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
For the Grammarians
Who or whom? Which or that? Jon Gingerich has helpfully assembled a list of "20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes."
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Do Books Make Friendships?
Do friendships form because of shared interests, or do those interests develop due to the friendship? Facebook reveals that music and film make friendships; books, not so much.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tax Records
A detailed analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax records, obtained from his estate, at The American Scholar. William J. Quirk scrutinizes Scott’s financial ledgers from 1919 to 1940, including short story royalties, expenses relating to wife Zelda, and his years spent in Hollywood. Indeed, you are what you spend.
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No Recourse to Steel
It’s safe to say that Jorge Louis Borges could have lectured on anything from watching paint dry to waiting in line at the DMV and the end result would still have been magnificent. Here he is teaching a little Buddhism 101, with an accompanying lecture by his close friend and UC-Berkeley professor Amelia Barili.
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BTBA long list announced
The 2012 Best Translated Book Award long list has been announced. Among the contenders in the fiction category are Edouard Levé for Suicide, reviewed on The Millions here; Mathias Énard's Zone, which our own Garth Risk Hallberg described as "the kind of book that can tie a critic in absolute knots"; and Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Truth About Marie, which The Millions Staffer Mark O' Connell called "a strange and unsettling novel that upholds its author’s status as one of the most exciting figures in contemporary fiction." One of Chad Harbach's year in reading selections, Dezso Kosztolányi's Kornél Esti, also made the list.
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The Power of Poetry
Computational linguists Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight have created a computer program that uses meter and rhyme to generate more secure, memorable passwords. You could also check out Andrew Kay’s Millions essay on the power of poetry.
The Taksim Square Book Club
The book club has turned into a form of protest. Inspired by “The Standing Man,” the Turkish demonstrator who stood for six hours in a silent vigil, protesters are silently standing while reading books. The Al Jazeera photo-essay shows Nietzsche, Camus, and Orwell as popular picks.
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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?