Big online classes work best when a motivated student has a specific use for the material.

Classroom education is not a relic. And online learning isn’t a pale imitation of “real” education, a dumbed-down version that endangers quality and excellence. The reality lies where it usually does — somewhere in between.

Classroom education won’t and shouldn’t be fully replaced by Web courses, but it could draw on what works online

Thrun's magic formula is not a fully automated online class featuring prerecorded videos and Web-based assessments. In other words, it's not a MOOC at all. To get better results, he said, "We changed the equation and put people on the ground." By adding mentors and a help line, and making phone calls to remind students to do their work, Udacity found it could get more students to do the work, finish the course and pass. Longer term, he has some ideas about using adaptive learning software to eliminate some of this labor, but for now it takes manpower

'wow, if my target group is the ones who make it through a MOOC, I might find some truly extraordinary people, but I will not have done anything to change education.'"

: “It’s much more effective to create an environment that predisposes you to do the things you do want to do or don’t want to do than to use willpower.”

If you’re deeply absorbed in a difficult but doable project--in a state termed as “flow” by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi--other tasks are naturally less interesting. Try to spend as much time as possible in this state.

For those of us who are geek parents, we may need to be a bit more careful. How easy is it to want our kids to love what we love? How hard is it to hold off on suggestions to make projects “better” when we have the experience to see the dead ends our kids are heading for? How easy is it to nag about getting stuff done in time for hard deadlines like Maker Faire? Even if we understand how interfering in even minor ways closes off possibilities in a child’s mind and takes a bit of the oxygen away for a flourishing intrinsically motivated passion? 

Let them go their own way, support the accumulation of maker treasure, and help (only) when asked (and provide the minimum amount of help needed to make it possible for them to take that next step.)

But what about nurturing the Maker in every child, even those who have not seized on making as their one true passion? I would suggest doing projects together just as you finger painted with them when they were babies and add in bits of DIY and tech for fun. Add lights or sounds to that painting with LED’s and conductive tape. Make a bird feeder with mechanically distributed portions. Grow your own food in a closet. Make it all about the experience together and not the result. And as your ambitions grow, find the maker spaces and experts in your community to help you make the things you didn’t know you could. But mostly take full advantage of not being an expert, not being an uber-geek, not being a know-it-all to follow your child instead of leading

ge or enter an URL to your portfolio i

Offerings like this would help us break through the credit-hour productivity problem, providing students more credit hours than we have to explicitly teach, while allowing faculty to concentrate on the sort of things that face-to-face environments do best.

For all the talk about Coursera, this fact generally goes unremarked. From a production perspective, Coursera is incredibly impressive. From a reuse perspective Coursera is as unrevolutionary as a for-profit textbook publisher.

I think it’s important to explicitly talk about the why or the goals behind the badges. Not only is that important for justifying and explaining why badges are a huge priority for us, but it can also help inform some of our decisions about the types of badges to include, what’s in scope/out of scope, etc.

• Badges = disrupting a monopoly and putting the control back into the individuals’ hands…it’s what Mozilla does.
• Defining / driving a Webmaker experience.
• tying together tools and experiences
• defining potential learning webmaking pathways
• defining an architecture of participation and contribution
• Building fun into the Webmaker experience.
• Recognizing and tracking learning.
• Building and formalizing community.
• Scaling our stuff beyond ourselves.

. The knower and the known must interact to generate knowledge for the knower about the known; therefore, the interaction should be part of the focus and should be enhanced to generate the most useful and valuable knowledge.

2. Although some Truth is absolute and therefore some realities or knowledge about that Truth are not negotiable, our knowledge or views of reality are rarely absolute.  We are struggling as human beings to clarify what we really know and what we must take on faith.  We do this in “learning communities” and “socially construct” many of our realities through interactions with others, putting forth our conceptions and seeing how others respond to them.

Similarly, I am skeptical about the facility of establishing credible causal linkages between variables through educational research studies.  As Lincoln and Guba suggest: all entities are in a state of mutual simultaneous shaping, so that it is impossible to distinguish causes from effects. This isn’t to say that there are no causal connections but showing them as indisputable facts is very difficult if not impossible to do, at least in human affairs.

Are qualitative findings generalizable? As indicated above, if generalization means time- and context-free generalizations, which are commonly sought by people using positivistic paradigms, then naturalistic inquiries are not meant to be generalizable.

However, if one means that the results of a study may be read by some one and used in their own setting (transferable), then the answer is yes. Qualitative inquiries should be conducted and written so readers can intelligently use the information from them in other settings.

6. Doesn’t the presence of the researcher change the behavior of the people he or she is trying to study? The problem of observer effect exists in all social research (and probably in the supposed hard sciences as well).  Qualitative inquirers seek to overcome this influence by interacting with the people they study as naturally as possible, over long periods of time, without manipulating the situation any more than possible.  They also study themselves as the research instrument to try to account for the influence they may be having on the setting.

6. The participants in this story appear to agree with five axioms set forth by Lincoln and Guba (1985) as central to naturalistic inquiry: a.  Regarding the nature of reality, the naturalistic paradigm holds that realities are multiple,  constructed, and holistic rather than single, tangible, and fragmentable.

b.  Regarding the relationship of the inquirer and the thing being inquired into, the naturalistic  paradigm holds that the knower and the known are interactive, inseparable rather than independent, a dualism.

c.  Regarding the possibility of generalization from a study, the naturalistic paradigm holds that only time and context-bound working hypotheses are possible rather than time- and context-free generalizations.

d.  Regarding the possibility of establishing causal linkages through research studies, the naturalistic paradigm holds that all entities are in a state of mutual simultaneous shaping, so that it is impossible to distinguish causes from effects, rather than claiming that there are  real causes, temporally precedent to or simultaneous with their effects.

e.  Regarding the role of values in inquiry, the naturalistic paradigm holds that inquiry is value-bound and not value-free (p. 37).

This is an open acknowledgement that our values are central to all we are and do and that

our inquiry is tied intricately with those values.

when teachers, student teachers, and teacher educators see themselves as learners, evaluators, and/or researchers and spend some of their energy trying to understand their students and their perspectives, they become less attached to pedagogical techniques and move quickly to a responsive and reflective way of teaching that is more commonly associated with master teachers.

cause they know their students better, they tailor learning experiences for them that are more appropriate than generic curriculum could be.

Analyses of our field notes were conducted both individually and jointly by all participants, throughout the course of the study

More recently, though, educators have begun to realize that the distinction should not be between qualitative and quantitative methods, but between paradigms for inquiry. Paradigms represent conceptualizations of the nature of reality, the relationship between the person trying to know something and the thing they are trying to know, the role of values in inquiry, and other issues.

” The point is that the whole experience is more than just the parts that go into it. Learning through qualitative inquiry is a holistic experience that involves several experiences occurring together harmoniously

But the claim of this book is that they were very much conducting inquiry and were learning while teaching

notes on all the other activities that were going into this experience

The Apostle Paul admonished, “By love serve one another.” ³ Recall with me the familiar words of King Benjamin in the Book of Mormon: “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.” ⁴

The Savior taught His disciples, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” ⁵

I believe the Savior is telling us that unless we lose ourselves in service to others, there is little purpose to our own lives. Those who live only for themselves eventually shrivel up and figuratively lose their lives, while those who lose themselves in service to others grow and flourish—and in effect save their lives.

My brothers and sisters, we are surrounded by those in need of our attention, our encouragement, our support, our comfort, our kindness—be they family members, friends, acquaintances, or strangers. We are the Lord’s hands here upon the earth, with the mandate to serve and to lift His children. He is dependent upon each of us.