Assyntk's List: EDCMOOC

• My students and I aren’t the only ones who thought this.  Via the EDC MOOC News blog I came across this post by Sandra K. Milligan, “Better than a Tarantino movie: raw peer assessment in #edcmooc.” After dis

  • Would this kind of discussion be possible at all in a locked down course where the post frequency and possibly content was policed. Would people speak up at all???
• Most of my students posted a link to their projects in this discussion on the class web site or on their blogs

  • Why did you not use some other way of aggregating them in the open??? Why didn't they? Were they afraid to like the course or be independent because you were disdainful of it? Where do you aggregate your student blogs???? Did you engage with their blogs around the course?
• give actual college credit.

  • I hardly think that this aprticular mooc was about gaining or giving any college credit. learning happens without credit al the time. it is not just via the discovery trips for interest only. if you can develop a portfolio of evidence around the informal learning opps (CPD) this does count as good evidence on which you can actually get a job. Perhaps with open ed opps and showcasing of your learning tools we will get rid of the silly need to go to courses just to get a piece of paper. My brother had to for a job although he knew all that the course was supposed to teach him but the silly employer did not trust the non-cert evidence!!! Fed up with writing somebody elses' essays so that I can get the said piece of paper after jumping through somebody elses' hoops. I want to learn what I want to learn.
• If I was teaching sixth grade I would ask more from my students in five weeks.

  • And yet you still got 1.5/2.0 on the assignment;) Obviously you did not manage to get it so easily;) Or perhaps not reading the assessment spec carefully enough;)
• what is “this” in the grading language in relation to the five different criteria? 

  • not easy to disentangle criteria and get consistency even with experienced markers. Making it simple makes it doable for beginners. The marking was actually also supposed to be learning for you - what did you learn from doing your marking?
• By the way, I earned a 1.5, I think because that jerk “peer 1″ probably dinged me on the grade with a 0 or some such thing.

  • So is the reason why you are not talking about the peer assessment you conducted is because you ended up being a jerk to others?
    Also not a good way to build respect and trust with your peers by calling them jerks because you think they are wrong....

  • So after all you cannot do it in 10 minutes and get a top score. Perhaps the meh is about you the prof of elearning not able to 'get' the simplistic course which you percieve as 10 min experience....meh;)
• but give participants a “home” where they have a chance to actually connect with others. S

  • welll - there was nothing stopping you from creating a group for your own students or getting them to create a group - out there and outside of the Coursera vle;) Lots of others did!
• Make participation “count.”  C

  • Then you are restricting partisipation to the shitty forums and restrict the types of participation - you are effectively closing the MOOC
•  I mean, if students don’t have a chance to react to the assessment on this artifact with a revision or a new project, there’s not much of a chance for the student to do anything differently–aka “learn” something.

  • E.g. interpreting the movies every week gave you much opportunity to practice 'image analysis' and work out how to convey messages visually?

  • THere were several opportunities and continuous chances to get practice and feedback from peers throughout the course - it just relied on the students taking the initiative to do it!
• Hold evaluators accountable.

  • Only because you have not gotten 2 on your assignment it does not mean that your peers were wrong;)

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• I found this lonely comment on one of the #edcmooc Coursera forums (this is just an example of many orphaned voices out there). Still no reply after 3 weeks. Alone in the crowd. And there are all of those who never did dare ask... - assyntk on 2013-02-27

• Transhumanists  view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn  to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution.  Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other  rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly  greater capacities than present human beings have.

