Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
I was at the Santa Fe Institute on Friday, where they were filming for Melanie Mitchell's MOOC. Also, I have been getting into MOOs a bit lately, and noticed many were set up partially or fully for educational purposes; has anyone here some experience with how well they worked? Wikipedia lists the precursors of MOOCs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course (not to be confused with Mooks http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mooks) as things like Khan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_AcademyAcademy, so more recent endeavors. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors’ Big Stage
Here's the MIT News version of the conference Friedman attended, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/edx-summit-0306.html, via ACM TechNews. -- rec -- On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Barry MacKichan barry.mackic...@mackichan.com wrote: … Coming in at the tail of this (I have my mail program turned off most of the day), but I have a few comments. I'm still trying to get my head around the concept of a Socratic course delivered through a remote, time-shifted medium. Is it virtual-Socratic? meta-Socratic? voyeur-Socratic? Several courses in the math PhD program at Stanford had students paid to take official notes. It cost very little to Xerox these and save myself many hours. Some lectures were pretty useless, but I went for the sake of the ego of the lecturer. In a quarter course by Kunihiko Kodaira, I understood only two words; theolem and ploof. But he was a very nice, earnest man, as well as a Fields Medal winner. --Barry On Mar 6, 2013, at 8:31 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
And, alas, many university classes, especially in introductory courses at large universities, bear little resemblance to the kind of ideal situation Nick created and sustained but rather look a lot like Nick's nightmare. Bruce FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
I suspect it may be only the beginning of Nick's nightmare. There really are gifted people who can teach an exciting course to 1000 students. Any if 1000, why not 100,000 via a MOOC? Parents and students who are paying $40,000 and more for tuition may wonder about where their money is going if there are 200-1000 students in a class. It's also easy to find mediocre to poor MOOCs on the Internet. Although it's very unclear were MOOCs will wind up, it's important to note that the primary driver of the movement in most universities is not the quality that MOOCs might be able to deliver nor providing universal access but money. Boards of Regents and other governing bodies are pushing MOOCs as a cost reducing measure. The Chronicle of Higher Education is a good source for what has gone on at UVA and some other large universities. At Virginia, the President was forced to resign over the issue and was only returned to office after continuing protests by the faculty and students that were going in the direction of a strike. Some of what I see now reminds me of the hype when video courses became available. Schools including USC and Stanford offered MS degrees by video and a consortium of universities formed the National Television University (NTU). I did some of a course for USC and one for NTU. But the economics changed as did the technology and NTU is now defunct. That may be the way of MOOCs. Ed __ Ed Angel Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico 1017 Sierra Pinon Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-0136 (home) an...@cs.unm.edu 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Mar 7, 2013, at 8:19 AM, Bruce Sherwood wrote: And, alas, many university classes, especially in introductory courses at large universities, bear little resemblance to the kind of ideal situation Nick created and sustained but rather look a lot like Nick's nightmare. Bruce FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
Ed, I am curious to know what the folks on this list think an education consists in. For me, it consisted in (1) Many large lectures of which most were stultifying beyond belief, but of which a few were inspiring. (2)A few settings where I made direct contact with professors (or good TA;s) and was taught how to do stuff and my work was critiqued in meaningful ways. (3)Many, many interactions with very smart peers in which they taught me and I got to try my ideas out on them. Was your experience different from that? N From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Edward Angel Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2013 4:44 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage I suspect it may be only the beginning of Nick's nightmare. There really are gifted people who can teach an exciting course to 1000 students. Any if 1000, why not 100,000 via a MOOC? Parents and students who are paying $40,000 and more for tuition may wonder about where their money is going if there are 200-1000 students in a class. It's also easy to find mediocre to poor MOOCs on the Internet. Although it's very unclear were MOOCs will wind up, it's important to note that the primary driver of the movement in most universities is not the quality that MOOCs might be able to deliver nor providing universal access but money. Boards of Regents and other governing bodies are pushing MOOCs as a cost reducing measure. The Chronicle of Higher Education is a good source for what has gone on at UVA and some other large universities. At Virginia, the President was forced to resign over the issue and was only returned to office after continuing protests by the faculty and students that were going in the direction of a strike. Some of what I see now reminds me of the hype when video courses became available. Schools including USC and Stanford offered MS degrees by video and a consortium of universities formed the National Television University (NTU). I did some of a course for USC and one for NTU. But the economics changed as did the technology and NTU is now defunct. That may be the way of MOOCs. Ed __ Ed Angel Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico 1017 Sierra Pinon Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-0136 (home) an...@cs.unm.edu 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Mar 7, 2013, at 8:19 AM, Bruce Sherwood wrote: And, alas, many university classes, especially in introductory courses at large universities, bear little resemblance to the kind of ideal situation Nick created and sustained but rather look a lot like Nick's nightmare. Bruce FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
