Greatest learning experience of my life… it will surprise you… Things I've learnt from Doug Part I

I had no idea. In fact I had the wrong idea. I never ‘got’ it. Why would anyone want a dog? Then I got one… and ‘got’ it. It’s been one of the deepest and significant learning experiences of my entire life.

First up is the emotion. Now I’m a bit of an old Calvinist, Scottish to boot, and as PJ Wodehouse said “It is never difficult to distinguish between with a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” But from first grasp, holding that tiny thing, as it looked into my eyes, I was, as they say… smitten. It only got worse. I became besotted. 

People, who have known me forever, will tell you that it made me calmer. It also, and I say this with no evidence whatsoever, made me more empathetic. You have to work with a dog. It doesn’t speak, so you need to get into its mind a little – which is clearly a mind that is free from most human concerns. Doug knows nothing of good or evil, heaven or hell. Socrates said that "the unexamined life is not worth living”. I look at Doug, and think, “the over-examined life ain’t all it’s cracked-up to be either”. I honestly think a dog can make you a better person.

Of course, you start out with high hopes – that your dog is so smart that it may just squeeze out a GCSE or two… then you realise that it is, well just let’s say cognitively capped. This had a sort of philosophical effect on me as I became more aware that we humans are most likely in the same predicament. You learn humility.

Yes, there’s the exercise, getting out more, nice walks and meeting people. I met a big, hairy-arsed builder who told me that when he comes back after a hard day’s graft, his teenage kids ignore him, his wife nods and seems tired of him, but when that first crack of the door opens, his dog greets him as if he had just won the dog lottery – every damn day. There’s the lovely Ethiopian guy, who recued his Huskie from China. Apparently there’s a growing middle-class who buy expensive breeds but can’t handle them in their little apartments, and dump them on the outskirts of the cities. There’s the teenagers who are happy to talk about school and sometimes… their hopes. 

Then there’s the dog talk – tons of it and I can tell you I love it. I’m becoming quite the dog-man. My grandfather had a Jack Russell and was called Jack Russell – both, I hear, were characters. He was a stand-up comedian back in the day and used the dog in his act. I’ve learnt that Corgis were bred to herd cattle – they snapped at their heels apparently. 
Brings your family together. We gather around Doug, take him for walks together. Talk about him. Buy him stuff - loads of stuff. Actually it's not that he brings your family together he is your family.

Most of all there’s Doug. He’s there all the time, prancing around the house, sleeping, bringing his soft toy (replica of a rat) and wanting to play. But the greatest joy is when he comes and sits next to you or better with his head on you. It would melt an obsidian heart.

So there it is… I flipped. I learnt that you can change your mind on something – big time. What it takes is not reading about dogs, researching dogs, going on a course about dogs – it’s about getting a dog. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks but you bloody well can. Thanks Doug. You don’t know it but you sort of changed my life mate.

Learning Designers will have to adapt or die. 10 ways to UPSKILL to AI….

Interactive Designers will have to adapt or die. AI and Generative AI (not the same thing) has started to play a major part of the online learning landscape, right across the learning journey. it is now being used for learner engagement, syllabus planning, core skills identification, learner support, content creation, assessment and so on. It will eat relentlessly into the traditional skills that have been in play for nearly 35 years. The old, core skillset was writing, media production, interactions and assessment, all delivered through an authoring language. It remained unchanged for nearly 30 years. In many ways it got worse as the tools began to determine the content, so we got lots of cartoony content, with click on speech bubbles, clumsy, drag and drop, stock photos and MCQs. It was expensive and took months. 

Every online learning company on the planet is now having strategy meetings to face uo to the challenge.

This is not easy as many of those involved in traditional online content creation will find it difficult to adapt. Others, however, will embrace the change. Many will have to identify individuals with the skills and attitudes to deal with this new demand. This means understanding the new technology (not trivial), learning how to write for new dialogic tools, and dealing more with AI-aided design and curation, rather than doing this for themselves. It’s a radical shift.

In a Keynote over five years ago, I summarised this shift as follows...

 

This is the new version…

 

In another context, using a tool like ChatGPT meant not using traditional interactive designers, as the software largely does this job. It identifies the learning points, automatically creates the interactions, finds the curated links and assesses, formatively and summatively. It creates content in minutes not months. This is the way online learning is going. I’m involved in several projects where Generative AI is appearing in real product. One was launched at BETT this week (Glean), others are on their way. This stuff is here, now.

 

The gear-shift in skills is interesting and, although still uncertain, here’s some suggestions based on my concrete experience of making and observing this shift in a number of different companies.

 

1. Technical understanding

Designers, IDs, LXDs, Learning Engineers or whatever they’re called now or in the future, will need to know far more about what the software does, its functionality, strengths and weaknesses. In some large projects we have found that a knowledge of how the NLP (Natural language Processing) works has been an invaluable skill, along with an ability to troubleshoot by diagnosing what the software can, or cannot do. Those with some technical understanding fare better here as they understand both the potential and limitations.

 

This is not to say that you need to be able to code or have pure AI or data science skills. It does mean that you will have to know, in detail, how the software works. If it uses semantic techniques, make the effort to understand the approach, along with its weaknesses and strengths. With ChatGPT, for example, you really do need to keep up with the speed of releases, ChatGPT came out in late Nov 2022, ChatGPT, an order of magnitude better came out in March 2023. I see far too many people still using and basing their opinions on ChatGPT3. Keep up or become irrelevant.

 

In a series of category errors, any of the silly clickbait 'look at what I've just done' screen shots don't really understand the underlying technology. most are from ChatGPT3, not 4, like using a version of Wikipedia from 2003. The fine tuning, RLHF and guardrailing is ignored, yet these are the things learning professionals need to know about the technology. This will take time. You always have to go through the clickbait phase to get to the serious comment and use cases. The good news is the amazing things people are doing with the tool, especially in learning.

 

Similarly with data analysis. With traditional online learning, the software largely delivers static pages with no real semantic understanding, adaptability or intelligence, hence the stickiness of SCORM. AI created content is very different and has a sort of  ‘life of its own’, especially when it uses machine learning. At the very least get to know what the major areas of AI are, how they work and feel comfortable with the vocabulary.

 

2. Writing

Text remains the core medium in online learning. It remains the core medium in online activity generally. We have seen the pendulum swing towards video, graphics and audio but text will remain a strong medium, as we read faster than we listen, it is editable and searchable. That is why much social media and messaging is still text at heart. When I ran a large traditional online learning company we regarded writing as the key skill for IDs. We put people through literacy tests before they started, no matter what qualifications they had. It proved to be a good predictor, as writing is not just about turn of phrase and style, it is really about communications, purpose, order, logic and structure. I was never a fan of ‘storytelling’ or ‘creativity’ as identifiable skills.

