Disfluency turns out to be rather good: people seem to learn better from things that are harder to read. Time to rethink those strategies about always making things as easy and clear as possible!
Address of the bookmark: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/the-benefit-of-ugly-fonts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29
Why did it take so long? Internet Exploder is about passable nowadays but not even close to best of breed and the extreme lack of trust in it that Microsoft meticulously cultivated over a decade or more should have put it to bed much sooner. Despite well publicised recent successes such as its ability to trap more malevolent sites than the rest (necessary, one might argue, because it is notably more vulnerable when it reaches them) and some long-needed if half-hearted improvements in security, speed and standards-compliance IE remains, at best, a mediocre alternative to Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera. It is interesting, therefore, how a technology that is manifestly inferior to virtually all of its competitors should still occupy one of the top two places in the charts. Force of history (the big one) driven by preferential attachment and the Matthew Principle, spawned by uncompetitive practices and aggressive marketing together with some very unwise choices by Netscape at precisely the wrong time in its history might help to explain a lot of it but, given the trouble IE has caused and the ease with which it can be replaced, I can’t help feeling there is another dynamic at work.
Pleasingly, Landing visitors seem to know better and we have seen far more Firefox users on the site than any other browser by a very sizeable margin. Indeed, even Safari seems to give IE a run for its money and Chrome, while still very much a minority browser, is starting to show up on the charts as more than just a flat line near the bottom of the Y axis.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/jan/04/internet-explorer-falls-behind-firefox-europe
Big numbers. Very big numbers. Open courseware has been wonderful for MIT and wonderful for learners around the world. The costs of infrastructure to support this may be high but the payoffs seem more than worth it.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/year-end_stats_from_mit_point_to_increasing_popula.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29
Fascinating: I particularly like ‘the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly’ – that one took a moment to absorb but makes great sense.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/chaos-monkey-how-netflix-uses.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29
Alas.
Many years back I cursed del.icio.us for taking ideas many others (including me) had created and building something brilliant and profitable out of them. But it was a fine site and, dammit, they did build a really great system that justly deserved its success and that was streets ahead of anything the rest of us were trying to do. So now I curse Yahoo (as usual) for giving it their inimitable kiss of death.
Address of the bookmark: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/
Frits Pannekoek has written a clear and well-argued indictment of the (ludicrous) C-32 bill that is currently going through the Canadian parliament. The proposed legislation is evil. It’s not just about laws that remove rights we have enjoyed for centuries, though that is bad enough. It’s about laws that take away some of our future rights to achieve all we can achieve and to become a better society.
In 1492 Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Spondheim, launched an impassioned attack on printing because of the harm it did to scribes (his attack was, of course, printed). Once upon a time publishers, like the scribes, provided a public good that greatly benefited society, but it was a good that was contingent on the technology that was available. DRM is an absurd skeuomorph that seeks to create artificial scarcity out of inherently nonrival resources, to the detriment of society. It is technologically naive as the genie is trivial to unleash (and cannot be contained by one nation’s misguided laws) and so it only hurts those who would be honest and law-abiding in the first place.
I don’t think it’s just about defending traditional rights, though those are indeed under threat by greedy corporations that see new opportunities to control supply like never before. This is about fundamental gains in opportunities for us to grow as a society and a species being squashed by ignorance and habits of mind based on past (but now fictitious) scarcity.
Bearing that in mind and, given that our core goal must be to increase knowledge in society, perhaps we at higher educational institutions now have a moral and practical obligation to eschew any DRM’d content while opening all of our content to the world. In an age of ubiquitous information, our value is in offering a community of scholars and a process that helps people to learn. When universities began it was as a means for students to learn from and with great thinkers, not to consume content, so this is not a radical suggestion. Far from it, it is very much about a return to traditional values.
Later today I’ll be giving a talk at the AU Learning Services conference, so here are my slides.
Softening the machine (note – only available to logged in users) BIG DOWNLOAD ALERT! May slow down the server if many people do this at once. UPDATE: Scribd version of the slides for viewing in a Web browser, no big download needed, at http://tinyurl.com/37hpr37
For those who want the condensed version, here is a stream of consciousness brain dump on the message I am trying to get acroos:
Like all educational systems, Athabasca University is a machine, composed of many technologies. Some of these are directly about teaching, some with processes around it, some with helping people to work together and more. Because Athabasca developed as a distance institution in the industrial age of distance learning, based primarily on the postal service and telephones, both its institutional and teaching processes became brittle: essentially, Michael Moore’s theory of transactional distance that treats distance as a continuum between structure and dialogue puts us in a tricky situation: limits on dialogue inevitably mean an increase in structure. Technologies developed from the Web 1.0 era that enable richer and more inclusive communication are changing that but they are based on a model of closed groups, focused and task-centric. And that tends to be the nature of dialogue, both in teaching and in the daily workings of the university. The real social connection stuff is still largely left to happen in more or less occasional face to face meetings. Web 2.0 technologies open that out and level the playing field, enabling serendipity, creative engagement, filling those spaces between the islands – that’s what the Landing is about, in both teaching and in ‘learning organization’ terms. However, the Landing is a soft technology: it offers enormous potential to increase the ‘adjacent possible’ but that comes at a price in terms of difficulty of use. The harder technologies from which most of Athabasca’s processes are built have the big benefit of making it easier, but at a cost of constraint. So, we are evolving the Landing so that it can make hard things softer, but also hard things softer. And it’s worth putting in the effort because the payoff can be large.
