Hapgood

Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy

August 2011

  • Cognitive surplus watch

    Cognitive surplus watch A lot of Shirky’s formulations are spot on, but I’ve always felt uneasy about the cognitive surplus idea. It’s not just, as Carr points out in the linked article, that there’s not much evidence that the Wikipedia hours are coming out of a surplus, but it’s the view of human endeavor as a noncount Continue reading

  • Schoolchildren Can Also Learn Complex Subject Matters On Their Own, Researchers Find

    Schoolchildren Can Also Learn Complex Subject Matters On Their Own, Researchers Find Another entry in the great debate, I suppose, though it comes down in part to what you mean by “on their own”: Following an introduction on the general topic by their teachers, the school children were given a workbook of geometric tasks that Continue reading

  • Publishing Gives Hints of Revival, Data Show

    Publishing Gives Hints of Revival, Data Show The “buggy-whip” theory of industry collapse has never really sat well with me. You know, the idea that the buggy-whip producers couldn’t see that cars would collapse their industry, etc. Here’s the problem — did anyone back then really produce (and only produce) buggy-whips? I imagine most “buggy-whip Continue reading

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  • Stat Lit Chart of the Day

    Stat Lit Chart of the Day This chart could mean that the more education you get, the more you drink. How many of your students know what else could it mean? Continue reading

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  • EdCamp Keene 2011 T-Shirts. Thanks Tim & Nicole, they look great! Continue reading

  • EdCamp Keene is Next Wednesday

    I haven’t blogged much about EdCamp Keene this year, partially because we got about to 75% of our 115 capacity within 24 hours of announcing it. So I’ve been letting the rest of the registrations slow-cook so that we don’t have to turn too many people away. But I have to take a moment and Continue reading

  • The Most Interesting Chart You’ll See On Peer Instruction This Year

    Came across this brand-spanking-new study on Peer Instruction with this cool graph from a previous study in it: What you are seeing here is a chart of right/wrong responses for a 3 question sequence in a Peer Instruction test — 1st question, 1st question after Peer Instruction, then results for an isomorphic question to test Continue reading

  • A Means A: Solving the problem of unbundled credentialing

    A Means A: Solving the problem of unbundled credentialing I am suspicious of any idea posted on econlib.org, to say the least. I mean really suspicious. But this is an interesting point a poster there is making — we need to come up with a hybrid solution to credentialing. Why? Well, unbundled credentialing tends to lead Continue reading

  • Rank-order Grading

    I have lots of reservations about rank-order grading, but found this interesting: This paper reports results from a unique classroom experiment that explored the potential of using rank-order grading to improve student performance and learning. Findings suggest that student performance is significantly improved when facing a grading system based on student ranking (norm-reference grading) rather Continue reading

  • The truck that delivers our groceries

    Neat quote from a 1996 paper by Charles Schlosser: As early as the mid-1960s, reviews of the literature made clear that there was “no significant difference” in the educational effectiveness of various media (Chu and Schramm, 1975). This conclusion was memorably restated by Richard Clark, who offered a powerful analogy: “The best current evidence is Continue reading