Norms concerning marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation show dramatic changes but virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving in the same direction, at roughly similar speeds. This has brought a parallel movement, without convergence.
Interesting that although norms have moved in the same direction for advanced industrial societies, they have not converged as some thought they would.
Can be used for planning your open and technology inquiry projects and interacting with your instructor. https://trello.com/
Great tool!
Revising our pedagogies with strategies that make for more meaningful learning anyway, including some of the strategies above, is a better approach.
A very sensible approach that will hopefully lead to more meaningful and active learning than traditional a lecture/paper pedagogy in most disciplines.
Today, I understand the story of the Mormon church in a much more complicated and nuanced way. People speak about their membership in the church with great love and affection for the promises the gospel holds for them. But these promises are not solely about eternal salvation; indeed, in the stories I heard and read there was also a tremendous amount of aloha for the opportunities afforded Polynesian Latter-day Saints to reconnect with a way of life that has been threatened and a subjectivity that has been devalued.
Interesting, and like most of things in life complex and not black and white.
In the forward to Potlatch [1969], George Clutesi tells us: “This narrative is not meant to be documentary. In fact it is meant to evade documents.
IMHO, Effective story telling in education should help anchor knowledge in learners’ hearts, and where appropriate help motivate action. Along with Active Learning, Storytelling is probably one of the most effective, but underused tools in higher education.
The relationship is not only the relationship that we have person to person between the people who are leading the class and receiving teachings in the class, but the relationship amongst the members of that immediate community.
Invite knowledge keepers and elders into our classrooms.
Learning is not a passive process of receiving knowledge from the expert or “sage on stage.” Learning and teaching is a two-way process
Flipped learning, inquiry based learning, active learning.
Not all knowledge is literate – this requires that we create a space for different ways of learning knowledge in orality and “culturally [accommodating] … how knowledge is constructed and passed on to others”
Learning by doing. Story telling. Self directed learning, or at least choice topics or projects for learning.
Edward Snowden, reflecting on how he learned to program by himself after schooling generally failed to challenge him, noted that “a computer would wait forever to receive my command but would process it the very moment I hit Enter, no questions asked. No teacher had ever been so patient, yet so responsive. Nowhere else—certainly not at school, and not even at home—had I ever felt so in control.”
Computer programing is the ultimate in responsive feedback tool, and can also allow learners to solve computer or computational problems they are interested in or pursue a passion they have.
While these terms are often used interchangeably, in fact, they each have fundamental differences.
It might also be helpful to point out that there is significant overlapping between each of these approaches to teaching.
“It has now got to the point where some of the statements being made are so easily refutable, so verifiably and unquestionably false, that you have to presume that the people writing them know that. And that must lead you to another assumption, which is that they know that this is not true, but they have decided that these national myths are so important to them and their political projects, or their sense of who they are, that they don’t really care about the historical truths behind them.
Another possible factor is motivated reasoning, especially when combined with important national myths.
Already some students are skipping lectures at their local institution because the teaching of the topic is better and clearer on OpenCourseWare, MOOCs or the Khan Academy.
This happened to my partner and her cohort in a biology class they took. I blogged about her experience back in 2011 which ended in her class getting a higher average grade than the other 4 sections of the class: https://richmccue.com/2011/01/12/youtube-facebook-educational-distractions-or-learning-tools/
Thus every instructor now needs to ask the question: if I can move most of my teaching online, what are the unique benefits of the campus experience that I need to bring into my face-to-face teaching? Why do students have to be here in front of me, and when they are here, am I using the time to best advantage?
As we move out of a virtual “Covid-19 mode” of teaching it will be interesting to see what instruction stays online, and what moves back into the classroom/lab. As the author points out this will vary discipline by discipline, and even class by class.
In the meantime, a method for determining which mode of delivery (face-to-face, blended or online) will be discussed in the next sections.
One thing that I have hear from a number of students in the cohort based program that I teach is that students really miss the pre and post class conversation and informal chats about my class, other classes, and their social lives. I’ve tried to replicate this by opening my Zoom class early for students to informally chat, and then do the same after, but the feedback from my students is while this is helpful, it’s still not the same for them.
Are there already suitable media resources freely available that I can use in my teaching, rather than creating everything from scratch? Can I get help from the library for instance in identifying these resources and dealing with any copyright issues
Probably obvious to most, but YouTube is an amazing resource for instructional materials, although I often find myself watching a lot of videos before finding suitable.
