This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner over in …. Nyack?
Hmm.
I have no idea what town the American Diner is in.
Retake.
This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner, it came to me.
Why MOOCs don't work, and why flipped classrooms aren't going to work, either.
I've got it.
Optimal arousal levels.
That's the problem.
As usual, the world of athletics is way ahead of the world of everything else.
More anon.
Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5
Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?
Do you mean the American Dream Diner on 303? It is in Orangeburg, according to Google Maps, which is very useful for this sort of question.
ReplyDeleteYou are going to have to explain your point. . . .I'm sitting here and wondering what "optimal arousal levels" mean for algebra class. Speaking for myself, I liked algebra - but I did not find it "arousing" in the conventional sense.
ReplyDeleteWhatever do you mean? I'm intrigued.
Catherine,
ReplyDeleteIf you listen to Daphne Koller's TED talk, the extent to which MOOCs are actually tremendous data gathering devices becomes readily apparent. She also concedes that MOOCs as a means of delivering lectures was more of an initial lure than how they will work in the future.
Much like the Common Core classroom vision, MOOCs become a means of social interaction among students around a common theme. The coursework is also grounded in Benjamin Bloom's Mastery Learning so the focus is on bounded skills, not knowledge per se. The software programs associated with doing the online questions serve to bound what it means to have skills and knowledge in an area. Previously if you were really good in an area there was no limit to what you knew and you developed your own conceptual understandings from the facts put together. In MOOCs those conceptual understandings come presupplied so they will become the "lenses" that guide perceptions of daily experience and whatever is delivered in the coursework.
It radically redefines what it means to "know" and standardizes it.
Benjamin Bloom's Mastery Learning so the focus is on bounded skills, not knowledge per se
ReplyDeleteI think that explains why I've become increasingly resistant to any and all mention of Benjamin Bloom.