למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Following the literature on student peer reviews, we have developed a process in which students are first trained using a grading rubric to grade other assessments. This has been shown to result in accurate feedback to other students, and also provide a valuable learning experience for the students doing the grading.

we draw on ideas from the literature on crowd-sourcing, which studies how one can take many ratings (of varying degrees of reliability) and combine them to obtain a highly accurate score.

• החינוך, הסאטירה והפרודיה נכללים בתחום השימוש ההוגן
• בחוק הגנות עבור שימוש לא מסחרי של תוכן תוצרת המשתמש (user generated content)
• מכסת הקנס על שימוש בלתי-חוקי אך לא מסחרי של חומרים מוגנים בחוק איננה גבוהה
• הוכנסו לחוק תנאים חריגים לטובת השימוש בחומרים מוגנים בזכויות בסביבות חינוכיות

In 2007, the government was hours away from introducing a bill that contained virtually no user-oriented provisions. Today, a bill took effect that has its flaws but also creates some of the most expansive copyright user rights in the world.

Once you see this pattern - a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know - you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.

It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

... the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. The most widely told story about college focuses obsessively on elite schools and answers a crazy mix of questions: How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instill reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidize the professor’s work?

MOOCs simply ignore a lot of those questions. The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.

At the time, the combination of user generated content, wide connectivity, social networking, mobile devices seemed to open up possibilities. I still find it amazing that I have such a rich, global network of peers, all of whom are smarter than me, and most of whom I haven't met. I would argue that this optimism, and slight discarding of critical powers we felt wasn't a failing however, it was a necessity. By engaging in this new world whole-heartedly one could really get the benefits and also potentially shape the possible futures we were envisaging.

So, I'll make a plea here - we like simple answers, we like people who give us simple answers. They're sexy. They're convenient. They're tweetable. But life isn't like that, and actually the messy, nuanced, complex picture is more interesting. Be suspicious of those oh so sweet tasting simple answers on either side of the technology divide.