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
Charlie Sheen’s Poetry
It was probably inevitable that someone would turn the ravings of Charlie Sheen into found poetry. But unlike similar collections “by” Donald Rumsfeld and Rod Blagojevich, this one offers us the opportunity to compare it to the real thing – Sheen’s early ’90s chef d’oeuvre, A Peace of My Mind.
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A Song of Ice and Input
Tired of waiting for George R. R. Martin to finish his next Game of Thrones novel, a software engineer has developed a neural network to write the book instead (via The Digital Reader). Pair with this consideration of how the HBO series is going off-book and breaking all the rules.
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Why?
Jesse Eisenberg’s nephew has a few questions for him in The New Yorker. Listen to Eisenberg read a piece of his new book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups, and face existential doubt in Shouts and Murmurs.
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Solzhenitsyn Stories
Nine stories by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn will be released in English for the first time. They are described by scholars as “ranking alongside his best work.” The collection will be entitled Apricot Jam: and Other Stories.
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Telegraph’s Books of 2011
To get geared up for our own “Year in Reading” series, here is The Telegraph’s best books of 2011.
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Literary T-Shirts from Kafkacotton
The t-shirt team at kafkacotton has generously offered to extend a special deal to readers of The Millions (knowing, I assume, that you bookish folks will dig t-shirts that cleverly proclaim their love for classic books). Use the discount code “THEMILLIONS” to get 10% off. Remember to put the discount code in the “Message to Seller” box. Then, I’m told, you can either immediately pay the full price and they’ll issue you a refund for the discount amount or you can wait for kafkacotton to send you a revised, discounted invoice. Thanks for setting up this deal kafkacotton!
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Franz Kafka: The Video Game
I hope the Franz Kafka video game isn’t anything like the Franz Kafka airport.
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?