From: a tweet by Jane O’Dwyer – http://bit.ly/1uvRtQM%5B/caption%5D
I was at the edX Global Forum last week. This is a meeting attended by faculty and staff from edX member institutions. This was my second one and the number of attendees and the diversity of institutions they represent have grown tremendously. It was great to meet several new people, including several from edX with whom I have only had phone contact. Because of our early start and the fact that we have completed four courses through WellesleyX, many attendees were eager to talk to me about our experiences.
Of all the talks and sessions I attended, the best was a student panel. Nine students from MIT, BU and Wellesley (may be Harvard also) who have taken “blended” classes discussed their experiences. Wellesley student Sharvari Johari is seated fourth from the left in the picture. She did a terrific job as a panelist. In almost all the courses these students took, their faculty taught a face to face class and was either teaching the same course at the same time on edX or had used an archived edX course that the faculty member had taught before. It was refreshing to hear directly from them for a variety of reasons, primarily because they are not afraid to express their opinions.
They liked the experience overall
All the students liked several aspects of the blended experience. The most liked aspects of the blended experience was the availability of the materials outside the classroom and the “stress free” assessment. Seven of the nine students are STEM majors and the courses that they took had assessments that are multiple choice questions which allowed multiple tries and provided a detailed answers that they could look up after completing the assessment. One of them mentioned how the stress of having to get the correct answer in a given period of time is a bit too much and many a times one is penalized for making silly numerical mistakes. Whereas in this medium, the focus is on learning. If you made a mistake, the explanation provided helps guide you to do it right the next time around.
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During the Cybersecurity month presentation by John Sileo, I heard him mention something to the effect that the constitution does not guarantee privacy. Whether the constitution explicitly provides privacy protection seems to be unsettled and different legal scholars seem to have different opinions about this. Whether constitution guarantees it or not, we have all made serious assumptions about privacy and lived with those assumptions and in the digital age, this has become a serious issue. In 1999, Scott McNealy was quoted as saying ““You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Despite the fact that this was pretty scary to hear, in the networked world, this has turned out to be correct.
Whenever you have a networked device that connects to the internet, it needs a unique identity, typically an IP number. I will keep things simple (because in reality they are very complicated as to how this works) by saying that in order to reach the destination, say a web site, information travels through multiple networked devices and all of them pass information from you to the destination. If your connection is encrypted (such as an SSL connection using https://), the content traveling back and forth is encrypted and generally hard for those intermediate devices to unravel, but there are certain pieces of information such as source and destination IP numbers and the “ports” on which they communicate which have to remain unencrypted. Ports are some predefined mechanism for different types of network communication to occur. This simply means there are a whole lot of devices and operators of those devices who have access to at least the IP numbers of who is communicating with who and what type of communication it is (typically based on port numbers). You need this information to properly route your packets back and forth. Requiring every intermediate device to unencrypt and re-encrypt this information is not practical and provides no additional security. And one we can generally agree that this is a serious privacy issue, especially, as we have found out that the government itself uses this information in ways that violates privacy!
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From: a tweet by Jane O’Dwyer – http://bit.ly/1uvRtQM%5B/caption%5D