O brave new university, / That has such MOOCs in’t!
As we head into the second half of Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOC MOOC, I thought I’d talk about the practices, principles, benefits of MOOCs using some of my favorite characters in all of pop culture. The basic principle: the ultimate learner-centered environment The most important thing to understand about Massive Open Online Courses is that they […]
Affordances of MOOCs
There’s a very cleverly-constructed MOOC about MOOCs this week, MOOC MOOC, and while my days are going to be crazy this week workwise, I’m trying to dip in as much as I can to get a handle on the chaotic discussion. At the end of the second day Athabaska University MOOC organizer/connectivist George Siemens wrote, […]
Dude, where’s my psychohistory?
In a feature story for Nature at the beginning of the month, Laura Spinney writes about the latest generation of academics hoping to quantify historical patterns and make universal claims about “cliodynamics,” as U Conn’s Peter Turchin hopes to call his work. We’ve seen this movie before as quantitative social science history in the 1960s, cliometrics in the […]
Faculty ROI: recalibrating your time before the semester begins
If you’re a faculty member on a standard U.S. academic calendar and anything like me, this week you are thinking at least a little about the new semester. (If you finished all your semester planning and are enjoying the day at the beach, why are you reading my blog right now??) Before the summer and […]
Gerard Robinson leaves the rodeo
Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson has submitted his resignation effective the end of August. The past year would have been hard on anyone in that position, appointed by the state board of education in large part because of pressure by Florida’s bull-in-a-china-shop governor Rick Scott, the same governor who pushed out Eric Smith in spring […]