Hapgood

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

  • The OS-based Lifestream Will Kill the Web-based Mega-Service, Part the Third

    New data this week about the Facebook being abandoned by the younger set: Now, there could be an error with the way this was computed — I’m fighting a number of edtech fires right now and don’t have time to dig into the methodology. But it matches the anecdotal evidence we’re seeing. One interpretation of Continue reading

  • EdXx

    Short thought I had last night. TED, as we know, is an elitist event that with a problematic epistemology. I think this take from Education Rethink captures some of the larger problems with the format and culture: TED Talks are the megaphones in the midst of a conversation… When I tweet about vulnerability, someone will Continue reading

  • Issue Hubs /Water106

    There was so much good thinking by others on the web during my winter vacation. And I want to comment on it all — just as soon as I go through the purgatory of semester startup. Faculty need blogs, administrators need schedules and work plans, and I may even need to have a syllabus together Continue reading

  • Revenge of the OS

    I’ve been trying to write a longer piece on an issue and failing, so I thought I’d put down the five paragraph version here, and see what Twitter thinks. Roughly, circa 2006 there was an corporate/institutional integration problem and a personal integration problem. The corporate/institutional problem went something like “We need to be THE one Continue reading

  • Synchronous Online is About To Get Much, Much Better

    Synchronous Online Sucks Synchronous online — the twisted mess of chat-rooms, video-conferencing, and screen-sharing we use for real-time online education — has sucked for a while now. To be sure we have products: it’s rare for a university to not have *some* web video-conferencing solution in place. And from what I understand, these products, at Continue reading

  • (Educational) Research Isn’t Broken But the Culture Is

    Great post today out on Simply Statistics. In it, the author critiques the claim that most research is false, finding claims of a reproducibility crisis are probably overstated at this point, but concluding the following steps are still necessary: We need more statistical literacy We need more computational literacy We need to require code be Continue reading

  • Use of MOOC Community Features in Blended Scenarios, Dan Ariely Edition

    As readers of this blog know, Amy Collier and I have been making a year-long argument that MOOC community features, as currently designed, are often perceived by blended students as low-to-no-value substitutes for local interaction. That made this snippet of MOOC-runner Dan Ariely talking about his own class’s use of the MOOC rather interesting: Dan Continue reading

  • Can People Designing Multiple Choice Tests for MOOCs Please Study Designing Multiple Choice Tests?

    David Kernohan has a post up titled How I got a “first” on a FutureLearn MOOC with one weird old trick… over at FOTA, and it does just what it says on the tin. In the post, David details how he was able to get an 87.4% on a FutureLearn test for a course module without studying Continue reading

  • Why the Why Matters

    A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post on the supposed “death of theory” and its relation to MOOC research — the story thus far is that a number of people sincerely think the “why” doesn’t matter if our sample is big enough and the variables tracked are numerous enough. Here’s a typical quote from Thrun: One Continue reading

  • Stocks, Flows, and the 80% Non-traditional Figure

    At the MOOC Research Initiative conference Jeff Selingo gave what I thought was a capable presentation of the current landscape of higher education. People might quibble with a point or two, but overall it was a relatively balanced, hysteria-free overview of a market which is not necessarily “broken”, but is poised to undergo some relatively Continue reading