Though the university initially fought its introduction, the printed textbook provided broad access to information that, for the first time, promised the possibility of universal education.
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The iPad and Information's Third Age | Open Culture - 1 views
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A barrier of symbolic complexity emerged between people and information for one of the first times in history. And the superabundance of information created a world that by necessity had to be divided into smaller and smaller subsections for organizational reasons. As people began to feel increasingly disconnected from information and as its relational and contextual aspects began to fade, we saw a transformation in teaching and learning. Hands-on apprenticeships and small teacher/student cohorts began to disappear, replaced by teachers delivering carefully parsed and categorized information to “standardized” students, all while trapped in classrooms isolated from the world in order to limit “distraction.”
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It has become virtually impossible for a person to assess the quality, relevance, and usefulness of more information than she can process in a lifetime. And this is a problem that will only get worse as information continues to proliferate. But a quick look at popular technologies shows some of the ways people are working to address it. Social networking leverages selected communities to recommend books, restaurants, and movies. Context- and location-aware applications help focus search results and eliminate extraneous complexity. And customization and personalization allow people to create informational spaces that limit the intrusion of informational chaos.
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Any genuine solution will have to address the problems of the current informational age — and it will need to continue answering the problems of the previous informational ages. From what I’ve seen, Apple’s new iPad is the first device to promise this (even if that promise isn’t yet fully realized). That is what makes it such a compelling candidate to be the first platform that serves true digital books.
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Books that are static, don’t allow customization, don’t connect with other information on the device, and don’t leverage social connectivity aren’t the future, no matter how sophisticated the device that serves them. They’re simply the past repackaged.
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Given what I’ve seen of its features and approaches, the iPad shows the promise to engender such a change, though much development will have to take place for it to realize its potential. Nonetheless, the innovation it offers in three critical areas is especially compelling: accessibility, participation, and customization. Central to all three of these is the fact that the iPad is not a single-use, standalone device; it’s a powerful, converged platform with robust development tools and capabilities.
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I would argue that the key accessibility feature of the iPad is its apparent “lack” of an interface (a feature Apple’s marketing is working hard to underscore). Unlike all of the other similar devices (including those running Apple’s standard OS), which require users to learn to negotiate complex symbolic interfaces — files, folders, hierarchies, toolbars, navigational buttons — the iPad limits or even eliminates these in favor of touch, an approach intuitive even to those too young to read.
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The collapsing of symbolic complexity into the simplicity of touch enables participation by new groups of people — even relative technophobes — and this mirrors the increased accessibility offered by Gutenberg’s revolution while lowering the barrier characteristic of most recent technologies.
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In Gutenberg’s case, the increase in accessibility led to a dramatic increase in cultural participation, and this is another way the iPad differentiates itself from many of its peer devices.
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Put in the hands of readers and students, the robust capabilities of its new version of iWork, combined with access to the complete range of apps on the App Store and an entirely new generation of native apps, the iPad could provide access to professional-quality creative tools that empower a new set of participants
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the iPad’s blend of social and contextual technologies and its ease of customization offer useful ways for the device to help users sort, focus, and control the information around them. The iPad’s networking capabilities, linked to a new generation of digital books, could help people discover both new texts and the members of a discussion group who could help them process what they’re reading. Combined with a portable format that allows readers to carry their books into various contexts, this could be incredibly powerful. One imagines, for example, a field-guide to forests linked to live discussion partners, allowing a reader to discover the forest in a new and engaging way that offers the advantages of both the first and second informational ages. Yet this sort of capability also reveals an area where the iPad falls surprisingly short: its lack of a camera (let alone two, one forward and one backward facing) means the device has limited capabilities for interesting emerging technologies like augmented reality — a staple of recently-developed apps. In terms of future eBooks, a volume of Hemingway that could alert readers that they were only two blocks from the café Les Deux Magots, for example, and offer an augmented tour of the place or that could direct the reader of Brontë to a moor would be transformational indeed. Perhaps we’ll see such capabilities on iPad 2.0.