How much time do you spend preparing lectures? Could that time be better spent preparing learning materials, then using the time saved from delivering lectures on interaction with students (online and/or face-to-face)?
Flipped Learning?
If AI is going to benefit education, it will require strengthening the connection between AI developers and experts in the learning sciences. Otherwise, AI will simply ‘discover’ new ways to teach poorly and perpetuate erroneous ideas about teaching and learning.
With a systems background myself, and having completed a Masters degree in Education, I can see in my past where I’d tried to encourage the adoptions of an EdTech tool based on my personal educational background and intuition. In hindsight I can see that in many cases my intuition was correct, however there are some notable exceptions where my personal insights would not have been largely contradicted by peer reviewed educational research.
they can enable teachers to set online group work, based on cases or projects, and students can collect data in the field using social media such as mobile phones or iPads;
A member of my family was part of a college class with a very in effective instructor. Fortunately they were in a cohort program, and had created a Facebook group for organizing parties. They quickly turned that FB group into a support and tutorial tool, where class members who couldn’t understand something from there lecture, and others would typically post helpful YouTube videos of collage professors explaining what their teacher failed to effectively communicate.
In a common final exam across 5 sections, the “FaceBook” section scored the highest average grade, even though by all account they had the worst instructor.
audio-based learning is difficult for people with a hearing disability;
Another potential drawback could be for students whose first language is not the one the audio is recorded in, unless a transcription is also provided.
Transport Canada won't budge on ferry-deck regulation Andrew Duffy / Times Colonist Transport Canada appears to be unwilling to reconsider allowing passengers to remain in their cars on B.C. Ferries’ enclosed lower decks, despite pleas to relax the ...
Just testing!
Second, while the model is a useful means of evaluating whether a use of technology merely enhances or radically changes teaching, it doesn’t help much with the hard part, and that is imagining the transformative ways in which a technology could be used in the first place. Nevertheless it is a good heuristic device to get you to think about the best way to use technology in teaching.
I find the SAMR model one of a couple useful evaluation tools I regularly use when evaluating new technologies that come across my desk. I also evaluate new tools for privacy and accessibility.
The critical point is that different media can be used to assist learners to learn in different ways and achieve different outcomes. In one sense, researchers such as Clark were right: the teaching methods matter, but different media can more easily support different ways of learning than others.
I completely agree. Clark (in the Clark/Kozma media debate in the late 1980’s) seemed to ignore the rich affordances “new” media provided that enabled new some new pedagogies. That said, teaching can be done well or poorly no matter what media or technology is used.
Today, this professional ‘divide’ can be seen between the differences between computer scientists and educators in terms of values and beliefs with regard to the use of technology for teaching. At its crudest, it comes down to issues of control: who is in charge of using technology for teaching? Who makes the decisions about the design of a MOOC or the use of an animation?
This divide became even more pronounced an many institutions in the hurried move to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020. While there is a significant role for Information Technologists in selecting campus wide tools for learning, it should be learning professionals who drive the bus so to speak.
There are three main advantages of peer assessment: if conducted properly, it can be an excellent pedagogical benefit to student learning as it requires students to think critically about what they have learned in order to judge other students’ work. It enables them to see other students’ perspectives on the concepts and ideas, thus widening and deepening their understanding; it enables learner support to be scaled up, allowing instructors to handle larger numbers of students; it develops a core 21st century skill of peer evaluation that will be critical when working in a digital society.
I love the idea of using peer assessment, not just to lighten the load of instructors, but to allow learners to see what their peers are doing, revisit the course material, and take a critical look at a course topic in a way that is difficult to do with your own work.
all students, whatever their discipline, need to know how to find, evaluate, analyse and apply information within their specific subject discipline. With so much content of varying quality now available at one’s fingertips, such skills are essential for a healthy society.
This sounds a lot like Information Literacy instruction that libraries have traditionally helped provide (at least in the past).
skills development is much more tied to specific teaching approaches and technologies.
“Learning is not a spectator sport!”
Universities in particular have always prided themselves on teaching such intellectual skills, but the move to larger classes and more information transmission, especially at the undergraduate level, undermines this assumption;
If a class uses multiple choice questions for assessment, that’s a bad sign.
Those with higher levels of education are likely to have a better chance of finding work that machines cannot do as well – or even creating new work for themselves.