  • humans are NOT an end point or even a pinnacle of evolution. we are evolving whether we want it or not. transhumanism seems to be about wanting to accelerate and control the direction of evolution which in essence is a futile endevour. Sigh.
• Some  transhumanists take active steps to increase the probability that they personally  will survive long enough to become posthuman, for example by choosing a healthy  lifestyle or by making provisions for having themselves cryonically suspended  in case of de-animation

  • yes - the singularity guys!!!
• Transhumanism  does not entail technological optimism
• intelligent  life becoming extinct
• widening social  inequalities or a gradual erosion of the hard-to-quantify assets that we care  deeply about but tend to neglect in our daily struggle for material gain, such  as meaningful human relationships and ecological diversity
• roots in secular humanist thinking
• Human limitations

  • greed just emanates from this - we want to take up more of the potential space more!!!
• Lifespan.
• For gardeners, educators, scholars, artists, city planners, and those  who simply relish observing and participating in the cultural or political variety  shows of life, three scores and ten is often insufficient for seeing even one  major project through to completion, let alone for undertaking many such projects  in sequence.
• Intellectual  capacity
• Some of these  – such as forgetting to buy milk or failing to attain native fluency in languages  you learn as an adult – are obvious and require no elaboration
• A more radical  kind of upgrade might be possible if we suppose a computational view of the mind.  It may then be possible to upload a human mind to a computer, by replicating in  silico the detailed computational processes that would normally take place  in a particular human brain.[4] Being an upload would have many  potential advantages, such as the ability to make back-up copies of oneself (favorably  impacting on one’s life-expectancy) and the ability to transmit oneself as information  at the speed of light. Uploads might live either in virtual reality or directly  in physical reality by controlling a robot proxy.

  • including the simulated afterlife idea

  • I think this is what Ian Banks explores wonderfully in the culture novels
• Sensory  modalities, special faculties and sensibilities

  • telepathy?

  • funny how individualistic all these are really - get a good fuck and be able to slim down at will - really this is your ambition? there is nothing about empathy and caring and altruism. Or even communication - hello boys you always complain about not being able to understand women. Or how about being photosynthetic ...(wanted to say something else here but the thought evaporated)
• sensibilities such as the capacity for sexual arousal in response  to erotic stimuli. Again, there is no reason to think that what we have exhausts  the range of the possible, and we can certainly imagine higher levels of sensitivity  and responsiveness.

  • boys will be boys.
• Our cognitive limitations may be confining us in a Platonic cave,  where the best we can do is theorize about “shadows”, that is, representations  that are sufficiently oversimplified and dumbed-down to fit inside a human brain.
• the transhumanist view that we ought to explore the realm of posthuman  values does not entail that we should forego our current values
• our biological limitations

  • Our biological limitations are not just ours - they are the limitation of the world we live in! Also once you evolve you will not be able to control how transhumans treat humans or indeed the world. If onlt their sex drive is enhanced alongside their ability to control world resources wtf can we expect from that kind of set up? The world as a massive sex toy? No thanks.
• A similar predicament arises within transhumanism: if the mode of being of a posthuman  being is radically different from that of a human being, then we may doubt whether  a posthuman being could be the same person as a human being, even if the posthuman  being originated from a human being.

  • Many of these questions seem irrelevant concerns as once we evolve into transhumans they will be replaced by the transhuman concerns. Also they assume we have control and choice over evolution. Hah.
• We  can, however, envision many enhancements that would not make it impossible for  the post-transformation someone to be the same person as the pre-transformation  person. A person could obtain quite a bit of increased life expectancy, intelligence,  health, memory, and emotional sensitivity, without ceasing to exist in the process.  A person’s intellectual life can be transformed radically by getting an education.
• Yet these developments are not viewed as spelling  the end of the original person. In particular, it seems that modifications that  add to a person’s capacities can be more substantial than modifications that subtract,  such as brain damage. If most of someone currently is, including her most important  memories, activities, and feelings, is preserved, then adding extra capacities  on top of that would not easily cause the person to cease to exist.
• Transhumanism  promotes the quest to develop further so that we can explore hitherto inaccessible  realms of value
• There are limits to how much can be achieved by  low-tech means such as education, philosophical contemplation, moral self-scrutiny  and other such methods

  • i.e. we will just take a pill or get a tech fix to replace any effort which may be required for personal improvement (no realy consideration of the social improvement?)

  • Oh dear.
• unacceptable existential risks

  • lol
• disasters and setbacks are inevitable in the implementation  of the transhumanist project
• Existential  risk – one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating  intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential

  • so it is ok to annihilate all other non-intelligent life then? all in the name of a better orgasm?????
• Since technological progress  is closely linked to economic development, economic growth – or more precisely,  productivity growth – can in some cases serve as a proxy for technological progress.

