500 Open Courses on UMW Blogs
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays , January 15, 2013.
Jim Groom points to 500 courses on the system free and open to anyone hosted at UMW. No doubt someone will have something to complain about - the courses, say, aren't perfect, aren't completge, are only in blog form, aren't always read all the way to the end, or don't guarantee academic success. More...
A Bad Start to Lifelong Learning?
Jeff Cobb, Mission to Learn, January 14, 2013.
The diagram, above, of engagement in school through the years is a depiction of failure - not failure of students, but failure of the system. Jeff Cobb comments, "As the writer of the Gallup blog post on the poll argues, you would hope these numbers would be exactly the opposite – that students would become more engaged as they go through school." I wonder what a similar diagram would look like, one documenting social engagement with society at large through online means. More...
The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck
Chris Mooney, Mother Jones, January 14, 2013.
We'll use the word 'science' a little loosely here, but meanwhile there's an interesting survey on the consequences of comment trolls: "it appeared that pushing people's emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs." The author offers an explanation, "the psychological theory of motivated reasoning," akin to Hume's dictum, but I think the interplay between thoughts and feelings (if they are even distinct things) is a lot more complex than that. More...
Why Aaron Swartz's Ideas Matter
Will Knight, MIT technology Review, January 14, 2013.
I don't want to write a long post about Aaron Swartz, because that's been done already by a bunch of people who actually knew him, but his career and mine intersected one or twice and I always recognized him as a brilliant and generous contributor to our field. His suicide is a tragedy and a loss and touches close to home to many of us. More...
Could a MOOCI Contribute to the Education of the World’s Most Impoverished Children?
John Connell, Weblog, January 9, 2013.
Let's map out the core dilemma that produces the idea (quoting from the text):
Paying for Proof
Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, January 9, 2013.
Free-Textbook Group Will Sell Its E-Books on Chegg, for a Small Fee
Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 9, 2013.
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