Hapgood

We Need A Taxonomy Of MOOCs People often complain that taxonomies are pedantic. But taxonomies force one to contemplate and respect significant differences in phenomena — and the process of making taxonomies is the process of understanding one’s aims and one’s value system. So taxonomies are hardly trivial. In any case I like terms that… Continue reading

Xeni Jardin stops her Google public posts Not exactly breaking news, but she was one of the few people using people using G+ the way I hoped people would grow to use it, as a sort of cross between twitter and blogging. And she’s quit doing it because of some unnamed unpleasantness.  It’s bad for… Continue reading

Cognitive surplus watch A lot of Shirky’s formulations are spot on, but I’ve always felt uneasy about the cognitive surplus idea. It’s not just, as Carr points out in the linked article, that there’s not much evidence that the Wikipedia hours are coming out of a surplus, but it’s the view of human endeavor as a noncount… Continue reading

Schoolchildren Can Also Learn Complex Subject Matters On Their Own, Researchers Find Another entry in the great debate, I suppose, though it comes down in part to what you mean by “on their own”: Following an introduction on the general topic by their teachers, the school children were given a workbook of geometric tasks that… Continue reading