  • so basically develop tech at any cost, including sucking all of the non-renewable resources out of the ground...what then? oh perhaps we will need to go back to biology ?
• The  history of economic and technological development, and the concomitant growth  of civilization, is appropriately regarded with awe, as humanity’s most glorious  achievement

  • not by all my dear not by all
• It would be sub-optimal if the  opportunity to become posthuman were restricted to a tiny elite.

  • only sub-optimal, eh?
• a number of derivative transhumanist values that  translate the transhumanist vision into practice
• individual freedom and  individual choice

  • no vision of what society/community we would like then. just everybody out for themselves...
• we need  to be wary of collective decision-making in the field of human modification
• put ourselves in a better position to make wise choices  about where we are going
• On an individual level, we can  benefit from education, critical thinking, open-mindedness, study techniques,  information technology, and perhaps memory- or attention-enhancing drugs and other  cognitive enhancement technologies.

  • education/current tech to enhance our wisdom for decision-making re: transhumanism
• expanding the rule of law and democracy on the international  plane.
• promoting international peace and cooperation
• Improvements  in surveillance technology

  • gasp
• Transhumanism advocates  the well-being of all sentience, whether in artificial intellects, humans, and  non-human animals (including extraterrestrial species, if there are any).

  • what about plants and fish and such. ok to devour/stampede over in our quest for better orgasm?
• development of moral sentiments
• Finally,  transhumanism stresses the moral urgency of saving lives, or, more precisely,  of preventing involuntary deaths among people whose lives are worth living.

  • who says that somebody's life is worth living?

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• interesting that biology is perceived as a limitation and yet so much of tech progress depends on copying it. including tech for information storage which is now trying DNA-based solutions. - assyntk on 2013-02-21

• In 1922 Thomas Edison proclaimed, “I believe the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.” Thus began a long string of spectacularly wrong predictions regarding the capacity of various technologies to revolutionize education.

  • I love this example of predictions of how transforming the tech really is;)
• The goal is twofold: to provide children with the computer skills necessary to flourish in a high-tech world and to give them access to tools and information that will enhance their learning in subjects like mathematics and history.
• find little evidence that making technology more available leads to higher student achievement in core subjects
• Larry Cuban writes in Oversold and Underused, “There have been no advances (measured by higher academic achievement of urban, suburban, or rural students) over the past decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers. . . . The link between test-score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested.
• . The problem with framing the issue merely as a question of whether technology boosts test scores is that it fails to address the interaction between technology and the values learned in school. In short, we need to ask what kind of learning tends to take place with the computer and what kind gets left out.

  • Nice echo of Hargaddon and Watters talk from 11 Feb 2013 - question whether tech is not reinforcing/making more efficient the flaws in the systeme.g. standardised testing which is blamed for a lot...
• A computer can inundate a child with mountains of information. However, all of this learning takes place the same way: through abstract symbols, decontextualized and cast on a two-dimensional screen. Contrast that with the way children come to know a tree–by peeling its bark, climbing its branches, sitting under its shade, jumping into its piled-up leaves. Just as important, these firsthand experiences are enveloped by feelings and associations–muscles being used, sun warming the skin, blossoms scenting the air. The computer cannot even approximate any of this.

  • I was thinking this about this exactly when watching the vid ad for the digital glass display
• . For smaller children especially, that relationship is as physical as it is mental. Rousseau pointed out long ago that the child’s first and most important teacher is his hands. Every time I walk through a store with my sons and grow tired of saying, “Don’t touch that!” I am reminded of Rousseau’s wisdom.

  • even if it was as effective as each other - is digital really better than hands on in terms of cheaper, more practical? Because we can approximate the experience should be replace one with the other? I know it is quite exciting for us that we can simulate things to that extent but that is not a reason we should get lost in revelling about it;)

  • Wonderful!!
• all of the information gushing through our electronic networks is abstract
• As social critic Theodore Roszak states in The Cult of Information, “An excess of information may actually crowd out ideas, leaving the mind (young minds especially) distracted by sterile, disconnected facts, lost among the shapeless heaps of data.”

