Head of gold, feet of clay: The online learning paradox | Power | The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

Head of gold, feet of clay: The online learning paradox – The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning:

“Although online learning (OL) is becoming widely accessible and is often viewed as cutting-edge, the actual number of regular faculty participating in this form of teaching remains small. Moreover, OL, despite its growing recognition, is often associated with high rates of student dissatisfaction and isolation, withdrawal, and attrition. Furthermore, although administrators typically champion support of OL, they often seem unable or unwilling to marshal the necessary financial, human, and technological resources to produce high-quality course materials and to effect efficient course delivery. In short, online learning seems paradoxically to be both booming and busting simultaneously. It is expanding supply yet hitting similar obstacles that distance education encountered generations earlier. Under these circumstances, OL is unlikely to become mainstream without a major redirection. This article applies economic principles and concepts to OL. The revised conceptualization posits that an understanding of stakeholder priorities is the key to improved online course design and delivery.”

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The Anthropology of Hackers – The Atlantic

 

The Anthropology of Hackers – Gabriella Coleman – Technology – The Atlantic

“A ‘hacker’ is a technologist with a love for computing and a ‘hack’ is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn’t mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). But once one confronts hacking empirically, some similarities melt into a sea of differences; some of these distinctions are subtle, while others are profound enough to warrant thinking about hacking in terms of genres or genealogies of hacking — and we compare and contrast various of these genealogies in the class, such as free and open source software hacking and the hacker underground. “

Suspended Teacher’s Angry Blog Posts Open Education Debate – TIME

Suspended Teacher’s Angry Blog Posts Open Education Debate – TIME: “Still, while Munroe maintains what she wrote was meant only to serve as amusement for herself, her husband and seven of her friends who read the site, in publishing the rants to a blog — rather than, say, via a mass e-mail to friends and family — she opened herself up to the chance that anyone outside her circle could find the posts.
(See TIME’s special feature ‘What Makes a School Great.’)
Someone did. Though she never could have predicted the fallout from what she thought were private rants, the full ramifications hit home on Feb. 9 when she was suspended with pay from her job at Central Bucks East High School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “

IBM’s Watson Wins Jeopardy! Next Up: Fixing Health Care

IBM’s Watson Wins Jeopardy! Next Up: Fixing Health Care | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: “The final round in the epic man vs. machine battle that’s been playing out on Jeopardy! all week was fought tonight. The winner: Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, who soundly defeated flesh-and-blood opponents Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, ending a three-night tournament and beginning a long period of social and technological commentators trying to figure out what it all meant. “

“Crowdsourcing” a Textbook: 120 Student Authors Writing on a Wiki (Research-Based) | EDUCAUSE

 

“Crowdsourcing” a Textbook: 120 Student Authors Writing on a Wiki (Research-Based) | EDUCAUSE: “Abstract: Many instructors have experimented with student-authored wiki textbooks. Advantages include reading and evaluating primary literature and facilitating constructivist learning. We manage the peer-review process using the Expertiza system, which allows reviewers and authors to communicate in double-blind fashion and sets deadlines for each step so that prerequisite chapters are written before chapters that depend on them. Students have given positive feedback on nearly every aspect of the process, especially on the care they put into their work and the insight they gained. Our efforts have scaled to a textbook with 40-plus sections written by a class of 120. “

The Problem of Learning in the Postcourse Era | EDUCAUSE

The Problem of Learning in the Postcourse Era | EDUCAUSE: “Higher education teaching practices (and curricula) sit at the potentially tense convergence of the power of experiential, ubiquitous and social learning on the one hand and rising pressure to assess and demonstrate evidence of student learning in increasingly visible ways on the other. In this context, what are some of the new and emerging ways we can see evidence of impact of digital learning technologies in the classroom and in student work? Are the places to look changing and are they at variance with conventional curricular structures that privilege courses and the formal curriculum as the center of the undergraduate experience? How might various social media tools help capture ‘thin slices’ of student thinking and longer narratives of intellectual and social development?”