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Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE - 0 views
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Net Gen students are facile at multitasking
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Workers anticipated having a single profession for the duration of their working lives. Education was based on a factory-like, "one size fits all" model. Talent was developed by weeding out those who could not do well in a monochromatic learning environment.
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Knowing now means using a well-organized set of facts to find new information and to solve novel problems. In 1900, learning consisted largely of memorization; today it relies chiefly on understanding.
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learners construct knowledge by understanding new information building on their current understanding and expertise. Constructivism contradicts the idea that learning is the transmission of content to a passive receiver. Instead, it views learning as an active process, always based on the learner's current understanding or intellectual paradigm. Knowledge is constructed by assimilating new information into the learner's knowledge paradigm. A learner does not come to a classroom or a course Web site with a mind that is a tabula rasa, a blank slate. Each learner arrives at a learning "site" with some preexisting level of understanding.
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Learning science research also highlights the importance of learner engagement, or as the American Psychological Association describes it, intentional learning.1 This means that learners must have a "metaperspective" from which to view and assess their own learning, which is often referred to as metacognition.2 An active learning environment provides the opportunity to assess one's own learning, enabling learners to make decisions about the course, as well as reflect on and assess their progress. In the past, the measure of learning was the final grade (a summative measure). But a final grade is merely a measure of the student's performance on tests. It does not measure the learning that did—or did not—take place. To encourage learning, summative testing or assessments must be combined with formative assessments. Formative assessment is not directly associated with the final grade; it helps learners understand their learning and make decisions about next steps based on that understanding.
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research indicating that learning is encouraged when it includes social components such as debate or direct engagement with peers and experts. Learning is strengthened through social interactions, interpersonal relations, and communication with others.
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Research indicates that learners need to be active with respect to their own learning process and assessment. Net Gen students' goal and achievement orientation comes into play here: that achievement focus can be directed toward quizzes and exercises that assist learners in evaluating their progress toward learning goals.
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Obviously not all forms of learning must be social or team-based. In a variety of learning contexts, individual work is important. It may well be that Net Gen students' strengths are also their weaknesses. The expectation for fast-paced, rapidly shifting interaction coupled with a relatively short attention span may be counterproductive in many learning contexts. Repetition and steady, patient practice—key to some forms of mastery—may prove difficult for Net Gen students. Designing courses for them necessitates balancing these strengths and weaknesses.
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We should not neglect the informal for the formal, or assume that Net Gen students somehow will figure out the virtual space on their own. We should connect what happens in the classroom with what happens in informal and virtual spaces.
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Simply installing wireless access points and fresh carpeting isn't enough if done in isolation; such improvements pay real dividends only if they are in concert with the institution's overall teaching and learning objectives. It is the vision that generates the design principles that will, in turn, be used to make key decisions about how learning spaces are configured.
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The vision and design principles should emphasize the options students have as active participants in the learning process. Design principles should include terms such as analyze, create, criticize, debate, present, and classify—all directed at what the space enables the students to do. For example, students should be able to present materials to the class. Outside class, they should have access to applications and materials that directly support analysis of data, text, and other media. Forums for discussion and critical debate, both real and virtual, are key to encouraging learning and will be looked for by Net Gen students.
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Learning spaces should accommodate the use of as many kinds of materials as possible and enable the display of and access to those materials by all participants. Learning space needs to provide the participants—instructors and students alike—with interactive tools that enable exploration, probing, and examination. This might include a robust set of applications installed on the computer that controls the room's displays, as well as a set of communication tools. Since the process of examination and debate leads to discovery and the construction of new knowledge, it could be important to equip spaces with devices that can capture classroom discussion and debate, which can be distributed to all participants for future reference and study.
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This lecture hall is of relatively recent vintage; its seats and paired tables make it much easier to deploy and use her "tools," which include printouts of the day's reading, as well as a small laptop computer. Her fellow students are doing likewise. Each of them is using some device to access the course's Web site—some with laptops, others with tablet computers, still others with handheld computers. Using wireless connections, they all access the course's Web site and navigate to the site's "voting" page.
