Hapgood

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

July 2012

  • Microsoft’s New Site Outlook.com Organizes All Your Social Activity (and initially, I’m impressed)

    I don’t have time to explore Outlook.com fully right this moment, but initially it looks pretty refreshing. The main shift here is that Outlook.com is not conceived of as solely a hub for Microsoft services but as a harness for multiple services (of which the MS services form a piece). For example, you can Facebook chat in Continue reading

  • The Post-Content LMS (Caution: 20-Page Whitepaper)

    This is an 20-page whitepaper I wrote this this Spring for our Academic Affairs leadership team, who had asked for a brief summary of current and projected trends in LMS use and an assessment of how Keene State might benefit from them. Presented it in May, but just realized I had never posted it publicly, Continue reading

  • The Bandcamp Model for Social Media

    We’re going through another round of stressing over the mess we’ve got ourselves into with advertising supported social media, this time spurred by a twitter competitor that will charge you a yearly rate. I think readers of this blog know enough about networks to understand why that won’t work. So it comes down again to Continue reading

  • George Washington’s Vision for a National University

    Until this week I had not known that George Washington (the President, not the institution) had considered the foundation of a national university to be of the utmost importance. In fact, he had meant to give it a starring role in his Farewell Address, and complained at length when Hamilton excised it from the work. Continue reading

  • What People Mean When they Complain About Khan Academy

    Came across this neat little tool in an article about the teaching of variability in a statistical literacy course. It’s a sample item to help a teacher think through the multiple ways that students might conceive of variability, and to what extent those conceptions either aid or block student comprehension of more complex issues: Take Continue reading

  • Why Google Doesn’t Render Memory Obsolete

    I’ve heard many people over the past couple years, people that I admire, say something along the lines that if you can Google it, it is not worth committing to memory. In our world of just-in-time learning, it’s a fashionable thing to say. But just-in-time learning doesn’t release us from the need to remember. Rather, it forces Continue reading

  • The Residential Online Consensus Builds

    A couple good posts from others today that support the future I’ve been calling “Residential Online” — a future where students take a mix of face-to-face and online classes, but do it within the relatively traditional frame of being a residential or commuter student. First, here’s Tyler Cowen: You will find two critiques of my Continue reading

  • Touchstone Values, Population

    Been playing around with this idea of “touchstone values” in statistical literacy — values that would enable you to quickly sanity check a statistic handed to you. Here’s a list of touchstone values for population. The numbers are brutally rounded. There’s redundancy and weirdness in the choices. The idea is not necessarily that you’ll remember Continue reading

  • Residential Online, a Reintroduction

    I jumped the other day into a fairly specific discussion of some problems that residential online could solve, and was reminded by some that these were not universal problems. So I want to back up, and talk bigger picture. I believe there are multiple possible futures for education, and that many of these futures will Continue reading