The Problem With EdX
Bonnie Stewart | Inside Higher Ed | Original Article Since it started last fall, I’ve heard the 36-week experimental #change11course referred to – half tongue-in-cheek – as “the Mother of All MOOCs.” Back when the course started in September, it seemed like a reasonable description. #change11 was designed and run by Massive Open Online Course pioneers George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, and had 36 separate facilitators lined up to cover everything from soup to nuts in the grand scheme of instructional technologies and 21st century learning. Apparently, however, George and Dave should have kept the crystal ball from their Edfutures MOOC a few years back. Because in thinking about the Mother of All MOOCs, it seems none of us in #change11 were thinking big enough. Today, the New York Times announced that Harvard has paired up with MIT in a new non-profit partnership called EdX, which will offer free online courses from both universities, following the MITx model begun over the winter. More… | | Can the Colleges Be Saved?
Anthony Grafton | The New York Review of Books | Original Article Betty Grable, top right, in "How to Be Very, Very Popular," 1955 Many years ago I asked Otto Neugebauer, a pioneering historian of mathematics and astronomy in the ancient world, about his education in pre–World War I Austria. Neugebauer was known both for his comprehensive histories and for his editions and interpretations of very difficult texts—mathematical and astronomical tables and horoscopes, preserved on cuneiform tablets, in Greek papyri and Latin manuscripts, and in many other sources and traditions. (Late in life, Neugebauer mastered Ethiopic and wrote penetrating work on Ethiopian astronomy and calendrics.) I expected him to say something warm about his teachers at gymnasium, along the lines of the memoir in which another great émigré scholar, Erwin Panofsky, described the “lovable pedant” who taught him Greek in Berlin (this gentleman reproached himself in class for failing to notice a misplaced comma in a Greek text, since he himself had written an article on that very comma long before). Instead, Neugebauer told me that he had hated his secondary school. He received his diploma, he explained, only because he volunteered for the army, which led to several years of service in the artillery on the Italian front. And he did not begin to work at a high level until he went to university after the war. More… Image from 20th Century Fox via the New York Review of Books | | Free-range thinkers
Matthew Reisz | Times Higher Education | Original Article What kind of person writes a book about Arctic wildlife, 18th-century surgery or the byways of Elizabethan poetry? Most of the readers, one might assume, will be within universities, so who will the authors be if not academics? And in general, no doubt, that assumption will be correct. Yet, just as many 19th-century country clerics produced important work on natural history, one can still find examples of “independent scholars” – people unattached to universities who venture more or less knowingly into academic territory. Take the case of Richard Sale. He studied physics, stayed on to do a PhD and then worked in the nuclear industry until 1996, when he began to focus his efforts on writing and photography. He has now written more than 60 books, the bulk of them travel and walking guides covering fairly familiar territory such as Dorset and the Italian Lake District. Yet Sale himself is also a more adventurous traveller, particularly in the Arctic, which he has now visited more than 30 times. He has been dropped off on the vast and virtually uninhabited Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and left there alone for a fortnight, which once required him to bandage up a fractured thumb with Sellotape. Another time, he and a couple of colleagues had to hold down and perform surgery on the leg of a husky that had been badly bitten by another, at night and without anaesthetic, in a temperature 20 or 25 degrees below zero. More… | |
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