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Efficiency = Feedback / Cost
This is exactly the kind of formulation that drives me mad sometimes. But in a time where our budgets are imploding it’s better to give management a simple formula that encapsulates much of the debate than to merely cross your fingers that they get it. We’re kind of blessed to have an enlightened administration here at Keene… Continue reading
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Two Educational Contexts
From Dan Kahneman: True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among… Continue reading
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Quality time
I don’t know if you’ve seen this Microsoft vision of the future yet. On the whole it’s pretty standard. The weirdest things about these recent corporate visions of the future is how they are always about someone traveling. Remote video in these things is used not to eliminate the travel (via business videoconference) but to… Continue reading
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Pinker on Statistical Literacy
Better Angels, indeed: In a question and answer session on Freakonomics Radio, Pinker was asked what people can do to help society “resist the urge to think things are worse and worse and the world is less and less safe when this is manifestly not the case”. Pinker’s answer was interesting: “One necessity is greater… Continue reading
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Canvas Instructure and the de-commodification of the LMS
One of the oddest yet most exciting stories of the past year or so is how the LMS, which had sunk to the level of a utility, has suddenly been revived. There’s a common path software takes, where it moves from a feature and performance war cycle slowly into a commodity cycle where the product… Continue reading
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Education and Start-ups
From Will Dropouts Save America? If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills… Continue reading
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The crowdsourcing scalability problem (or the thinness of the cognitive surplus gruel)
I’m sure someone has mentioned this, but the interesting thing if you look at Wikipedia is how many editing hours have gone into each page. Shirky says there’s a hundred million hours put into Wikipedia. There’s an estimated 342,768 full articles in Wikipedia. That’s about 291 hours per article. I don’t know what they get to write an… Continue reading
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Critiquing the MetaMovement
So when I heard the Occupy Everything movement referred to as a “MetaMovement” I thought — at last, someone has nailed my ambivalence. It turned out I was wrong about what the coiner of that phrase meant. But here is what the MetaMovement should mean — There is a core of the movement that is… Continue reading
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World’s Simplest Stimulus Plan: Student Loan Holiday?
I’ve become cynical enough in this space that I thought nothing could surprise me. I was wrong. This is shocking: Of the nearly $1.5 trillion in loans that US students have ever taken out on record, about $900 billion of it hasn’t been repaid. Yes, there are, according to the best estimate available, around some… Continue reading
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Ed Roulette Project Is Off and Running
Jim Groom, Tim Owens, and I have started talking about how to make Ed Roulette a reality. Please take 5 minutes of your time and check out the short wireframe walkthrough of how the application would work and let us know if you can help us build it, test it, popularize it. It’s a killer… Continue reading
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