Modeling Learning Progressions in Epistemic Games with Epistemic Network Analysis
Rupp, A, Choi, Y, Gushta, M, Mislevy, R, Thies, MC, Bagley, E, Nash, P, Hatfield, D, Svarovsky, G, Shaffer DW. (2009). Modeling learning progressions in epistemic games with epistemic network analysis: Principles for data analysis and generation. Paper to be presented at the Learning Progressions in Science conference (LeaPS), Iowa City, IA, USA.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/leaps-learning-progressions-paper-rupp-et-al-2009-leaps-format1.pdf
The market is there, people
A nice summary of the arguments against text books notes:
$50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house.
So, if you do the math on the number of students in the US times the number of classes they take times the number of textbooks they use each year, then why isn’t there a market for good educational games?
What’s next in higher education?
A colleague recently forwarded an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the future of higher education, criticizing the way in which academic knowledge is becoming increasingly irrelevant:
Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
Leaving aside the fact that I actually think it might be interesting to understand how the use of citations has changed over time–and what that would imply about how we think we know what we know–the article is fundamentally misguided.
