Group items tagged

Twaining in Twitter, Terence Wing, Learning solutions magazine, 3 February 2011

Twitter in education, what next? presentation by Dave Hopkins, 11 September 2010

A framework for teaching with Twitter, Mark Sample, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 August 2010

In the schools, too, there is no reward for helping others (indeed, it is heavily penalized). Suppose educational achievement was measured at least partially according to how much (and how well) you helped others. The value of the achievement would increase if the person is a stranger (and conversely, decrease to zero if it's just a small clique helping each other) and would be in proportion to the timeliness and utility of the assistance (both of which can be measured).

Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value.  Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours. Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).

There is, again, no reason why public service cannot be incorporated into individual assessment. Adding value to fire and police services by means of monitoring and reporting (not the piece-work model of something like CrimeStoppers, but actual prevention), supporting environment by counting birds, sampling water, servicing sports events by acting as a timer or umpire - all these can add to a person's assessment. I'm not thinking of the simple sort of tasks grade school students can perform. Indeed, a person hoping to attain a higher level qualification would need to contribute to the public good in a substantial and tangible way. Offering open online courses (that are well-subscribed and positively reviewed by the community) should be a requirement for any graduate-level recognition. The PhD used to be about offering a unique research contribution to the field; now it's about paying tuition and being exploited as a TA. These three things - helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good - are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it's far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But assessing students in this way, far from measuring putative 'content knowledge', is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted. It acts as an invitation to cheat, as it places self-interest ahead of the values it is actually trying to measure.

open educational resources and open scholarship (a form of open educational practice)

The recent growth of ebooks and tablet computers, like the iPad, is fuelling the drive towards digital education. For the first time, institutions are thinking of innovative ways to incorporate digital content into learning programs. The potential to reach a global audience is also significant. And online learning need not be static or impersonal: on the contrary, it offers unparalleled opportunities for interactivity and open communication among students and teachers

Another attractive feature of online learning is that it is much more accessible than traditional tuition. Since resources can be spread instantly and for free to anyone in the world, learning is immediate, affordable and rewarding. It does not attract the hidden costs of contact based learning, like transport, material and stationery costs, which makes it valuable for less-privileged students. It also allows working people to gain valuable education in the time available to them, so that they can increase their skills and improve their working lives.

Many universities are now posting video lectures, reading materials and other resources for free online. The range of materials covers everything from introductory videos and podcasts to advanced textbooks and detailed research -- a true multimedia experience.