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Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Stanford's open courses raise questions about true value of elite education | Inside Hi... - 4 views

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  • This made Stanford the latest of a handful of elite American universities to pull back the curtain on their vaunted courses, joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project, Yale University’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.Berkeley, among others. The difference with the Stanford experiment is that students are not only able to view the course materials and tune into recorded lectures for CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; they are also invited to take in-class quizzes, submit homework assignments, and gather for virtual office hours with the course’s two rock star instructors — Peter Norvig, a research executive at Google who used to build robots for NASA, and Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford who also works for Google, designing cars that drive themselves. (M.I.T., Yale and Berkeley simply make the course materials freely available, without offering the opportunity to interact with the professors or submit assignments to be graded.)
  • MOOCs question the value of teaching as an economic value point.”
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  • Based on the success of Norvig and Thrun’s experiment, the university’s computer science department is planning to broadcast eight additional courses for free in the spring, most focusing on high-level concepts that require participants already to have a pretty good command of math and science.
  • It raises the question: Whose certification matters, for what purposes?
  • For one, the professors can only evaluate non-enrolled students via assessments that can be graded automatically.
  • it can be difficult to assess skills without being able to administer project-based assignments
  • With a player like Stanford doing something like this, they’re bringing attention to the possibilities of the Web for expanding open education
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.
Rob Parsons

Is the Revolution Justified? : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scho... - 9 views

  • And Oblinger and Oblinger (2005) claim as one of the defining characteristics of the net generation that ‘they want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda. As a result, they like to know what it will take to achieve a goal. Their preference is for structure rather than ambiguity’. This rather begs the question, ‘was there evidence that previous generations had a stated preference for ambiguity and chaos in their learning?’
  • It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. (Prensky 2001)
    • tatiluna
       
      I think this statement is anachronistic. In fact, the "new students" today who do not fit into the traditional educational system are in many cases people who were raised in the system, and then either rejected it or were rejected by it in some way.  Our educational system is designed to train conformist drones, who do not know how to learn without school.  There are many who are also able to live in both of these worlds, the traditional and the new, but I think they can bring new insights to the traditional school environment.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      I think this is a red herring as far as technology is concerned. it's much more to do with a pervasive social issue about inclusion and exclusion, probably worldwide, but much more marked in the UK due to the enthusiastic implementation of Thatcherism by her and subsequent governments. Many students know or suspect that there is no point for them in school and schools exclude like everyone else does those pupils who are likely to be expensive. Cost has truly overtaken value as the main point of reference
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    • Rob Parsons
       
      That's interesting. I doubt that the older generation were inherently more moral. I suspect that they regarded plagiarism more seriously because it's easier to hold censorious views about a crime that's difficult to commit. When the crime becomes easy to commit fewer people stand out against it. There is also the issue that plagiarism falls into the category of wrong doing that doesn't obviously hurt anybody - like speeding or smoking cannabis.
  • Brown (2009) reports, Recently, the Nielsen Norman Group study of teenagers using the web noted: ‘We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users’. The report added: ‘Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level’.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      Summary: discussions about net gen are not significant. There is not evidence of significant difference between net gen and previous gens. Also there is evidence of significant variation within today's younger generation. Issue also lacks significance because we still need to cater for very large number of other gen learners.
  • A new generation is behaving fundamentally differently – there seems little real evidence beyond the rhetoric that the net generation is in some way different from its predecessors as a result of having been exposed to digital technologies. There is some moderate evidence that they may have different attitudes. There is a general change in society which has relevance for learning – certainly the overall context is an ICT-rich one, and people are using the Internet for a variety of learning-related activities. People are learning in different ways – although firm evidence of informal learning is difficult to gather, there is much by the way of proxy activity that indicates this is the case. There is growing dissatisfaction with current practice in higher education – there seems little strong evidence for this. Probably more significant to the culture of education has been the shift to perceiving the student as a customer. There is certainly little evidence that the dissatisfaction is greater than it used to be, but what may be significant is that there are now viable alternatives for learners. Universities have lost their monopoly on learning, which reinforces the next point.
  • Higher education will undergo similar change to that in other sectors – there are some similarities between higher education and other sectors, such as the newspaper and music industries, but the differences are probably more significant. However, the blurring of boundaries between sectors and the viability of self-directed, community-based learning means that the competition is now more complex.
  • The first is that there is lag between society's acceptance of a technology and then its adoption in higher education. Brown (2009) suggests that in society the stages of technology diffusion can be defined as critical mass (ownership by 20–30 per cent of the population), ubiquity (30–70 per cent) and finally invisibility (more than 70 per cent). If higher education were to wait for the invisibility stage to be reached before it engaged with a technology, then given the time it takes to implement policies and technology, it really will look outdated. For example, in 2007, those using social networks might have been in the minority; now they will be in the majority. This is the problem with waiting for data to determine decisions – if you made a decision based on 2007 data that social networks were largely unused, it would look out of date in 2010. What is significant is the direction of travel, not the absolute percentages at any given time.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      I'm not entirely sure what the argument is here; or what the evidence is. What sort of lag and how much is actually evident? And which bits of society is HE lagging behind - there are lots that haven't caught up with the interwebs at all, and others that are racing ahead.
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    The Digital Scholar - Martin Weller
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    I haven't read any of this book yet, but this quote is running along the lines of my own thinking for my own interaction with the web and all its tools and structures. I'm beginning to feel that many of the new tools used for organization, aggregation, and note taking are too regimented for what I want right now, too task-oriented. I'm figuring out how I learn best, and the most important part of that process that has been missing for me in the past is connection to creativity. Of course, the internet is a place where so much creation is going on and I can certainly find inspiration from it. But in terms of working out my projects using solely these new tools, I keep running against a wall. I'm not exactly sure if that's what Oblinger and Oblinger are talking about, but that's what I thought of.
Allan Quartly

