e experience, he writes, was like writing a book. I can believe it.
Technology, they say, eliminates the middle-man. Fair enough. But from a certain perspective, everyone can be seen as the middle-man. That's why major publishers, instead of seeing themselves as the intermediaries between author and reader, see see schools, colleges and universities as the intermediary between themselves and students. What does this mean, in practice? How about degrees handed out, not by some university, but by Thompson, Pearson or Kaplan (which such reorganized and rebanded its learning units this week). Far-fetched? Well, it would be, except that, as this story reports, Pearson is already doing it.
If you think about it, you realize that this is correct. And when you realize that this is correct, you begin to rethink what you're doing. What is it? This: "Higher Education is actually a 'bundle' consisting of a library, some professors, a social life, a transformative experience, a curriculum and an accreditation. Most people want the accreditation and would be willing to sacrifice the rest." meanwhile Jack Uldrich predicts that a student without a degree will sue for admission into law or medical school strictly on the basis of test results.
I watch that video of fifteen year old student protester Rodney Owen McCarthy, and I think, "That's me. That's me!" Well, me of 36 years ago, and with better technology. But you get the point. "We are no longer that generation that doesn't care, we are no longer that generation to sit back and take whatever they give us. We are now the generation at the heart of the fight back," he says in the video to an enthusiastic crowd at the Coalition of Resistance National Conference in Camden, U.K. Rock on.
Good stuff from Will Thalheimer as he extracts data from 14 studies on how much people remember and what causes them to forget. As he notes, "Rules-of-thumb that show people forgetting at some pre-defined rate are just plain false. In other words, learning gurus and earnest bloggers are wrong when they make blanket statements like, 'People will forget 40% of what they learned within a day of learning it.'" Forgetting varies widely. Prior knowledge matters. Motivation matters. Context matters. Learning methods matter.
Wjat is the role of analytics in education? This excellent article provides a non-Orwellian (and hence, refreshing) way to think about analytics. I like the way it is summarized, as well, as follows:
- Developed as a concept in the science of choice, subtle interactions - or nudges - can influence people's actions without infringing on their freedom of choice.
- he wealth of digital data in higher education enables the use of that data to nudge students toward better achievement and persistence.
- The next step is to figure out correlation characteristics from machine recommendations, and determine practices based on patterns found in the data.
- A vibrant community is forming for action, basing new practices on successful models of pattern analysis, implementation, and evaluation.
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