Hapgood

I can’t really add much to the beautiful eulogies for Aaron. Except perhaps one thing. Somewhere back in the 1970s micropolitics emerged as the dominant paradigm of change. As a Generation Xer, it’s really all I’ve ever known. My parents grew up in the civil rights age, where the idea was to get hold of… Continue reading

From Sue Jacoby’s Age of  American Unreason: Reverential images of self-education have been deeply embedded in the American psyche from the colonial period and persist today, in an era characterized by a mania for specialized educational credentials that Emerson could not have imagined. Yet these images have cut two ways in shaping American attitudes toward… Continue reading

Dan Meyer has a great study from the early days of programmed learning linked from his latest post. This paragraph in it caught my eye: Benny has used IPI material since the second grade and is familiar with the system and seems to have accepted the responsibility for his own work. He works independently in… Continue reading

One interesting omission from the current “Future of the American University” discussion is the effect that PowerSchool, now in use by over 10 million K-12 students, is having on parent and student expectation on real-time notification and assessment. If you don’t know what PowerSchool is, take a look at the above video. While it shows… Continue reading

So I was going to head straight into part two, on mixability in the mOOC. But I realized I needed to outline how mixability of OER stands now, at least when used in a traditional institutional context. The answer, in short, is using OER today is like trying to compose emails to people using only… Continue reading

Just a note looking through the education predictions out. For as long as I can remember, every year has brought predictions of the mobile revolution that is going to tear through higher education. And they have been wrong every single time. Now sure, if you expand the meaning of education to “All of human existence”… Continue reading

This is an off the cuff presentation of the module structure in the Psych course we are developing, which shows some of the possibilities of combining multiple OER into a course designed for institutional reuse. Part II will talk more about the mixability piece. I started this project to in part show how easy this… Continue reading

Charter school company Rocketship’s current hybrid model seems like a decent enough idea — move from generalist to specialist teachers in grade school — specialists that understand learning issues in math and literacy at perhaps a deeper level. Adopt a 75/25 blend of classroom teaching with  learning lab activities that are adaptive — customized to their… Continue reading

I’m a firm believer in encouraging students use psuedonyms on the web, at least while they find their feet in social media. I wouldn’t want to be haunted by my freshman composition assignments for the rest of my life, and accordingly I don’t think it’s fair (or smart) to encourage freshmen to blog under their own name… Continue reading

Cole points me via email to Tyler Cowen today, who continues to argue that what I’ve been calling “Residential Online” is indeed the future: A large number of institutions in the top one hundred will move to a hybrid on-line model for a third or so of their classes and they will do so gradually,… Continue reading