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Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD

What Connectivism Is ~ Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes - 0 views

  • Connectivism is, by contrast, 'connectionist'. Knowledge is, on this theory, literally the set of connections formed by actions and experience. It may consist in part of linguistic structures, but it is not essentially based in linguistic structures, and the properties and constraints of linguistic structures are not the properties and constraints of connectivism.
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    Connectivism is, by contrast, 'connectionist'. Knowledge is, on this theory, literally the set of connections formed by actions and experience. It may consist in part of linguistic structures, but it is not essentially based in linguistic structures, and the properties and constraints of linguistic structures are not the properties and constraints of connectivism.
Ed Webb

Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 3 views

  • A success for college-made free online courses—except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.
  • the recession and disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your "free" content?
  • David Wiley, open education's Everywhere Man
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  • The education oracle offers another prophecy for open courseware. "Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit," he has blogged, "will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."
  • ventures around the country are seriously exploring new business strategies. For some, it's fund raising à la National Public Radio; for others, hooking open content to core operations by dangling it as a gateway to paid courses.
  • "Given that exclusivity has come to be seen by some as a question of how many students a university can turn away, I don't see what's going to make the selective universities increase their appetite for risking their brands by offering credits for online versions of core undergraduate courses,"
  • the unbundling of higher education.
  • MIT, where students pay about $50,000 a year for a tightly knit package of course content, learning experiences, certification, and social life. MIT OpenCourseWare has lopped off the content and dumped it in cyberspace. Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.
  • "Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."
  • Peer 2 Peer University
  • University of the People
  • Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education.
  • much open courseware is "lousy,"
  • "There's a pretty significant fraction of the population that learns better with instructor-led kinds of activities than purely self-paced activities,"
  • "It doesn't shift what's happening in some of the very stable traditional institutions of higher education. But there are huge numbers of others who aren't being served. And it's with those that I think we'll begin to see new forms."
  • The model boils down to six words: Do you like this? Enroll now!
  • a Korean university where students competed to produce open lecture notes. The prize was an iPod and lunch with the university president.
  • Carnegie Mellon is trying a different model. When its courses are good enough, with other colleges assigning them as e-textbooks, it asks students to pay a fee as low as $15, says Joel M. Smith, vice provost. "That would be a very, very, very cheap textbook," he says. "If it were used by a large number of colleges and universities, it could sustain the project."
  • the free courses taught him one thing, something important when you've been out of school so long: He can do it. He can follow a Yale class. He has nothing to fear.
gobibijou

Stephen Downes - 0 views

  • ning 2.0 and the
    • gobibijou
       
      S. Downes: http://www.blip.tv/file/840097 2 approaches to learning - tradiotional (AI): old artifitial technology. Expert system organises. Old managnement systems. Focus on: - Goal orientated. - Competencies. - Efficency (from A to B in the most efficient). Requieres: - an expert - knowledge representation (VS. Siemens: the knowledge that we have CAN'T be represented) for expl. language -- Problem: it creates a simplification of the knowledge. - learning activities are set up by an expert. -network approach: (???IDF). Conectivism (born 40 years ago Pappert &?). Computational system is NOT set up as a representational system BUT is set up as a NETWORK (like a brain). The connectivist system: - is unnorganized - is unstructured (previously) - looks messy and unorganised - can NOT be predicted HOw Knowledge is represented in the system? DISTRIBUTED. Our concept of X is not a symbolic representation but a set up of active connections also in a neuronal level (?) Model of learning NOt based in deduction and inference BUT on ASSOCIATION based on: - concurrency. - proximity. - back propagation (economics: supply and demand market is based on that) - ???Amealing the way form networks/community in society work in THE SAME WAY that they do in a neuronal level and a personal level. Communities ARE networks that work through distributed connections. How should be the network? - DIVERSITY (wide representation of different points of views) Knowledge in a network is: EMERGENT - AUTONOMY : each individual is self-directed. Each individual works as his own guide. - CONNECTEDNESS (or interactivities). Knowledge produced by mechanism of interaction is produced by the nature/properties of the network. The way/organization of connections are formed is essential. - OPENESS (there's no inside/outside the "system"). Connection FLOWS freely. RECOGNITION of patterns (clustter). LEARNERS: Learners have different things they want to learn and the system
  • 2.0 and the impact of web 2
    • gobibijou
       
