Tag Archives: Twitter

TWEET: Use data to build better schools

“Learning is not a place but an activity”

Andreas Schleicher talks about the PISA test.  This is a global measurement that ranks countries against one another and uses the data to help schools improve.

“Measuring how much time people spend in school or what degree they’ve got is not always a good way of seeing what they can actually do”

PISA tests whether students can extrapolate what they’ve learned and apply their knowledge in novel situations.  Apparently we’re so, so in the rankings of the readiness of our young people for today’s economy.

Most relevant to this algorithmic cultures block “Data can be more powerful than administrative control or financial subsidy through which we usually run education”

TWEET: too easily distracted

A shocking indictment of how ineffective those side bar adverts can be that I’m having to force myself to look at them.  In contrast the ads that appear in the timeline are virtually impossible to miss, which is probably why people find those more annoying.

Possible learning here for the placement of information in e-learning design.

TWEET: Pinterest

Apparently it’s a setting we don’t have access to or needs a plugin. I’ve mentioned before that the idea of embedding content from lots of sources has been problematic for me.  My recommendation for  future iterations of this course would be to ensure that all the major embed format are fully supported.

TWEET: Adchoices from the advertiser’s perspective

A rather telling quote from the opening of this blogged article reads “The good news for advertisers is that [the Adchoices] icon is fairly small and unobtrusive; most consumers don’t even notice it.”  However, the closing remarks are more positive from both a consumer and advertiser perspective.  “I’d love to see Google go the extra mile and offer additional information to advertisers.  Sharing information gleaned from muted ads could be a game changer for PPC advertisers. […] Analyzing the results from this would allow advertisers to understand whether their ads simply aren’t resonating with their audience, or if they are too repetitive. Armed with this information, they will know when they need to create fresh ads or adjust their ad delivery settings.”  This feels like a good example of how analytics can be used to drive improvements, although it appears in this case that the data isn’t being made available to those who could make the best use of it.

Incidentally, in a moment of pure serendipity, while tweeting the above I noticed a link to follow my nephew’s partner on Twitter – algorithms in action!

 

TWEET: Ethnography ‘watch outs’

This definitely struck a chord with me.

These days it seems we distance ourselves from and ‘sanitise’ so much of life.  We package meat and other food in ways that disguises its origins to such an extent that some children have no idea where it comes from.  Society distances itself from mental health issues, ‘perverse’ sexuality and beliefs that do not conform to the norm.  In many parts of the developed world we live our lives behind closed doors, a long way from the close-knit communities of our history.

So, yes, I can see how complete immersion in the culture of a community is essential to really understand it.

That got me thinking about the word immersion and how much more of a visceral and ‘real’ experience baptism by total immersion must be compared to the sanitised and symbolic ritual many Christian churches observe.  To me that feels like a great example of understanding through immersion, in a very literal sense.

Getting an ‘insiders’ view of digital education was one of the reasons I decided to complete this Masters course.  Studying the topics I have has proved useful in my day job, but some of the most useful insights have come from being a distance learning, digital student.  All along I’ve been ‘doing ethnography’ and didn’t know it!

TWEET: Ellen Isaacs Ethnography TED talk

This humorous and well presented talk provides some useful insights into they ways ethnography can improve understanding and identify opportunities.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”

TWEET: Why MOOCs (still) matter

In this TED talk Anant Agarwal, head of MOOC provider edX, describes education as having ‘calcified’ for the past 500 years.  I’m not sure that’s entirely fair if one considers education in the wider context, from primary school through to post-graduate university study and not forgetting the learning and development that is facilitated by countless commercial and not for profit organisations.

My wife works in a primary school so I see first hand how different the facilities and ways of engaging pupils are to when I was at a similar school over fifty years ago.  Yes there are still the brightly coloured pictures on the walls and familiar pots of paints and crayons, but there’s plenty of technology too.  I wouldn’t say that the technology has shaped the teaching practices in the school though.  What is different is definitely cultural, it’s about the way pupils are encouraged to treat one another and to embrace what life has to offer.  This is summed up in the school’s motto “New day, new possibilities”.

Agarwal also talks about the innate ability of the millennial generation to use technology, a topic I remember debating right back at the start of the IDEL course.  I’m not going to go over that again now, save to say that there’s enough evidence to debunk that theory.

However, contrary to what you might expect from the head of a company offering online education, Agarwal isn’t extolling the virtues of MOOCs as the elixir to cure the ‘calcified’ educations system in this video presentation.  Instead he talks about a blended approach, where online resources are combined with classroom based activities.

Argawal suggests a number of ideas he believes would be effective in helping students learn more effectively:

  • Similar to a TED talk I posted earlier in this blog from Coursera founder Daphne Koller, Argawal promotes ‘active learning’ quoting Craik and Lockhart (1972), who proposed that “Learning and retention is related to depth of mental processing”.
  • Secondly he suggests that ‘self pacing’ is very helpful to learning, for example students being able to pause and rewind virtual lectures.
  • He suggests that ‘instant feedback’ is more effective than the traditional format where work is submitted and feedback and grading is received a couple of weeks later when ‘students have forgotten all about it’.  “Instant feedback turns teaching  moments into learning outcomes”
  • Gameification through virtual laboratories
  • Peer learning through discussion forums and Facebook like interactions – learning by teaching

This talk was published in 2013 so it’s no surprise that all of the ideas he suggest above are present in the learning environments offered by many of the businesses I network with on a regular basis, including my own.  Many of these ideas have been implemented for purely pragmatic reasons, to reduce costs and to enable a relatively small number of trainers to meet the needs of a large number of learners.  They also appear to be an effective way of helping large numbers of people learn.