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a "magic wand," a radio-frequency controller that enables her to operate her computer—as well as many of the classroom's functions—wirelessly, from any point in the room. She can capture anything she writes on the blackboard and make it available to her students on the course Web site. Freed from needing to take extensive notes, the students are able to participate more fully in the class discussion. Finally, the professor is carrying a small recorder that captures her lecture, digitizes the audio, and uploads it to the course Web site for the students to review when they prepare for finals.
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Sandra launches the classroom's screen sharing application. Within a few seconds, her computer's screen is projected on the room's main screen. The class discussion focuses on this diagram, and the professor, using a virtual pencil, is able to make notes on the diagram. The diagram and notes are captured and placed on the class Web site for review.
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Soon the debate gets stuck; the students can't resolve the issue. The professor goes to the podium, types briefly, and then asks the students to go to a URL to see a question and to choose the answer they feel is correct. The students access the Web page from laptops, handhelds, or wireless IP-based phones. In two minutes they have completed the poll and submitted their responses. The results are quickly tabulated and displayed. The wide diversity of opinion surprises everyone. The professor reframes the issue, without giving the answer, and the students continue to discuss it. She repeats the poll; this time there is more agreement among the students, enabling her to move the discussion forward.
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She goes to the podium computer and clicks on a few links, and soon a videoconferencing session is displayed on the right-hand screen. She has arranged to have a colleague of hers "drop in" on the class to discuss a point that is in the colleague's particular area of expertise. The class has a conversation with the expert, who is at large research institution more than 500 miles away. Students listen to the expert's comments and are able to pose questions using one of the three cordless microphones available to the class. On the left-hand screen, the visiting professor shows some images and charts that help explain the concepts under discussion.
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the other students in her class have signed up for most of the slots, conferring with friends using chat programs to ensure that they sign up for the same lab slots.
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The discussion pocket is the college's term for a small, curved space with a table and bench to accommodate a meeting of four or five people. Found outside the newer classrooms, they are handy for informal, spontaneous discussions. Sandra's group moves into the pocket and for the next 15 minutes continue their "spill over" discussion of the class.
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hey are able to have an audio chat; Sandra's friend is in her dorm room, and Sandra is in a remote corner of the library where conversation will not disturb others. As their discussion progresses, they go to the course's Web site and launch the virtual whiteboard to diagram some concepts. They develop a conceptual diagram—drawing, erasing, and revising it until they agree the diagram is correct. They both download a copy. Sandra volunteers to work on polishing the diagram and will leave a copy of the final diagram in her share folder in her online portfolio "locker
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The underlying theme remains the same, however: cultivating learning practices consistent with learning theory and aligned with the habits and expectations of Net Gen students
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For most higher education institutions, the lecture hall will not disappear; the challenge is to develop a new generation of lecture hall, one that enables Net Gen students and faculty to engage in enlivened, more interactive experiences. If the lecture hall is integrated with other spaces—physically as well as virtually—it will enable participants to sustain the momentum from the class session into other learning contexts. The goal is not to do away with the traditional classroom, but rather to reinvent and to integrate it with the other learning spaces, moving toward a single learning environment.
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Learning theory is central to any consideration of learning spaces; colleges and universities cannot afford to invest in "fads" tailored to the Net Gen student that might not meet the needs of the next generation.
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For example, start with the Net Gen students' focus on goals and achievement. That achievement orientation ties to learning theory's emphasis on metacognition, where learners assess their progress and make active decisions to achieve learning goals. Learning space design could support this by providing contact with people who can provide feedback: tutors, consultants, and faculty. This could, in turn, be supported in the IT environment by making formative self-tests available, as well as an online portfolio, which would afford students the opportunity to assess their overall academic progress.
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As institutions create an anywhere, anytime IT infrastructure, opportunities arise to tear down silos and replace them with a more ubiquitous learning environment. Using laptops and other networked devices, students and faculty are increasingly able to carry their entire working environment with them. To capitalize on this, campus organizations must work collaboratively to create a more integrated work environment for the students and faculty, one that better serves the mobile Net Gen students as well as a faculty faced with the initial influx of these students into their ranks
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One of the key variables is the institution itself. Learning spaces are institutional in scope—their implementation involves the institution's culture, tradition, and mission.
