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education

Good Luck With That

October 19, 2012 13:02:05.121

Looks like the Education System doesn't like change:

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the state has decided to crack down on free education, notifying California-based startup Coursera that it is not allowed to offer its online courses to the state’s residents. Coursera, founded by Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, partners with top-tier universities around the world to offer certain classes online for free to anyone who wants to take them. You know, unless they happen to be from Minnesota.

Since this is all web based, how do they intend to ban residents from taking these courses? Are instructional DVD's also a bad thing?

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posted by James Robertson

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education

Software and Education

July 16, 2011 12:54:27.256

It's taken until now - and the advent of Khan Academy - to see how software can really be used in education. I suspect there will be massive resistance, since the pattern illustrated below blows away the traditional "lecture model" that is used now:

Initially, Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She’s now on her way to “flipping” the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan’s videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It’s when they’re doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck.

The funny thing is, any educator who considered this would realize that it makes them invaluable. The students can get the lecture from the internet, but what they can't get there is a walkthrough on a specific problem - the hints and "aha moments" that come from working through a problem together.

posted by James Robertson

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Advanced Smalltalk Research

January 13, 2011 7:26:09.024

INRIA is holding a seminar on advanced Smalltalk topics, March 7 - 11 in Lille:

The objective of this school is to present on advanced Smalltalk topics such as compiler compiler, virtual machine, interaction with C, advanced UI

You can register here.

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education

We Don't Know What We Think We Do

September 7, 2010 16:47:41.000

Timeless advice given to stuidents is, well, not so timeless....

posted by James Robertson

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education

Better Learning Through Bite Sized Chunks?

June 8, 2010 16:02:45.732

This is interesting to me - the short video lectures on a wide range of subjects that Salman Khan has put together. On a very narrow topic (Cincom Smalltalk), I've been doing something similar since 2006 - short videos to cover a small topic area. The contrast between typical education and this approach is stark:

Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.

It takes a motivated person to learn via self paced instruction, but I wonder - how much do unmotivated people learn in a University setting? A lot of the people I went to school with spent much of their time partying - they could have done that on their own dime, instead on mom and dad, or a student loan. Maybe it's time to really examine how useful the standard lecture approach to education is.

BarCamps are blowing up the traditional conference; maybe it's time something blew up the traditional school the same way...

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education

Step One: Outsourcing the Grading

May 3, 2010 20:49:38.065

I seriously doubt that the outsourcing of education will end here:

Prices vary per course, but Virtual-TA estimates the program costs a university about $12 per student per assignment. Six assignments for 20 students would cost $1,440. EduMetry graders receive from $500 to $1,000 a month, depending on hours worked, according to GlobalPost, a news service.

At one point, I might have worried about these sorts of jobs going overseas, but I've been looking at the cost of a University education (I have a teenage daughter a couple years away from that) - and the costs are absurd. The next logical step is streaming video to multiple locations from a single good professor - and when that happens, the cost of an education might finally leave the stratosphere.

Can't happen too soon, IMHO...

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education

Screencasts: Quick Learning

March 14, 2010 21:10:19.928

Obviously, I like the idea of screencasts - I've been doing them every day for 3 1/2 years now :) Well, the Pharo crew is heading down the same path, and the latest one they've released looks like a great topic item: how to submit and publicize bug fixes to the Pharo team.

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posted by James Robertson

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