One of my favorite ways of studying historic change is to look at it through the eyes of someone who did not modify his or her position or disposition, regardless of the fact that consensus was dramatically transforming around them. The most dramatic example of this would be Cato the Younger who did not budge […]
Archives for December 2013
Interview with Peter Bol, Harvard’s Vice Provost for Advances in Learning
Today, we will be visited by Peter Bol, Harvard’s Vice Provost for Advances in Learning and one of the professors behind a new HarvardX courses on the history of China. ChinaX is one of the most ambitious MOOCs to date, one that experiments with – among other things – how a course can be defined […]
MOOCs and Lifelong Learners
In both the backlash stories I wrote about last week and responses to my backlash backlash pieces, a certain argument seems to be repeated that asks why schools and investors should be sinking millions into creating educational resources (i.e., MOOCs) that we all know just benefit older, educated, professional (and by implication well-off, middle-class) lifelong […]
The Pragmatic Maxim
Time again to take a look at MOOC and other forms of free learning from the perspective of another one of the subjects I’m studying: Pragmatic philosophy. I’ve been learning about Pragmatism through a second attempt at a self-study course, one which is going much more smoothly than the first, probably because excellent resources are […]
MOOCs and Critical Thinking
Another point Daphne Koller brought up in that Ted video I mentioned yesterday was that MOOCs, especially if they were implemented as part of a flipped classroom, would enable professors to spend less time lecturing and more time helping students master important skills, notably critical thinking. Having spent the last several years trying to figure […]