      S. Downes: http://www.blip.tv/file/840097 NOtes (need to be double checked) 2 approaches to learning 1. traditional (AI): old artifitial technology. Expert system organises. Old managnement systems. Focus on: - Goal orientated. - Competencies. - Efficency (from A to B in the most efficient). Requieres: - an expert - knowledge representation (VS. Siemens: the knowledge that we have CAN'T be represented) for expl. language -- Problem: it creates a simplification of the knowledge. - learning activities are set up by an expert. 2.-network approach: (???IDF). Conectivism (born 40 years ago Pappert &?). Computational system is NOT set up as a representational system BUT is set up as a NETWORK (like a brain). The connectivist system: - is unnorganized - is unstructured (previously) - looks messy and unorganised - can NOT be predicted HOw Knowledge is represented in the system? DISTRIBUTED. Our concept of X is not a symbolic representation but a set up of active connections also in a neuronal level (?) Model of learning NOt based in deduction and inference BUT on ASSOCIATION based on: - concurrency. - proximity. - back propagation (economics: supply and demand market is based on that) - ???Amealing the way form networks/community in society work in THE SAME WAY that they do in a neuronal level and a personal level. Communities ARE networks that work through distributed connections. How should be the network? - DIVERSITY (wide representation of different points of views) Knowledge in a network is: EMERGENT - AUTONOMY : each individual is self-directed. Each individual works as his own guide. - CONNECTEDNESS (or interactivities). Knowledge produced by mechanism of interaction is produced by the nature/properties of the network. The way/organization of connections are formed is essential. - OPENESS (there's no inside/outside the "system"). Connection FLOWS freely. RECOGNITION of patterns (clustter). LEARNERS: Learners have different thin
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    downes talking about approaches in education. Web 2.0, elearning...
Ed Webb

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation... - 0 views

  • Note that this isn’t just a technological alternate history. It also describes a different set of social and cultural practices.
  • CMSes lumber along like radio, still playing into the air as they continue to gradually shift ever farther away on the margins. In comparison, Web 2.0 is like movies and tv combined, plus printed books and magazines. That’s where the sheer scale, creative ferment, and wife-ranging influence reside. This is the necessary background for discussing how to integrate learning and the digital world.
  • These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.
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  • CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference. Students (and staff) also contribute to this peering world; more on this later. For now, we can observe that as teachers we grapple with this mechanism of change through many means, but the CMS in its silo’d isolation is not a useful tool.
  • those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.
  • unless we consider the CMS environment to be a sort of corporate intranet simulation, the CMS set of community skills is unusual, rarely applicable to post-graduation examples. In other words, while a CMS might help privacy concerns, it is at best a partial, not sufficient solution, and can even be inappropriate for already online students.
  • That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.
  • Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature. It is too open, goes the thought, constituting a “Wild West” experience of unfettered information flow and unpleasant forms of access. Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments, iPhone-style walled gardens that protect the learning process from the Lovecraftian chaos without.
  • social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed.
  • at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.
  • For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
  • Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?
  • The internet of things refers to a vastly more challenging concept, the association of digital information with the physical world. It covers such diverse instances as RFID chips attached to books or shipping pallets, connecting a product’s scanned UPC code to a Web-based database, assigning unique digital identifiers to physical locations, and the broader enterprise of augmented reality. It includes problems as varied as building search that covers both the World Wide Web and one’s mobile device, revising copyright to include digital content associated with private locations, and trying to salvage what’s left of privacy. How does this connect with our topic? Consider a recent article by Tim O’Reilly and John Battle, where they argue that the internet of things is actually growing knowledge about itself. The combination of people, networks, and objects is building descriptions about objects, largely in folksonomic form. That is, people are tagging the world, and sharing those tags. It’s worth quoting a passage in full: “It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two. For example, You R Here, an iPhone app, neatly combines these two approaches. You use your iPhone camera to take a photo of a map that contains details not found on generic mapping applications such as Google maps – say a trailhead map in a park, or another hiking map. Use the phone’s GPS to set your current location on the map. Walk a distance away, and set a second point. Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.” (http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194) What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?
  • imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.
Ed Webb

The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd - 0 views

  • Wikipedia isn't written and edited by the "crowd" at all. In fact, 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits. Even Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers."
  • I think your headline is misleading and Vassilis Kostakos should read the book before poking holes. Surowiecki is very clear about the conditions necessary for a wise crowd to prevail and those conditions are: 1. Diversity of opinion 2. Independence 3. Decentralization 4. Aggregation If your crowd possesses those qualities then it is wise and then it will be better at making decisions under Surowiecki's paradigm. The crowds used in the research (and the crowd in general) doesn't possess those qualities and therefore is an unfit data set. We should be trying to create the ideal crowd before we can obtain superlative results and not try to get good results from any random crowd.
  • Limitations in predictions market are well documented (and include Muhammad's points above), and constrain their practical application to a well-defined number of situation. Crowdsourcing suffers from the same limitations, which is not a problem, as long as you limit its application correspondingly. The problem occur when you stretch it outside the required constraints and yet present the results as "scientific", i.e. as a good proxy for what the crowd thinks. That's what professor Vassilis Kostakos's theory ultimately comes down to (or should - I don't know, I haven't read his report). Apps like Digg or Amazon's review are not scientific applications of crowdsourcing, and thus their results should not be seen as precise representation of our collective thinking.
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  • Wisdom of Crowds is a crypto-fascist idea; there is no objective truth, there are no facts, truth is what "the crowd" decides it is. You get these unhealthy echo chambers of "activists" setting the agenda. This article said it best, over three years ago: DIGITAL MAOISM The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
  • What I'd like to see is non-fakeable metrics on ecommerce sites: return rates or reorder rates (as appropriate), for example. Or for apps, how many times users open the app per day/week or whatever.
  • the research is interesting if linked to ideas of unrepresentative or illiberal democracy, as posited by Fareed Zakaria that suggests small interest groups can hijack democratic systems.
Lisa M Lane

