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
Some Links
The Poetry Archive: “The Poetry Archive is the world’s premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work. You can enjoy listening here, free of charge, to the voices of contemporary English-language poets and of poets from the past.”A few days ago the New York Times released its usual 100 book “Notable” list, but now we get the really good stuff: the Times top ten of the year. The big surprise: an appearance by Curtis Sittenfeld’s “calm and memorably incisive first novel,” Prep.Scott and Ed and others have already noted this, but I just got around to reading it: the NYRB piece on our latest National Book Award winner, William T. Vollmann.Also noted by many litblogs, the ever-multitasking Bud has launched a sleek litblog network/aggregator/community: MetaxuCafe. Very cool.
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The Night I Am Heading Into
In Case You Missed It: This email exchange between playwright Sarah Ruhl and the late Max Ritvo, whose Four Reincarnations is out next week: “I think my mind is a set of lapis lazuli steps falling apart, and all I want is to be told ‘it’s alright, we rebuild it every day’ But what is the it? What is it? And if I was vaporized by a ray gun but was then replaced instantly by an identical person with an identical filigree of nerves shot through with identical sparks cased in an identical skull—would it still be me? I don’t think so. I don’t know if even a perfect Reincarnation would be a Reincarnation to me, in my heart. I’m starting to feel like Theseus and I just want my fucking ship out of the dry-dock and back on the water.”
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Tilting Druglords
Look, it’s hard being the bloodthirsty kingpin of a multinational drug smuggling cartel. Apparently Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has been feeling a bit sorry for himself post-capture, so what did Eduardo Guerrero, head of Mexico’s prison systems, think would cheer him up? He brought him a copy of Don Quixote.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Knausgaard; Lynch; Means; MacManus; Sittenfeld
Out this week: My Struggle: Book Five by Karl Ove Knausgaard; Before the Wind by Jim Lynch; Hystopia by David Means; Midnight in Berlin by James MacManus; and Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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Living Characters
“I don’t think writing the truth makes you strong by default. I think it makes you vulnerable, which in turn can make you strong.” Amy Jo Burns writes for Ploughshares about the difficulties of “Writing About Other People” and the upcoming publication of her debut memoir, Cinderland.
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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?