Hapgood

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

  • Probabilistic vs. Deterministic Thought

    Surprisingly good advice from LinkedIn founder: > “One of the things that philosophy is very helpful on is how to think pretty precisely about arguments, and an investment thesis is fundamentally an argument. Part of philosophical training is making you really understand how good an argument is and how to think through the alternatives. Philosophy Continue reading

  • Pill-Splitting the Textbook

    Commenter GalleryP pointed out in the comments of my last piece on OER (here) that the Calculus book can be used across two semesters if bought new and not rented. This is true, and I’ll adjust down the high end of the range down across the two semesters by $209. (Spoiler alert: it’s still an obscene amount, Continue reading

  • Asking What Students Spend on Textbooks Is the Wrong Question

    Phil Hill continues to do some of the best data journalism in educational technology. His last piece is a tour de force, marshalling data to show that students spend much less on textbooks than the current figures bandied about would indicate. I think he’s right on that point, but I also think readers of that Continue reading

  • Why Renewable Assignments Must Be Recyclable As Well

    Renewable assignments, as defined by David Wiley, are assignments that don’t get thrown away at the end of the semester (disposable assignments), but rather live on because they engage in real-world problems. Christina Hendricks, in her treatment of this practice, provides some helpful examples: Some instructors ask their students to write or edit articles on Continue reading

  • Inhospitable Writing

    Edit: What I describe here is not meant to imply you should write on the web one way or another. Different styles serve different purposes. But I think sometimes people are confused as to why we need wiki, or OER, or other such things when we “have the web”. And the answer is that the Continue reading

  • Write for the Federated Library Project!

    Or maybe it’s the Federated Learning Project? We’re going to try to construct some federated wiki-ish stuff in WordPress. I explained what I need to do to get WordPress to act in the way we want it to to Boone Gorges, and he said it would be relatively easy, which means it should take me Continue reading

  • My Daughter Made a Cute Piece of OER on Art History. Discuss.

    My wife Nicole was trying to make a short video for her fifth grade art class, but found it hard to get up the requisite on-camera energy for that sort of thing. So my 12 year-old daughter stepped in as pinch hitter and delivered the lesson. I think she did pretty good, and if you Continue reading

  • The Banal Uselessness of the Utopian Binary Critique

    I was watching Jesse Stommel at NWeLearn this past week give an excellent presentation on grading. In it he suggested a number of alternatives to traditional grading, and outlined some of the ways that traditional grading is baked into the system. And the end of the talk, the inevitable hand: “Your presentation seems so BINARY,” Continue reading

  • The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

    Opening keynote for dLRN 2015. Delivered October 16th @ Stanford. Actual keynote may have gone on significant tangents… 1 | a year in the garden A week or so ago, I was reading about the Oregon shooting. I’m a pretty standard issue liberal and when I see things that support my liberal views I tend Continue reading

  • Building a Pseudo-Wiki on Tumblr

    At the heart of wiki is a simple idea that names matter. Page names in wiki are not locations. They aren’t a place where a document lives. Names identify ideas, patterns, theories, and data in wiki that can be recombined with other ideas, patterns, theories, and data to make complex meaning not expressible in a Continue reading