It is snowing again, so what’s new? I was at a conference organized by MIT and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” last weekend. I was able to go only for part of it. On Sunday evening I attended a dinner  & listened to Drew Faust, president of Harvard, Rafael Reif, president of MIT and Gene Sperling, Director, National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy talk about the broader issues surrounding the online education as a disruption. I was actually going to blog about that, but I found that Tom Friedman, who attended the conference did a great job in this piece yesterday in NY Times, so I won’t repeat it.

I was sitting next to Daphne Koller from Stanford, and the co-founder of Coursera. We had very interesting conversation. I also thanked Eric Grimson for his wonderful Introduction to Computer Science & Programming class in edX. The place was packed with many of the well known names from MIT & Harvard and over 60 other institutions. I had a chance to connect with some of the liberal arts college folks that were there and with a friend who works at MIT after a long time. He and I overlapped in College in India, and connected back in the mid-80’s here.  He is such a busy guy, it is so hard to find a time to meet with him. So it was good to catch up.

I also visited Bates on Monday to participate in a panel where I was asked to talk about WellesleyX. It was a beautiful drive, but I wonder whether all of the drive was worth it. I could have done the same job remotely. Oh well, we can’t turn the clock back. Wait… May be. I am waiting for that discussion in my Quantum Mechanics class – Tunneling and time reversal and all that jazz.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk to Wellesley faculty and staff on “Milking Google for What it is Worth” which was well attended and I received several emails from the attendees about how they discovered so many capabilities of Google Docs that they were not aware of. I just wanted to recount some of what I talked at that meeting here.

Google is the cow that we are planning to milk. Some basics of milking a cow

• patience – things don’t work the first few times
• practice – practice makes perfect
• milk often – goes hand in hand with practice
• collaboration – community milking is fun and most productive
• might get kicked – Google has this habit of pulling the plug on some of your favorite tools or features on short notice!

Some basic things:

Chrome Sync – This is very useful in that it stores all information regarding your browser on the cloud so you can share them on multiple machines. Extremely useful for faculty who want to access bookmarks (that they tucked away on computers in their offices or homes) in the classrooms or while they are giving a lecture on other campuses. Since most of them seem to be logging into their Google Apps account in the classroom, accessing info through Chrome Sync should be seamless. They just need to remember to log out from public computers 🙂

GMail Meter – I love this analytical tool which provides nice summary of GMail based statistics. Look at real numbers to see whether the complaints about too many emails at midnight or weekends is real or simply a perception! And use these analytics to have informed conversations with others or help change your own email behavior. A picture is worth thousand words!

Search

OK, everyone is an expert at Google searches (or so, we all think!). Here are a few things to check out:

• Search Playground – “Feed your curiosity, test your search skills and explore topics in a whole new way.”
• Specialized Searches – How to perform targeted searches for better results, ranging from stock quotes, to flight schedule to dictionary definitions.
• Graphing – Search can now produce graphs of a single function (a second one), or multiple functions or even 3-D graphs easily. Can come in very handy in classes or labs requiring graphing. By the way, there are some fun graphs like a heart.

Research Tools

• Research Tool – This was a big hit with the audience. This tool allows you to access images, research articles etc very easily while editing a document or presentation and insert citations according to MLA, APA or Chicago styles. The seamless fashion in which you can lookup dictionary or articles without having to jump back and forth and copy and paste is just beautifully done. Of course, one concerned faculty member wanted to know “but, don’t we want the students to read the article first?” Of course, the student can, by clicking on the link to the article. Google may even know whether she really read the article or not, but they are not going to tell us that!
• Trends – Well, the only way to explain this is for you to experience this yourself. Can be a fantastic informational tool that shows how particular topics are trending based on public searches. This page collects some cool examples.
• Correlate – This is sort of like trends, where you specify the phrase search and this shows other public searches that are highly correlated to your search phrase over time. In Google Trends, you are the one who is specifying a group of search phrases to compare. Guess what? You can actually download the data for your own research! And, you can upload your own data to see correlation between public search data and your personal data. I think these are extremely powerful research tools. My favorite here: Correlate Labs. You can draw a particular distribution pattern and it finds correlated searches that match the drawing.
• Google Books Ngram Viewer – This is a Google Books phrase search facility. This paper titled “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” sets the stage for “culturomics” which in some fashion seems to be the basis of Ngram viewer. You can go hereto view some interesting Ngram searches.
• Google Research Blog – This is the blog for Research @ Google. A treasure trove of research topics. You can see Peter Norvig’s open source course builder post here. Fascinating idea. When can we have it?

Additional Info

• google.org – Technology for Social Impact. The ongoing projects provide a glimpse of what this is all about and some of the projects are really fascinating.
• Flight Search – I love this because of the speed! I booked my most recent trips through the searches done here.
• Flubaroo – OK, no idea why this name for a grading application. Google Apps Script based autograder application using Google Forms as the assessment tool. Very well done. The reason why I talked about this, we have a Google LMS that is being used by a good number of faculty and I always hear how the lack of a good assessment tool and gradebook is a problem. I built a gradesheet using script that allows for most of what our faculty need and can be combined with Flubaroo to provide a workable environment. Google Forms based assessment is VERY limiting and will not match the advanced features of the common LMSes. But for simple quizzing or drilling, this has the potential to work.