 

However, the sort of writing one has to do in the new world of AI has more to do with being sensitive to what generative AI does, and dialogue. Prompt writing is important and this is where experienced IDs and graphic artists can excel. Prompting is best done by domain experts. A good graphic artists will know how to ask for the right image in terms of style, fonts, look and feel, with all the right parameters. Similarly with good IDs, who will know how to prompt for great questions, not just fact checking. It is a matter of taking your skills and applying them to using these new tools and technologies.

 

3. Interaction

Hopefully we will see the reduction in the formulaic Multiple-Choice Question production. MCQs are difficult to write and often flawed. Then there is the often vicariously used ‘drag and drop’ and hideously patronising ‘Let’s see what Philip, Alisha and Sue think of this… ‘ you click on a face and get a speech bubble of text. I find that this is the area where most online learning really sucks. This, I think, will be an area of huge change as the limited forms of MCQ start to be replaced by open input; of words, numbers and short text answers. NLP allows us to interpret this text. There is also voice interaction to consider, which many will implement, so that the entire learning experience, all navigation and interaction, is voice-driven. This needs some extra skills in terms of managing expectations and dealing with the vagaries of speech recognition software. If you don’t know about Whisper, you should. Personalisation may also have to be considered. These tools are basically AI on tap. This software is far too complex to build on your own. Yet it makes smart implementation in scale possible.

 

4. Media production

As online learning became trapped in ‘media production’ most of the effort and budget went into the production of graphics (often illustrative and not meaningfully instructive), animation (often overworked) and video (not enough in itself). Media rich is not necessarily mind rich and the research from Nass, Reeves, Mayer and many others, shows that the excessive use of media can inhibit learning. Unfortunately, much of this research is ignored. We will see this change as the balance shifts towards effortful and more efficient learning. There will still be the need for good media production but it will lessen as AI becomes multimodal, creating text, images, audio and video, even 3D worlds. 

 

Video is never enough in learning and needs to be supplemented by other forms of active learning. AI can do this, making video an even stronger medium. Curation strategies are also important. We often produce content that is already there but AI helps automatically link to content or provides tools for curating content. Lastly, a word on design thinking. The danger is in seeing every learning experience as a uniquely designed thing, to be subjected to an expensive design thinking process, when design can be embodied in good interface design. We are now in the world of rapid design by smart software that has done a lot of the A/B testing on a gargantuan scale. These methods look more and more out of date.

 

5. Assessment

So many online learning courses have a fairly arbitrary 70-80% pass threshold. The assessments are rarely the result of any serious thought about the actual level of competence needed, and if you don’t assess the other 20-30% it may, in healthcare, for example, kill someone. There are many ways in which assessment will be aided by AI in terms of the push towards 100% competence, adaptive assessment, digital identification, open input, transfer, good generated rubrics and so on. This will be a feature of more adaptive and dialogue-driven AI driven content. Generative AI produces assessments at speed and with relevance to the competences. That was never the case in traditional online learning.

 

6. Data skills

SCORM is looking like an increasingly stupid limit on online learning. To be honest it was from its inception – I was there. Completion is useful but rarely enough. It is important to supplement SCORM with far more detailed data on user behaviours. But even when data is plentiful, it needs to be turned into information, visualised to make it useful. That is one set of skills that is useful, knowing how to visualise data. Information then has to be turned into knowledge and insights. This is where skills are often lacking. First you have to know the many different types of data in learning, how data sets are cleaned, then the techniques used to extract useful insights, often machine learning. You need to distinguish between data as the new oil and data as the new snake oil.

 

We take data, clean it, process it, then look for insights – clusters and other statistically significant techniques to find patterns and correlations. For example, do course completions correlate with an increase in sales in those retail outlets that complete the training? Training can then be seen as part of a business process where AI not only creates the learning but does the analysis and that is all in a virtual and virtuous loop that informs and improves the business. It is not that you require deep data scientist skills, but you need to become aware of the possibilities of data production, the danger of GIGO, garbage-in/garbage out and the techniques used in this area. AI is now a feature of data-centric learning solutions. Acquire some basic knowledge of data science, nothing fancy, just get to know the lie of the land.

 

7. User testing

In one major project , we produced so much content, so quickly, that the client had trouble keeping up on quality control at their end. We were making it faster than it could be tested! You will find that the QA process is very different, with quick access to the actual content, allowing for immediate testing. In fact, AI tends to produce less mistakes in my experience as there is less human input, always a source of spelling, punctuation and other errors. I used to ask graphic artists to always cut and paste text as it was a source of endless QA problems. The advantage of using AI generated content is that all sides can screen share to solve residual problems on the actual content seen by the learner. We completed one large project without a single face-to-face meeting. This quick production also opens up the possibility of quick testing with real learners. 

 

8. Learning theory - pedAIgogy

In my experience, few interactive designers can name many researchers or identify key pieces of research on, let's say the optimal number of options in a MCQ (answer at foot of this article), retrieval practice, length of video, effects of redundancy, spaced-practice theory, even the rudiments of how memory works (episodic v semantic). This is elementary stuff but it is rarely taken seriously. With AI you can build pedagogy, or what I call pedAIgogy, into the prompting and therefore learning experiences. We are doing precisely this on one product.

 

With the implementation of AI, the AI HAS to embody good pedagogic practice. Bill Gates recently published an excellent piece on Generative AI saying that learning will be it b] greatest benefit, but te piece was marred by him pushing ‘learning styles’. Greg Brokman, of Open AI, did te same retweeting a tool based on learning styles. We know better than this and can build good, well-researched, learning practice into the software. Hopefully, this will drive online learning away from long-winded projects that take months to complete, towards production that takes minutes not months, and learning experiences that focus on learning not appearance.

see PedAIgogy

 

9. Agile production

Communications with AI developers and data scientists is a challenge. They know a lot about the software but often little about learning and the goals. On the other hand designers know a lot about communications, learning and goals. Agile techniques, with a shared whiteboard, scrums and superfast production are useful. I love these. There are formal agile techniques around identifying the user story, extracting features then coming to agreed tasks. Comms are tougher in this world so learn to be forgiving. There will inevitable be friction between the old and the new. Treat that as a normal.

 

Then there’s communications with the client and SMEs. This can be particularly difficult, as some of the output is AI generated, and as AI is not remotely human (not conscious or cognitive) it can produce mistakes. The good news is that these are now rare. You learn to deal with this when you work in this field. To be honest, A=all of those learning folk telling me that AI shouldn't be used in learning, as it sometimes has an error or two, will happily use content with learning styles, Myers-Briggs, Bloom's pyramid, Maslow and no end of bogus theory and content in courses

 

This new approach is often not easy for clients to understand, as they will be used to design document, scripts and traditional QA techniques. I had AI once automatically produce a link for the word ‘blow’, a technique nurses ask of young patients when they’re using sharps or needles. The AI linked to the Wikipedia page for ‘blow’ – which was cocaine – easily remedied but odd. You have to be careful but that has always been te case. I can barely think of a single training project where the SME content was spot on.

