Even though I’m on vacation, things with the potential to completely transform the way we teach and learn come along so rarely I had to share. It’s called Google Wave. Check out Tim O’Reilly’s writeup, “What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?” and the Google Wave homepage.
Monthly Archive for May, 2009
There’s an excellent article over on Wired right now with interesting implications for our field. The End of Theory reads in part:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all…
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves…
Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise…
There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
Let’s temporarily assume Chris is right, for the sake of argument. Could it be that educational research is finally on the brink of making an inch of forward progress? Do mediating educational technologies provide us with the opportunities to capture enough data that we could eventually do this “new kind of research?” Could access to this kind of data finally be the killer app for high technology in education?
Elsewhere in the article, Chris says,
Google’s founding philosophy is that we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.
Amazon, of course, doesn’t ever ask you to explicitly state your preferences for genres of book. Netflix doesn’t ask for explicit information about your taste in movies. And Google doesn’t need semantic analysis do determine which page is better than another. Is there a time coming when access to a sufficient quantity of educational activity and performance data will finally stomp out the petri dish of poorly informed opinion that is the vast majority of educational research? Would you care if I couldn’t classify your learning style or aptitude a la Cronbach and Snow or your intelligence type a la Gardner if I could consistently give you educational experiences that you found enjoyable and effective? I suspect not.
I’ve just been named #78 on Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business list (David Wiley). In my wildest dreams I never imagined finding myself on a list with Hayao Miyazaki (Totoro), JJ Abrams (Lost), Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are), and Brian Eno (where to start?), and 95 other incredible people. I’m certainly not deserving, but I’m grateful for the recognition of my contribution and I hope that it brings greater awareness to the work we’re all doing on open education.
This year’s MASTER STUDY RESOLUTION for the 2009 General Session, a “joint resolution of the [Utah] Legislature [which] gives the Legislative Management Committee items of study it may assign to the appropriate interim committee” over the summer, includes something we have been hoping to see! Item 30 reads:
30. Educational Resources in the Public Domain – to study how curriculum materials and other learning resources created with state funds may be placed in the public domain.
If the public pays for it the public deserves free access to it, right? Looks like we’re one step closer to a more formal conversation about OER here in Utah!
About a year ago, I finished 2005-2012: The OpenCourseWars, and thought it quite a fun exercise to try to forecast where things are headed. A few months ago Trey called me a futurist, and I chuckled. Then the Deseret News called me Nostradamus, and I cringed. Perhaps I let what others say about me influence me too much, but I have been spending more and more time thinking about the future of the movement.
As I’ve been pondering the future of the open education movement, I’ve thought particularly about the future of OpenCourseWare initiatives and think I can see something coming a few years down the road. What I see is the end of OpenCourseWare as we know it. Here’s a specific forecast (by being specific I can clearly be either right or wrong):
Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit will be dead by the end of calendar 2012.
Now, hopefully they won’t pull their sites and content offline – ongoing access to that material would be really nice. (It’s probably time to start building local mirrors of all the world’s OCWs.) But I strongly suspect that all OCW development and maintenance activity at these schools will have ground to a halt by 2012. Why?
The first generation of OpenCourseWare projects (“OCW 1.0″) had essentially no sustainability plan. These first generation projects were funded by grants and had no means of supporting themselves once the grants ran out – except asking other people and other organizations to donate money. Consequently, in tough economic times (read, “now”) these programs will find themselves at risk. (Please understand that I’m not pointing and laughing; I established one of the larger OCW 1.0’s in the country at USU.)
A new generation of OpenCourseWare projects are built around sustainability plans. These second generation projects are integrated with distance education offerings, where the public can use and reuse course materials for free (just like first generation OCWs) with the added option of paying to take the courses online for credit (there is no way to earn credit from the first generation OCWs). The Open Universities of the UK and the Netherlands, UC Irvine, and the small pilot program at BYU Independent Study are built on this model. These second generation OCWs are simultaneously a powerful public good and effective marketing tools that generate revenue and can likely sustain themselves financially. (We’re studying this sustainability model in a truly fascinating dissertation study at BYU right now.) Schools with first generation OCWs that also offer distance education courses (like USU) could transform themselves into OCW 2.0 programs if they wanted to.
As the second generation model of supporting and sustaining OpenCourseWare projects (“OCW 2.0″) is demonstrated to be effective, the OCW movement will expand rapidly. I anticipate the cost per lead generated from opening courses will prove significantly lower than the cost per lead through other marketing channels. Once this is established, OCW will become a default component of marketing programs at public, private, and for-profit schools that offer distance courses. The number of content-complete courses (as opposed to the often spotty, content sampling approach of OCW 1.0) will explode. The relevance of OCW 1.0 collections may be called into question at this point.
Unfortunately, universities which refuse to offer distances courses cannot sustain their OCW projects with the OCW 2.0 model. It is unclear to me what – besides credit – they could possibly sell in conjunction with their OCW content in order to sustain themselves financially (particularly in lean times when each and every program on campus is being scrutinized).
Perhaps the composition of the OpenCourseWare movement will be quite different three years from now…
