Stephen Downes

Good insight from Wes Fryer on Giulia Forsythe's visual note-taking. He writes, "Do you take visual notes yet? Have you taught your own students about visual notetaking or graphic facilitation yet? In addition to watching Guilia’s presentation video, check out some of the other videos and tutorials on the “Visual Notetaking” page of “Mapping Media to the Common Core.” Very inspiring ideas to both apply personally and share with students!" I tried taking visual notes during Idea City in 2003, which went well, but did not inspire me to abamdon my existing practice of converting presentations into articles on the fly.

I've long thought that the deal-breaker for big data and learning analytics is personal privacy. Now it appears events are bearing this out, a bit (PRISM notwithstanding). "A $100 million database set up to store extensive records on millions of public school students has stumbled badly since its launch this spring, with officials in several states backing away from the project amid protests from irate parents... The system is set up to identify millions of children by name, race, economic status and other metrics and is constructed in a way that makes it easy for school districts to share some or all of that information with private companies developing education software." Really? They didn't go for that...?

Glenn Kleiman writes, by email, "We have launched a program of MOOCs for Educators (MOOC-Eds) and have opened registration for our second MOOC-Ed, with more coming soon.  Information is available at www.mooc-ed.org and I've attached the press release about the math one which starts July 1."

The most useful thing about this article is the link to EdX code, which as the author notes was released in early June. I took a quick look at the git source, there's a lot there, a mixture of Python, Ruby, and NodeJS, built on Django, all using a Mongo database. OK, at least it's not Java. But hosting this still looks like a major commitment. As for the article itself, it on the one hand demonstrates a certain hubris ("we are part of a movement that seeks to change the face of education") and on the other the simplistic 'magic bullet' approach to learning management ("we are now looking at whether professors should assign homework before the lecture, instead of after"). And despite the title, it doesn't really mention teachers at all, nor what they should be doing (aside from moving homework assignments).

Four newly minted (by the media) 'experts' on MOOCs discuss and debate the format. "To date, few discussions of what Aaron Bady has called “the MOOC moment” have focused specifically on how new models of online learning may impact the humanities. The Los Angeles Review of Books invited four distinguished professors, some of whom have experience teaching online, to reflect on the risks and opportunities MOOCs present for the humanities." One good quote from Davidson: "Higher education is becoming the province of the high achieving and the wealthy global 1%. I don’t want a society that massively excludes so many students, nor one where you have to be better than perfect to gain admission to your state university."

Interesting summary and reflection of a 2010 paper by Mackness, Mak and Williams on the four conditions (autonomy, diversity, openness, interactivity) I set for evaluating MOOCs. The paper itself is of limited value as a research paper, being based as it is on a survey of 22 people. But the discussion is interesting, as Christina Hendricks find it "puzzling that in that recent post Downes doesn’t talk about asking participants about their experiences in a cMOOC at all." But some of the remarks in the paper show exactly why. Consider this: "The researchers provided quotes from two participants stating that they would have preferred more structure and guidance, and one course instructor who reported that learner autonomy led to some frustration that what s/he was trying to say or do in the course was not always 'resonating with participants'." So how is this relevant? So some people didn't like autonomy (one because they couldn't control outsomes) - what do I do, revise the criteria for assessing courses based on this? Clearly not.

Scott Wilson on the changing database landscape: "there has been a steady trickle of announcements from organisations switching from MySQL to MariaDB. From next month, MariaDB will replace MySQL as the default database in Fedora.  And now RedHat has announced its doing the same. Even Wikimedia started using it." For my own part, I continue to use MySQL (also also Enterprise Red Hat, though my provider is switching to CentOS, which is responding to RedHat price increases). Also, PostgreSQL is a popular open source alternative to MySQL.

Interesting results from a survey of the first EdX courses. "Educational success in a MOOC, but also in a face-to-face class, is not a wholly individual activity," says Mintz, who was not involved in this study. "It has a social dimension. To put this another way, persistence and success are not simply products of cognitive factors. Noncognitive factors — in this case, social connection — are equally important." The full report is here.