 

The great news is that this all means we can reduce iterations with SMEs, even cut them out altogether, as the software often has more knowledge and can write it to any level or style. The cause of much of the high cost of online learning is expensive SMEs and endless iterations. If the AI is identifying learning points and curated content, using already approved documents, PPTs and videos, the need for SME input is lessened. This saves a ton of time and money.

 

10. Make the leap

AI is here. We are, at last, emerging from a 30 year paradigm of media production and multiple choice questions, in largely flat and unintelligent learning experiences, towards smart, intelligent online learning, that behaves more like a good teacher, where you are taught as an individual with a personalised experience, challenged and, rather than endlessly choosing from lists, engage in effortful learning, using dialogue, even voice. As a Learning designer, Interactive designer, Project Manager, Producer, whatever, this is the most exciting thing to have happened in the last 30 years of learning.
Most of the Interactive Designers I have known, worked with and hired over the last 30  plus years have been skilled people, sensitive to the needs of learners but we must always be willing to 'learn', for that is our vocation. To stop learning is to do learning a disservice. So make the leap!

Conclusion
In addition, those in HR and L and D will have to get to grips with AI. It will change the very nature of the workforce, which is our business. This means it will change WHY we learn WHAT we learn and HOW we learn. Almost all online experiences are now mediated by AI - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, Netflix.... except in learning! But that has just dramatically change. Generative AI heralds a new era, a renaissance oin learning, where we can learn anything, at anytime, anywhere using sophisticated AI tutors. What is needed is a change in mindset, as well as tools and skills. It may be difficult to adapt to this new world, where many aspects of design will be automated. I suspect that it will lead to a swing away from souped up graphic design back towards learning. That would will be a good thing.

Habitual learning (h-learning)

Habits fuel learning
In a Pizzeria, after a visit to one of my favourite London spots (the Soane Museum) Jay Cross asked me what I thought fuelled good learning. My answer was ‘habits’. Soane was a habitual learner and collector. Strong, autonomous learners tend to have developed habitual learning, whether in reading, blogging, conversing, taking notes and so on. They all have different sets of habits, but habits they have in abundance.

Blogging as a habit
This is a good example. Some bloggers start but tail off, others work at it and keep going for years, benefiting from the opportunity to habitually structure their own thoughts, get feedback, reflect and LEARN.

7 habits of highly effective learners
Here’s a stab at what I’d say makes habits work in learning:

1. Stick with a new habit until it takes root. Habits fall away unless stuck to for some time and with some vigour.
2. Always take something to read or listen. Autonomous learners always have something in their pocket or bag in what Marc Auge calls Non-Places – trains, airports, planes, automobiles, hotel rooms etc.
3. Take notes. The best way to ensure that knowledge sticks is to write it up in your own words. Studies show between 20-30% increase in recall when you take notes.
4. Habitually encode. Habitual learners simplify and structure the stuff they want to remember in the right order.
5. Replay and recall. Effective learners voluntarily recall what they’ve learnt at intervals after the event. Recall that talk on the way home from the conference, recall your holiday on the plane back.
6. Customise habit forming feeds. Customise your home page to encourage your bountiful learning habits.
7. Kick-start new learning habits. Blog, subscribe to a new magazine, feeds from new sources, use a new tool on web – good learners are always adding learning habits to their repertoire.

Bad habits
Of course we know a lot about the power of habits, especially bad ones such as smoking, eating fatty foods and gambling. Recent research confirms that habits may form familiar neural pathways which makes it more difficult to break the pattern of behaviour. It would seem that these neural pathways get triggered if the habit cues return, hence recidivism in smoking, alcoholism, drug abuse etc. However, it is the nurture of good habits in learning that matter, and there are two interesting thinkers who see habit as lying at the core of learning, Locke and William James. Sorry to get a little detailed here, but it’s worth recalling what they said.

Locke those habits in
John Locke, the greatest philosopher of his age, laid the foundations for empiricism and the enlightenment view of knowledge, politics and education. Breaking free from medieval scholasticism, and disaffected by the educational habits of his day, he put forward a sophisticated theory of education built, not around the transmission of information, but the shaping of habits and character around wisdom and virtue. These theories, grounded in his liberal, political philosophy, are written in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692). The book was widely translated and became a manual for education among the upper classes for most of 18^th century.

The book is a series of very practical methods for encouraging good habits and character right down to details on curiosity, games, language learning, dancing etc. He recommends educational methods that focus on example and practice, rather than the teaching of information and principles. In this sense, it is not learning that matters, but the establishment of good habits. It is repeated practice that instils these worthy behaviours so that they become instinctive. The concrete rather than the abstract is recommended for the reinforcement of such good habits.

The learner must not be coerced into learning but made to feel as if it is in their own interest, and that they are acting from their own free will. Not that children should be spoilt. For those of a vocational bent he recommends practical skills and understanding. Beyond this, his focus is on a healthy mind that has the basics in reading, writing, arithmetic, a knowledge of literature along with the natural and social sciences. But not the arts, which he regarded as either useless or dangerous. Detailed scholarly study should be left to those who want to become scholars.

He does not recommend school for those who can afford tutors, and sets great store on the enthusiasm of parents, and the family in general. Schools, he thought, merely perpetuate bad company and bad habits of behaviour. A child is a member of both a family and nation with the individual having the right to life and liberty. It is the idea of a free mind, that uses the power of reason to become contributory, autonomous adults in a free society that mark out this educational theory based on political belief.

James: habits as basic principle in education
Like Locke, he wrote a practical book Talks to Teachers (1899), originally a series of lectures, giving practical advice to teachers. The difference is that psychology had now become, through his efforts, a science, and its principles could be used in educational theory.

It was here that he put forward his now famous theory on learning by doing. This was to heavily influence John Dewey, and the future of educational theory through to Kolb and others. The book doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, as psychology is a science; teaching an art. But some psychological principles are clear.

Education is, above all, the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behaviour. Children should not be expected to learn by rote. Their experiences must be turned into useful and habitual behaviour through action. The learner must listen, but then take notes, experiment, write essays, measure, consult and apply. He recommends learning through work and the creation of real things or dealings with real people in a shop, to give you educational experiences beyond mere theory. He was in fact a firm advocate of vocationally oriented schools and work-based learning (relevant today or not?).

