Hapgood

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

  • Your Diploma Just Got Downgraded. But You Can Upgrade It At a 20% Discount!

    From the comments on my last post —  friend of the blog (and Sloan-C Karoake instigator) Michael Berman lets us know he got some bad news about the Udacity certificate he earned in 2012. Please note this is a real email, from “Amanda Sparr, Coach @Udacity”. This is not a parody. (Really!) Dear Michael, Nice work Continue reading

  • The Sieve Manufacture Continues at Udacity

    From Udacity last week, regarding the phasing out of free certificates: “We owe it to you, our hard working students, that we do whatever we can to ensure your certificate is as valuable as possible.” and We have now heard from many students and employers alike that they would like to see more rigor in Continue reading

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  • Are Blogs the Vinyl Records of the Internet?

    From Blogs are the Vinyl Records of the Internet The quote comes from a full article in the Washington Post about the decline of blogging in Iran. A few years ago, Iran emerged as a culture filled with high traffic, powerful blogs. It was called Blogestan. But, these days, as in many other cultures around Continue reading

  • 228 Summaries

    I don’t talk enough about the classes I work with. I’m trying to change that, starting with my own class, T&L 521: Educational Technology. I ended up teaching this class because they had a last minute schedule conflict with the person who normally does it. It was a one credit class with pre-service teachers who Continue reading

  • Using ProProfs With Dokuwiki

    I’ve wanted for a long time to embed questions in things like course wikis and blogs, questions that fed to a centrally managed backend system. Finally a number of people are working on this — Instructure’s Canvas mentioned this as something under development (or maybe here at this point, we’re an Angel campus, unfortunately). Bill Continue reading

  • Experience Without Humility Is Not Very Helpful At All

    Phil Hill has a great analysis of the NYT interview with Richard Levin, the new CEO of Coursera. And core to that analysis is a point I’ve made before — that Ivy League institutions *do* have experience in online education, but they are so committed to covering up their failure in those efforts that they Continue reading

  • Some Notes on DokuWiki Setup for Academic Settings: Spam

    Still  working with DokuWiki as an educational platform for faculty here at WSU Vancouver. I’ve found a couple things that are worth mentioning, Thought I’d jot them down here. This post deals with spam prevention. The idea that Dokuwiki wikis don’t get spammed as much as MediaWiki installs is true, but trivially so. You’ll get Continue reading

  • If Your Product Is So Data-Centric, Maybe It Should Have Data Export?

    Yesterday-ish, from Justin Reich: I was also somewhat surprised to learn that in many systems, it is actually quite difficult to get a raw dump of all of the data from a student or class. Many systems don’t have an easy “export to .csv file” option that would let teachers or administrators play around on Continue reading

  • Hacking and Reuse: A Regrouping

    Via Clay Fenlason: “Feeling like the time spent to understand WTF @holden is talking about would be well spent, but who has that kind of time?” Fair enough. I blog mostly for myself, to try and push on my own ideas in front of a relatively small group of people I know who push back. Continue reading

  • This is what I mean by new modes of sharing (Fedwiki meets Dropbox Carousel)

    File-based sharing based around pushing copies of good stuff to others. That’s what the federated wiki is about. For that reason I find newer efforts like this that push files around instead of references to be fascinating. This out today from Dropbox, a new product called Carousel: Photos of events such as graduations and weddings, Continue reading