digress.it - 0 views

shared by Lisa M Lane on 05 Sep 09 - Cached
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    Digress.it is a plugin for WordPress that supports discussion at a far finer level than is traditionally available on most blogs. Rather than limiting conversations to a single field at the bottom of a post, digress.it "lets you comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text." -- Mike Bogle, TechTicker
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    I'm continually looking for a way to use this but so far haven't found one. For personal blogs with fairly short posts it's a bit of overkill I think, but I could easily see it used for longer pieces - especially where you're meticulously analysing or interpreting things.
anonymous

Carsonified » Meet @HelloApp, Making Conferences More Fun - 0 views

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    After four tiring-exciting-stressful-fun days, we'd like to introduce you to our new little buddy, HelloApp. The idea is simple: When you arrive at a conference, you just say where you're sitting, via Twitter. Once you do that, you can … 1. Search for people with a certain skill-set (ie PHP, jQuery, CSS3, marketing, etc) and see where they're sitting 2. View the seating diagram colored based on Twitter follower count 3. Search for a specific person in the audience and find out where they're sitting 4. View the seating diagram colored based on whether people are Designers, Developers or Businessmen 5. Earn badges and points by meeting people and completing tasks. If you earn a high enough rank, you'll be able to post public messages to the entire audience and win prizes.
 Lisa Durff

Here we are…there we are going « Connectivism - 0 views

  • Learning consists of weaving together coherent (personal) narratives of fragmented information. The narrative can be now created through social sensemaking systems (such as blogs and social networks), instead of centrally organized courses. Courses can be global, with many educators and participants (i.e. CCK08). Courses, unlike universities, are not directly integrated into the power system of a society. Can decentralized networks of autonomous agents serve the same function as organized institutions? But who loses, and what is lost, if the teaching role of universities decline?
    •  Lisa Durff
       
      So learning is developing a story from one's schema of a thing!
    •  Lisa Durff
       
      "But who loses, and what is lost, if the teaching role of universities decline?" My concern surrounds the word teaching. Who said that is their primary role? Isn't it licensing, formally sanctioning persons so they can enter the world of work with the "proper" credentials? Did you learn anything in your college days?
    •  Lisa Durff
       
      So what really needs to change is not the university, but the culture it serves...
  • The virtues that a society finds desirable are systematized in its institutions. However futile this activity, it helps society, and media, to hold people accountable, to devise strategies, and create laws so people feel safe. Similarly, results that are desirable (financial, educationally, etc) are systematized to ensure the ability to manage and duplicate results. I shared some thoughts on this systematization last year as a reason for the currently limited impact of personal learning environments (PLEs). Quite simply, even revolutionaries conserve.
  • Teaching is what is most at risk. Can a social network - loosely connected, driven by humanistic ideals - serve a similar role to what university classrooms serve today? I hope so, but I don’t think so. At least not with our current mindsets and skillsets. We associate with those who are similar. We do not pursue diversity. In fact, we shy away from it. We surround ourselves with people and ideas that resonate with our own, not with those that cause us stress or internal conflict. Secondly, until all of society becomes fully networked (not technologically networked, but networked on the principles of flows, connections, feedback), a networked entity always risks being subverted by hierarchy. Today, rightly or wrongly, hierarchy holds power in society.
    • Gina Minks
       
      What if the social network serves to exlude information from other groups? Who can fight against disenfranchisement if no one can see it any more because its filtered away?
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    Oh, George, so gloomy!
Ed Webb

The 'Web Squared' Era - Forbes.com - 0 views

  • Web 2.0, the name we gave this phenomenon in 2004 when we named our new conference, turns five on Oct. 5
  • Web Squared.
  • Web Squared is another way of saying "Web meets World."
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  • collective intelligence applications are increasingly driven by cascades of sensor data being thrown off by devices, often without explicit human intervention. Today’s smartphones contain microphones and cameras, as well as motion, proximity, location, and direction sensors. They have their own eyes, ears, and sense of touch. Revolutionary new applications connect those senses to cloud databases and programs running on massive server farms.
  • Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone.
  • our world will have "information shadows." Augmented reality amounts to information shadows made visible.
Lisa M Lane