The supervision of the acquisition of habit is another of his principles. Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, and should be exercised until securely rooted. The result of almost all learning is this habitual behaviour. Association, interest, attention, will and motivation; these are James’s driving forces in education. In addition there’s memory, curiosity, emulation, constructiveness, pride, fear and love - all impulses that must be turned to good use.

This is not to say that he favoured a lazy, or what he called ‘soft pedagogics’. He recognized that learning was sometimes hard, even arduous. William James devotes chapter 4 of ‘The Principles of Psychology’ to habit and outlines some principles for the acquisition and sustainability of good habits, including; launch yourself with as strong and decided an initiative as possible, never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life, seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.

Why Latin should NOT be in the school curriculum

The venerable Mary Beard invited me to debate the ‘Future of Latin’ at the British Museum some time ago and every few years, normally in line with the electoral cycle, the issue arises again. So how did it go and what were my arguments?

Sell-out

A sell out, with 350 paying Latinists, who turned up to hear Mary chair a debate which pitched David Aaronovitch and I against Peter Jones and Natalie Haynes. As we walked on stage and introduced ourselves (I found that I was the only person who didn’t go to Oxford), everybody seemed to know each other (except me). This is exactly the sort of challenge I like, as although it was a sell-out, I’m not in the habit of selling-out on my beliefs and principles.

Neither contrarian nor philistine

To be clear, I was not there as a contrarian or philistine, as I’ve been in love with the classics since I was a boy. My first secondary school lay astride the Antonine Wall and for over 40 year I’ve been to every corner of the Roman, Greek and Egyptian Empires, from Scotland to Syria. I cycled Hadrian’s wall, still go to Greece every year and never miss an opportunity to visit sites, especially on the Peloponnese. and I go to Egypt, as I do almost every year, for another dose of Egyptology in December, and have done since 1989. 

I am, however, also a rationalist and realist, and my 30 plus years of experience in the learning game have made me deeply suspicious of the position of Latin, among many other things, in our culture and school curriculum. 

As Bertrand Russell said:

“I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.”

I was there to argue that it should NOT be taught in schools at all. These were, and are, my arguments. Note that I am not against Latin the language as an object of study, I am against it being taught in schools. The arguments for each of these propositions were presented by my opponents and audience members. These were my responses.

1. LATIN does NOT help you learn other languages

Why scratch your ear by going over the top of your head? Isn’t it obviously easier to just get on and learn Spanish, Italian and French, rather than the convoluted route through Latin. Researchers Thorndike, Sherwin, Haag & Stern all think so. In the Sherwin meta-study 'Research and the teaching of English, “the study of Latin does not necessarily increase the ability to learn another language… No consistent experimental evidence in support of this contention was found.” Learners have limited time, that time is clearly better spent on the target language itself. 

In fact, Latin can make learning a new language MORE difficult. In Search of the Benefits of Latin by Haag and Stern (2003), who followed up on Thorndike’s work nearly a century earlier, in the Journal of Educational Psychology is the key paper. They took two groups of German students, one who studied French, the other Latin as their second language. Both groups were given a course in Spanish and the results measured. When the results were analysed by a Spanish assessor (who didn’t know who had taken French or Latin) the French students made significantly fewer grammatical errors than the Latin students. As predicted the Latin students wrongly transferred the rules of Latin to Spanish. For example “misconstructions in verbs emerged to be either highly reminiscent of or identical to Latin verbs”. The French group turned out to be much better prepared to cope with Spanish grammar.

Psychologically the Latin students had suffered from negative transfer using false friends in their new language. The problem with understanding Latin is that you need to pay close attention to word endings; case markers on nouns and time markers on verbs. But in English and Romance languages word order and prepositions are more important. Endings play a minor role. The fact that the grammatical similarities between modern Romance languages are much greater than that between Latin and modern Romance languages, means that the defenders of Latin are flogging a dead horse. Thorndike was right – transfer of the wrong kind occurs.

2. LATIN does NOT have an edge in improving cognitive skills

This argument is greatly loved by the parents of ‘gifted children’ although I rarely come across a middle-class parent whose child is not gifted. For gifted, read ‘pushed’ (not a bad thing but very different). Again Haag and Stern (2000), in a review of the literature found that Thorndike, “did not find any differences in science and maths in students who learned Latin at school and those who did not”. Two groups of comparable students, where one studied Latin, the other English, were assessed after two years, “No differences were found in either verbal or non-verbal IQ or grades in German or Maths”. This again had been predicted by Thorndike decades before, namely that transfer needs common ground in the source and target.

3. LATIN does NOT give significant advantages in using English

English is a Germanic language – we are largely speaking in Old English rooted language. The TOP 100 words are Old English (sorry three are Old Norse – THEY, THEIR, THEM). As for one audience member’s argument that it is necessary as all children need to be able to understand etymology, I disagree. Is there anything more annoying than the dinner-party bore who stops you and explains the root of a word, as if it made any difference to your argument or its contemporary meaning. If anything a good course in Old English would be better. Do you really have to go through years of Latin so that you understand the roots of Homo sapiens?

4. LATIN does NOT guides us correct use of English grammar

Stephen Pinker, Harvard’s world renowned expert in psycholinguistics backs this up in The Language Instinct, “Latin declensional paradigms are not the best way to convey the inherent beauty of grammar”. He recommends computer programming and universal grammar on the grounds that they are “about living minds and not dead tongues”.

Pinker has a go at the Latin language mavens who want to pointlessly foist Latinate rules of grammar into English. As Pinker explains, this snobbery took root in 18th century London, when Latin was used as a mark of social class (still true today) and Latin grammar rules were crudely pasted into books on English grammar, for example, ‘don’t split infinitives’ and ‘don’t end a sentence with a preposition’. Latin simply doesn’t allow you to split an infinitive and to stupidly insist that it’s wrong in English, is as stupid as making us all wear togas.

English does NOT have Latin grammar. English grammar fundamentally Germanic. Latin highly inflected, role of word in a sentence indicated by its endings. English relies primarily on word order to determine grammatical relationships. Latin nouns gendered English are not.

5. LATIN is necessary for SCIENCE, LAW and MEDICINE

One girl in the audience, from Merseyside was adamant that Lawyers needed to have studied Latin. Incidentally, if you’ve heard the argument that Latin helps medical students learn and understand the considerable amount of medical vocabulary that has to be learned in medical schools. This also turns out to be false as shown in Pampush and Petto (2010). The Latin vocabulary in law, medicine and biology is there but one can simply learn the words, without knowing their etymology - most lawyers, doctors and scientists do exactly that. Why spend years learning Latin to help you in a small selection of vocabulary? The pay-off is, as Russell pointed out, is tiny.

