CATE edtech bookmarks

New Media & Society Journal:

Paul's e-learning resources: links to free online services that allow you to provide learning opps to students.

John Seely Brown: "Even when children are high achievers and facile with new technology, many seem gradually to lose their sense of wonder and curiosity, notes John Seely Brown. Traditional educational methods may be smothering their innate drive to explore the world. Brown and like-minded colleagues are developing the underpinnings for a new 21st century pedagogy that broadens rather than narrows horizons. John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox, has morphed in recent years into the "Chief of Confusion," seeking "the right questions" in a range of fields, including education. He finds unusual sources for his questions: basketball and opera coaches, surfing and video game champions. He's gathered insights from unorthodox venues, and from more traditional classrooms, to paint quite a different picture of what learning might look like. The typical college lecture class frequently gathers many students together in a large room to be 'fed' knowledge, believes Brown. But studies show that "learning itself is socially constructed," and is most effective when students interact with and teach each other in manageable groups. Brown wants to open up "niche learning experiences" that draw on classic course material, but deepen it to be maximally enriching. In basketball and opera master classes, and in architecture labs, he has seen how individuals become acculturated in a "community of practice," learning to "be" rather than simply to "do." Whether performing, creating, or experimenting, students are critiqued, respond, offer their own criticism, and glean rich wisdom from a cyclical group experience. Brown says something "mysterious" may be taking place: "In deeply collective engagement in processes...you start to marinate in a problem space." Through communities of practice, students' minds "begin to gel up," even in the face of abstraction and unfamiliarity, and "all of a sudden, (the subject) starts to make se

The World Bank's statistics on education

21st Century EdTech Blog: great overviews, how-to's, advice for edtech coordinators

electronic ink sneak peek: here are some of the upcoming epaper / etext displays

Apple Learning Interchange

The Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium by Sloan-C, MERLOT, & Moodlemoot. Jonathon Richter will be there presenting with the rest of the MERLOT Virtual Worlds Taskforce fort the Grand Opening of the Center for Learning in Virtual Environments' MERLOT Teaching Commons and activities in Second Life, Open Wonderland, and other virtual worlds.

New Media Consortium's press release announcing their award of a free sim in Second Life for the Virtual Oaxaca Project - by the Wired Humanities Project and the Center for Learning in Virtual Environments at the University of Oregon

Linden Lab's new policy on third-party viewers

sliderocket: share and access presentations anywhere, anytime - analytics

The Education Arcade: MIT's lab to move learning games fwd: authentic, engaging play that teaches

WolfQuest: Become a wolf and learn to navigate Yellowstone Park like a wolf - find a mate and try to lure him/her; mark your territory; find and hunt food; join a pack. Going into "smell" mode is awesome! Developed by the Minnesota Zoo

The EcoMUVE project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is a recently funded project of the United States Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The goal of EcoMUVE is to develop a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)-based ecosystems science curriculum for middle school, and to conduct feasibility studies on the practicality, integration, and acceptance of the MUVE-based curriculum for student engagement and learning in classroom settings. MUVEs enable multiple participants to access virtual worlds simultaneously, interacting with other students and with computer-based agents to facilitate collaborative learning activities of various types.

SocialGo: an alternative to Ning - social network / collaboration network

Oaxaca Social Movement:

"7 Scientific Ways to Promote Sharing on Facebook" - an interesting article discussing research on what content works and what doesn't on Facebook and - by extension - other social networks. Keep it Short and Simple is the synopsis. :)

Spruz: an alternative to Ning networks - create social networking groups with enabled collaboration and a variety of display features.

50 free collaboration tools for education: this collection has a number of tools that I'd never seen before!

iPad Usability review by Jakob Nielsen - a negative review of the iPad! Some real points to consider!