I only had 2 years of very large lectures freshman and sophomore years of college. My k12 and the rest of college consisted mostly of your (2), varying degrees of personal relationships with teachers. My (3) was limited because I'm a kook and don't play well with others. But the few peers I did interact with became lifelong teachers to me. I'm still friends with most of them. Frankly, I get very little out of lectures. If it's not interactive and exploratory, it's largely wasted on me. The only reason I survived my 1st two college years was because my high school classes covered much of that material and I was too chicken to try to test out of those classes. There was a horrifying bridge period the second half of my second year in college and much of my third year that tested my resolve. I did very poorly. Then it picked up quite a bit when I started taking classes where thought was valued over testing skills. Nicholas Thompson wrote at 03/07/2013 04:03 PM: I am curious to know what the folks on this list think an education consists in. For me, it consisted in (1) Many large lectures of which most were stultifying beyond belief, but of which a few were inspiring. (2)A few settings where I made direct contact with professors (or good TA;s) and was taught how to do stuff and my work was critiqued in meaningful ways. (3)Many, many interactions with very smart peers in which they taught me and I got to try my ideas out on them. Was your experience different from that? -- == glen e. p. ropella I came up from the ground, i came down from the sky, FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
I was an undergrad at Caltech. Although there were only 200 new students each year, for all the beginning science and math classes, we were all put in one lecture. So I agree with (1). There were Nobel laureates (Pauling and Feynman) who were inspiring but most lectures were stultifying and had no correlation with the research of the lecturer (one of the fallacies universities like to propagate). I mostly agree with (2) although we had some truly awful TAs. (3) was what mattered and is most of what I remember most and is still my tie to my undergraduate education.. If there was any correlation, it was that in a major research institution, very few faculty truly care about undergrads, especially those who are struggling. There are some but they are few and far between. When I was at USC and Berkeley it was very similar. In my 30 years at UNM, I think UNM did what many other large universities have done in moving towards a research orientation and thus the percentage of faculty who both want to and can put in a significant amount of time to undergraduate education has gone down. Personally I find that factor overrides the large vs small class issue. Ed __ Ed Angel Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico 1017 Sierra Pinon Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-0136 (home) an...@cs.unm.edu 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Mar 7, 2013, at 5:03 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Ed, I am curious to know what the folks on this list think an education consists in. For me, it consisted in (1) Many large lectures of which most were stultifying beyond belief, but of which a few were inspiring. (2)A few settings where I made direct contact with professors (or good TA;s) and was taught how to do stuff and my work was critiqued in meaningful ways. (3)Many, many interactions with very smart peers in which they taught me and I got to try my ideas out on them. Was your experience different from that? N From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Edward Angel Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2013 4:44 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage I suspect it may be only the beginning of Nick's nightmare. There really are gifted people who can teach an exciting course to 1000 students. Any if 1000, why not 100,000 via a MOOC? Parents and students who are paying $40,000 and more for tuition may wonder about where their money is going if there are 200-1000 students in a class. It's also easy to find mediocre to poor MOOCs on the Internet. Although it's very unclear were MOOCs will wind up, it's important to note that the primary driver of the movement in most universities is not the quality that MOOCs might be able to deliver nor providing universal access but money. Boards of Regents and other governing bodies are pushing MOOCs as a cost reducing measure. The Chronicle of Higher Education is a good source for what has gone on at UVA and some other large universities. At Virginia, the President was forced to resign over the issue and was only returned to office after continuing protests by the faculty and students that were going in the direction of a strike. Some of what I see now reminds me of the hype when video courses became available. Schools including USC and Stanford offered MS degrees by video and a consortium of universities formed the National Television University (NTU). I did some of a course for USC and one for NTU. But the economics changed as did the technology and NTU is now defunct. That may be the way of MOOCs. Ed __ Ed Angel Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab) Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico 1017 Sierra Pinon Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-0136 (home) an...@cs.unm.edu 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel On Mar 7, 2013, at 8:19 AM, Bruce Sherwood wrote: And, alas, many university classes, especially in introductory courses at large universities, bear little resemblance to the kind of ideal situation Nick created and sustained but rather look a lot like Nick's nightmare. Bruce FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
I had roughly equal numbers of lectures and tutorial sessions at Reed for two years, almost entirely tutorials from then on. Math was entirely taught in tutorial sessions. All tutorials were led by professors or advanced undergraduates. All lecture courses had a tutorial component. Most of the people at a college are your fellow students so you're bound to have a lot of interactions with them. What proportion of those interactions are educational or Educational or not worth remembering surely varies a great deal. Richard Hamming had damning words for entertaining lecturers, he felt they invariably cheated. The experience of listening to them lecture was always followed by the disheartening discovery that you had no idea how to do X, even though X should have been covered right between W and Y in the lecture. The lecturer omits X because it's messy and it spoils his delivery. -- rec -- -- rec -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