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The starting point for rethinking learning spaces to support Net Gen students begins with an underlying vision for the learning activities these spaces should support. This vision should be informed by learning theory, as well as by recognition of the characteristics of the students and faculty who use these spaces.
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The New Gold Mine: Your Personal Information & Tracking Data Online - WSJ.com - 0 views
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privacy online rights onlinerights onlineprivacy tracking datamining
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the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. • The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
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the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. • These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
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Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.
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"It is a sea change in the way the industry works," says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. "Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages."
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The Journal found that Microsoft Corp.'s popular Web portal, MSN.com, planted a tracking file packed with data: It had a prediction of a surfer's age, ZIP Code and gender, plus a code containing estimates of income, marital status, presence of children and home ownership, according to the tracking company that created the file, Targus Information Corp.
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Tracking is done by tiny files and programs known as "cookies," "Flash cookies" and "beacons." They are placed on a computer when a user visits a website. U.S. courts have ruled that it is legal to deploy the simplest type, cookies, just as someone using a telephone might allow a friend to listen in on a conversation. Courts haven't ruled on the more complex trackers.
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tracking companies sometimes hide their files within free software offered to websites, or hide them within other tracking files or ads. When this happens, websites aren't always aware that they're installing the files on visitors' computers.
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Often staffed by "quants," or math gurus with expertise in quantitative analysis, some tracking companies use probability algorithms to try to pair what they know about a person's online behavior with data from offline sources about household income, geography and education, among other things. The goal is to make sophisticated assumptions in real time—plans for a summer vacation, the likelihood of repaying a loan—and sell those conclusions.
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Consumer tracking is the foundation of an online advertising economy that racked up $23 billion in ad spending last year. Tracking activity is exploding. Researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute last fall found tracking technology on 80% of 1,000 popular sites, up from 40% of those sites in 2005.
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The Journal found tracking files that collect sensitive health and financial data. On Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.'s dictionary website Merriam-Webster.com, one tracking file from Healthline Networks Inc., an ad network, scans the page a user is viewing and targets ads related to what it sees there.
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Beacons, also known as "Web bugs" and "pixels," are small pieces of software that run on a Web page. They can track what a user is doing on the page, including what is being typed or where the mouse is moving.
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The majority of sites examined by the Journal placed at least seven beacons from outside companies. Dictionary.com had the most, 41, including several from companies that track health conditions and one that says it can target consumers by dozens of factors, including zip code and race.
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After the Journal contacted the company, it cut the number of networks it uses and beefed up its privacy policy to more fully disclose its practices.
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Flash cookies can also be used by data collectors to re-install regular cookies that a user has deleted. This can circumvent a user's attempt to avoid being tracked online. Adobe condemns the practice.
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Wittingly or not, people pay a price in reduced privacy for the information and services they receive online. Dictionary.com, the site with the most tracking files, is a case study.
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Think about how these technologies and the associated analytics can be used in other industries and social settings (e.g. education) for real beneficial impacts. This is nothing new for the web, the now that it has matured, it can be a positive game-changer.
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Media6Degrees Inc., whose technology was found on three sites by the Journal, is pitching banks to use its data to size up consumers based on their social connections. The idea is that the creditworthy tend to hang out with the creditworthy, and deadbeats with deadbeats.
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"There are applications of this technology that can be very powerful," says Tom Phillips, CEO of Media6Degrees. "Who knows how far we'd take it?"
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Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty's computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.
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"We can segment it all the way down to one person," says Eric Porres, Lotame's chief marketing officer.
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One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.
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"Every time I go on the Internet," she says, she sees weight-loss ads. "I'm self-conscious about my weight," says Ms. Reid, whose father asked that her hometown not be given. "I try not to think about it…. Then [the ads] make me start thinking about it."
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Information about people's moment-to-moment thoughts and actions, as revealed by their online activity, can change hands quickly. Within seconds of visiting eBay.com or Expedia.com, information detailing a Web surfer's activity there is likely to be auctioned on the data exchange run by BlueKai, the Seattle startup.
