Hapgood

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

regular

  • Spamonyms

    I wrote a long defense of nyms just now, and I realized about halfway through it that I had completely skipped over the problem of spamonyms. So let me say one thing in defense of a real names policy — if Google could couple it with a real effort to cut down on spamonyms (those… Continue reading

  • Why Self-Reported Evaluations Are Evil

    Well, not quite. But this from Mazur is pretty depressing (though thoroughly expected if you read the literature on this sort of thing): These are two concepts from physics, and as you can see the students who say they were confused on a concept score significantly higher than the students that say they are not… Continue reading

    ,

  • On The Innovative University

    I read a ton of books on the history of higher education, how change happens in higher education, and how technology will change education, etc. Stuff going back to Boyer’s 1987 book College, Lion Gardiner’s 1994 work on redesigning higher education, to the more recent explosion of books on re-engineering what we do (I’m sure… Continue reading

  • Bill the Cat Unveils the EdCamp Keene Hashtag

    I know you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for the hashtag to be announced.  Well, here you go! It’s #eck11.  Yeah, it sounds like someone coughing up a furball… …but it’s short, and we want you all to have the characters you need. Tune in! 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

  • 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

  • Generational Learning Styles Are Bunk, Part 28

    Via Downes, this 2008 summary of the research on whether today’s students really do learn differently. The answer is probably best summed up in these two excerpts: “In contrast to the dubious bromides provided by the “experts” quoted above, a review of educational research reveals that there are virtually no research-based findings or evidence drawn from robust… Continue reading

    ,

  • On the Death of Borders

    Scott Leslie asked me a great question a year ago that I never forgot. In the middle of a discussion about the decline of newspapers and it’s relation to the impending implosion of higher ed he asked me, since I was defending institutional relevance, to name one case where an entrenched industry made changes and… Continue reading