6. LATIN brings the joy of ideas and literature

One contribution from the audience I did like was the idea that Latin bridges us to rich tradition of thought and literature. He mentioned Roman literature but also the Magna Carta, Bacon and Newton. First, anyone studying history will not lose out by working with translations of the Magna Carta or Bacon. And does anyone really need to read Newton’s tortuous Latin, other than scholars in the history of maths? I think not. 

And why not Greek? Wouldn’t you prefer the riches of Plato and Aristotle, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, along with the works of any one of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes to the largely derivative Roman philosophers (few can name any) and dramatists. Even in History, the Greeks Thucydides and Herodotus are a match for any Roman writer, including Tacitus. In politics, our democratic traditions are largely Greek. Even English law is not Roman (although in Scotland it is). Then there’s the politics and democratic traditions that are fundamentally Greek. Even in maths and science the mighty Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes trump the Romans.

7. LATIN’s history of exclusion

Of course, Latin was introduced to this country as the language of the clergy, it was not, as is sometimes supposed introduced by the Romans, as few Latinate words come from that era. As the language of the church it largely excluded the laity, as most remained illiterate and spoke various forms of English. It was then used as the gatekeeper for learning. This had some benefits, when Latin was sort of European Esperanto, but continued for centuries after that died and was long used as the gatekeeper at Oxbridge and other institutions. David Aaronovitch made the telling point that it is still a key ‘marketing’ differentiator for independent schools.

8. LATIN would NOT die if not taught in schools

There are plenty of scholars in subjects that are not taught at schools. The bottom line with any dead language, especially Latin, is that there’s little that is new and to be uncovered. Compare this to the vast amounts of Sumerian cuneiform tablets that still need to be both deciphered and excavated. In the end I agree with one of our greatest living Latin scholars Mary Beard, “the overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin or Greek from school or University. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek.” This about sums up my position. 

I am not against the study of Latin or any other historic languages. This is largely a matter of proportionality for our Universities. By all means let a few study Latin. What I am against is too prominent a role for Latin in contemporary school curricula. Our young people have enough on their plate at 5-18, as the range of subjects expands to include a wider range of science subjects, IT and other vocational skills. A dead language, in the sense of no longer being spoken or used for scholarship, at this stage is merely the dead hand of educational history being played out by interested parties.

9. LATIN is NOT about choice

Several people argued that Latin is a matter of choice in schools. The curriculum is crowded enough with increasing demand every year as new subjects, such as computer studies, emerge. As we have seen from recent educational lunacy in policy, has resulted in the destruction of choice in the curriculum. Professor Alison Wolf, Gove’s lapdog, ignored advice from industry and education experts to crush 3100 vocational qualifications. That strange beast, the EBacc, which had Latin as a core choice, deliberately excluded all vocational subjects, even ICT. Gove's successors , such as Williamson did the same, with special temporary funding, creating a one-sided system that simply reinforces the old apartheid system we have in this country between academic and vocational learning. 

This is not to say that all education should be aimed at utility and employment, just that a contemporary curriculum in schools is always a trade-off, with new subjects and content always arriving, so that everything we taught in the past can’t just remain. We need to weed and feed a curriculum, which means some hard choices. My preference would be to focus more on modern languages themselves, where we have declining numbers.

10. LATIN is a political issue

It has now become a political pawn. A largely (not exclusively) right wing movement to impose private school norms (7%) on state schools (93%) became an electoral issue, hence Williamson's special funding.  Labour won and implemented their promised VAT policy on private schools and in reassessing budgets they also scrapped Williamson's artificial subsidy for Latin in state schools. We can argue for or against Latin in schools but this was democracy in action.

Conclusion

I rather liked this audience and I especially liked Peter Jones.  He was my opponent but put to bed those old tropes about Latin improving your ability to learn languages, improve intelligence or think logically. He was remarkably free from cant and any sense of snobbery. What he loved was Latin and his plea was for the beauty and intrinsic value of the language. With that I have no argument.

Google: first MOOP (Massive Online Open Pedagogy)

Seek and you will find

As a kid I never imagined, when watching Star Trek, that I really would have a little device on which I could ask any question, and it would almost certainly give me a meaningful answer. Science fiction came true and I have one next to me now and its main tool is Google search. Google search is probably the most profound pedagogic shift in the history of learning, not a game changer but a previously unimaginable shift towards universal access to anything, anytime from anywhere.

Montessori kids

Brin was born in Russia and educated in the US, Page is from Michigan. Like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, Sigmund Freud, Buckminster Fuller, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget and Hilary and Bill Clinton before them, they both attended Montessori schools. Indeed, they both credit their Montessori education for much of their success. It was the Montessori experience, they claim, that made them self-directed, allowing them to think for themselves and pursue their real interests.

They only met in 1995, at Stanford, yet their business, Google, famously based on a spelling error (Google should have been Googol), has become one of the most significant global businesses of our times. The company floated in 2004 and is run as a triumvirate of Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergei Brin.

Most potent, pedagogic, productivity tool ever

As the world’s most successful search engine it has become an indispensable tool for learning and research. It’s a way of learning that has touched almost everyone in the developed and increasingly developing world. Search has transformed the way we search for information and has changed our very relationship with knowledge, making a significant contribution to the very idea of what needs to be learnt and newer. It is, arguably, the single most powerful, pedagogic, productivity tool we have ever seen.

Google – game changer in learning

Google's mission is to ‘organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Specialist searching of text, images, video, books, blogs, academic papers, news, and maps, has given the ordinary user unparalleled access to knowledge stored across different media.

Their mathematical approach to search problems at Stanford led to a search engine that ranked sites by popularity. In addition, the more we search, the greater the data Google has and the better their search engine becomes. As their scalable model looked at links, so the larger the web became the better their engine became.

It is the speed and efficiency of such search that has accelerated our ability as learners to identify relevant knowledge. Learners of all ages and abilities see the web as a useful source of knowledge. Of course, Google also relies on knowledge bases such as Wikipedia, Journals and many other sources to deliver content.

Researchers, from schoolchildren with projects to advanced researchers in educational institutions, now find Google an indispensable tool. As online access to research Journals and scholarly knowledge bases increases, so search has become an indispensable tool.

Google tools and learning

Google Education provides a rack of useful tools for education. Thie rapprocah is to provide productivity tools, not content. Gmail has given users a free email service with substantial amounts of storage. Google Calendar provides individual and shared calendars. Google docs, shared documents. Google+ collaboration and hangouts. Google translate for languages. Google Scholar is even more precise in its intention.

