Skip to main content

Home/ educators/ Group items tagged educational technology funding

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Vicki Davis

Education funding changes 'untenable' says NSW Premier - ABC News (Australian Broadcast... - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...5126204

education news politics nsw

shared by Vicki Davis on 30 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Vicki Davis on 30 Nov 13
     
    Education is an issue around the world as demonstrated in this video from New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell. They have problems with "reneged deals with Federal and State governments." Education is in flux the world over, lest any one group of educators feel they are being singled out. This is largely caused by the information age. While the industrial age changed how people worked, the information age is fundamentally changing how people learn and those organizations that can adapt and progress will remain. Some towns suffered the loss of factories but kept their schools. What happens when the schools close? Integrate technology, blend learning, or the tightening finances world wide will make it hard for you to thrive in an education landscape increasingly mixed with education technology.
Ed Webb

What Cliff? Data and the Destruction of Public Higher Ed | Just Visiting - 2 views

www.insidehighered.com/...d-destruction-public-higher-ed

education future futures demographics data policy politics neoliberalism analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Mar 22 - Cached
alexabliss and oktayakk liked it
  • That higher education institutions are facing a “demographic cliff” in the coming years has become conventional wisdom. But what if there is no cliff? What if we’ve instead been subjected to a narrative rooted in limited data that serves the interests of corporations and is doing real damage to our public institutions?
  • Currently, the NCES projects relatively constant numbers of high school graduates through 2030, with total graduates expected to increase in the mid-2020s, followed by a modest decline, making the projected 2029–30 number slightly greater than in 2016–17. Further, it is important to note that since the 1970s, the total number of high school graduates in the U.S. has declined several times before. More importantly for higher education, the NCES projects modest increases in higher education enrollments through 2029.
  • WICHE is an interest group with an explicit policy agenda—“focus areas”—which includes “developing and supporting innovations in technology and beyond that improve the quality of postsecondary education and reduce costs.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The purported demographic crisis is being used around the country to fundamentally remake higher education. For example, this is the main argument being advanced by Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature seeking to radically reshape the University of Wisconsin system. This plan calls for the significant expansion of online education, regionalization of the comprehensive campuses, increased campus specialization and program consolidation and elimination, among other long-standing priorities.
  • The current context of higher education provides fertile ground for the uncritical acceptance of the demographic cliff. Higher education enrollments have declined since reaching historic highs in 2010. And decades of political decisions have made higher education tuition-driven, one state budget cycle at a time. We are vulnerable to the demographic cliff framing because of the politically imposed financial crunch in which we exist. Enrollments dictate everything we do.
  • the demographic cliff is an austerity-driven narrative that assumes that public funding will never—and should never—come back
  • Programs must be eliminated, online education must be expanded and, if necessary, even entire campuses must be closed. Higher education must be agile because tax increases are off the table, even as stock markets reach new highs and the income and wealth of the highest earners skyrockets. The interests of corporations and the wealthy will dictate public policy.
  • official population and education data—which come with no political assumptions, narrative or products for sale—show a slowly increasing population, including higher education enrollments, in the coming years.
  • demographic cliff is a manufactured crisis
  • takes advantage of a tuition-dependent higher education system to implement even greater austerity while imposing an education policy agenda that could never be adopted through normal political means
Vicki Davis

Hacking at Education: TED, Technology Entrepreneurship, Uncollege, and the Hole in the ... - 5 views

hackeducation.com/...tephens-hole-in-the-wall-mitra

education news trends TED all_teachers edu_trends tumblr

shared by Vicki Davis on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Vicki Davis on 05 Mar 13
     