  • This is certainly the feeling I am getting in a MOOC;)
• McLuhan understood that the consumption and manipulation of symbolic, abstract information is not an adequate substitute for concrete, firsthand involvement with objects, people, nature, and community, for it ignores the child’s primary educational need–to make meaning out of experience.

  • Actually, since when education was primarily about concrete first hand experience of the world. We have been using txt and images as abstractions for the real world and ideas for EVER. Not a new thing.
    AND the world at large has changed in character. It is overloaded with information. Surely our responsibility to our children is to try to help them cope with it - give them a guidance on what we think is important in being human. They already are different from us - they are the next gen. We cannot keep them with us forever - we need to prepare to let them go and take humanity into the future...
    [chuckle]
• , computers can simulate experience

  • So they are not a simulation - they are the reality, not the only reality but a reality.

  • Computers/digital have become a very large part of experience.
• , which lies not in the computational capabilities of the pioneers but in their determination, courage, ingenuity, and faith as they overcame extreme conditions and their almost constant miscalculations. Because the com

  • Hang on are u suggesting that using computers makes you less couragous and persistent and inventive???? Hm -one example - Aaron Shwarz...
• McLuhan called this process amplification and amputation. He used the microphone as an example. The microphone can liter.ally amplify one’s voice, but in doing so it reduces the speaker’s need to exercise his own lung power. Thus one’s inner capacities may atrophy.
• technology’s circumventing the developmental process: the student who uses a spell checker instead of learning to spell, the student who uses a calculator instead of learning to add–young people sacrificing internal growth for external power.

  • I guess - wolleee is an excellent example of taking this idea to its conclusion;)
• We know that face-to-face conversation is a crucial element in the development of both oral and written communication skills.

  • yep - but ipads do a wonderful job as well;)
• Television and computers, on the other hand, generally require nothing more than the passive acceptance of prefabricated images.

  • Aaah so passive consumtion of media is at fault here (which would include reading books btw). Perhaps web 2.0 where you are expected to create comtent as well as consuming it gets over this objection?;)
• Teaching them the computer skills was the easy part. What I was not able to provide were the rich and varied firsthand experiences students needed in order to connect the abstract symbols they had to manipulate on the screen to the world around them. Students with scant computer experience but rich ideas and life experiences were, by the end of the year, generating sophisticated relational databases, designing marketable websites, and creating music videos. Ironically, it was the students who had curtailed their time climbing the trees, rolling the dough, and conversing with friends and adults in order to become computer “wizards” who typically had the most trouble finding creative things to do with the computer.
• For that purpose, the computer wizards in my class seemed particularly ill prepared.

  • Ok - so now you are self-contradictory. First you claim it is students with rich life experiences and social interactions that suceeded as computer wizards but in the next breath you say that these were the ones who had real problems with prep for life????????!!!
• What the computers-are-just-tools argument ignores is the ecological nature of powerful technologies–that is, their introduction into an environment reconstitutes all of the relationships in that environment
• the more prominent we make computers in schools (and in our own lives), the more we see the rapid accumulation, manipulation, and sharing of information as central to the learning process–edging out the contemplation and expression of ideas and the gradual development of meaningful connections to the world.
• Its growing dominance is witnessed in the language that abounds in education: talk of empowerment, student control of learning, standards, assessment tools, and productivity. Almost gone from the conversation are those inner concerns–wisdom, truth, character, imagination, creativity, and meaning–that once formed the core values of education. Outcomes have replaced insights as the yardstick of learning, while standardized tests are replacing human judgment as the means of assessment. No tool supports this technological shift more than computers.

