Over 60,000 in one course. This will change everything! Except for the part about needing the same effective class size in order to support the handful of students that actually pass the course... Nice reorganization of the marketing hype published by Coursera.

So in the end, we have 107 students who got the more personalized attention (doing a project, getting feedback, being part of the Google hangout presentations).

This class had one professor and 3 TA, about a 1 : 27 teacher/student ratio.

I put together another set of notes while prepping for the thesis oral exam thingy. They might be useful for folks who are interested in the Community of Inquiry framework.

• combined notes
• previous notes on articles

they're not a complete overlap. many articles never made it into the publish-notes pipeline, but did get into the combined notes…

I don’t usually have to put an explicit disclaimer on posts, but here goes. I’m not writing this in any official capacity, my university hasn’t approved the message. YMMV. IANAL. YHBH. etc…

I was at a presentation by Dr. Krishnaswamy Nandakumar on the impact of technology in education, and it triggered some thoughts on MOOCs¹. I’d been avoiding thinking (or writing) about them, because the hype just seemed silly and pointless. But, combined by a recent nudge by Kate Bowles, I think it’s worth writing it now.

Bull. Shit.

Giving people access to didactic lectures by a handful of elite professors at a handful of elite institutions is not the most important educational technology in the last 200 years. Not even close. Sure, it’s good. It’s fantastic that I can have access to the lectures and resources of some of the biggest and most famous institutions. Awesome.

But the most important ed tech in two centuries? Bull. Shit.

using textexture.com, thanks to a tip from Bryan Alexander. Doesn't mean a whole lot at first glance, but it sure is purty. This is chapters 4 and 5 of my thesis (textexture choked on the whole thing):

(click to embiggen)

I’m almost done. About a month to oral defence. But, here are the tools I used to gather data, process it, whip up visualizations, and write the thesis:

• Papers (for storing the 598 papers I worked through during the process).¹²
• Dropbox (for having the files available on any computer I’m using, storing revisions, and making me not freak out about backups)³
• Noteshelf - best notebook iPad app I’ve used. Did CoI coding data in it. Tracked progress in it. Sketched visualization ideas in it. Etc…
• SurveyMonkey (for the online survey. wish I hadn’t used it, though, because I didn’t spring for a paid license and my data was trapped)
• a custom HTML page and CGI processor hosted by UCalgary for gathering ethics consent from participants
• Chrome (save web page… provided the online discussion archives)
• BBEdit (for processing the discussion archives)
• Excel (for storing the metadata and coding data, processing the data, and generating some visualizations)⁴
• Gephi (for playing with visualizing online communities - wound up dropping most of those from the thesis, though)
• OmniGraphSketcher (for creating many of the visualizations. FANTASTIC app for playing with data visualization)
• OmniGraffle Pro (for the concept map visualization and some supporting media)
• Acorn (for processing all graphics)
• iPhone Voice Recorder app (for recording instructor interview)
• VLC (for playing the instructor interview slowly without going mental)
• Word (for writing the thing)
• WordPress (category on my blog for running notes on journal articles)
• likely a handful of other handy apps thrown in for good measure

The irony… my thesis basically boils down to “it’s not the tool, it’s how you use it.” And I write a “these are the tools I used” post…

Gardner Campbell did the opening keynote at the Open Education 2012 conference in Vancouver this year. It was an inspiring call for us to snap out of the literal and measured stages of openness and implementation, and to take the supersonic bunny hop into something bigger. ¹

https://www.youtube.com/embed/kIzA4ItynYw

Watch the presentation. Take the bunny hop.

Then, he kicked out the jams in a studio session.

Then, of course, he did it again. On a boat. With the second keynoter (none other than John Willinsky) jamming along.

So it looks like Pearson sent a DMCA takedown notice to edublogs and their hosting provider. And edublogs' hosting provider crumbled and took down 1.4 million websites in response.

To be clear, Pearson didn't take anything down. I'm guessing a legal intern or bot followed an algorithm (search for known strings, run a Whois,
send email…). And the hosting provider, who should have told the legal intern to frack off and take their silly misguided takedown requests with them, decided to turn off websites rather than having to risk paying their own lawyers to fight the request.

Clarke, L, & Kinne, L. (2012). Asynchronous discussions as threaded discussions or blogs. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 29, 4-13.

The article looked at students publishing online discussions using Blackboard and WordPress, and their reported sense of community, etc…

Kinda perfect for use in my thesis.

But the article is embargoed from our library collection, and the ISTE website for the journal locks it behind a broken paywall. I've tried several times to buy the article, but can't get near it.

John sent this around. It's too awesome not to post.

yeah. my commute isn't quite like that…

but, with all of the awesome trick riding in the video, I was most stunned by the application of WD-40 at the end of the video. I mean, WHO DOES THAT? It's a solvent. No est bueno!

I just tried out the new PrivacyFix extension, which checks your privacy settings and also estimates how much Facebook and Google make off me each year.

Turns out, my privacy settings are pretty decent already. And, it looks like Google makes less than a dollar per year off me. Facebook makes nothing. The guy that wrote the article on Ars Technica clocks in at $700 per year going to Google, through advertising etc... Wow.

via Michael Geist - Educational Fair Dealing Policy Shows Why the Access Copyright Licence Provides Little Value.

Comparing the scope of the copying rights under fair dealing and the Access Copyright licence provides a good sense of why the licence now provides little value. Note that before considering either fair dealing or the Access Copyright licence, educational institutions will first rely on hundreds of site licenses that grant access to millions of articles and other materials or on the millions of open access works that are freely available online. Moreover, in the case of K-12 schools, an Access Copyright backed study found that 88% of books and other printed materials are copied with permission and without the need for a fair dealing analysis or an Access Copyright licence.