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shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 11
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Visualize your GPS tracks with Breadcrumbs | Google Earth Blog - 0 views
www.gearthblog.com/...your_gps_tracks_with_brea.html
gps socialannotation 3d trail video googleearth googelmaps
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Our users can log their ski trip, hiking trip or sightseeing trip, upload it to Breadcrumbs with their photos and videos, and send it to all their friends, who can relive the adventure in 3D. And this is only the start, as we plan to provide our users with a platform to not only edit and maintain tracks, but also to find new places to explore and interact within a social network.
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Breadcrumbs is the first web application of its kind, where users can manage GPS tracks, photos and videos in one place - it can be thought of as 'Flickr for GPS tracks'.
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The key features of Breadcrumbs include:Relive your adventure: Breadcrumbs brings together photos, videos and GPS tracks in one quick and easy process and our 3D playback function brings the track alive. Edit and manage: Breadcrumbs comes with a suite of tools which let users edit and manage their GPS tracks, photos and videos. These include:- Automated geotagging of photos.- Track editing tool to correct GPS points.- Add information to your adventure to help tell the story, such as show where you ate your lunch or spotted some wildlife.- Organize: Breadcrumbs offers a rich set of tools to help users to manage adventures.- Share: Breadcrumbs makes it easy to share adventures, with options including a public page for each track and direct integration with Facebook.
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Our utilization and heavy integration with the Google Earth plugin is also a big bonus for the user. Garmin allows you to look at your data in Google Maps and indeed Google Earth. However, Breadcrumbs builds on this as we have built a track playback feature on top of the plugin which allows you to hit play and replay your trip step by step. It's like watching a movie of your day out! This really does bring the users' GPS data to life especially when sharing with friends and family.
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We are already integrated with one smartphone application allowing the user to push their tracks directly to Breadcrumbs from their phone.
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shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Aug 11
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Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online | DMLcentral - 1 views
www.dmlcentral.net/...rticipatory-peer-global-online
learning2.0 cop communitiesofpractice rheingold
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I have found that in both my traditional physical classrooms and online environments, the chances of successful outcomes are multiplied when every person in the group makes a commitment to active participation in helping others learn.
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When a sufficient number of people jump in and start contributing and building on one another's contributions, it becomes clear to all that it's not just about the teacher's performance and the student's ability to complete assignments. It's about our joint effort to make the whole of our encounter more valuable than just the sum of our individual learning.
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I type roles on the whiteboard and show how to use the whiteboard tools to enter, format and move around elements. Roles include searchers, chat summarizers, session summarizers, mindmap leaders, session bloggers. I ask co-learners to write their own names on the whiteboard next to the roles they want to take, show them how to create break-out rooms to coordinate their collaborations, and ask the summarizers to feed their output to the bloggers, who take responsibility for posting a reflective summary of the session later
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Yes, we're a collective intelligence, which is exhilarating, but we're a toddler collective intelligence, stumbling around learning to walk and trying to figure out where we're going at the same time. A number of new skills are required in short order. Information and communication flow through multiple simultaneous channels. The enterprise is challenging - that's part of the exercise. Taking my direction from George Siemens' ideas about networked learning ("we emphasize that early course experiences tend to be overwhelming and chaotic") I assure co-learners early and often that we can relax, accept and even embrace the chaos, and regard our networked attempts to make sense of it as the scaffold for our co-learning.
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Instead of seeking to put every fact in its place in an existing well-ordered taxonomy, why not seek to learn together by asking questions about what puzzles us, then organizing our discussions and mining them for knowledge?
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Sometimes, I get into predicaments and don't know how to quit a webtour or place people in breakout rooms. So I calmly start exploring possible solutions, talking about it as I try to recover. While doing so, I also talk about the importance of exploring close enough to the edge to fall over it frequently. I model tolerance for error, learning from error, pushing the envelope of tech. Indeed, I've found that the earlier I can break something and fix it in public, the better. We talk about what works and what doesn't, discard what doesn't suit our purposes, push a tool further if it helps us learn together. It requires regular doses of humility to abandon what seemed like a bright idea at the time.
