Insert Stranger Ways song here...

[usernamenumber]

Starting the first lecture in the coursera.org algorithms class I posted about earlier. I am reminded that I have many Thoughts and Opinions when it comes to principles of creating good presentation materials. Not that the course isn't goo, I just... yeah, Opinions. I think I need a T-shirt to wear when attending lectures: "I'm judging your slides".

Comments

[heiligekuh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a helpful (I guess) that I can run the entire lecture with the tab hidden, but doesn't speak well for the actual design of the course.

This has been my experience with offerings similar to Coursea, they're a mediocre attempt to map the college lecture experience to an online format. I'm not convinced that the college lecture experience is anything other than the dominant mutant of it's particular ecosystem, so transplanting it with all of it's weird flaws into this radically different format seems like a poor choice.

These courses are treadmills. With Coursea and EdX, at least it's a treadmill that's free to try.

Want to choose a weeknight to Skype/IRC about the HW sets?

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in talking more about this treadmill notion...

You know, at first I was going to say that this is exactly the kind of course where I couldn't imagine a crunchy, alt-ed approach working, but the more I think about it, with some creative programming, I could imagine a graphical tool/game where the algorithms (at least the ones in the first set of lessons) are represented as increasingly complex machines, such that how they work, how efficient they are, and the nature of the problem each enhancement addresses can be visualized and interacted with.

That would be really cool, but I do wonder if it would be worth the great effort it would take to produce. I mean, you do most of that tweaking and experimentation, albeit more abstractly, in code.

Anyway. Would love to "study group". I'll probably be free tonight and/or Weds. Will either of those work?

[ultimatepsi.livejournal.com]

You've reminded me of a edu-game design I had for teaching high-school algebra that I shelved because a) It was more coding work than I had time/skill/motivation for and b) It would mostly be good at teaching algebra to students who like abstract puzzle games (a limited group who is likely to do well at algebra anyhow).

I desperately want to see more simulation-based edu-games. The vast majority of edu-games now are basically instant-feedback quizzes. Now instant feedback is awesome, and there's value in that type of game, but it mostly teaches disconnected facts, or at best, related sets of patterns in a small realm.

We should get together and discuss technology and education sometime, because text has insufficient bandwidth.