Harvard and MIT are partnering for an MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) known as edX. Currently, similar offerings are available from Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, and the University of Michigan. Unfortunately edX and others like it will grade student papers by utilizing “crowd-sourcing” and “natural-language software.” Oh, geeze. Not that again.
Harvard and MIT Go MOOC
Do Emoji Really Count?
What’s your favorite form of punctuation? R. L. Stine is partial to the em-dash.
“Writers have always been whiners.”
With just a few more weeks to go until the end of the world, here’s an argument for the golden age of writing – right now.
Makes Excel Seem Like a Breeze
Hate your job? At least you’ve never been Stanley Kubrick’s secretary: “Instead of having [‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’] typed on only the few sheets seen by viewers, the director asked his secretary Margaret Warrington to type it on each one of the 500-odd sheets in the stack. What’s more, he also had Warrington type up an equivalent number of manuscript pages in four languages—French, German, Italian, Spanish—for foreign releases of [The Shining].”
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Going Rogue: The Unauthorized Index
Slate corrects an oversight to Sarah Palin’s otherwise impeccably edited memoir: no index. Theirs runs from “Alaska, autumn bouquet of” (page 1) to “‘you betcha’ – revelation of as not actually Alaska’s state motto” (page 309), and includes such helpful detours as “exclamation point, usage of” (pages 4, 26, 120, 121, 122, 138, 150…) You almost – almost – don’t have to read the book.
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The Eternal Struggle
“I bet you can relate. Always another crisis, always more costs to keep down. It’s hard to find time for yourself, you know? But the president of the United States should be able to read a book when he wants to. Or at least look at one. Maybe I could just look at this book for a while.”
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The Nature of Cinderella
Over on LARB, Marie Rutkoski traces the geneology of Cinderella and explores the theme of nature that runs through the classic fairytale’s many iterations. It’s also well worth revisiting Kirsty Logan’s piece exploring how contemporary authors have revisited the story of Snow White.
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Allies Respond
Writers John Keene, Dawn Martin Lundy, and others respond to the mass shooting in Orlando. “Homophobia, transphobia, and ideologically-nurtured hatreds of all kinds, coupled with semi-automatic weapons, provide the fuel for terror, in this case literally,” says Keene.
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As many of the experienced educators have pointed out, this heroic effort to fund a new approach/technology is another glaring example of focusing on the wrong thing! Any student of systems engineering, or the systems approach to problem-solving will understand that focusing on the result or symptoms is useless. Look for the cause, not the result. Fix the source/cause instead of wasting resources to treat the symptom.
MOOCs is bad. MOOCs is today’s example of once again jumping on a new technology to apply a non-educational solution to education problems without identifying the problem. This attempt is no different that long list of historical failures to fix education with technology.
1. Radio (broadcast lectures)
2. Educational/Training Films (often another boring lecture)
3. Educational TV (watch other students endure boring lecture)
4. VHS classrooms (same as above, but can be mass-distributed to bore thousands)
5. early attempts at “eLearning”
a. read text script of boring lecture
b. programmed instruction on a PC
c. PowerPoint on demand
6. YouTube, iTunesU, and other variations of boring-lecture-on-demand
The problem shared by the colossal failure of each of these to solve education’s problems was two-fold: (1) the problem was adequately identified, analyzed and treated, and (2) the focus was on the technology rather than the quality of the content or the effectiveness of its delivery.
After viewing several examples of iTunesU, Udacity, and the Harvard/MIT edX project, I see nothing new but a repeat of the VHS classroom. Been there, done that, it was boring and nearly non-educational. This mode of content delivery is lacking the basic requirements of an effective and efficient learning situation: content interactivity, peer-peer interaction, student-teacher interaction, drill-and-practice, monitoring and feedback, and assessment of actual learning.
A closer analysis of some these new MOOC-oriented organizations reveals a surprising lack of instructional design expertise. A couple are being built solely with software programmers (some with educational backgrounds), but none claiming educational technology, psychology, or design credentials.
Stop the funding until someone addresses the basic questions of: (a) what is the educational goal, (b) what is the educational philosophy or strategy that will be employed, and (c) how will success be measured?