Apple’s announcement, blah blah blah—I think Audrey Watters’ “Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-revolution” sums it up best. So what should a “textbook” for a webified world look like? David Andrade’s description of what he does in his physics course, and Frank Noschese’s “Vision for a Physics iBook” are much better answers.
I enjoyed the first three episodes of BBC’s Sherlock. I was disappointed by how episode 4 (the first of the newest trilogy) resolved episode 3′s hangover, but immediately forgave the writers as A Scandal in Belgravia unfolded. But then came episode 5, The Hounds of Baskerville, which was frankly awful.
So it all came down to episode 6, The Reichenbach Fall. Good opening, great development, tension steadily ratcheting up, and then bam, the final three minutes ruined it all. Completely. It was completely implausible, inconsistent with what we’d seen of the characters up to that point—frankly, it almost had me expecting Moriarty to reveal that he was Sherlock’s long-lost twin brother.
My ending is below the fold. Enjoy.
OK, so on the one hand we have online education growing by leaps and zounds, until anyone who really wants to do a quality university degree can do so from the comfort and security of their parents’ basement. On the other hand, we have the quite natural desire of 18-year-olds to get out of said basement and hang out with each other. What can we do to help them?
Welcome to Gravenhurst, a small town in the heart of cottage country two hours north of Toronto. (I could equally well say “welcome to Bracebridge” or to Parry Sound or to any of a dozen other places, but I’ll stick to Gravenhurst for now.) Every summer, Gravenhurst is filled with vacationing urbanites who either own, rent, or visit the lakeside cottages around it. They buy stuff at its stores, they drink in its pubs, they keep its summer theater alive—and then they go home, usually around Labor Day.
Would it be possible to create a centralized campus for decentralized learning in a place like Gravenhurst? I.e., could someone build a few dorms and labs and a gym to give students the social zing of living in a college town, and just skip all that stuff about professors and lectures and what-not? Students would take courses online from any provider (or mix of providers) they wanted, and get their degree from the course provider (which could be a big-name school like Stanford, Oxford, or whatever). When it came time to dissect a frog or write an exam, though, they’d pay a small fee to their campus provider for facilities, supervision, or invigilation [1].
I think it makes sense from the town’s point of view: students would be arriving just as tourists left, and leaving as tourists arrived, so it would even out the town merchants’ cash flow. It might not appeal to students who crave the bright lights of the big city, but I think there are plenty of others who’d leap at the chance to be a five minute walk from boating, canoeing, hiking, and the rest of the great outdoors. (And of course you could set up a physical campus for virtual courses in a big city, too, it would just cost more, and you’d have a harder time getting the host city to think you were really important.)
So: is anyone already doing this? If so, I’d welcome pointers…
[1] I actually think that invigilation—i.e., exam supervision—is the key to this whole plan. Once online learning really matters, we’re going to see cheat-for-hire services appear (“Give me $50 and your login ID, I’ll write the calculus exam for you.”). Learning providers who want to maintain the value of their degrees or badges will need ways to prevent fraud, so there’ll be a need for people like notary publics (notaries public?) to provide such assurances.
Sylvia Jane Cotton (née Wilson), November 7, 1964 – January 21, 2012
I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns and great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
— Virginia Woolf
I was passionate about politics when I was in my twenties, mostly because I was desperate for something to be passionate about. (I had friends who felt as strongly about Hibs and jazz as I did about apartheid and nuclear weapons, for much the same reason.) And while I’d never actually been in any “direct action”, and would have been absolutely useless in a riot, I often quoted Malcolm X’s phrase, “By any means necessary.” I even used the whole thing as a mail signature for a while:
We declare our right on this earth…to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.
I didn’t really mean it, though. There were things I simply wouldn’t do, and right at the top of that list was “compromise”. Like most angry young men, I’d rather fail than find common ground, because after all, the point wasn’t actually to change the world—the point was to be trying to, to be preaching at the indifferent, and above all, to be angry.