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The objective is a culture of conversation that troubleshoots practical skills, explores theoretical underpinnings, dissects social implications.
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Our internal social bookmarks enable us to create a mini-collective-intelligence by gathering resources about our discussion topics, selecting or writing descriptive snippets, assigning tags. The emerging tag-cloud serves as an index to the resources.
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In the process of using these tools to try to make sense together, we co-construct our learning. The last week of the course is about re-examining our learning process, reiterating the most important things we've learned, and redesigning the parts of the process that didn't work so well.
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SpeEdChange: A physical place for virtual education - 0 views
speedchange.blogspot.com/...ace-for-virtual-education.html
learning spaces irasocol critped udi socol
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And if you can't eat around it, or drink around it, just don't buy it. Education is messy - if your carpet or upholstery can't be easily cleaned, you've bought the wrong stuff.
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Design so that lighting varies, bright, dim, warm, cool. The idea of uniform room lighting, pulled from turn-of-the-20th-century German factory design, has never been appropriate for human use
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Design so that noise levels can vary as well. Not everyone needs auditory chaos, but many do. serve everyone. Don't pick "50 year" furniture.
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Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections - 0 views
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While used textbooks are obviously less costly, they often carry another benefit new textbooks don't: highlights, underscores and other annotations by their previous owners. Even though the author of, and rationale for, the annotations may be unknown, the fact that somebody found particular sections of the book important enough to emphasize tends to make the eye linger. Ideally, annotations can make learning and knowledge discovery feel less like a solitary pursuit and more like a collaborative effort.
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At first glance, it would seem that the trustworthiness of an unknown individual who has interpreted or appended an author's work would be questionable, but several reasonable assumptions can be made that contribute to the perceived authority of an unknown annotator. At the very least, they read the work and took the time to make the annotations, which may question or clarify certain statements in the text, and create links to other works, authors or ideas. The subsequent reader of an annotated work then has one or more additional perspectives from which to evaluate the usefulness of the text and annotations, and more implied permission to add his or her own interpretations than in an unannotated text. Published scholarly works are objects for discussion in an ongoing conversation among a community of knowledge seekers, and whether via formal citation in later publications or annotations in existing ones, all are designed to advance the generation and exchange of ideas.
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Most critically, knowledge discovery and transfer is no longer restricted to a model of one expert creator to many consumers. In Web 2.0, consumers are creators, who can add their voices to both expert and non-expert claims. Users get the benefit of multiple perspectives and can evaluate claims in the best tradition of participative, critical inquiry.
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However, as with annotations in paper books, sometimes the value of an annotation goes beyond its content. Marshall (1998) suggests that the very act of evaluating a handwritten annotation's relevance creates a level of critical engagement that would not happen while reading a clean copy of a book. Marshall studied university students' annotations in textbooks, and found that students preferred books that had been marked by previous readers, as long as the marks were intelligible.
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Similarly, Sherman (2008) studied marginalia in English Renaissance texts and found that students of the time were routinely taught that simply reading a book was insufficient. In order to have a "fruitful interaction" (p. 4) with a text, marking it up with one's thoughts and reactions was considered essential. Marginalia and other signs of engagement and use – even such apparently content-neutral additions as food stains – Sherman sees as valuable evidence of reader reaction, and the place of the physical information object in people's lives.
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In a study of flickr.com, Ames and Naaman (2007) created a taxonomy of motivations for annotation along two dimensions: sociality and function. The latter dimension echoes people's motivation to annotate printed textbooks: the function of making important or interesting passages more easily findable for later review. The sociality dimension is a component of the Web infrastructure – making photographs findable for others, and creating shared tagsets for people with similar interests, so they might collaborate more easily. In this sense, photographs are boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989), around which diverse individuals can interact and communities can build (Gal, Yoo and Boland 2006). Digital collection items can also be boundary objects, even if those conversations take place asynchronously.