Just curious - how many of you have actually signed up for and completed a MOOC? If the answer is not yet, then consider jumping onto Scott Pages excellent model thinking course that is just starting. Curt https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking On Mar 7, 2013 6:19 PM, glen g...@ropella.name wrote: I only had 2 years of very large lectures freshman and sophomore years of college. My k12 and the rest of college consisted mostly of your (2), varying degrees of personal relationships with teachers. My (3) was limited because I'm a kook and don't play well with others. But the few peers I did interact with became lifelong teachers to me. I'm still friends with most of them. Frankly, I get very little out of lectures. If it's not interactive and exploratory, it's largely wasted on me. The only reason I survived my 1st two college years was because my high school classes covered much of that material and I was too chicken to try to test out of those classes. There was a horrifying bridge period the second half of my second year in college and much of my third year that tested my resolve. I did very poorly. Then it picked up quite a bit when I started taking classes where thought was valued over testing skills. Nicholas Thompson wrote at 03/07/2013 04:03 PM: I am curious to know what the folks on this list think an education consists in. For me, it consisted in (1) Many large lectures of which most were stultifying beyond belief, but of which a few were inspiring. (2)A few settings where I made direct contact with professors (or good TA;s) and was taught how to do stuff and my work was critiqued in meaningful ways. (3)Many, many interactions with very smart peers in which they taught me and I got to try my ideas out on them. Was your experience different from that? -- == glen e. p. ropella I came up from the ground, i came down from the sky, FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
Why? On Mar 7, 2013 9:03 PM, Curt McNamara curt...@gmail.com wrote: Just curious - how many of you have actually signed up for and completed a MOOC? If the answer is not yet, then consider jumping onto Scott Pages excellent model thinking course that is just starting. Curt https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking On Mar 7, 2013 6:19 PM, glen g...@ropella.name wrote: I only had 2 years of very large lectures freshman and sophomore years of college. My k12 and the rest of college consisted mostly of your (2), varying degrees of personal relationships with teachers. My (3) was limited because I'm a kook and don't play well with others. But the few peers I did interact with became lifelong teachers to me. I'm still friends with most of them. Frankly, I get very little out of lectures. If it's not interactive and exploratory, it's largely wasted on me. The only reason I survived my 1st two college years was because my high school classes covered much of that material and I was too chicken to try to test out of those classes. There was a horrifying bridge period the second half of my second year in college and much of my third year that tested my resolve. I did very poorly. Then it picked up quite a bit when I started taking classes where thought was valued over testing skills. Nicholas Thompson wrote at 03/07/2013 04:03 PM: I am curious to know what the folks on this list think an education consists in. For me, it consisted in (1) Many large lectures of which most were stultifying beyond belief, but of which a few were inspiring. (2)A few settings where I made direct contact with professors (or good TA;s) and was taught how to do stuff and my work was critiqued in meaningful ways. (3)Many, many interactions with very smart peers in which they taught me and I got to try my ideas out on them. Was your experience different from that? -- == glen e. p. ropella I came up from the ground, i came down from the sky, FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
To see what a MOOC is like, Ruth Chabay and I took the Udacity CS 101 course. We were impressed by the course design. The description of the course said that In about 7 weeks you will build a small search engine, even if you've never written a computer program before. This goal statement is very clear and very challenging. All through the course, new CS concepts were introduced in a way that made it clear how the concept would serve the course goal, thereby providing motivation and continuity. The blackboard presentations were clear, and frequently interrupted by the equivalent of clicker questions used in large lectures in many universities now (the students have simple handheld wireless devices to respond to multiple-choice questions). The programming language was Python, which is a particularly good choice for novices. Homework consisted of writing functions that took sample input and produced specified output. We uploaded our functions, which were run on input data unknown to us and marked correct if all the inputs produced the correct outputs. There were occasional breaks in the action to discuss questions that had been raised in a forum. The instructor, David Evans, was excellent in his presentation and choice of examples. All in all, a class act. We went through the whole course out of curiosity, and we too were occasionally challenged by extra challenge problems that were not required. Bruce On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:03 PM, Curt McNamara curt...@gmail.com wrote: Just curious - how many of you have actually signed up for and completed a MOOC? If the answer is not yet, then consider jumping onto Scott Pages excellent model thinking course that is just starting. Curt https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
I forgot to mention that a few months ago Ruth started the Scott Page course with high expectations but eventually dropped it with disappointment. However, she perceived that Page didn't receive nearly the kind of infrastructure support that Evans had received from Udacity, at least in that first offering. In any case, Your results may differ. Bruce On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:03 PM, Curt McNamara curt...@gmail.com wrote: Just curious - how many of you have actually signed up for and completed a MOOC? If the answer is not yet, then consider jumping onto Scott Pages excellent model thinking course that is just starting. Curt https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] The Professors’ Big Stage
