Blogs

Stephen Downes made a comment in passing yesterday, calling Khan Academy's online video library a MacGuffin, "something [that] provokes learning, but isn't." I've been stewing about the analogy ever since.

These days I'm a little obsessed with Moneyball, the book and the film. Michael Lewis's story of the transformation of the Oakland A's through data-driven decision-making and a commitment to rethinking the game even in the face of resistance from old-school scouts isn't inspiring in the way we think of come-from-behind, underdog sports stories.

We're moving into the start of 'prime-time season' for watchers of development and change related to the Bologna Process (which is fueling the establishment of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA)), and its cousin, the European Research Area (ERA). This is because the 2012 Bucharest Ministerial Conference, which will be held in Bucharest, Romania, on 12-13 April, is the setting for two key gathering that stir up analyses.

Whether you’re into bread, pastries, cookies, soups, sauces, casseroles, or other delightful, delectable, and preferably time-consuming sundries, elaborate cooking projects can be a welcome distraction from those towers of books scattered and stacked precariously around your living quarters. It’s true that, at this stage of the game, each of us has our own arsenal of finely-tuned “productive” procrastination techniques to help us avoid the real work of reading, writing, and grading, and far be it from me to pass judgment on anyone’s time-tested methods. But while baking started out as an avoidance strategy for me, it has evolved into a tool for invention.

Reflecting on how effective Quebec's "national student strikes" have been at keeping tuition in the province the lowest in Canada.

Maybe you think that the big "Games" event today is the premier of the Hunger Games movie. You'd be wrong. The big event that you should be anticipating is when you buy/borrow/download Ted Kosmatka's amazing new book, The Games.

Note to software/hardware vendors: if you want to make the case that what you’re selling will overturn teaching and learning as we know them, don’t do so with a four-hour lecture.

In statistics, we often talk of "outliers," observations that appear so far from the average that they teach us something about the underlying data and how they came to be. This is a concept that has gained attention recently as the month of March has so far distinguished itself as a true outlier in this part of the country.