Hapgood

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

Mike Caulfield

  • 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

  • Online Residential and the End of Course Scarcity

    It’s pretty common in higher education for students not to get the courses they need to graduate on time. Here’s a quote from a recent report from UT Austin on graduation rates: Research conducted by the task force also revealed that for many students an impediment to graduation is availability of courses needed to graduate. It… Continue reading

  • How Much Does EdX *Really* Cost?

    (from npr.org) A quick thought here. The institution I’m at charges $13,000 or so a year in tuition. EdX, the new MOOC darling, costs zero. Or at least that’s what you hear. But that’s a rotten comparison, really. If you planned to use EdX for an undergraduate education, you’d have to feed and clothe yourself during… Continue reading

  • Amazon.com, Interlibrary Loan, and MACCs

    An addendum to the last post. First off, since no one is going to move off the term MOOC for MANIC, here’s a replacement term: MACCs: MAssively Connected Courses.  The point here is to indicate the people that have co-opted the term MOOC have botched it. The openness is a means, not an end. The… Continue reading

  • Interlibrary Loan is the Prototypical Red Balloon Project

    Hoisted from the defunct Tran|Script blog. Originally published August 11, 2011. New projects need prototypes. When twitter first came out, people often asked me what it was. And to the extent I told them it was an entirely new thing they would tune out. I realized very quickly however that there were two ways to… Continue reading

  • Screw MOOCs, Let’s Do MANICs.

    Martin Snyder of the AAUP said something about Coursera-style MOOCs I agree with recently:  “If this kind of a system takes off, you might have a situation where the very wealthy students go to a campus to interact with real professors, while the rest of the world takes online courses…what appears to be a democratization process… Continue reading

  • The NY Times is Ridiculously Sloppy in Talking About College Cost

    I don’t know what it is about college cost reporting, but it either attracts shoddy reporters, or makes good reporters shoddy. Take the recent piece by Andrew Martin and Andrew Lehren. Here’s a paragraph that actually appeared in it: Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education —… Continue reading