls preventing release of personal data to anyone at all, indeed no obvious means of revenue generation and some big infrastructure costs, how on earth will they make their money?
Address of the bookmark: http://www.viber.com/
Steve Jobs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
He believed that the dots will connect down the road and I suppose that they did, though the road carries on and the dots never stop. I love his closing quote in this video from the very last page of the very last issue of Stuart Brand’s great comic, the Whole Earth Catalogue:”Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Kind of the John Lennon of geeks, I think, and Lennon might have said something simllar to his odd but haunting phrase uttered to these new graduates: “You are already naked – there is no reason not to follow your heart.”
For practical reasons (they work a bit better than others) I’ve had a fair number of Apple machines and, for some time, I’ve called them all Steve, liking to imagine him scuttling around finding and organising things for me inside the device and its network. Now just a ghost in the machine. It is impossible not to be moved by the death of the most obvious and most driven genius behind most of those devices. Steve Jobs was maybe not a good man in every way (that would be a bit much to ask), but he was certainly a great man.
I’d like to remember him by believing that his last gift (not sure to whom it was addressed, probably to himself) was a very small twinkle of characteristic brilliance: the release yesterday of the iPhone 4S. Imagine for a moment, a man who knows death is imminent, who knows what his death will mean, who knows an important new product is looming, so dedicated and focused that he realised his death would wreck its early sales figures and might even initiate a long term decline. If makes perfect sense. I suspect the iPhone 5 will arrive in weeks rather than months, it will be a huge success, and it will be (sadly nearing the last) part of his magnificent if ethically ambiguous legacy. I wonder if the Apple logo will be black? Either way, a good way to leave us, not with a bang but with a slightly irritating ring tone.
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One final aside that has little to do with Steve Jobs: the video I point to at the start of this post is copyrighted by Stanford University. Let me run that past you again. Steve Jobs read a speech (I’d love to think he wrote it but I’m sure he at least paid for it) yet the employers of the goon behind the camera (not the goon him or herself, who was not a creative genius anyway) own the copyright. I actually suspect Steve Jobs would have been among those who approved, but I am not one of them.
It’s to be expected. I have what is arguably the best Android iPad competitor on the planet right now and it is not a patch on my iPad 2. Actually, despite neat cameras, the latest Android O/S and theoretically wonderful battery life (reality is so disappointing when a Flash movie is running in the background or Skype it humming to itself, so you pick the thing up after less than a day to find the battery that should last 16 hours is already dead in less than 5), it’s not even close to my old iPad 1. It’s getting there, but Apple win hands down without having to even breathe heavily. Which is why, in passing, I agree with most analysts that Amazon’s approach that does not seek to directly compete with the iPad is brilliant and might actually work.
Actually, if this site reveals truth, there is a far more remarkable figure embedded in these already surprising statistics. That 60% of roaming wifi devices (major proviso: those that use Meraki networks) are made by Apple. I’m not sure why I should be surprised because that’s what I see every day when I walk past coffee shops, sit in airport lounges or hang out around open wifi networks. Despite the fact that Apple make well under 10% of the devices used on this planet to access the Internet, they are often the majority that I can see in public places and likely the majority portrayed on the old media like film and TV. Given that, within considerably under a decade, desktop and other tethered devices are likely to recede into a humdrum distant past and have little relevance to most people any more, this is a startling factoid. The only thing that makes me a little reluctant to predict the ascendance of the dark overlord as a direct result (Apple as a company make Microsoft look like saints, albeit saints with bad taste and poor intellectual skills) is that wireless networks as we know them today have very little hope of survival. In itself and in the long term, this is a matter of minor interest as other more friendly and reliable wireless technologies will supplant the creaking wifi bandwidth hogs of yesterday. But legacy systems have a tendency to hang around for a while so wifi is not going to vanish immediately. And the chances that my 2005 vintage Mac will (without a lot sweet USB loving or some open countryside far beyond a city) still be able to access the airwaves at more than a few bits per second in 2015 are slim. Actually, my 2011 Macbook Air (not the latest model but not an elderly wreck) will have some similar problems. Scrub that, it already does, more than a few feet from an access point. So maybe Apple will choke on its own brilliance, and chance whimsy will determine what we use in a few years to get at stuff that is not on our machines, because Apple could not resist the low hanging wifi fruit when it should have been chasing something else. And the network, as we have always known, is the thing that matters most. Amazon know that.
Address of the bookmark: http://meraki.com/press-releases/2011/06/22/meraki-reveals-ipads-use-400-more-wi-fi-data-than-the-average-mobile-device/