DailyDirt: How To Really Cook

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Chemistry labs are usually pictured as a clean room environment with an array of colorful liquids sitting in weird glass containers -- or sometimes as an RV racing through a desert with some crazy guy in a gas mask and dead drug dealers sliding around on the floor (a la Breaking Bad). But home kitchens are also a type of chemistry lab, and food science is getting more advanced as people with entirely too much free time (ahem, Nathan Myhrvold...) experiment with novel cooking techniques. Here are just a few links for budding home master chefs.

• If you want to grill a nice steak at home, don't try to mimic how your favorite steakhouse does it. Steakhouses optimize for speed, but at home, you can take your time and get it just the way you like it. [url]
• Some fancy cooking techniques have been called "molecular gastronomy" to describe the intersection of food science and chemistry/physics. The definition of this field of study hasn't quite been nailed down, but some chefs are starting to publish papers in scientific journals. [url]
• Harvard researchers and professional chefs are teaching an online course for haute cuisine techniques. This introductory course has no pre-requisites, and starts Oct 8th.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: chefs, chemistry, cooking, edx, food, haute cuisine, molecular gastronomy, science, steak

DailyDirt: Can Computers Grade Written Essays?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Technology aimed at education could really benefit an incredible number of students by making classes and learning (potentially) a more pleasant and efficient experience. Computers can't replace a really good human teacher, but they can make it easier for good human teachers to reach a vast audience of students. Massively open online courses (MOOCs) promise to change how education works, but there are some technological tools that might be missing. It's pretty straightforward to test students on math problems in an automated way, but grading essays is a much more daunting problem. There have been some calls for automated grading software from various organizations (like the Hewlett Foundation). But at the same time, the National Council of Teachers of English argues that computers simply can't grade essays. Here are just a few more links on this debate over the use of algorithms over English professors (or grad students).

• EdX, the non-profit started by Harvard and MIT, is releasing some software to automagically grade human-written essays. Some see this software as just another tool for educators to use for more immediate feedback to students, while others are worried that these algorithms will be used incorrectly and lead to disastrous educational policies and outcomes. [url]
• There are studies that show algorithms are statistically comparable to humans when it comes to ranking essays on a 5 point scale. There are things machines can do better and things humans do better -- just make sure you know the differences and automated essay grading can be done productively in the right context. [url]
• Automated essay readers can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. The Educational Testing Service is testing out automation, so students may soon be facing algorithmic grading for their college entrance exams. [url]
• Grading a few sentences can be harder than it might look. Professional (human) teachers are obviously better at interpreting the insights and ideas behind the words a student writes, but computers scale much better and never tire of horrible spelling mistakes or misplaced modifiers.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: ai, algorithms, artificial intelligence, automation, education, edx, essays, ets, exams, grading, mooc, nlp, tests
Companies: harvard, hewlett foundation, kaggle, mit

Harvard And MIT Back Open Education With $60 Million Online Learning Project

from the another-tipping-point? dept

News that Harvard University is the latest to join the growing revolt against the exorbitant pricing of academic journals caused something of a stir recently -- although it has been pointed out that its case would be stronger if it followed its own advice and made the Harvard Business Review open access, or at least cheaper.

But here's an area where Harvard, together with MIT, is being more pro-active in helping to make knowledge more widely available online:

EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.

EdX will build on both universities’ experience in offering online instructional content. The technological platform recently established by MITx, which will serve as the foundation for the new learning system, was designed to offer online versions of MIT courses featuring video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning. Certificates of mastery will be available for those who are motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.

MIT's MITx platform already offers some MIT courses online, and is open source:

EdX will release its learning platform as open-source software so it can be used by other universities and organizations that wish to host the platform themselves. Because the learning technology will be available as open-source software, other universities and individuals will be able to help edX improve and add features to the technology.

The hope is that other universities will join with Harvard and MIT to make EdX one of the primary platforms for online learning. Interestingly, it will also be used to research how people learn using digital technology -- and how it can be deployed more effectively:

MIT and Harvard will use the jointly operated edX platform to research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. The edX platform will enable the study of which teaching methods and tools are most successful. The findings of this research will be used to inform how faculty use technology in their teaching, which will enhance the experience for students on campus and for the millions expected to take advantage of these new online offerings.

This looks like an important move for online learning, not least because of the scale of the financial support:

The initiative will be overseen by a not-for-profit organization based in Cambridge, Mass., to be owned and governed equally by the two universities. MIT and Harvard have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration.

Those funds and the projects they will catalyze could boost efforts to make university courses more widely available, complementing the growing success of open access in opening up published materials.

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Filed Under: education, edx, harvard, mit, open access