Hapgood

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

  • Informal Statistical Inference

    What we are trying to do in our Stat Lit class is to develop good intuitions about data, rather than create mini-statisticians. Our belief is that everyone, in almost any job or civic task, has to make inferences from data without having access to complex data crunching tools or methods, and, as such, it is… Continue reading

  • Openness and Analytics

    I am sure someone has already commented on this, but it occurs to me that openness and analytics have a problematic relationship. For instance, in the Intro to Psych course we are developing on several campuses, we’d like to use analytics to do things like nationally norm percent correct on questions. So you answer a… Continue reading

  • AASCU, Red Balloon & National Course Collaborations

    So this is really neat. I’m on the phone here with some American Association of State Colleges and Universities people on a conference call, and we’re hammering out how multiple state colleges and universities can best work together to build fully articulated blended and fully online courses that we share with one another. The basic… Continue reading

  • Hattie’s Table of Effect Sizes

    Hattie’s Table of Effect Sizes I need more information to make this table meaningful — and meta-analyses are always tricky things. But I think tables like this (and Hattie is just a follower here of Bloom and others) help people think about prioritizing changes to pedagogy. What Hattie finds, of course, is unsurprising — feedback… Continue reading

  • You will do what you are told, until the rights are sold…

    I’m with this commentary, mostly, until about halfway through when it gets into the thicket of what ownership means. There is a shock doctrine that edtech-vangelists have been all-to-willing to sell. Here’s the real deal, once again. The main problem with education is that it competes financially as a social good with health care. Health… Continue reading

  • Worker=Hipster Redux

    Worker=Hipster Redux I read You Are Not a Gadget, and was pleasantly surprised with its style and presentation. Of the hivemind backlash posse, I’d be happy to hang out with Lanier any day, and maybe along with Nick Carr we could go play Ding-Dong-Dash on Bauerlein.  On the whole, though, Lanier is wrong, and this… Continue reading

  • The Benefits of Using Clickers in Small-Enrollment Seminar-Style Biology Courses

    The Benefits of Using Clickers in Small-Enrollment Seminar-Style Biology Courses More decent stuff out of CU, this time on clicker use in small classes. Not anything rigorous here in regards to measuring learning gains (the problem with interventions in a twelve person seminar is, of course, it’s a sample size of twelve) but a nicely written explanation… Continue reading

  • Single-Concept Clicker Question Sequences

    Single-Concept Clicker Question Sequences Interesting research about a small modification to Peer Instruction sequence (from Sept 2011 issue of The Physics Teacher). What I fine maybe most interesting though is this chart: Leaving aside the E&M results (students should be able to review clicker questions, obviously) the interesting thing to me is that the gains… Continue reading

  • Did OER teach millions of people the wrong physics?

    Probably too provocative a title. But it’s a question worth asking, because it’s a question to which we don’t have an answer. Professor Walter Lewin’s classes (above) have been viewed by millions of people on cable TV and downloaded by millions via OCW. In them, Walter demonstrates the best of breed in demonstration-based physics. If… Continue reading

  • Spamonyms

    I wrote a long defense of nyms just now, and I realized about halfway through it that I had completely skipped over the problem of spamonyms. So let me say one thing in defense of a real names policy — if Google could couple it with a real effort to cut down on spamonyms (those… Continue reading