Nice article from Discover Magazine, 2005, on how Web 2.0 is different in the ways information and ideas spread when compared with simple hypertext.
Address of the bookmark: http://discovermagazine.com/2005/oct/emerging-technology
Not at all, I fear. A primitive bit of technology but a sophisticated business model that might well work if the technology offered more. The crossover between open and closed approaches is potentially very powerful. But, as far as I can tell from a fairly cursory exploration, sadly this potential innovation seems to reinforce the wrong values and pedagogies like all the rest and seems sub-moodle in functionality. Sigh.
Address of the bookmark: http://nixty.com/course/Structure-and-Interpretation-of-Computer-Programs-MIT-Eric-Grimson
Very nice article from one of my favourite bloggers on education, Donald Clark, covering a multitude of issues including a scary story of a positively evil self-serving, exam-result-drive school, the benefits of mobile technologies, outsourcing, home tutoring and more. I was particularly struck by his comments applying to the Learndirect call centre in Leicester, UK, that could (or should) equally apply to Athabasca University:
The learners are pleased not to be attending a class, college or school, as that, for them, is associated with past failure in their own lives. They are learning in the comfort and safe environment of their own home, free from the tyranny of time and location.
The association between institutional learning and past failure is one that we at Athabasca should be doing everything we can to break. In the the admissions process, our distance-learning approach, and, to an extent, many of our pedagogies and other processes we are successful in doing this. However, there are a few areas where we could do more, most notable of which is in how we assess.
First to go should be written exams at exam centres. It astonishes me that we choose to bow to ignorance and prejudice in still allowing, let alone promoting or condoning, sit-down written examinations. I have particular loathing for those taken unseen, especially when the rest of our course may be entirely online. Aside from being anti-pedagogic, de-motivational, inauthentic and guilty of many other atrocities and crimes against learners, there is nothing more certain to be associated with past failure in a student’s mind than a sit-down exam when coming to an open university such as ours. If anyone feels that a written exam is necessary they should be forced to make a case to a jury of peers and get special approval, explaining how it shows ability in an authentic setting. If the subject being learned typically requires a person to sit down in a strange place, with a pen and paper, and produce (typically reproduce) knowledge under enormous pressure, in silence, without the assistance of other people or machines, then I am fine with it. If not, it should be scrapped.
I think we also have a tendency to over-assess, often for the best of reasons: assessment can be a very powerful formative tool, helping to correct misapprehensions, offer guidance, subject-knowledge support, motivational support and more but, maybe more importantly, in our unpaced courses it enforces a process of dialogue and communication between learner and tutor. However, when linked with marks and turned into something summative, it can become a major source of stress, not to mention a recipe for the worst kind of externally regulated extrinsic motivation and consequent destruction of intrinsic motivation. I don’t see the point of giving a summative assessment of a course until very near to its end apart from to make a tutor’s life easier. Formative assessment is wonderful, and there is no harm in loosely enforcing a process. Structure and scaffolding can help to maintain motivation, and ability to work to deadlines within a formal or semi-formal structure is a valid and authentic learning outcome in many cases (though, if that is the skill to be learned, should not be assessed till students have had a chance to learn it in the context of the subject being taught). It is also perfectly acceptable to use the outputs and process artefacts of the formative process as evidence in a summative assessment. However, in assigning final grades directly to outputs, we transfer the target of that motivation from mastery of the subject being learned to the passing of the assessment. Formative assessment should allow students to improve and fill in the gaps so that they can pass the summative assessment more easily and, only when they are ready, should they submit something to us in our role as judge and jury.
If we assume that our job is to teach, if we do our jobs well (enthusing, motivating, providing subject knowledge, supporting and managing the process of learning) then there should never be any students with less than 100% on the final summative assessment. Period. I realise that is, in our current system, unrealistic, especially as we play the dual role of educators and sorters of abilities. It is also, for some few students, too hard: whether through wilful efforts to avoid work, lack of interest in the subject and/or a rare innate lack of ability, the effort involved in bringing some students to a level of mastery is not economically viable for them or us to achieve. It’s not that it couldn’t be done: there is no human-created subject that cannot, with enough assistance, time, effort and patience, be learned by any able-minded human being. It’s just that, sometimes, that time can be very long indeed, and the care, effort and patience might be better spent on other things. Be that as it may, I think 100% pass-rates with 100% achievement is a worthwhile goal to aim for and maybe, if we see every lost percentage mark as a failure on our part, we might try a little harder to teach and spend a little less time trying to pick holes and seek out weaknesses.
Address of the bookmark: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2010/10/faceless-schools.html