Interesting MOOC discussion .. starting with one of the best courses I've taken, Michael Sandel's political philosophy course Justice. I'm sending a scrape of the NYT page due to their limited access policy. The last sentence is the key: When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over. Guess we all gotta get special to keep up! -- Owen The Professors’ Big StageBy THOMAS L. FRIEDMANhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.htmlPublished: March 5, 2013 421 Commentshttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?hp_r=0#commentsContainer - FACEBOOK - TWITTER - GOOGLE+ - SAVE - E-MAIL - SHARE - PRINThttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?hp_r=0pagewanted=print - REPRINTS - I just spent the last two days at a great conference convened by M.I.T. and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” — a k a “How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my kid can learn it all free from massive open online courses?” Josh Haner/The New York Times Thomas L. Friedman Go to Columnist Page »http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html [image: Opinion Twitter Logo.] Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion https://twitter.com/#!/nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYThttps://twitter.com/#!/andyrNYT . Readers’ Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. - Read All Comments (421) »http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?hp_r=0#comments You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers. “Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas. Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players.” O.K., not every professor will develop a global following, but the MOOCs revolution, which will go through many growing pains, is here and is real. These were my key take-aways from the conference: ¶Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency. ¶Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor. There seemed to be a strong consensus that this “blended model” combining online lectures with a teacher-led classroom experience was the ideal. Last fall, San Jose State used the online lectures and interactive exercises of M.I.T.’s introductory online Circuits and Electronics course. Students would watch the M.I.T. lectures and do the exercises at home, and then come to class, where the first 15 minutes were reserved for questions and answers with the San Jose State professor, and the last 45 were devoted to problem solving and discussion. Preliminary
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors’ Big Stage
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 7:31 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. I think the most interesting line is, increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. *-- Russ Abbott* *_* *** Professor, Computer Science* * California State University, Los Angeles* * My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688* * Google voice: 747-*999-5105 Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/ * vita: *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/ CS Wiki http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/ and the courses I teach *_* FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
Owen, Something tells me Celebrity Professor Thing is not going to end well. It is the TEDdification of higher education. Vast numbers of silent people, sitting in the dark, watching somebody on a vast stage, in brilliant illumination, before a huge screen THINK FOR THEM. Now, you would be right to suspect some sour grapes on my part, a professor who always strutted a very small stage. I could never lecture like this. I just didnt have the gift. I could question, and offer quixotic examples, and connect what two students had said, or ask a third to make a connection. I could even, when I was at my very best, let long silences fall in the room until the students realized that what was important was what they were thinking, not what I was about to say. So of course I am inclined to think that that sort of retail activity is essential to education. What you describe here sounds more like the Nuremburg Rallies, than higher education. Nick From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 8:31 PM To: Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] The Professors Big Stage Interesting MOOC discussion .. starting with one of the best courses I've taken, Michael Sandel's political philosophy course Justice. I'm sending a scrape of the NYT page due to their limited access policy. The last sentence is the key: When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over. Guess we all gotta get special to keep up! -- Owen The Professors Big Stage By http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/tho maslfriedman/index.html THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: March 5, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage .html?hp_r=0#commentsContainer 421 Comments ·FACEBOOK ·TWITTER ·GOOGLE+ ·SAVE ·E-MAIL ·SHARE · http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage .html?hp_r=0pagewanted=print PRINT ·REPRINTS · I just spent the last two days at a great conference convened by M.I.T. and Harvard on Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education a k a How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my kid can learn it all free from massive open online courses? http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/09/16/opinion/Friedman_New/Friedma n_New-articleInline.jpg Josh Haner/The New York Times Thomas L. Friedman http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/tho maslfriedman/index.html Go to Columnist Page » Opinion Twitter Logo. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/opinion/Twitter_Avatars/NYT_Twitter_opi nion.png Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow https://twitter.com/#!/nytopinion @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow https://twitter.com/#!/andyrNYT @andyrNYT. Readers Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. · http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage .html?hp_r=0#comments Read All Comments (421) » You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student Justice course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers. Where did you get those? I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas. Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players. O.K., not every professor will develop a global following, but the MOOCs revolution, which will go through many growing pains, is here and is real. These were my key take-aways from the conference: ¶Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of time served to a model of stuff learned. Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what