Generally speaking I agree that those with higher levels of education have jobs that are more difficult to automate, however there are lower level tasks traditionally done by lawyers and accountants that either have been automated or are in the process of being automated. On the other hand, plumbers who repair problems will probably not have their jobs automated in the foreseeable future. So while higher levels of education are usually helpful if you’d like a job that an AI can’t easily replace, it’s no guarantee.
vendors “don’t want any academics that might end up as users in that room asking difficult questions” (para. 12). Partly this is because vendors will often use powerful but largely meaningless and discredited theories, such as disruption, digital natives, and learning styles
If true, this is thoroughly depressing.
Throughout this book, most of the innovations that appear are technologies. Sometimes these are underpinned with strong accompanying educational frameworks, such as the original cMOOC, but also there are cases of a technology seeking an application, as seen with blockchain.
While we want to critically evaluate all new technologies to make sure that the tail is not wagging the dog, and that any new technology put to use in education either enables a new pedagogy, or helps make teachers’ lives easier while respecting the privacy of learners, we should not discourage looking at any new technology (block chain included) to see if they could be helpful in educational contexts.
This type of activity can be implemented in all subjects and has the advantage of being useful for the study of the topic itself, rather than a separate and often dry “digital competence” type of activity.
It’s so important to weave these actives into other authentic student chosen projects in order to give them relevance and meaning rather than as a standalone “library” activity on a topic that isn’t necessarily meaningful to learners.
YouTube’s role in radicalization — The recommendation engine of YouTube accelerates the move to extreme content, so that a user might find they are quickly presented with conspiracy theories and radicalizing content.
This makes me so sad that YouTube’s algorithms are helping to radicalize people, because I personally find it so useful as an education tool for myself and the learners I teach. I sincerely hope that it’s tendency to radicalize can be fixed while keeping the features that make it such a useful education tool.
Amazon’s remote deletion of 1984 (Manjoo, 2009) — In one of the most ironic accounts of privacy invasion, Amazon deleted purchased copies of Orwell’s 1984 from Kindle, removing copies without the permission or knowledge of users.
I alternate between laughing at the lack of self awareness of Amazon’s actions, or crying because of how addicted I am to Amazon’s low prices and quick deliveries (which are particularly helpful during the Covid crisis of 2020-2021).
Being skeptical about technology can no longer be seen as a specialist interest.
I completely agree that we must be sceptical about the claims of any new educational technology. The SAMR model for evaluating new technologies can be a particularly useful tool in my experience. Other key questions I like to as myself are:
Being skeptical about technology can no longer be seen as a specialist interest.
I completely agree that we must be sceptical about the claims of any new educational technology. The SAMR model for evaluating new technologies can be a particularly useful tool in my experience.
The technical infrastructure goes some way to assuring this credibility. This is achieved by means of our friend from chapter 8, metadata. The digital badge contains metadata about the learner, the issuer of the badge, a link to the evidence, criteria for acquiring the badge, etc. This means anyone viewing the badge can verify its authenticity.
Being able to link back to learning outcomes required to be met for earning a badge, can make it more clear to employers what a person has learned than what is communicated by linking to the syllabus of a for credit course (at least in the case of my institution’s badging program).
The digital badge contains metadata about the learner, the issuer of the badge, a link to the evidence, criteria for acquiring the badge, etc. This means anyone viewing the badge can verify its authenticity.
Being able to link back to the learning outcomes for earning a badge, and even the curriculum (in the case of OER based instruction), can tell typically an employer more about what a person has learned that listing a for credit course they’ve completed.
For many universities in our scenario, rather than being a means of offering extra support, it allows them to more accurately filter out students who are expensive to support and more likely to fail. When universities are judged on their completion and continuation rates (for example, continuation is one of the metrics in the teaching excellence framework in the UK), then such action becomes more likely.
Wow, talk about potential for unintended consequences... the program that is a well intentioned attempt to support struggling students generates data that potentially allow other organizations in the university to exclude learners who will cost more to support and lower the university’s performance rankings.
Sustainability — We looked at e-learning costs in chapter 6. It came as no surprise then that, as MOOC became industrialized and required high-quality media outputs, its costs varied considerably, particularly when staff time, marketing, and support were factored in (Hollands & Tirthali, 2014). Finding sustainable business models that justified this expenditure has proven problematic
The sustainability piece was what I always wondered about. For the machine learning and programming MOOC’s it made sense for tech companies to pay the MOOC organizers for the contact information for the top students so they could make job offers. For other MOOC’s it was less clear how they would ultimately be paid for. May they were advertising for the sponsoring institution’s other paid offering? Possibly foundation support? Possibly part of a research project so that the people running the MOOC would collect data to help them with other research?