Google Earth and Google Maps are astonishing tools for learning and research. Blogger, owned by Google, provides free blogging software to tens of millions of bloggers. YouTube is the world’s greatest, searchable repository for videos, now a mainstream source of content for learning. These promise to put even more power in the hands of learners, freeing us from the traditional limitations of paper-based libraries and physical ‘places’ of learning.

Outsourced memory

When most knowledge is easily searchable the need to learn and memorise knowledge starts to recede. Indeed, in the corporate world, it is clear that modern managers rely less on knowledge and more on skills. Memory is, in a sense, outsourced, placing less of an emphasis on rote learning and memorisation.

Many argue that this is also true of schooling, where the traditional model has been rote learning and memorisation, as opposed to critical thinking and other skills. Teaching students how to search may be as powerful a skill, as teaching them to read and write. Indeed, Google have a free course that does just that.

Google may also have altered our general idea of what constitutes knowledge. You have to learn to see knowledge as varying in quality and certainty, distinguish different sources in terms of their reliability. On the other hand, some suggest Google search has made us fickle, lazy and fragmented in our learning.

Digital Maoism

Google has its detractors. Jared Lanier warns against ‘digital Maoism’ aided and abetted by Google, that may take the wisdom of the crown and turn us all into slavish followers or tribal groups. The subterfuge is that Google monetises your search data and is “selling people [their advertiser-targetable personal identities, buying habits, etc.] back to themselves“. He goes further in his latest book The Fate of Power and the Future of Dignity claiming that the financial crash and future economy may be undermined by techno-utopianism, where we unwittingly submit to becoming become advertising fodder. These are interesting arguments and well worth noting but they tend to ignore the simple pay-off, that I gain more personally than I risk. Most people seem happy to give up their search data to get such a fee, powerful and useful product in return.

Googling the future

Google are so ambitious and have so many projects on the go that it is difficult to predict where they are heading. Now that they have tentacles into every online and offline person, organisation and place on the planet, including the planet itself, it seems likely that they will move beyond search through an expanding suite of tools to become your personal assistant for almost everything you want in life – knowledge, shopping, jobs…. However, it’s hard to see where Google X’s projects, supervised by Brin, such as the driverless car and Google Glass fit in.

Let’s not forget that Google gave us the Android mobile operating system, a welcome alternative to the closed world of Apple and a strategy one that seems to be paying off. Apple’s walled world is at odds with Google’s open world and in the long term my money’s on Google. Look out for Android games consoles, such as the Ouya. Android’s important as it eats into the OS market with phones, tablets and laptops like the Chromebook.

Conclusion

Page and Brin have created a toolset that has already revolutionised access to knowledge. Their organisation continues to revolutionise learning and to ‘organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’. The scale of this task is enormous and on-going. It is truly an example of technology making a huge impact on the nature, future and efficacy of learning, a truly momentus pedagogic force. Search as a Massive Open Online Pedagogy (MOOP) is something that is was around before MOOCs and will be around long after MOOCs are gone. It’s long-term effect on learning is irreversible and profound.

Latin: 10 reasons why it should NOT be taught in schools

The venerable Mary Beard, whom I love, not only for her books but also her television programmes, and the fact that all that bullshit about presenters having to be groomed clones, is beneath her, invited me to contribute to a debate on ‘The Future of Latin’ at the British Museum. So how did it go?

Sell-out

A sell out, with 350 paying Latinists, who turned up to hear Mary chair a debate which pitched David Aaronovitch and I against Peter Jones and Natalie Haynes. As we walked on stage and introduced ourselves (I found that I was the only person who didn’t go to Oxford), everybody seemed to know each other (except me). This is exactly the sort of challenge I like, as although it was a sell-out, I’m not in the habit of selling-out on my beliefs and principles.

Neither contrarian nor philistine

To be clear, I was not there as a contrarian or philistine, as I’ve been in love with the classics since I was a boy. My first secondary school lay astride the Antonine Wall and for over 40 year I’ve been to every corner of the Roman, Greek and Egyptian Empires, from Scotland to Syria. I cycled Hadrian’s wall, still go to Greece every year and never miss an opportunity to visit sites, especially on the Peloponnese. and I go to Egypt, as I do almost very year, for another dose of Egyptology in December., have done since 1989. 

I am, however, also a rationalist and realist, and my 30 plus years of experience in the learning game have made me deeply suspicious of the position of Latin, among many other things, in our culture and school curriculum. As Bertrand Russell said 

“I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.”

I was there to argue that it should NOT BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS AT ALL. These were, and are, my arguments. Note that I am not against LATIN the language as an object of study, I am against it being taught in schools. The arguments for each of these propositions were presented by my opponents and audience members. These were my responses.

1. LATIN does NOT help you learn other languages

Why scratch your ear by going over the top of your head? Isn’t it obviously easier to just get on and learn Spanish, Italian and French, rather than the convoluted route through Latin. Researchers Thorndike, Sherwin, Haag & Stern all think so. In the Sherwin metastudy 'Research and the teaching of English, “the study of Latin does not necessarily increase the ability to learn another language… No consistent experimental evidence in support of this contention was found.” Learners have limited time, that time is clearly better spent on the target language itself. 

In fact, Latin can make learning a new language MORE difficult. In Search of the Benefits of Latin by Haag and Stern (2003), who followed up on Thondike’s work nearly a century earlier, in the Journal of Educational Psychology is the key paper. They took two groups of German students, one who studied French, the other Latin as their second language. Both groups were given a course in Spanish and the results measured. When the results were analysed by a Spanish assessor (who didn’t know who had taken French or Latin) the French students made significantly fewer grammatical errors than the Latin students. As predicted the Latin students wrongly transferred the rules of Latin to Spanish. For example “misconstructions in verbs emerged to be either highly reminiscent of or identical to Latin verbs”. The French group turned out to be much better prepared to cope with Spanish grammar.

Psychologically the Latin students had suffered from negative transfer using false friends in their new language. The problem with understanding Latin is that you need to pay close attention to word endings; case markers on nouns and time markers on verbs. But in English and Romance languages word order and prepositions are more important. Endings play a minor role. The fact that the grammatical similarities between modern Romance languages are much greater than that between Latin and modern Romance languages, means that the defenders of Latin are flogging a dead horse. Thorndike was right – transfer of the wrong kind occurs.

2. LATIN does NOT have an edge in improving cognitive skills

This argument is greatly loved by the parents of ‘gifted children’ although I rarely come across a middle-class parent whose child is not gifted. For gifted, read ‘pushed’ (not a bad thing but very different). Again Haag and Stern (2000), in a review of the literature found that Thorndike, “did not find any differences in science and maths in students who learned Latin at school and those who did not”. Two groups of comparable students, where one studied Latin, the other English, were assessed after two years, “No differences were found in either verbal or non-verbal IQ or grades in German or Maths”. This again had been predicted by Thorndike decades before, namely that transfer needs common ground in the source and target.

