mikecaulfield
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The $10,000 Degree: A Response, Part II
About a week ago I critiqued the first half of the Third Way report on the “$10,000 degree“. In that post I talked a bit about bloat and some of the issues with reconstructing college positions. Moving on, the report’s suggestions around use of blended learning and the impact of student success initiatives on cost… Continue reading
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Some Notes on Using MOOCs for Blended Instruction
Tayna Joosten asks on Twitter whether anyone has any best practices for reusing MOOCs. I’ve been looking at this with Amy Collier, Helen Chen and others, but we’ve tended to focus on the question of how to create MOOCs that make reuse easier. However, it’s not a big jump to flip that perspective around to… Continue reading
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Is Domain of One’s Own a platform?
Is Domain of One’s Own a platform? The short answer is no, not in the traditional sense. But I came across this 1995 post from Dave Winer about what a platform should be, and there is some definite resonance with his conception of the idea: A platform must have potential, or open space. I call… Continue reading
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Rediscovering (Semi-)Social Bookmarking
I joined Pinboard, the new, ad-free, pay-once-get-it-forever social bookmarking service a few months ago for an educational tech project I am working on. I’m not new to social-bookmarking — I’d been an early user of delicious, a Diigo migrant, and ultimately became a lapsed bookmarker, confused about why the whole thing hadn’t worked out. I… Continue reading
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A Plan for a $10K Degree: A Response
A new proposal is out from Third Way, authored by Anya Kamenetz. It makes an argument for a radical restructuring of higher education in pursuit of a radically cheaper degree. I plan to write a few blog posts on its proposals. This is the first. There’s many things to like about the plan. I like… Continue reading
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Second (Third?) Tumblr Linklog Attempt
I’m trying that thing again where I post a few Downes-style1 takes on random education articles I come across to Tumblr. This will likely be followed by that thing where I stop posting Downes-style takes on random articles. But the sad twitter-centric state of the artist formerly know as the edublogosphere has compelled me to… Continue reading
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A Simple, Less Mathematical Way to Understand the Course Signals Issue
I’m re-reading my Course Signals post, and realizing how difficult it is to follow the numbers. So here’s an example that might make it clearer. From this desk here, without a stitch of research, I can show that people who have had more car accidents live, on average, longer then people that have had very… Continue reading
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Why the Course Signals Math Does Not Add Up
I see that there’s a new Course Signals press release out that claims Course Signals boosts graduation rate 21%. Or, more exactly, it claims taking *two* classes using Course Signals boosts graduation rates by 21%. Why does it claim that? Well, I haven’t looked at the new data, but I did look at it last… Continue reading
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Commitment
New research out on the use of student response systems in the classroom, and really no surprises to be found in it. Students respond favorably to SRS use in the classroom when it’s used consistently with a clear purpose by an instructor who is excited about using it, and committed to the method. It does… Continue reading
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The Myth of the All-in-one
Occasionally (well, OK, more than occassionally) I’m asked why we can’t just get a single educational tech application that would have everything our students could need — blogging, wikis, messaging, link-curation, etc. The simple answer to that is that such a tool does exist, it’s called Sharepoint, and it’s where content goes to die. The… Continue reading