Diagrammr - 0 views

shared by Lisa M Lane on 28 Aug 09 - Cached
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    create a diagram by writing a sentence
Sia Vogel

How to Save the World - 0 views

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    Very interesting discussion about how Google Wave will change everything by DavePollard
Lisa M Lane

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind - 0 views

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    In this enlightening book James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age-today's heated battles over intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and today's policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation.
Ed Webb

50 things that are being killed by the internet - Telegraph - 0 views

  • rights
    • Ed Webb
       
      That should be, of course, 'rites' of passage - I wonder if the internet is to blame for killing the skills of subeditors at the Telegraph? I suspect not.
Leon Cych

Homepage | Social by Social - 0 views

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    New technologies are changing the way we engage communities, run companies, deliver public services, participate in government and campaign for change.
Ed Webb

It's Time To Hide The Noise - 5 views

  • the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.
  • the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug
  • if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all.  Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening.  It’s enough to make your brain explode.
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  • all I need is two columns: the most recent Tweets from everyone I follow (the standard) and the the most interesting tweets I need to pay attention to.  Recent and Interesting.  This second column is the tricky one.  It needs to be automatically generated and personalized to my interests at that moment.
    •  Lisa Durff
       
      How do you determine which are the most interesting tweets? What is your criteria?
    • Ed Webb
       
      Aye, there's the rub. This is where those clever algorithms come in that monitor your activity and make suggestions. Like Amazon recommendations. Er, which are always brilliantly spot-on. Or something.
  • search is broken on Twitter.  Unless you know the exact word you are looking for, Tweets with related terms won’t show up.  And there is no way to sort searches by relevance, it is just sorted by chronology.
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    Signal/noise ratio is an issue in networks
miz minh

To think: in language, learning and ... - Google Books - 3 views

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    Overview › Preview Reviews (1) Buy    (1) - Write review Add to my library Get this book Routledge Amazon.com Angus & Robertson Booktopia.com.au All sellers » Sponsored Links Creative Training Double your creativity with our creative thinking training www.inventium.com.au Pages displayed by permission of Routledge. Copyright.      Contents   Page 118 Link Feedback Clear searchResult 1 of 1 in this book for neuro thinking inaccessible Page 119 is not part of this book preview
Ed Webb

Filtering Reality - The Atlantic (November 2009) - 1 views

  • Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages. AR systems will be used for spam too, whether via graffiti-like tags, ads that pop up when you look too long at a shop, or even abstract symbols stuck to a wall or worn on a shirt that, when viewed through an AR system, turn into 3-D animations. Fortunately, just as Web browsers have pop-up blockers, AR systems will filter spam. Moreover, they’ll likely be able to filter out physical ads, too, such as billboards—a capability that many opponents of visual clutter will find deliriously attractive.
  • Conceivably, users could set AR spam filters to block any kind of unpalatable visual information, from political campaign signs to book covers. Parents might want to block sexual or violent images from their kids’ AR systems, and political activists and religious leaders might provide ideologically correct filters for their communities. The bad images get replaced by a red STOP, or perhaps by signs and pictures that reinforce the desired worldview.
  • It won’t take a majority of people using these filters to poison public discourse; imagine this summer’s town-hall screamers on constant alert, wherever they go. Yet this world will be the unintended consequence of otherwise desirable developments—spam filters, facial recognition, augmented reality—that many of us will find useful.
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  • The harder answer, but ultimately the correct one, would be to strengthen our society’s ability to tolerate diverse viewpoints—to encourage not muddy centrism, but a basic ability to hear out, and to see, fellow citizens with a measure of respect.
roland legrand

Real-time web and management cybernetics | Teemu Arina - 0 views

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    "nd interpreted by every employee (and customer) to lesser or greater extent."
Lisa M Lane

The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Cour... - 7 views

  • highlighting the purpose of the tools (e.g., skill-building) and stating clearly that the learners can choose their preferred tools
  • Although formal attendance seemed to be the main driver for completing assignments and the course, the main reason for not completing the course was a lack of time
  • Learners, in the absence of a stronger motivation, attend only partially
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  • students attend the course without expecting a certificate
  • Furthermore, a “hand-made” or “hacked” certificate issued by the instructor (not by the institution) (Young, 2008) only partially affects the motivation to finish the course:
  • comments confirm the need for increased attention to usability since users do not want to deal with confusing interfaces
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    The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Course Tools Problematic study of CCK08 -- sample size was way too small, would have been more interesting to examine ways in which instructor choices of tools influenced student tool use -- choices are exclusive, so can't put "confusing" and "overwhelming" at the same time.
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