3. LATIN does NOT give significant advantages in using English

English is a Germanic language – we are largely speaking in Old English rooted language. The TOP 100 words are Old English (sorry three are Old Norse – THEY, THEIR, THEM). As for one audience member’s argument that it is necessary as all children need to be able to understand etymology, I disagree. Is there anything more annoying than the dinner-party bore who stops you and explains the root of a word, as if it made any difference to your argument or its contemporary meaning. If anything a good course in Old English would be better. Meaning is use – get over it Latinists.

4. LATIN does NOT guides us correct use of English grammar

Stephen Pinker, Harvard’s world renowned expert in psycholinguistics backs this up in The Language Instinct, “Latin declensional paradigms are not the best way to convey the inherent beauty of grammar”. He recommends computer programming and universal grammar on the grounds that they are “about living minds and not dead tongues”.

Pinker has a go at the Latin language mavens who want to pointlessly foist Latinate rules of grammar into English. As Pinker explains, this snobbery took root in 18^th century London, when Latin was used as a mark of social class (still true today) and Latin grammar rules were crudely pasted into books on English grammar, for example, ‘don’t split infinitives’ and ‘don’t end a sentence with a preposition’. Latin simply doesn’t allow you to split an infinitive and to stupidly insist that it’s wrong in English, is as stupid as making us all wear togas.

English does NOT have Latin grammar. English grammar fundamentally Germanic. Latin highly inflected, role of word in a sentence indicated by its endings. English relies primarily on word order to determine grammatical relationships. Latin nouns gendered English are not.

5. LATIN is necessary for SCIENCE, LAW and MEDICINE

One girl in the audience, from Merseyside was adamant that Lawyers needed to have studied Latin. Incidentally, if you’ve heard the argument that Latin helps medical students learn and understand the considerable amount of medical vocabulary that has to be learned in medical schools. This also turns out to be false as shown in Pampush and Petto (2010). The Latin vocabulary in law, medicine and biology is there but one can simply learn the words, without knowing their etymology - most lawyers, doctors and scientists do exactly that. Why spend years learning Latin to help you in a small selection of vocabulary? The pay off is tiny.

6. LATIN brings the joy of ideas and literature

One contribution from the audience I did like was the idea that Latin bridges us to rich tradition of thought and literature. He mentioned Roman literature but also the Magna Carta, Bacon and Newton. First, anyone studying history will not lose out by working with translations of the Magna Carta or Bacon. And does anyone really need to read Newton’s tortuous Latin, other than scholars in the history of maths? I think not. And why not Greek? Wouldn’t you prefer the riches of Plato and ARistotle, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, along with the works of any one of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes to the largely derivative Roman philosophers (few can name any) and dramatists. Even in History, the Greeks Thucydides and Herodotus are a match for any Roman writer. In politics, our democratic traditions are largely Greek. Even English law is not Roman (although in Scotland it is). Then there’s the politics and democratic traditions that are fundamentally Greek. Even in maths and science the mighty Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes trump the Romans.

7. LATIN’s history of exclusion

Of course, Latin was introduced to this country as the language of the clergy, it was not, as is sometimes supposed introduced by the Romans, as few Latinate words come from that era. As the language of the church it largely excluded the laity, as most remained illiterate and spoke various forms of English. It was then used as the gatekeeper for learning. This had some benefits, when Latin was sort of European Esperanto, but continued for centuries after that died and was long used as the gatekeeper at Oxbridge and other institutions to keep out - such as women. David Aaronovitch made the telling point that it is still a key ‘marketing’ differentiator for independent schools.

8. LATIN would NOT die if not taught in schools

There are plenty of scholars in subjects that are not taught at schools. The bottom line with any dead language, especially Latin, is that there’s little that is new and to be uncovered. Compare this to the vast amounts of Sumerian cuneiform tablets that still need to be both deciphered and excavated. In the end I agree with one of our greatest living Latin scholars Mary Beard, “the overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin or Greek from school or University. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek.” This about sums up my position. 

I am not against the study of Latin or any other historic languages. This is largely a matter of proportionality for our Universities. By all means let a few study Latin. What I am against is too prominent a role for Latin in contemporary school curricula. Our young people have enough on their plate at 5-18, as the range of subjects expands to include a wider range of science subjects, IT and other vocational skills. A dead language, in the sense of no longer being spoken or used for scholarship, at this stage is merely the dead hand of educational history being played out by interested parties.

9. LATIN is NOT about choice

Several people argued that Latin is a matter of choice in schools. The curriculum is crowded enough with increasing demand every year as new subjects, such as computer studies, emerge. As we have seen from recent educational lunacy in policy, has resulted in the destruction of choice in the curriculum. Professor Alison Wolf, Gove’s lapdog, ignored advice from industry and education experts to crush 3100 vocational qualifications. That strange beast, the EBacc, which had Latin as a core choice, deliberately EXCLUDED all vocational subjects, even ICT. Gove's successors , such as Williamson did the same, with special temporary funding, creating a one-sided system that simply reinforces the old apartheid system we have in this country between academic and vocational learning. It’ i a mistake that may take decades to reverse. Who would have thought that with all of this talk of 21^st century skills, mass youth and graduate unemployment, we’d be discussing the promotion of the teaching of a 2^nd century BC language that no one speaks, as a core curriculum subject.

10. LATIN is a political issue
It has now become a political pawn. A largely (not exclusively) right wing movement to impose private school norms (7%) on state schools (93%) became an electoral issue. Labour won and implemented their promised VAT policy on private schools. In reassessing budgets thay also scrapped Williamson's the artificial subsidy for Latin on state schools. We can argue for or against Latin in schools bit this was democracy in action.

Conclusion

I rather liked this audience and I especially liked Peter Jones.  He was my opponent but put to bed those old tropes about Latin improving your ability to learn languages, improve intelligence or think logically. He was remarkably free from cant and any sense of snobbery. What he loved was Latin and his plea was for the beauty and intrinsic value of the language. With that I have no argument.

Universities - recorded lectures better than live

Universities, in their current guise, have become closed, inward-looking, traditional, elitist institutions. Shut for much of the year, empty buildings, three lectures a week, poor teaching – the current financial squeeze will hopefully force us to re-examine the model.

Imagine a world in which some universities simply opened their doors to learners, even offering courses for free. There are signs that such a paradigm shift may be happening on the web. Suddenly a huge amount of good content is available on the web, for free, as some of the biggest brands on the web act as conduits for higher education content, with hefty foundation grants paying the bill.

