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Tai Arnold

digital digs: Welcome to badge world - 5 views

  • Colleges are filled with students who could give a damn about learning but desperately need that credential.
  • Then it's all about the badges. My kids can just give up on ever having a single moment of joy in their lives. Even if they were going to enjoy something, how can they when they've already committed to this transactional experience instead?
  • The commodification of learning was already quite clear in the Reagan era when we stopped thinking of higher education as a social good and instead defined it as an individual's investment in his/her human capital. 
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  • Anyone can open their own diploma mill, err I mean badge-selling operation? Of course not. Badges would have to be accredited by someone.
  • If you want to get a badge though, that's going to cost.
  • I think the presence of a badge could actually be a detriment to an otherwise genuine learning experience.
  • ]The whole point of education organisations adopting elearning is to cut costs. They are not doing it to improve education standards. They say it's to educate more. But we know this is a smoke screen. Bean-counters run universities and colleges just like they run commercial companies.For example, The Briish Council is planning to move into distance learning big time. 10,000s of new students. Their reasons (am I #cynic) won't be to improve educational outcomes (mostly English language teaching) but to get more qualifed teachers for for their bucks.
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    Thank you for compiling this info and posting for us all. I believe this is an interesting way to engage the learner and increase their extrinsic motivation to learn. I don't see elearning as a way to cut costs but rather a way to expand the reach of learning. Learning on line is different from face to fact and therefore it's possible that this commodification of learning is necessary as a result of these changing times.
Tai Arnold

Systemic Changes in Higher Education | in education - 9 views

  • When control over information shifts from organizations to individuals, considerations of new models in universities is required, as evidenced by historical transitions of information-based institutions. As an industry fundamentally concerned with “creating and communicating information” (Carey, 2009,
    • Tai Arnold
       
      This is probably the most important element; control=power and the other changes are expanding individual control of content
  • Recognition of only formal learning is a needlessly limiting mindset currently held by higher education.
    • Tai Arnold
       
      Yes!!!
  • Many of the assumptions that inform higher education today – such as classrooms, textbooks, physical space, co-location of educators and learners, pairing of research and teaching, bounded curriculum – are called into question by emerging learning theories and technologies.
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  • However as education in the developed world moves in new directions, we must be cognizant of how this move impacts the learners in the developing world. How will learners in these areas access, explore and contribute to the creation of knowledge? Will social networking technologies, and the emergence of next generation technologies further exclude the greatest number of undergraduate learners. Will this new reality result in too few voices connecting and validating knowledge? How can non-Eurocentric voices be heard? One must ensure that there is some democracy in this new model.
  • Educators and leaders in academia are confronted with important questions. How should institutions of learning be designed to serve the needs participative, social, and global information cycle? What assumptions about the system of higher education need to be abandoned due to technological advancements? How can the vital roles of research and teaching and learning be addressed through distributed means? How can accreditation be broadened to include the full spectrum of formal and informal learning activities?
  • Failure to recognize the pivotal role of digital technologies will result in institutions at odds with the world in which they operate.
  • The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006) propose that universities are experiencing a revolution—with tremendous consequences. They write, Everything is in play, as nearly every aspect of academic life is being driven by a host of inter-related developments: dazzling technological advances, globalization that permeates academic boundaries, rapid increase of tertiary students worldwide, expansion of proprietary higher education, a blurring of (the) public/private distinction, and entrepreneurial initiatives on and off campus. (p. xvii)
  • Technological innovations in bandwidth, storage, processing speed, and software directly impact education (Downes, 2009), creating new opportunities for learner-learner/educator and learner-information interactions.
  • ome researchers have turned to complexity theory to advance education, suggesting that emphasis be placed on the whole system rather than reductionist views often found in "mainstream science" (Mason, 2008). Increased collaboration in a model of "interlocking partnerships among researchers, among universities, and across international borders” (McFadden Allen, 2007, p. 3) promises a new model of not only what it means to be an academic, but also what it means to be an academic institution.
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    a very important article - as someone commented (either about this article of another of George's), those who most need to read it probably won't. I'm going to see what I can do about changing that
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    Education, as knowledge presentation, assessment and learning is not the only concern about the modern university system. We must also concern our selves with helping student acheive their goals, or as mentors, helping them to discover what they want to contribute to society. While part of this is job placement, a great deal of it is helping the learning see the possibilities out there and providing them with the tools to acheive those possibilities (such as knowing what types of credentials, certificates, degrees, etc.. they may need). It is also about helping them develop their abilities to filter material, think of material in new or different ways. One problem is the rigid, ego centric hold provided by discipline specific education.
markuos morley

iterating toward openness - 2 views

  • One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process.
  • However, because the gold standard for learning credentials is acceptability by employers, any meaningful badges demonstration project will have to operate in this space.
  • We want to create a collection of badges that a top employer, like Google, will publicly recognize as “equivalent experience.” This goes straight for the jugular, demonstrating that badges are a viable alternative to formal university education.
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  • The bolded items above really represent one version (and certainly not the only one) of the complete package – open content, open learning support, and open badges that help you demonstrate competence to an employer.
  • • Combine these and other business models to generate enough revenue so that (1) the marking service can be free in addition to all the badge related materials being openly licensed and (2) employers will respect and recognize the badges resulting from the process.
  • - An initial list of OER (e.g., OLI courses) and Q/A services (e.g., StackOverflow.com or OpenStudy) which will help individuals develop the skills necessary to obtain the badges
  • If a digital artifact released under a CC BY license is posted on a public website it would qualify as an open educational resource for everyone with internet access. However, if a teacher downloaded a copy of the OER and placed it inside a learning management system it would suddenly cease to be an open educational resource – even though the resource hadn’t changed.
  • The efficacy ideal is not realizable in practice. Intuitively we would want the ideal OER to support the educational goals of every user, and some definitions limit OER to “high-quality” materials. However quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. A resource considered very high quality by an English speaking undergraduate might be very low quality for an English speaking primary school student or a Spanish speaking undergraduate.
  • While everyone wants the OER they use to be high quality for them, it is meaningless to talk about OER being “high quality” without simultaneous reference to the user.
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    David Wiley's Blog
Tai Arnold

'Harnessing America's Wasted Talent': You Don't Need a Weatherman….. - 0 views

  • n short, there is activity across the entire spectrum of learning, from pre-engineered and self-paced to open sourced and self-directed with more conventional models in between. All are enhanced and scalable as never before by the web and web-enabled technology.
Allan Quartly

Change MOOC Reflections - BioRam - 9 views

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    I am following this blog because he raises some very good questions about credentialling and the learning process, and how it fits together or apart.
tim mcnamara

The Primary Challenge for the OER Movement | iterating toward openness - 4 views

  • 1. The Complete and Utter Lack of Assessment in the OER Space.
  • The vast majority of OER in the world do not include any assessments.
  • some people in the field need to turn their attention to the creation of Open Assessment Resources (OAR).
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  • The work on the Open Badge Infrastructure is only slightly encouraging with regard to this challenge.
  • However, we can’t credential (responsibly) without assessments, and in the midst of all the excitement about badges I’ve yet to hear of any novel (or even uninteresting) work on the underlying assessments themselves
  • Given the OAR acronym, users of OER are literally up a creek without a paddle. And will be until we start making some progress on the OAR issue.
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