SpeEdChange: A physical place for virtual education - 0 views
speedchange.blogspot.com/...ace-for-virtual-education.html
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This Visible College (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 1 views
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To understand this brave new classroom, we can learn from the library. For years librarians have grappled with their own version of this inversion, seeing library functions migrate beyond physical walls. Indeed, a slogan coined in 2005, around the same time Web 2.0 started growing into a planetary force, spotlighting not library as place, but (every) place as (a) library.11 Libraries facilitate access to patrons anywhere. Similarly, teachers increasingly make learning experiences available to any connected learner, willingly or not. Thus education needs all kinds of professional and policy responses to support the classroom. We can imagine changes to teacher training in graduate school, new professional development content, increased campus media capture support, new privacy policies, intellectual property policy revisions, reinterpretations of FERPA, and new licenses and negotiations for non-OER materials. And that’s just for starters.
Edcanvas | The one place to organize and present knowledge - 0 views
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Open Resources - Transforming the Way Knowledge Is Spread - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the five functions now performed by universities — teaching; providing a space for social interaction; testing students’ knowledge and offering feedback in the form of grades; cultivating a reputation as a good place to learn; and certifying what graduates know through accreditation — will inevitably change.
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In October 2003, there were 511 courses available, all from M.I.T. According to Ms. Mulder, the current total is over 21,000 — with 9,903 in languages other than English, including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, Korean and Japanese.
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The school’s Masters Series Madrid is a game — with soundtrack, 3-D graphics and interviews with executives — that allows students to manage an international tennis tournament. “It’s a great way for people to see our school,” said Matthew Constantine, a member of the IE staff.
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Although all of the material on IE’s Web site is free for individual use, he said, the school “avoided developing material for self-learning” because “we think class discussion is essential.”
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“The completion rates for students in purely online programs are very low,” he said. “If a program is too open, too flexible, too ‘on demand,’ students won’t ever finish.”
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Mr. Mulder also warned against viewing O.E.R. as a panacea. “O.E.R. is not education,” he said. “It’s only content. It becomes learning when you have good teaching.”
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Do Students Know Enough Smart Learning Strategies? | MindShift - 0 views
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recent finding by PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which administers academic proficiency tests to students around the globe, and place American students in the mediocre middle. “Students who use appropriate strategies to understand and remember what they read, such as underlining important parts of the texts or discussing what they read with other people, perform at least 73 points higher in the PISA assessment—that is, one full proficiency level or nearly two full school years—than students who use these strategies the least,” the PISA report reads.
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Askell-Williams and her colleagues found that those students who used fewer of these strategies reported more difficulty coping with their schoolwork. For the second part of their study, they designed a series of proactive questions for teachers to drop into the lesson on a “just-in-time” basis—at the moments when students could use the prompting most. These questions, too, can be adopted by any parent or educator to make sure that children know not just what is to be learned, but how. What is the topic for today’s lesson? What will be important ideas in today’s lesson? What do you already know about this topic? What can you relate this to? What will you do to remember the key ideas? Is there anything about this topic you don’t understand, or are not clear about?
LiveBinders - the Knowledge Sharing Place - 0 views
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Calhoun School: Steve's Blog Is it Learning or Training? - 0 views
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proponents claim, the methods “work,” as represented by higher test scores. Because, they add, the methods are efficient, meaning you can produce results with brutal economic efficiency and large classes. And, in ed policy-speak, the systematized, highly structured methodologies are “scaleable,” easily replicated and exported to other schools.
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Anyone intensely “drilled” in facts or simple algorithms will demonstrate superior performance when tested on short-term retention. The students in programs like that at Williamsburg Collegiate are being trained to give the “right” answers, but they are learning little or nothing. Other evidence exposes the folly of these practices, as test score gains among younger students are not holding as the same students move into older grades. But the policy response in most places is reflexive, not reflective. Drill them more and test ‘em again!
