Hapgood

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

  • 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

  • Short Notes on the Absence of Theory

    Martin Weller, Stephen Downes, and Matt Crosslin have been kicking around the “post-theory” critique of MRI ’13 that came up in a discussion Jim Groom and I had Thursday night in the middle of a bar in the middle of a hotel in the middle of an ice storm. I thought I might just add… Continue reading

  • MRI 13

    I’ve just finished attending the MOOC Research Initiative conference and workshop, which felt not so much a conference on MOOCs to me as the beginning of something else. We kick Courdacity-style MOOCs around a  lot, but if all MOOCs did was bring this level of intelligence and insight into problems of online learning, it would… Continue reading

  • Counting History PhD Employment

    I used to do more statistical literacy stuff on this blog, and I’m toying with the idea of going back to that. The problem is that the stuff that really tends to matter is stuff everybody thinks they already know, but which most people have not built habits around. It’s not really fascinating stuff to… Continue reading

  • “Experimented On”

    This “experimented on” phrase bothers me a bit: The SJSU affair falls somewhere between educational research and a social experiment, and we are very much in need of better experiments in these areas. Most educational research is pretty abysmal. Most social policy goes untested. The lack of decently designed experiments in these areas generally allows… Continue reading

  • Thrun Enters Burgeoning Sieve Market

    I can’t read much of the recent piece of Thrun hagiography without wanting to do bodily harm to myself, so this following analysis might miss some of the subtlety of the article. I’ve tried to push myself to read it fully, and I really just can’t. From the photo up top of Thrun in what… Continue reading

  • Educational Technology and the Sources of Innovation

    Cross-posted from e-Literate. After reading an an excellent post by tech-blogger Jon Udell on innovation, I spent the weekend getting reacquainted with work of Eric von Hippel, the researcher who pioneered the study of user-driven innovation. What’s interesting about von Hippel is that his research hits on the common themes of the open education movement,… Continue reading

    ,

  • That “Flipped Classrooms May Not Work” Story

    This USA Today article is unfortunately par for the course in educational journalism today. Phil Hill already has an excellent take on this story, but let me add my two cents. It details the preliminary “impressions” of professors engaged in a three year study that will end in 2016. Despite having run flipped classes, they… Continue reading

  • For Precisely This Moment

    Jon Udell gets it 100% right: “Thanks to the philosophical foundations of the Internet — open standards, collaborative design, layered architecture — its technologies typically qualify as user innovation toolkits. That wasn’t true, though, for the Internet era’s first wave of educational technologies. That’s why my friends in that field led a rebellion against learning… Continue reading