    I agree with Audrey Watters -- we need a way to QUESTION TED talks. Good ideas worth spreading are worth interrogating and discussing. There is NO platform for that and a growing issue, I think that TED MUST address if it is going to live long and prosper. Good educators, good leaders always question and are curious. We try things out and we wonder. We want solutions but solutions packaged in a cute 15 minute presentation aren't ever really as simple as they seem. There is a different between a sound byte and a bit of something I can REALLY use.  I agree with Audrey - READ her post. My worry is that we're spreading ideas that haven't, perhaps, been tested and gone through full examination. IF we didn't learn anything from the Mortensen "3 cups of tea" fiasco then education deserves to be mislead again. We should examine and have transparency with the speeches and be able to continue the conversation. "But I have questions. I have questions about this history of schooling as Mitra (and others) tell it, about colonialism and neo-colonialism. I have questions about the funding of the initial "Hole in the Wall" project (it came from NIIT, an India-based "enterprise learning solution" company that offers 2- and 4-year IT diplomas). I have questions about these commercial interests in "child-driven education" (As Ellen Seitler asks, "can the customer base be expanded to reach people without a computer, without literacy, and without any formal teaching whatsoever?"). I have questions about the research from the "Hole in the Wall" project - the research, not the 15 minute TED spiel about it. I have questions about girls' lack of participation in the kiosks. I have questions about project's usage of retired British schoolteachers - "grannies" - to interact with Indian children via Skype. I have questions about community support. I have questions about what happens when we dismantle public institutions like schools - questions about
Ed Webb

The academy's neoliberal response to COVID-19: Why faculty should be wary and... - 1 views

