I can’t believe that today is the last day of September! Where does the time go? It was approximately 35 years ago that I came to this country. I arrived in JFK on Sunday, Sep 10th, totally lost. When I was about to leave, a relative of mine asked where in NY I was going to “is it Manhattan island?”. Of course, I knew my Chemistry and Math really well, but not geography! I had no clue. I was waiting at the airport for an Indian grad student from Hunter College to pick me up, except no one was seeking me. After a long wait and nervousness, another Indian person looking for someone else from my flight asked if I saw “a dark Indian guy with glasses”. I said to myself, “that would be three quarters of all Indians in the flight”. Then he asked me who I was waiting for and when I told him, he could not stop laughing “Vasu is happily watching football in his apartment!”. It turns out that the telegram I sent before I left, which was strategically sent just a couple of hours before my flight on Saturday, was addressed to his Hunter College address on a wekend. I later found out that telegrams were not as reliable here as they were in India! Of course, now those who arrive from India are so savvy that they become my GPS! Sometimes I get irritated (sorry) and take an alternate route.
Before I get carried too far… As you may know, Wellesley’s first ever MOOC, Introduction to Human Evolution, taught by Adam van Arsdale, opened last Wednesday, September 25th. It is an important step for our grand experiment. Adam worked extremely hard to make this happen and edX staff keep telling us how he is a natural and this is one of the courses that have gone through very smoothly, including the opening day. Many of us have been watching some of the early discussions with enthusiasm. I have watched several of the videos and looked at the problem sets etc. They are really cool! The diversity of students in terms of the many dimensions of the data collected – gender, highest degree, the location etc – are fascinating. There will be more to come…
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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.
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By now, this is old news. Last week, you all must have seen an announcement that Wellesley has joined edX
and that we plan to offer four courses through edX in what President Bottomly called a Grand Experiment. This decision came after an almost a yearlong internal conversations on what should be Wellesley’s strategy around the MOOCs and generally online education. I am so glad that we are entering into this partnership and that it is clearly an experiment. There are far too many questions than answers and as true academics, when we seek answers, we engage in experiments. There is simply no other way to find out than getting our hands and feet wet.
In general the extended Wellesley community seems excited about this decision. The student reporter who interviewed me on this topic was very excited and talked about how the newspaper, in an earlier editorial had supported Wellesley getting into this realm. She was also excited about the course she was enrolled in and her hands on experience. But, everyone also has a lot of interesting and important questions.
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Final presidential debate is over and done with and the San Francisco Giants quietly came from behind to beat the Cardinals and the World Series is all set. Whether it is the debates or the Yankees losing to the Tigers, there is a lot of spinning going on. In case of politics, the spin rooms are there for this purpose. In sports, it is always the bad calls or the injuries; I guess you can throw money at acquiring all the talented players but you can’t buy their well being and health. I am sure we will all be watching the different polls and other sources such as Intrade during the next few days while also checking the World Series. When I was growing up, the election seasons in Sri Lanka and India were so much fun. There were so many outdoor events where the politicians came and gave fiery speeches, with a lot of warm up acts including music and dance. Finally, when the time came to announce the results, we were up all night listening to the short wave radio, sipping on coffee or chai (which was a predictor of which side you were on!), screaming hard when our parties won a seat and waking up all the neighbors. It was a lot of fun.
I continue to watch Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight (I should say that I loved it much better the way it was before NY Times took over), Real Clear Politics and Intrade. I check these along with Facebook and Twitter before I even check my emails in the morning. Email is for the older people 🙂 I get so much out of my social media connections. As I have said before, those who I follow have already filtered the news for me so that when I get up, the virtual newspaper is waiting for me from all over the world. It is this concept that is also helping drive the online courses. So, I decided to go back to school to check ’em out.
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