News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Practice Doesn't Make Perfect by yourapostasy on Saturday October 01, 2016 @09:29AM (#12617745)
This is what I worry about the MOOC's: a lot of the best teachers I've had personally, and observed (with children), drew a vast tree of pedagogical techniques, but used their evaluation of a student's individual personality/psychology to inform them of which node/branch to select next. The most sophisticated MOOC's ever get is to brute-force try one node after another, if they support presenting the same material in a different way at all. And there isn't a classification system that I'm aware of to organize all the branches, especially around annotations that say "this branch appropriate if personality/psychology tends towards <this>" (yet another ontological terra incognita, I'm not aware of any classification system to describe students' pedagogical personality/psychology, which can change even depending upon context like subject matter, mood, etc.).

MOOC's are a step in the right direction, but far, far from a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer idealized vision that I would like to see.

Re:Practice Doesn't Make Perfect by agumonkey on Saturday October 01, 2016 @09:42AM (#12617797)
If I may add my 2 cents, I almost never interacted positively with teachers at the College level. Mostly because I became borderline sociophobic tbh. MOOCs removed a big barrier between teacher judgement and politics (they're human, they can be prejudiced). Also gave me way more opportunity to collaborate and exchange with other students (mostly through IRC channels).
Re:Practice Doesn't Make Perfect by yourapostasy on Monday October 03, 2016 @11:19AM (#12628037)
Very good point. I strongly suspect as an individual's autodidactic capabilities increase, the need for highly-attuned teachers decreases, and by college-level academics MOOCs may be far more effective in that context. I think ironically however, that the need for high-attuned mentors comes up later, as the academics segues into field practice.