Mike Caulfield (2017a), who has done much of the work in exploring the impact of misinformation, has developed an online book and a wide range of activities to help develop these skills.
Another engaging resource to help learners discover how fake news is generated and spread is this fun, but educational web based game called “Bad News”. Enjoy! https://www.getbadnews.com/
83% of respondents to a recent Association of American Colleges and Universities survey said an e-portfolio would be ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ useful in ensuring that job applicants have requisite knowledge and skills”
I am very surprised by this. I can understand that a hiring manger would not want to look at the portfolios of dozens of applicants, but after narrowing a search down to 2 or 3 candidates, I’ve found it very helpful to look at the work of those applicants.
Although e-portfolio tools remain pertinent for many subjects, particularly vocational ones, for many students owning their own domains and blogs remains a better route to establishing a lifelong digital identity.
I completely agree with this. A blog that an individual has full control over and can seamlessly transfer between academic institutions, and beyond seems like a much better solution for learners.
Hiring managers are skeptical that the Web portfolios will convey anything more than a résumé and interview” (para. 9). This makes sense — while employers will say that the extra information in an e-portfolio is useful, in practice, their having to work through many pieces of evidence submitted by many applicants in addition to their résumés and having to conduct interviews is probably too time consuming
I’m not surprised that hiring managers do not use e-portfolios in the initial stages of a job search, but when a search has been narrowed down to 2 or 3 candidates, I personal find it very helpful to see some of the work the final few individuals have done, in addition to an interview.
The last consideration Web 2.0 raises for higher education is that of quality. Weinberger (2007) summarized the change that Web 2.0 brought as “filtering on the way out” rather than filtering on the way in. Higher education processes are nearly always based on filtering on the way in — the journal review process, creation of learning content, selection of research proposals, student admission.
I wonder if some sort of a hybrid approach might be a better way to allow not completely formed research questions to be explored prior to a formal peer review process... and now that I think about it, academic blogs and twitter might perform this function currently. For students lucky enough to be in programs that use the inquiry process, this might perform a similar function.
Rethinking effective use of classroom time in a digital networked world, and the effective use of abundant resources, especially video, would seem to be a desirable pursuit in higher education. But following a prescriptive approach or failing to accommodate for the increased load on students and educators can be a result of pursuing an educational trend.
Like most teaching methods, flipped learning can be done well or done poorly, and as this chapter points out, the subject area, grade, and the level of access to technology that students have need to be taken into account.
Informal Learning
I'd add to this list, "Just in time learning." Meaning, that someone can learn how to do something at their point of need rather than at the instructor or course's convenience. There are so many household fixes I've learned by following along with YouTube videos that were shared by people from around the world. Last month I replace the door springs in my dishwasher by following along with a community contributed YouTube video.
blogs provide is a means of anchoring an online identity
A person blog can be a hub or anchor for a wide variety of other online platforms that learners and academics engage in.
For almost every ed tech that comes along — e-portfolios, LMS, MOOC, OER, social media — there is a group, of which I would probably be a member, who propose that a blog version would be a better alternative.
I 100% agree for so many reasons, including open learning, making assignment less like "throw away" assignments, and allowing students to build a public portfolio of their best work if they wish.
“That isn’t in our LMS road plan.” This inevitably stifles innovation and is one of the common complaints against the LMS.
One way around this for the technically savvy instructor is to use external tools to augment the typically ridged toolset of your institutions LMS. I thoroughly appreciat the open source tools that the https://opened.ca group makes available to us in British Columbia, Canada, that help me engage in more open pedagogies with my learners.
there simply isn’t the same culture of sharing for teaching as exists for research. Existing reward structures are largely to blame; for example, citations of research papers are a key metric in evidencing significance, but having others download and reuse your teaching material is not as widely recognized (and is even actively discouraged in many instances).
Amen! As was alluded to, the lack of a reward structure for effective teaching (as opposed to research) is a significant problem at many research universities. Hopefully this can start be addressed by way of rewarding quality OER creation in the tenure and promotion process.
much of the criticism of e-learning revealed a conceit regarding the superiority of face-to-face education over distance learning, and an assumption that face-to-face is the only valid form of education.
The other cost that sometimes doesn't get factored into the cost of high quality online resources, is the updating costs in disciplines where tools and understandings change.
Given the manner in which even students in primarily face-to-face settings employ Wikipedia and other online resources, it is difficult to imagine any higher education situation now which isn’t blended to an extent, whether formally or informally. The blending of face-to-face provision with online delivery has been one area of significant growth, and it has allowed many “traditional” universities to offer flexible learning opportunities.
