So for the second year in a row, for the Class Central blog, I’ve posted a fictitious article on April Fool’s Day. Last year, it was making fun of Coursera, edX, and other MOOC providers by describing a shameless product they introduced to make money. This year’s was much more interesting. It posited that Michael Scott of ‘The Office’ (played by actor Steve Carrell) took MOOCs and was interviewed by […]
Of all the burdens we have to bear in modern society, one of the ones that is growing most is information overload. This is something that has been pointed out for years, and yet new information content is growing–let’s say rapidly (I was going to say exponentially, but I’m not sure if that’s strictly true). Now of course, I think this is a net good thing. I’m sure we’ve all […]
One of the projects I am involved in is creating an educational card game for kids called Go Extinct! Yes, its physical cards. The idea is that the game is similar to Go Fish, but instead of using regular playing cards, the cards are based on animals from the evolutionary tree. How is this educational? Three ways: a) Players learn about different animal species, based on beautiful original artwork […]
I spent this week at SXSWedu, my first time. It was exciting and quite inspiring. The conference is huge, so much so that if you talked with someone, there’s no guarantee you will run into them again the rest of the 4-day conference. There is an interesting mix of academic researchers, policy folks, nonprofits, ed tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and foundations. They all have different perspectives on education (which often, […]
One of the recent trends I’ve seen in business over the past decade is an increasing reliance on “data”. You hear people talking about basing decisions on data, ‘crunching the numbers’, doing A/B testing, etc. This doesn’t guarantee being free from bias (indeed, flimsy rationalizations often cite ‘data’), but this is better than thinking that relying on our gut instincts is the best way to go. We’ve learned enough from […]
Most reasonable people nowadays acknowledge that prejudice is a bad thing. But it is such a strong, persistent force that we need to constantly guard ourselves against it. It is so natural, this desire to identify with a group and disparage non-group members. We’ve learned more about this aspect of human behavior (via findings from psychology and cognitive science that are finally reaching the mainstream), and so many of us […]
The traditional paradigm for learning is structured education only while we are young. But, life expectancies are rising, we are cognitively fit longer, and the world is more complex. Accordingly, the ways we learn are starting to evolve… There are two major learning platform types online: for content creation (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube’s education channel, the growth of MOOCs) and content curation (e.g. Facebook, Pinterest, Scoop.it, etc.). Blogs commonly span both, making […]
I recently completed my first Learnist board, collecting reviews of each of Ishiguro’s six novels. He is primarily famous for ‘Remains of the Day‘, but his other works are also really well-written and compelling. His writing is famous for his emotionally-repressed ‘unreliable narrators’, his poignant writing style highlighting the interior mental life, and his demonstration of the weakness of memory. Learnist, if you are not familiar with it, is sort […]
Here is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Professor Joseph Konstan on his upcoming MOOC about recommendation engines/systems, which has more than 20,000 people signed up. It starts today, is free & open to anyone online, and is also the source of lectures for his semester-long on-campus class at the University of Minnesota. He’s an early pioneer in this space, and the class should be highly informative. People […]
Do you blog or want to blog about nonfiction books you’ve read? If so, do you lean more towards summarizing their content or providing your commentary/reactions to the book? How do you find that balance? There are many ways to go about this depending on your purpose as well as your personal style. I have an approach that works for me which I’ll share. I tend to lean towards summarizing […]
To Notice and to Learn 