Hapgood

Just put in this proposal to a conference, thought it was worth reposting here as a discussion starter: The “wrapped MOOC” has gained attention over the past year as a way to integrate MOOCs into traditional education. This presentation will present results of interviews with practitioners of this method to show that in practice most Continue reading

The fever-dream formerly known as California continues to provide insight into where we as a country might be headed. This week, we’re hearing about proposed bill AB 1306, which proposes to create a new faculty-free “university” that will provide exam-based degrees. (Jim Julius, you win the prognostication prize on this one). Looking at the bill, Continue reading

From an article on Bowen, one of the theorists behind the Cost Disease model of higher education inflation: At a recent conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bowen looked around a room of mostly Ivy League faculty members gathered at an invitation-only conference about the future of the residential college in the digital age. There were, it Continue reading

Audrey beat me to reviewing Morozov’s latest book, and as is often the case when Audrey digs deep into something, there isn’t a whole lot left to say. I encourage people to read her exhaustive analysis. To me, the book ended up being a systematic treatment of an issue that I have been struggling with Continue reading

Back in August last year, I wrote a piece on How MOOCs Could Kill Higher Education. In the scenario presented, the first step was this: In public education, the problem has the potential to get bad quite quickly. Imagine a legislature that says that the state colleges must provide a path to credit through MOOCs Continue reading

This chart, showing electrodermal activity believed to be associated with “cognitive stress” is making the educational blog rounds recently: The thing generating interest in the blogs, of course, is the flatlining you’re seeing in the class segment, which lends it to the catchy soundbite that “Lectures produce no more cognitive activity than TV.” Of course, Continue reading

So for reasons not worth going into (OK, Twitter spat), I became interested in whether my understanding of Schumpeter and his Marx-inspired theory of “creative destruction” was wrong. I have a bit of an allergic reaction to the term, which I associate with CEOs shrugging off layoffs as “churn” and taking the Jack Welch position Continue reading

I’ve leaked this out on Twitter, Facebook, and in personal conversations, but I’ve put off writing a blog post about it because I find it very hard to do justice to the people I’ve worked with at Keene State in a goodbye. So let me just say that despite crushing state cuts, constant friction, and Continue reading

So a funny thing I never realized before last Sunday — Sugata Mitra, the informal learning darling of the hour, was part of the NIIT team that did a leveraged buyout of the company I worked for in 2003. And NIIT still owns it. That’s interesting, since what Cognitive Arts does (or at least used Continue reading

Bryan Alexander has an excellent post on the odd situation we find ourselves in which MOOC mania reigns but OER and OCW are seen as yesterday’s news. The mind boggles, and I spent a good ten minutes trying to come up with a metaphor to explain the absurdity of the situation only to find that Continue reading