Given the extremely wide range of pedagogies that could be considered blended, without elaboration, "blended learning" as a pedagogical label is almost meaningless IMHO.
the possibilities it opened up for new pedagogy.
"What new pedagogies does this technology enable (if any)?" is one of the questions I always ask myself when evaluating new educational technologies.
This judgment may not have been overly harsh given the quality of many web-based courses at the time, but it does highlight how a focus on current limitations can miss the broader, long-term implications.
Thank-you for bringing up this common problem, or blind spot that often clouds our evaluations of new technologies. I often underestimate their impacts for both good and bad. Ahhem... social media ;-)
In contrast to the transmittal model illustrated by the classroom lecture-note taking scenario, the constructivist model places students at the center of the process — actively participating in thinking and discussing ideas while making meaning for themselves. And the professor, instead of being the “sage on the stage,” functions as a “guide on the side,” facilitating learning in less directive ways.
Another similar quote is like is, "learning is not a spectator sport." While there are more effective and less effective constructivist pedagogies, a bias towards move active learning rather than less usually results in more student engagement in my experience.
When there was no alternative to face-to-face settings, the function of communication was not considered in such detail, but in fact, when analyzed, universities were designed specifically to foreground effective communication. Students were brought together in one physical location, over a tightly constrained time frame, with a strict timetable which occurs within an architecture that offers students multiple spaces (cafes, bars, common areas) and opportunities for informal discussion. This is all obvious in retrospect, but it was so commonplace that the intentionality of the structure became invisible.
A lack of opportunities for regular, but informal conversations between learners is one thing I've heard from students in my classes during the current Covid-19 lockdown. One small thing I've done that I've received good feedback on is allowing any of my logged in students to "open" our Zoom classroom so that they can socialize, talk about our course assignments, or other courses much like they would have done if they'd arrived in a physical classroom early (or stayed late).
The removal of the publication filter that the web provided was often touted as the most significant socio-technological change since the invention of the printing press (e.g., Giles, 1996) and, 25 years later, that view does not seem like hyperbole.
For better for or for worse.
The final entry in this book focuses on what I have termed “ed tech’s dystopian turn,” as there has been a shift from often unquestioning advocacy of particular technologies to a more critical, theoretical understanding. This represents something of a maturing in the field, although many technology vendor conferences are still free of any such critique.
To borrow a phrase from the 1990 Clinton campaign, "It's the pedagogy stupid!" While I'm the first to admit that as a geek I tend to look for the best in flashy new technologies, with EdTech in particular I now am usually quick to put on a critical lense to try to determine if a new digital tool can help enable a new pedagogy, or extend an existing teaching method in some way. The SAMR framework is particularly helpful to me in this regard.
I learned Russian by gaining fluency through practice, repetition, and rote learning—but rote learning that emphasized the ability to think flexibly and quickly.
IMHO, unless there is a strong motivation, desire, or already developed self-regulation in the learner, rote learning can be challenging.
To help encourage students to speak out in class more often and share their screen with me, I now welcome each student as they arrive in my online classroom, and chat with them in order to build a rapport.
While building a rapport with students is important in face-to-face classes, it is arguably more important in virtual classes.
The problem we will be describing in this article is how we have balanced librarians’ occasional desire to offer workshop topics they think they should be teaching graduate students and faculty, with the issue that highly theoretical or abstract workshops are often poorly attended.
Hilariously true... sometimes.
The lack of transformation of teaching practices can be partly attributed to the lecturers’ lack of appropriate competencies, which is not properly addressed by the training and development programme offered by the University: a mismatch between the object of the training sessions and the actual needs of lecturers has been identified as well as a requirement for the development of tool-related competencies to be supplemented with that of task-related and metafunctional competencies so that Moodle can become a functional organ for both staff and students. Until then, lecturers may not be equipped to address the disruptions caused to their existing teaching practice by their own pattern of Moodle use. In particular, tensions between the ‘semiotic’ and ‘technological’ needs, object and motive of the ‘design for learning’ activity may not be resolved.
I'd also argue that in addition to training, there is a work load issue around creating a new curriculum to take advantage of the new pedagogical opportunities the technology affords.
While most academics may quickly be trained in the basic operations of a VLE (such as setting up activities and resources or creating content), few would have availed of pre-service teacher training courses and fewer again would have acquired some instructional design competencies before obtaining an academic post. Metafunctional competencies, on the other hand, are likely to be acquired through experience and interaction with colleagues and support staff. The role and impact of functional organs will be further explored in the following section.