academicmatters.ca/eoliberal-response-to-covid-19

Canada education online neoliberalism capitalism opinion analysis pandemics

shared by Ed Webb on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • In the neoliberal economy, workers are seen as commodities and are expected to be trained and “work-ready” before they are hired. The cost and responsibility for job-training fall predominantly on individual workers rather than on employers. This is evident in the expectation that work experience should be a condition of hiring. This is true of the academic hiring process, which no longer involves hiring those who show promise in their field and can be apprenticed on the tenure track, but rather those with the means, privilege, and grit to assemble a tenurable CV on their own dime and arrive to the tenure track work-ready.
  • The assumption that faculty are pre-trained, or able to train themselves without additional time and support, underpins university directives that faculty move classes online without investing in training to support faculty in this shift. For context, at the University of Waterloo, the normal supports for developing an online course include one to two course releases, 12-18 months of preparation time, and the help of three staff members—one of whom is an online learning consultant, and each of whom supports only about two other courses. Instead, at universities across Canada, the move online under COVID-19 is not called “online teaching” but “remote teaching”, which universities seem to think absolves them of the responsibility to give faculty sufficient technological training, pedagogical consultation, and preparation time.
  • faculty are encouraged to strip away the transformative pedagogical work that has long been part of their profession and to merely administer a course or deliver course material
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • remote teaching directives are rooted in the assumption that faculty are equally positioned to carry them out
  • The dual delivery model—in which some students in a course come to class and others work remotely using pre-recorded or other asynchronous course material—is already part of a number of university plans for the fall, even though it requires vastly more work than either in-person or remote courses alone. The failure to accommodate faculty who are not well positioned to transform their courses from in-person to remote teaching—or some combination of the two— will actively exacerbate existing inequalities, marking a step backward for equity.
  • Neoliberal democracy is characterized by competitive individualism and centres on the individual advocacy of ostensibly equal citizens through their vote with no common social or political goals. By extension, group identity and collective advocacy are delegitimized as undemocratic attempts to gain more of a say than those involved would otherwise have as individuals.
  • Portraying people as atomized individuals allows social problems to be framed as individual failures
  • faculty are increasingly encouraged to see themselves as competitors who must maintain a constant level of productivity and act as entrepreneurs to sell ideas to potential investors in the form of external funding agencies or private commercial interests. Rather than freedom of enquiry, faculty research is increasingly monitored through performance metrics. Academic governance is being replaced by corporate governance models while faculty and faculty associations are no longer being respected for the integral role they play in the governance process, but are instead considered to be a stakeholder akin to alumni associations or capital investors.
  • treats structural and pedagogical barriers as minor individual technical or administrative problems that the instructor can overcome simply by watching more Zoom webinars and practising better self-care.
  • In neoliberal thought, education is merely pursued by individuals who want to invest in skills and credentials that will increase their value in the labour market.
  • A guiding principle of neoliberal thought is that citizens should interact as formal equals, without regard for the substantive inequalities between us. This formal equality makes it difficult to articulate needs that arise from historical injustices, for instance, as marginalized groups are seen merely as stakeholders with views equally valuable to those of other stakeholders. In the neoliberal university, this notion of formal equality can be seen, among other things, in the use of standards and assessments, such as teaching evaluations, that have been shown to be biased against instructors from marginalized groups, and in the disproportionate amount of care and service work that falls to these faculty members.
  • Instead of discussing better Zoom learning techniques, we should collectively ask what teaching in the COVID-19 era would look like if universities valued education and research as essential public goods.
  • while there are still some advocates for the democratic potential of online teaching, there are strong criticisms that pedagogies rooted in well-established understandings of education as a collective, immersive, and empowering experience, through which students learn how to deliberate, collaborate, and interrogate established norms, cannot simply be transferred online
  • Humans learn through narrative, context, empathy, debate, and shared experiences. We are able to open ourselves up enough to ask difficult questions and allow ourselves to be challenged only when we are able to see the humanity in others and when our own humanity is recognized by others. This kind of active learning (as opposed to the passive reception of information) requires the trust, collectivity, and understanding of divergent experiences built through regular synchronous meetings in a shared physical space. This is hindered when classroom interaction is mediated through disembodied video images and temporally delayed chat functions.
  • When teaching is reduced to content delivery, faculty become interchangeable, which raises additional questions about academic freedom. Suggestions have already been made that the workload problem brought on by remote teaching would be mitigated if faculty simply taught existing online courses designed by others. It does not take complex modelling to imagine a new normal in which an undergraduate degree consists solely of downloading and memorizing cookie-cutter course material uploaded by people with no expertise in the area who are administering ten other courses simultaneously. 
  • when teaching is reduced to content delivery, intellectual property takes on additional importance. It is illegal to record and distribute lectures or other course material without the instructor’s permission, but universities seem reluctant to confirm that they will not have the right to use the content faculty post online. For instance, if a contract faculty member spends countless hours designing a remote course for the summer semester and then is laid off in the fall, can the university still use their recorded lectures and other material in the fall? Can the university use this recorded lecture material to continue teaching these courses if faculty are on strike (as happened in the UK in 2018)? What precedents are being set? 
  • Students’ exposure to a range of rigorous thought is also endangered, since it is much easier for students to record and distribute course content when faculty post it online. Some websites are already using the move to remote teaching as an opportunity to urge students to call out and shame faculty they deem to be “liberal” or “left” by reposting their course material. To avoid this, faculty are likely to self-censor, choosing material they feel is safer. Course material will become more generic, which will diminish the quality of students’ education.
  • In neoliberal thought, the public sphere is severely diminished, and the role of the university in the public sphere—and as a public sphere unto itself—is treated as unnecessary. The principle that enquiry and debate are public goods in and of themselves, regardless of their outcome or impact, is devalued, as is the notion that a society’s self-knowledge and self-criticism are crucial to democracy, societal improvement, and the pursuit of the good life. Expert opinion is devalued, and research is desirable only when it translates into gains for the private sector, essentially treating universities as vehicles to channel public funding into private research and development. 
  • The free and broad pursuit—and critique—of knowledge is arguably even more important in times of crisis and rapid social change.
  • Policies that advance neoliberal ideals have long been justified—and opposition to them discredited—using Margaret Thatcher’s famous line that “there is no alternative.” This notion is reproduced in universities framing their responses to COVID-19 as a fait accompli—the inevitable result of unfortunate circumstances. Yet the neoliberal assumptions that underpin these responses illustrate that choices are being made and force us to ask whether the emergency we face necessitates this exact response.
  • The notion that faculty can simply move their courses online—or teach them simultaneously online and in person—is rooted in the assumption that educating involves merely delivering information to students, which can be done just as easily online as it can be in person. There are many well-developed online courses, yet all but the most ardent enthusiasts concede that the format works better for some subjects and some students
  • Emergencies matter. Far from occasions that justify suspending our principles, the way that we handle the extra-ordinary, the unexpected, sends a message about what we truly value. While COVID-19 may seem exceptional, university responses to this crisis are hardly a departure from the neoliberal norm, and university administrations are already making plans to extend online teaching after it dissipates. We must be careful not to send the message that the neoliberal university and the worldview that underpins it are acceptable.
Vicki Davis