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Perhaps the greatest tragedy of this approach to education is that it disregards, often punishes, the qualities that most characterize real learning. Children are discouraged from expressing a point of view – no time for that and it isn’t on the test. Creativity is irrelevant. Children who are sensitive and poetic are devalued, forced into quick, aggressive responses by a drill sergeant teacher. Critical thinking is not welcome. Where is the space for empathy and imagination? What about the child whose unique intelligence is the ability to visualize something beautiful, to see another possible way to solve a problem, to turn a history assignment into a song?
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Most highly regimented urban charter schools are largely for the “other” –the underclass children of color whom powerful people talk about but seldom meet. I wonder if Mssrs. Gates, Broad, Dell, Walton or Bloomberg would subject their own children to such a school environment, where they would march in tight formation and eagerly parrot the “right” answers required by the training manual? I would guess not. Of course I didn’t see many of those guys at Fort Benning either.
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There is little evidence outside of the short term, self-fulfilling cycle of call and response, that these schools are educating students at all
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Cell phone novels come of age › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion - 0 views
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“Teenage girls began messaging with pagers in the early ’90s,” says Mizuko Ito, a research scientist who studies cell phone use among Japanese youth. “Because of this, Japan was the first country to have widespread mobile communications, even before mobile phones became affordable and popular.” Ito sees in the rise of cell phone novels a high degree of media and gadget literacy, a cultural willingness to experiment with new technologies, and a desire for private space and intimate communication.
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The way it works is this: novels are posted by members of cell phone community sites to be downloaded for free and read on other cell phones. Reading often takes place in crowded trains during long commutes. The works are published in 70-word installments, or abbreviated chapters that are the ideal length to be read between shorter train stops. This means that, despite small cell phone screens, lots of white space is left for ease of reading. Multiple short lines of compressed sentences, mostly composed of fragmentary dialogue, are strung together with lots of cell phone-only symbols. The resulting works are emotional, fast-paced and highly visual, with an impact not unlike manga.
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Following Starts, other publishers like Goma and Asuki Media Works moved in to cherry pick cell phone novel sites online and put out the next big hit. The number of cell phone novels in print began skyrocketing in 2006, when 22 books hit the shelves; the following year, there were 98. Even a no-name author with a cell phone novel publishing deal enjoyed a first run of between 50,000 and 100,000 copies.
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Indeed, cell phone novels do not go through the editorial selection process; they first become popular with readers and then are published based on their ability to please a crowd. This rawness is at once their appeal and a major hurdle keeping the emergent genre from maturing.
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Opportunities for Creating the Future of Learning - 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future ... - 0 views
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It remains to be seen whether new learning agents and traditionally certified teachers will cooperate or compete.
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Secondly, it emphasizes the need for learning to be an ongoing process whereby we all become engaged citizens of a global society. T
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By embracing technologies of cooperation, prototyping new models of learning, and cultivating open and collaborative approaches to leadership, “amplified” educators and learners will become the organizational “superheroes” of schools and districts.
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The globalization of open learning systems characterized by cooperative resource creation, evaluation, and sharing will change how educational institutions view their roles and will offer new forms of value in the global learning ecosystem.
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The result will be an emerging toolset for designing personalized, learner-centered experiences and environments that reflect the differentiation among learners instead of forcing compliance to an average learning style and level of performance.
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As the hierarchical structure of education splinters, traditional top-down movements of authority, knowledge, and power will unravel. Before new patterns get established, it will seem as if a host of new species has been introduced into the learning ecosystem. Authority will be a hotly contested resource, and there will be the potential for conflict and distrust.
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Learning geographies will be accessible to communities through a range of key tools, such as data aggregated from disparate sources, geo-coded data linking learning resources and educational information to specific community locations, and visualization tools that help communicate such information in easily understood visual and graphic forms. Such information will often contain multiple layers of data (for example, school performance statistics, poverty rates, and the degree of access to fresh food).
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These new dimensions of learning geographies will require new core skills. Among them will be navigating new visual cartographies, identifying learning resources in previously unexpected places, leveraging networks to take advantage of learning opportunities, and creating flexible educational infrastructures that can make use of dispersed community resources. Through enhanced visibility and accessibility, learning geographies will bring new transparency to issues of equity in learning.