Agreed. This is a serious issue, especially if the focus of a particular faculty member is on research and not instruction because of mismatched tenure and promotion guidelines.
If on the contrary, the introduction of new technologies does not result in the expansive transformation of the internal structure of the teaching activity but rather in the rejection of the new element, the activity has not been disrupted in the previous sense. It has merely been momentarily disturbed or interrupted (see the first definition of disruption from the Oxford English Dictionary recalled earlier): teaching practices remain unchanged.
I completely agree. This reminds me of the "media debate" by Richard Clark and Robert Kozma in the early 90's. Is it the media (or technology) or the pedagogy that changes learning outcomes? I think that new technology can enable new pedagogies, but the technology itself does not change learning outcomes on its own. http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/The_media_debate
points to the “growing need for the education community to account for the distinct ‘digital disconnect’ between the enthusiastic rhetoric and rather more mundane reality of university ICT use”
I don't think we need to look any further than lecturers who have syllabus and class outlines already created, not wanting to add to their work load in by implementing an new pedagogy with new technology, even thought it might lead to increased student satisfaction and improved learning outcomes.
The solution to this is to use outcomes based education instead of hours based education. The theory here is that as long as we ensure that students ‘get it’ who cares how many hours it takes? But what is ‘IT’? How do we decide what a person needs to know in order to have a Bachelor’s degree in Arts with a major in Philosophy? What outcomes are you going to choose to make a Major in Biology? Can a student finish in 2 years? What about one year? What about 20 years? Is it time based at all? Well… we could model off of what we have now…
I completely agree that outcomes based education is the way to go, but getting faculties and university communities to change is notoriously difficult. Engineering the change in mindsets and policy will be the biggest challenge, especially with faculty primarily focused on their own research goals.
To predict content relevant for children there needs to be sensitive, human-directed input – not automation. Otherwise we end up with what might be called de-personalised learning, and classrooms with little conversation between student and teacher. In subcontracting out teaching to technology, the risk is that the valuable social contact between students, teachers and parents that’s inherent to effective learning will be reduced.
Maybe should should have titled this section, "The dangers of personalized automated learning." I agree that fully automating the personalization process has significant pitfalls, some automation makes sense once a direction has been set by a teacher and learner, with the ability to modify and change course if desired of course.
Zuckerberg’s idea of personalised learning has three major flaws. First, education has always been about acquiring knowledge and skills relevant to a profession, but also about acquiring general knowledge. By feeding children only the content they’re interested in, we may end up with many specialists and few generalists.
I think personalized learning's success will come down to how it is implemented. I agree that we do not want our children to only learn about the things they are interested in, however leveraging their interests as an entry point to engage in other topics would be a sensible tactic to try and keep engagement levels high.
If independent researchers can’t evaluate the inner workings of personalized learning software, how can we be sure that such algorithms so what they are supposed to do without being prejudicial? Perhaps the authors of education technology algorithms need a code of conduct, and a course on social justice?
Perhaps some gaps for open source projects to help fill?
I think that locus of control is the distinguishing aspect, and that the role of shared control remains an open conceptual and empirical question.
There is some interesting work being done in the area of autonomous vehicles that my be conceptually applicable to personalized learning. A significant drawback to the current crop of self driving cars is the inability of passengers to give feedback to the car on how it's doing, or to give it some direction on how to get to where it's been told to go. "Stuart" is one researcher's attempt to fill this gap. The technology allow occupants to let the car know if she wants it to go faster, slower, or go in a different direction (if safe to do so of course), much like a horse rider indicates to a horse where to go, but the horse of course has a say in how any direction it is given is implemented. http://felixros.com/stewart.html
This might be an interesting model to explore in e-learning settings.
I’m not talking about simply videotaping lectures. I’m talking about combining great talks by one or more professors and outside experts with video clips, animation, quizzes, games and interactive exercises — then supplementing that online material with weekly in-person sessions for discussions, problem solving or other forms of “active learning.” And having “labs” open day and night that use tutors and interactive software to provide individualized instruction in math and writing until the desired competency is achieved.
This makes so much pedagogical sense, but as the author pointed out, getting through a faculty or university's governing process would take a very strong leader indeed.
98 percent of articles published in the arts and humanities are never cited by another researcher. In social sciences, it is 75 percent. Even in the hard sciences, where 25 percent of articles are never cited, the average number of citations is between one and two.
I had no idea that 98% or arts and humanities were never cited... It would be interesting to know how Derek Bok arrived at that number.