A Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course (Link to Lesson One)(Link to Lesson Four) Lesson Five: A Fraudulent Potential “And this is what we celebrate in Wikipedia is pretending that there’s some absolute truth that can be spoken that people can approximate and that the speaker doesn’t matter.” –Jaron Lanier Are you . . .
Read MoreIt is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that experimental writing is emotionally arid, its brainy explorations of language and its commitment to difficulty wringing from the work any possibility of deep feeling as a reader works through the text. The wrongness of this assumption is obvious to anyone who has spent a . . .
Read MoreA Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course (Link to Lesson One)(Link to Lesson Three) Lesson Four: A Brief History of Failure Largely absent from the discourse surrounding the MOOC is the recognition that the current wave exists in a lineage. Online education has a history, one that, as far as MOOCs are . . .
Read MoreA Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course (Link to Lesson One)(Link to Lesson Two) Lesson Three: Let’s Not Forget the Poor MOOCs are cheap; or rather, they are less expensive than courses at traditional colleges and universities. This is one of the MOOC’s major selling points: according to proponents, it reduces education . . .
Read MoreA Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course (Link to Lesson One) Lesson Two: To the Letter of the Discourse “This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press.”—Professor Anant Agarwal, President of edX People talk about MOOCs in much the same way Apple talks about a new iPod—with a . . .
Read MoreA Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course Lesson One: Roughly $81 Billion That is the size of the combined endowments of the existing members of edX, one of the leading massive open online course [MOOC] platforms. That amount of money alone is enough to give anyone pause, even if we don’t consider . . .
Read MoreEditor’s note: The interview that follows was first published on September 25, 2014 in Oslobođenje, the leading daily in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s capital city. The translation is by Una Tanović. After the comic “The Secret of Nikola Tesla,” based on a short story by Karim Zaimović, was published in the Massachusetts Review, we spoke with its author . . .
Read More
Jim Foley with staff and graduating students at the Care Center in Holyoke. From left to right: Irma Medina (Care Center staff), Glenda Suarez (Care Center graduate and teen mom), Jim Foley, Aimee Loiselle (English GED Teacher), and Maria Salgado (Care Center Transition Counselor).Photo courtesy of the Care Center. Editor’s note. The other . . .
Read MoreOf the dozens of posts I’ve written in the years since the magazine added this blog to its website, this is the first that has worked its way through three working titles. Having just returned from a grueling, difficult, and—I believe—essential two weeks at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC . . .
Read More
I’ll begin with a pair of quotes. Tim O’Brien, in his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, says, “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.” And J.M. Coetzee, from his Diary of a Bad Year, writes: “The generation of . . .
Read More