Our annual conference (which several of you attended last year, thanks!) is back. Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education will take place September 28 – 30, 2005 in beautiful Logan, Utah. I’m *really* excited about the conference this year. A few highlights:
- Keynote speakers include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information, etc.) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin, etc.) and one other (but we can’t say who yet).
- The Hewlett Foundation will be holding its annual open education fundees meeting in conjunction with the conference, which will bring several super interesting participants to the conference
- Finally, the group of universities that recently met at MIT to discuss their OpenCourseWare projects will be meeting again in conjunction with the conference, which will bring even more people doing really excellent open education work
I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…
Published on
March 23, 2005 in
Uncategorized.
Tags: bunk.
Am I biased in my perspectives? Absolutely. Is there anyone who is not? No. So, now that I’ve owned up wholly and completely to the accusation that I am biased in my reading and interpretation of the study in question…
Commenting on my previous post about the Fuchs & Woessmann study, Mihaly Nyary writes: “You have an agenda, and not the authors,” and provides the abstract to the study, which is in no way whatsoever related to the point I made yesterday. Let me try once more, and make a handful of other points along the way.
Continue reading ‘More on Fuchs & Woessmann’
Am I biased in my perspectives? Absolutely. Is there anyone who is not? No. So, now that I’ve owned up wholly and completely to the accusation that I am biased in my reading and interpretation of the study in question…
Commenting on my previous post about the Fuchs & Woessmann study, Mihaly Nyary writes: “You have an agenda, and not the authors,” and provides the abstract to the study, which is in no way whatsoever related to the point I made yesterday. Let me try once more, and make a handful of other points along the way.
Continue reading ‘More on Fuchs & Woessmann’
Published on
March 21, 2005 in
Uncategorized.
Tags: bunk.
Slashdot is running a story about a highly questionable research study:
The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today…. Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University.
While the report itself doesn’t seem to be available, I’m going to make a wild guess here: these tests were administered using #2 pencils and sheets of paper with many bubbles on them, which students diligently filled out.
Does no one else see the problem here? I would like to see the Telegraph article retitiled, “Students Who Are Tested in a Context Differing Significantly from their Instructional Environment Do Worse.” Why would we be shocked or surprised to find that kids who spend more time with paper and pencil outperform their high tech peers on paper and pencil tests??? If the tests had been administered on computers, which group would have been the top performer? As Paul Saffo famously said, “It’s the context, stupid.”
Yet another example of people with an agenda “doing research.” What an embarassment. No wonder educational research is completely discredited in the popular mind.
So we’ve been updating all sorts of things lately. OpenContent.org has been laying more or less unproductive for a while, so it seemed like time to update it as well. OpenContent.org is now a mini-portal into several collections of open educational resources and the discussion forums around those. Have a look around, and if you can think of an open access collection I haven’t listed there (which you no doubt will), let me know. If you think OpenContent.org should be doing something completely different, let me know.
