Monthly Archives: October 2012

Here’s my progress in a Stanford Online course: The problem is that I didn’t really try on this. I just hit answers till I got it right, and it let me try again. I’ve been through online courses like this … Continue reading →

It’s a Gates funded project, but it jives with how I’ve been thinking about MOOCs lately: Once they’re in, Portmont students will meet up for a one-week, one-credit intensive orientation where ideally they’ll bond with their classmates and the personal … Continue reading →

It’s interesting to see this on the front page of the Coursera course I’m taking: Obviously what has happened here is that Johns Hopkins and Kevin Frick have negotiated additional rights for Coursera to this OCW material, which allows them … Continue reading →

I’m still going through the process of cleaning up some old posts damaged by the database, and tonight I found this one I wrote on OpenCourseWare from 2009: Rise of the Cohort, Educational and Otherwise Posted on January 9, 2009  “Cohort” is … Continue reading →

From The Lomborg Deception: From these and many similar statements, we can identify “Lomborg’s Theorem,” circa 2001, which asserts that the Earth and its environment are not threatened in any fundamental sense by human activity and, for the purposes of this … Continue reading →

I have been slowly repairing the damage the great database corruption of 2010/2011 did to my blog posts, pulling them over from Archive.org and trying to get them back into my blog. Today I came across this one from May … Continue reading →

I read The Fall of the Faculty a couple months ago, partially because it was cited in an ongoing discussion on our campus about what is to blame for higher educational costs. My general operating assumption is that of all … Continue reading →

I was just thinking about statistics on traditional students vs. non-traditional, and realized that there are huge outflow issues in the way they are often presented. [For more on inflows, stocks, and outflows, read this short description] It’s common to … Continue reading →

I was flipping through Mark Taylor’s book on the Crisis in Higher Education when I found this startling statistic: Though the fact is rarely noted, the traditional four-year college whose students are eighteen to twenty-two years old is rapidly becoming … Continue reading →

Farm Factory Wife, by csessums A book I’m reading now, Food Wars, has this to say about “Productionism”, the paradigm that dominated food policy through the 20th century: In the Productionist paradigm (Figure 1.3), health is portrayed as being enhanced, above … Continue reading →