Hapgood

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

  • On George Siemens’s Duplication Theory of Value

    I think a lot of this is happening, frankly. Univ. of Central Florida, a leader in online/hybrid courses has a student body that for the most part takes a fluid blend of online, hybrid, and f2f classes. That model is being duplicated many places. The Innovative University’s fascinating final chapters talk about this as well… Continue reading

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  • Ed Roulette

    via Wall of People Being Awesome on Chat Roulette. A post on Philipp Schmidt’s stream got me thinking about how we might tap into the 20 years of research on Peer Instruction to better inform peer learning initiatives.  I’m assuming here that readers are familiar with the Peer Instruction research (if you are not, you… Continue reading

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  • Smart Use of Cognitive Disfluency Goes Mainstream

    From the NYT, today: Another common misconception about how we learn holds that if information feels easy to absorb, we’ve learned it well. In fact, the opposite is true. When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known… Continue reading

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  • NH to make $35 million in state agency cuts [Healthcare vs. Higher Ed., Again]

    NH to make $35 million in state agency cuts [Healthcare vs. Higher Ed., Again] After last Spring’s cuts, the State of New Hampshire provides only 5% of our operational budget at Keene State College. The word on the street is this new round of cuts will reduce it to 3%.  A lot of this is… Continue reading

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  • Peer Instruction Failure

    Peer Instruction Failure I’ve been making sure to note places where experimentation shows at least partial failure of Peer Instruction. This article (“Effect of personal response systems on student perception and academic performance in courses in a health sciences curriculum”) is a good example of that. Only one of the sections fails, but it’s worth… Continue reading

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  • Scholarships Go Disproportionately To White Students

    Scholarships Go Disproportionately To White Students From Yglesias, today: The issue here isn’t racial discrimination, it’s a symptom of the fact that the incentive structure of American higher education is totally screwy. Schools want to produce two things. One is rich alumni who give them money, and the other is high ratings from US News… Continue reading

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  • Healthcare swallows everything

    Healthcare swallows everything Government spending as a percentage of GDP This is basically the story all over America: John Arnold, director of the Office of Strategic Planning and Budgeting, said that Medicaid and other health-care expenses are predicted to grow to as much as 40 percent of the state budget by 2015. That will force… Continue reading

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  • The Edupunk’s Guide to a DIY Credential: A Review by Someone Else

    Part of the reason I started Hapgood was to try to break the habit of wasting time engaging in Big Rhetorical Debates about Stuff That Capital-M Matters. Hapgood is largely about me getting back to the research and implementation focus that grounds me, and keeping the rhetorical stuff intermittent and focused on pressing concerns. I’m… Continue reading

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  • Increased Course Structure Improves Performance in Introductory Biology

    Increased Course Structure Improves Performance in Introductory Biology Lots of interesting (and maybe dubious?) methodological stuff in this. Its primary value for me was articulating a complex structured design fully, and testing that full design (rather than one or two smaller interventions). If you want to restructure your class like this, you could do it… Continue reading

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  • Do pre-tests boost achievement in online courses?

    From an older paper which found that online courses involving pretests outperformed F2F instructions, but that online courses with no pretest showed no difference: There exists a possibility that a pre-test works as a moderator affecting teaching and learning processes of ODE settings. For example, a pre-test might provide information for the online instructors to… Continue reading

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