But here I am, almost 49, and I’ve come to realize that compromise isn’t just the only way to make progress—it’s the right way too. Science and democracy both depend on the most difficult of virtues: humility. Both only work if people regularly say, “I might be wrong,” and actually believe it, rather than just saying it to clear their throats before adding, “But…” I think I know how best to teach certain things, but I might be wrong, and people who believe others ways are better might be right. I think I know what basic ideas people need to grasp in order to make the web their own, but I might be wrong about that too. Sticking to my guns might give me a crusading adrenaline rush, but if I really want to change the world, I need to accept that people I disagree with—people I think are part of the problem—are (mostly) sincere and intelligent, that their opinions are based on experiences I haven’t had, and that they almost certainly have insights and ideas that would complement or improve on mine.
This is why I find myself off in a corner in many of the discussions about teaching programming to the masses. Like many of the people who are trying to do this outside traditional classroom settings, I believe that:
However, I think these things are independent of one another. More specifically, I think that we can and should try to work with—not just co-opt, but work with and learn from—teachers who are inside today’s system, even though we think that system is part of the problem. They have the hands-on experience that most of us don’t; if we’re willing to listen, they can tell us which of our seemingly-plausible ideas are going to fail when transferred to the 85% of learners who aren’t ultra-curious hard-working self-starters.
This is why I’ve asked participants in the P2PU course on teaching webcraft and programming to free-range learners to think through the IES report on organizing instruction and study to improve student learning. This is why I think that we should be going to every relevant conference we can find, rather than setting up our own events. Yes, it’s fun and invigorating to hang out with fellow revolutionaries, but remember Frank’s Law:
If you care deeply about a cause and you are then engaged on behalf of that cause in an activity that makes you feel very good and very brave and you’re really in solidarity with all your friends, and you’re enjoying it, you’re probably not advancing the cause very much, because you’re spending all your time with people you agree with cheering each other on and not engaging.
And this is why I’m trying to hear what people like Larry Cuban, Scott Gray, Mark Guzdial, and Audrey Watters are saying, and to go and meet them on their home ground (physically as well as virtually). Humility doesn’t come naturally to me—just ask my parents or my former students—but if we really want to change the world, it’s as necessary as courage.
The P2PU course I’m leading on teaching programming to free-range learners [1] officially kicked off this week. The first two challenges are up. First, compare the way you teach (or the way you’ve been taught) to the research-based best practices in this IES report. Second, describe who you’re trying to help. It’s already clear that participants are coming at these questions from many different angles—I’m looking forward to learning more.
[1] “Free-range” meaning “anything other than a conventional classroom format”. I like the term because it allows us to call people sitting in lecture halls listening to someone talk at the front of the room as “battery-farmed learners”.
I’m glad you asked:
It’s going to be a busy few months…
The Internet of Things is already here: it’s just strangely distributed. (I’d probably exercise more if I had one of these, and yeah, a gym full of them would be cacophonous, but imagine getting your whole aerobics class to punch four-part harmony?)
I’m very pleased to announce that the Sloan Foundation has generously agreed to fund six months of work by Software Carpentry and the Mozilla Foundation. You can read more on the Software Carpentry blog; it’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m looking forward to it.
If you’ve ever posted an ad for a programmer, you’ll know just how much haystack you have to sift through to find a few needles. At least half of the people who send in resumes cannot write a simple FizzBuzz program, and filtering the ones who can is always a headache (and a big drain on a company’s technical resources, since most HR staff don’t know enough about programming to do it themselves).
Enter Stack Overflow, the premier technical Q&A site on the interweb. Lots of people spend lots of time being helpful there, and smart companies have taken notice: I know of at least two that ask applicants for their SO scores as part of the resume-screening process. My question is, could companies outsource technical interviews to SO? More specifically:
Crucially, the candidate and interviewer don’t know each other’s identities: they both log in to SO to get connected, and since everything is recorded, HR will know if they gave each other a way to connect via another channel. That makes it hard (not impossible, but hard) for the two parties to conspire with each other, and that, plus a sufficiently large pool of interviewers, keeps the system trustworthy.
I’ve been interviewed this way (though I knew the identity of my interviewer), and it worked pretty well. It solves a real problem that a lot of companies face, and it gives people an incentive to keep being useful on SO (which I think is a good thing). Do you think it’s workable? Or is there a variant that would work even better?
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