  • Chicken and egg? surely standardisation pre-dated the computer introduction?? It is the very basis of the 'industrial' education?
• We must help our young people develop the considerable moral and ethical strength needed to resist abusing the enormous power these machines give them

  • I guess the computer has teh capacity to amplify the nasty - digital bullying flaming etc. But it also makes it more visible (why do you think so many pedophiles get caught these days compared to the past)

  • I guess there this is where digital citizenship comes in??
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  • • ehm.
• Trying to teach a student to use the power of computer technology appropriately without those moral and ethical traits is like trying to grow a tree without roots.
• Our attempts to use powerful machines to accelerate or remediate learning are part of a pattern that sacrifices the growth of our children’s inner resources and deep connectedness to community for the ability to extend their power outward into the world.
• Whereas the intellectual focus of schools in the rural society of the 19th century compensated for a childhood steeped in nature and concrete activity, balance today requires a reversal of roles, with schools compensating for the overly abstract, symbolic, and artificial environment that children experience outside of school.

  • Interesting idea - good for visual!!
• But computer-based learning needs to grow out of years of concrete experience and a fundamental appreciatio

  • What about the idea of children learning more naturally the earlier you expose them e.g. language. If its left too late they will find it harder?
• By concentrating high technology in the upper grades, we honor the natural developmental stages of childhood

  • And why do kids work out how to use remotes by themselves - perhaps it's all natural at this stage?? It's only later we see the new things as unnatural as we did not grow up with them??
• Schools that see their job as preparing young people to meet the demands of a technology-driven world merely embrace and advance the idea that human needs are no longer our highest priority, that we must adapt to meet the demands of our machines.

  • I like the idea that the educators mus question the trajectory of society/tech rather than just passively adapting to its demands...
• technology-awareness programs that help young people think about, not just with, technology
• Filling schools with computers will not help find the answers to why the freest nation in the world has the highest percentage of citizens behind bars or why the wealthiest nation in history condemns a sixth of its children to poverty

  • but as you say they can be powerful so perhaps they can be used to answer these questions/solve these problems;)

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• Curious that he does not mention books in this argument at all - but some of his objections to computers can be equally applied to books - assyntk on 2013-02-16

• The technology that allows me to see Hersh’s face as he speaks to me is not new.

  • NB most ppl chose not use vid in their comms (after the initial period of excitement) - but perhaps important for us to establish a visual image of smbd and thereafter we can imagine them better)
• believes it may hold the key to solving an old problem that has plagued distance education since its beginnings: the retention gap.

  • BUT - ppl now mantain presence via other media on the routine basis. Just using these does the same trick of establishing a personal connection. Perhaps new media but plugging into the natural/innate instincts
• Hersh says the human-touch problem can be solved.
• solution is to incorporate more video and audio components into the course-delivery mechanism
• professors to use video of themselves to teach or interact with their online students -- largely because the purveyors of major learning management systems do not orient their platforms to feature that method of delivery
• he company is less focused on audio- and video-based interactivity than on promoting “engagement in general,” in accordance with numerous studies that link high engagement to low dropout rates
• “There is no question in my mind, based on work on social presence over 15 years, that if you increase interaction between humans, you can increase and enhance engagement, comfort and, eventually, retention,
• Hersh studied the satisfaction and completion rates of a sample of 145 students in his “presence”-oriented learning environment compared to a similar sample taking their courses through a “traditional” LMS. That research “demonstrate[d] that students feel more satisfied in their online courses when they feel engaged through human presence design,” Hersh wrote in a summary provided to Inside Higher Ed. “Further… students who find intrinsic satisfaction in their human presence courses tend to complete them at hi
• “illusion of non-mediation,” a term he borrowed from virtual-presence scholars Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton. When students are able to see the face of the instructor who is guiding them through a course, they are more likely to trust that professor, and they feel more invested in the course

  • interesting idea
    and trust is crucial!
    AND I can say from own experience that on recent courses it works! But does not need to be use vid for all lectures type of thing - esp that it adds to the cost and dev time!
• a cost: The text-based medium that currently dominates online learning environments may eliminate the prejudices and distractions inherent to visual communication, making conversations in text-based learning environments more focused
• But communicating solely via text is also alienatin
• “The learner-instructor interaction is the most critical one to the success of the learning experience,” for not only instructional but also emotional reasons
• the overall design of online courses — not just the tools involved in delivery — still have the greatest bearing on whether a course is effective.

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