YouTube EDU

Simple enough, video lectures with ratings and details of number of downloads, from over 320 Universities such as; Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford,, and so on. Cambridge, Coventry, Edinburgh, Leeds, Nottingham, OU, The top lecture has received 10.5 million views! But even physics lectures are beating the 350,000 mark. Compare this with the once a year, lecture from a typical living academic – let’s say 100 students once a year for 15 years (and that’s really pushing it). You’re effectively extending the life of a good physics lecturer by thousand of years!

YouTube lectures can be public or private, structured as playlists embed on your site or show on a mobile phone. YouTube Insight gives you loads of useful stats on; views, referrals, gender, age, geography.

iTunes U

Like YouTube EDU, iTunes U is all free content, currently at 200,00 audio and video items, from major Universities. You can download all the tracks on a specific topic or just one. You can also subscribe to receive new stuff automatically. Top downloads – Intensive English, Introduction to Mac OS, Building a Business, beginners’ French etc. One distinct advantage is that you can play audio or video on your iPod, iTouch, iPhone, MP3 player, Mac or PC. iTunes U Reports give you lots of stuff on downloads, unique users and so on.

Open Learn

Open Learn is the OUs Moodle based system is much more sophisticated on support for learners with its learning tools, knowledge maps, shared activities and activity reports. All you need do is register with a personal profile. The content and forums are then available for group discussions, you can do the self-assessment, where you answer questions, then compare your answers with model answers. You can rate and review units, create a learning journal and use Learning Space to organise your study. Pretty impressive.

MITOPENCOURSEWARE

That guy Walter Lewin, physics lecturer, is at the top of the downloaded courses with his Physics 1 Classical Mechanics lecture with its subtitles/transcript, lecture notes, assignments/solutions and exams/solutions. More of him later.

MITOpenCourseware has an annual running cost of $3.6 million (10% lower than last year) they’re constantly lowering their cost base. Over 1900 courses, some translated, at both undergraduate and graduate level, this is an astonishingly rich resource of free lecture notes, videos and exams from MITs actual courses. There’s translations in Chinese, Thai and Persian. Zipped downloads and lots of user controls coming

The stats are astounding 40 million visits by 31 million people from almost every country in the world. The majority view this stuff for personal learning 62%. Overall the breakdown is 49% self-learners, 32% students, 16% educators.

University of the People

The ‘free’University , yes ‘free’. Just started this year but puts forward a model that may be ideal for the developing world (see my previous post).

WikiBooks

A growing resource of ‘Open books for an open world’ are available with the usual wiki functionality of discussion, source and history for each book. There’s also print-ready and PDF books available.

Project Gutenberg

At 2.5 million downloads per month, Project Gutenberg is starting to motor. What’s interesting is the eclectic nature of the downloads. The top ten contains fiction such as Alice in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, but also a science book, the Kama Sutra and a book on the history of Furniture. They also have their famous ‘Distributed Proofreading’ system, where volunteers proofread e-books, a page a day.

Wikipedia

The greatest single, searchable store of knowledge on the planet and growing still. It’s a miracle of the web, and I’d personally give Jimmy Wales the Nobel Prize for knowledge dissemination. Who doesn’t use this thing? It’s wonderful beyond belief. Who cares if a few errors are noted, they’re soon fixed. It quite simply the greatest knowledge sharing show on earth.

Open Education

OER (Open Education Resources) is a rapidly growing movement with the not-for-profit OER Foundation launched last month on the back of a $200,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation and support from the Learning4Content project.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration is up and running, a sort of manifesto for future development. The Opencast Community site has a wealth of information on podcasting in Higher Education. The Matterhorn project is of real interest with $1.3 million from the Mellon and Hewlitt Foundations to develop software that will schedule, capture, encode and deliver audio and video content to the likes of YouTube EDU and iTunes U. Should be ready by summer 2010. WkiEducator is one of many communities operating in the field, where you can join, and create free content. They promise to ‘turn the digital divide into digital dividends’.

Funding

So how is all of this funded? Well, there’s a number of sources; foundations, most notably, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, institutions themselves, free contributions, donations and payment. The foundation money (mostly from private sector benefactors) tends to seed the initiative, which then gains momentum either in a University or community. The real progress comes when you get a slingshot effect from altruistic contributors (as in Wikipedia).

Recorded lectures – better learning?

Are Youtube video lectures better than the real thing? I think the evidence is in the video themselves. In the cutaways to the audience you see some students attention wander and always towards another student. You don’t have that distraction in your own company. Lewin understands and explains at the start of his lecture series, that lectures complement other forms of study. He is NOT lecturing the book. It’s about demonstrating physics, selling physics, exciting people about physics. It’s about motivation, as well as understanding.

What I love about Walter Lewin is his style – he walks around, he shouts, he gesticulates, he demonstrates, he stands up on his desk, gets students up, he quips – he’s a livewire. He does the very opposite of playing that ‘I’m an academic and have to be serious, grave and dull’ routine.

Case study 1: University of Texas - Austin

Major findings included:

• Attendance was not significantly affected by webcasts, even given the limited degree to which some students repeatedly substituted webcasts for attending class.
• Students perceived webasts to be a helpful tool for learning, but the impact of webcasts on their performance in terms of grades and test scores is not clear.
• Students used webcasts for learning benefits (e.g., reviewing course content) and psychological benefits (e.g., anxiety reduction, course satisfaction).
• A majority of students watched webcasts at least once, typically 1-7 times, before exams or 1-3 times a month, at night from home through high-speed connections.
• Most students watched the entire lecture and typically they both listened to the lecture and watched videos and slides.
• Female students and students who cared about their course grades perceived webcasts as more beneficial than did male students or those who did not care about their grades respectively. Also, those with certain difficulties non-native speakers of English, students with a learning disability, and students with difficulty in understanding the professor’s speech) did not report benefits from webcasts, contrary to our expectations.
• Students rated most current and future webcast interface features as important, in particular stop/rewind (current feature), scan (current feature), manipulating the slides or video window (current feature), and better quality or full screen animation/video (future feature).
• Students and instructors were generally satisfied with webcasts’ quality and did not experience many technical problems. Many problems they did report can be resolved through training of instructors, students, and camera operators.
• Both students and instructors in general indicated that webcasts were good supplemental learning resources but not a substitute for attending class.

Case Study 2: University of Michigan - Flint http://tiny.cc/9q0fI

The results presented here now further extend the benefits of the cyber classroom by demonstrating a significant improvement in student outcomes as assessed by final grades with a nearly half grade improvement in mean grades, a 56% drop in failing grades, and a 36% increase in grades B+ and above.

Case study 3: ICTP Trieste

Another comes from ICTP in Trieste, who have been using recorded lectures for some time. Assessed learning improves, students watch 2 hours per night after live daytime lectures and even watch lectures from other courses they’re not taking.