In my view, the work itself is a significant contribution. It also is a positive indicator about Pearson’s future direction as a participant in and influencer of that community, although how strong an indicator is a much harder question to evaluate. And it gives us another clue about the co-evolution of educational institutions and ed tech vendors that we are likely to see over the next years and decades. In this post, I’m going to evaluate each of these aspects in turn.
learning-design
Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Help Improve Teaching
Here’s a nifty video summary of a doctoral dissertation by Derek Muller that a client pointed out to me: The basic gist is that students have pre-conceived notions that are wrong, and it is very hard to dislodge those mistaken notions. If you show them a video with an accurate explanation, the students will say […]
Conversations About Learning Design
Some discussions have popped up recently on the Sakai Pedagogy discussion group that led to some interesting questions about the potential role of learning design (small “l”, small “d”) in higher education. Since the Sakai conversations tend to be technologist-heavy and teacher-light, I cross-posted a few of the foundational questions to the LAMS community: What […]
First Impression of Sakai 2.0: Better Than I Expected
Given that Sakai 1.5 was a feature-impoverished, unusable wreck, I fully expected 2.0 to be unusable as well. After spending half a day with it, I think it’s safe to say that I was wrong. While 2.0 is certainly not nearly as mature as other FOSS LMS’s such as dotLRN and Moodle, I think it […]
Learning Objects Aren't Legos, Part II
In my last post, I agreed with Stephen Downes that we have to be careful not to take our analogies too literally and specifically pointed out flaws in the “learning-object-as-software-object” analogy. Sometimes the best way to make sure an analogy doesn’t get too deeply rooted is to counter it with another analogy that causes just […]
Re-usable Learning Content Objects or Re-usable Learning Experience Objects?
Yesterday, Stephen Downes replied to my most recent post on educational pattern languages: Michael Feldstein is on the right track, mostly, with his exploration of the applicability of pettern language to learning. In this brief item, he asks, “Can we deduce sort of generative grammar of educational experience that enables us to string together these […]
Open Pedagogy
Carnegie Mellon (apparently sponsored by HP) has created an interesting twist on the MIT “open courseware” (OCW) model. I find the Open Learning Initiative to be interesting for several reasons: They are giving away not just content but also pedagogical models, which include “cognitive tutors,” “virtual laboratories,” group experiments, and simulations. They have focused on […]