Federation of American Scientists :: The National Center for Research in Advanced Infor... - 0 views

www.fas.org/...nationalcenter.html

edu_news education learning

shared by Vicki Davis on 20 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Vicki Davis on 20 Aug 08
     
    New center for researching information and digital technologies and the impact on learning has been created.
  • Vicki Davis on 20 Aug 08
     
    Comprehensive research on how advanced computer and communication technologies can improve all levels of learning has been funded. This National Center was created and signed into law on August 14, 2008 in the United States. I think that research is a great thing. I they will involve all educators in developing their primary questions. Research based best practices underlie all we do and we do need more. I hope, however, they don't get too hung up on the technology (i.e. wiki, blog) and focus on what technology lets us do.
karenban

Love your Teachers? Want your Kids to Learn More? Fund Education Technology - 7 views

blog.volunteerspot.com/...fund-education-technology.html

administrator all_teachers technology

shared by karenban on 06 May 10 - Cached
  • karenban on 06 May 10
     
    Easy actions to engage parents in supporting and funding education technology.
Anne Bubnic

Top News - Stimulus bill includes $142B for education - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...index.cfm

education edtech economic_stimulus

shared by Anne Bubnic on 19 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Anne Bubnic on 19 Jan 09
     
    Some $20 billion for school modernization and $1 billion for educational technology are among nearly $150 billion in funding targeted toward education in the House version of the new economic stimulus package, which lawmakers introduced Jan. 15.
Carl Bogardu

Next Gen Learning Challenges - 1 views

nextgenlearning.com

learning education challenges Web 2.0 Blended Learning NextGen next funding administrator all_teachers grants technology bestpractices techintegrator web2

shared by Carl Bogardu on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Carl Bogardu on 12 Oct 10
     
    Grant website to fund projects in open courseware, blended learning, learner analytics
Vicki Davis

BBC News - Computer uses images to teach itself common sense - 3 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-25090534

education news computers technology

shared by Vicki Davis on 25 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Vicki Davis on 25 Nov 13
     
    Visual recognition and intelligent identification of objects is making progress. Soon, just a picture of a child could tell everyone that child's name if simple facial recognition is used. This is more than just facial recognition but is rather, trying to teach a computer to learn. This is an interesting article. "The aim is to see if computers can learn, in the same way a human would, what links images, to help them better understand the visual world. The Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) program is being run at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. The work is being funded by the US Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research and Google. Since July, the NEIL program has looked at three million images. As a result it has managed to identify 1,500 objects in half a million images and 1,200 scenes in hundreds of thousands of images as well as making 2,500 associations."
Dean Mantz

DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS: Tools and Technologies for Effective Classrooms - 0 views

www.guide2digitallearning.com/...aborate_timelines_web2_0_style

cases digital education funding learning professionaldevelopment technology tools

shared by Dean Mantz on 10 Oct 08 - Cached
  • Dean Mantz on 10 Oct 08
     
    This website provides a wide range of technology tools and effective methods for integrating into the classroom.
1 - 11 of 11
Showing 20▼ items per page