Tag Archives: network

TWEET: What we’re learning from online education

“Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary”

This quote from NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman sets the scene for this TED talk from Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera.

The talk is relevant to both the community culture and algorithm cultures of this course.  From a community perspective Koller describes cultural norms in MOOCs that we have also seen develop during this course, including students asking  and answering each others questions and forming into smaller study groups of their own volition.

From an analytics  perspective Koller talks about the way massive open online courses have enabled turning “the study of human learning from a hypothesis driven mode to the data driven mode”.  Koller states that the data Coursera collects enables fundamental questions such as “what are good learning strategies versus ones that are not” to be examined.  She also talks about the personalisation that is possible by virtue of having large volumes of data available, making it easier to spot anomalies and address them with targeted guidance for students.

Interestingly she doesn’t see MOOCs making traditional universities  obsolete, but calls upon them to move away from the lecture based format and embrace active learning.

She finishes with a vision of the possibilities that online education brings for fundamental change in the world.

TWEET: Got to love these spam comments

Tin of spam
“A can of spam. SPAM is made up of “Shoulder of Pork and Ham and was a World War 2 favourite, it’s also a term used to describe irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc. “

As the old saying goes “Flattery will get you everywhere” and that was clearly the tactic behind three of the latest ‘spam’ comments on my Lifestream blog.

I’m not going to approve them and no doubt others on the course have received the same or similar, but I thought I’d share today’s crop as they’re strangely life affirming…even though they’re spam!

“It’s nearly impossible to find well-informed people on this subject, but you seem like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks”

“No, thank you – and I wish I did!”

Hi, I do think this is an excellent website. I stumbled upon it 😉 I am going to come back once again since I bookmarked it. Money and freedom is the best way to change, may you be rich and continue to guide others.

“Well I do have a lottery ticket for tonight…”

You ought to take part in a contest for one of the most useful websites online. I most certainly will highly recommend this site!

“One of the most useful websites online, wow, how about that, and it’s only my first attempt at blogging  in public.”

Oh well, one can dream, now back to the serious content – my mindmap of Knox, J. (2015) coming up next.