Teaching in Social and Technological Networks « Connectivism - 6 views

  • How can we achieve clear outcomes through distributed means?
  • How can we achieve learning targets when the educator is no longer able to control the actions of learners?
  • A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map.
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  • A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.
  • Learning is an eliminative process. By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.
  • Course content is similarly fragmented. The textbook is now augmented with YouTube videos, online articles, simulations, Second Life builds, virtual museums, Diigo content trails, StumpleUpon reflections, and so on.
  • Fragmentation of content and conversation is about to disrupt this well-ordered view of learning. Educators and universities are beginning to realize that they no longer have the control they once (thought they) did.
  • However, in order for education to work within the larger structure of integrated societal systems, clear outcomes are still needed.
  • How can we achieve clear outcomes through distributed means? How can we achieve learning targets when the educator is no longer able to control the actions of learners?
  • Thoughts, ideas, or messages that the teacher amplifies will generally have a greater probability of being seen by course participants.
  • Each RT amplifies the message much like an electronic amplifier increases the amplitude of audio or video transmitters.
  • A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.
  • In CCK08/09, Stephen and I produced a daily newsletter where we highlighted discussions, concepts, and resources that we felt were important. As the course progressed, many students stated they found this to be a valuable resource -a centering point of sorts.
  • Today’s social web is no different – we find our way through active exploration. Designers can aid the wayfinding process through consistency of design and functionality across various tools, but ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to click/fail/recoup and continue.
  • Fortunately, the experience of wayfinding is now augmented by social systems. Social structures are filters. As a learner grows (and prunes) her personal networks, she also develops an effective means to filter abundance. The network becomes a cognitive agent in this instance – helping the learner to make sense of complex subject areas by relying not only on her own reading and resource exploration, but by permitting her social network to filter resources and draw attention to important topics. In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.
  • After all, why should we do the heavy cognitive work when technology is uniquely suited to analyzing and generating patterns?
  • I’d like a learning system that functions along the lines of RescueTime – actively monitoring what I’m doing – but then offers suggestions of what I should (or could) be doing additionally. Or a system that is aware of my email exchanges over the last several years and can provide relevant information based on the development of my thinking and work. With the rise of social media, and with it the attention organizations pay to how their brand is being represented, monitoring services such as Viral Heat are promising. Imagine a course where the fragmented conversations and content are analyzed (monitored) through a similar service. Instead of creating a structure of the course in advance of the students starting (the current model), course structure emerges through numerous fragmented interactions. “Intelligence” is applied after the content and interactions start, not before. This is basically what Google did for the web – instead of fully defined and meta-described resources in a database, organized according to subject areas (i.e. Yahoo at the time), intelligence was applied at the point of search. Aggregation should do the same – reveal the content and conversation structure of the course as it unfolds, rather than defining it in advance.
  • Filtering resources is an important educator role, but as noted already, effective filtering can be done through a combination of wayfinding, social sensemaking, and aggregation. But expertise still matters. Educators often have years or decades of experience in a field. As such, they are familiar with many of the concepts, pitfalls, confusions, and distractions that learners are likely to encounter. As should be evident by now, the educator is an important agent in networked learning. Instead of being the sole or dominant filter of information, he now shares this task with other methods and individuals.
  • By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.
  • Given that coherence and lucidity are key to understanding our world, how do educators teach in networks? For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.
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    Unpacking the role of the teacher in connectivism
tim mcnamara

On OER - Beyond Definitions | iterating toward openness - 1 views

  • “open educational resources” is a highly context-mediated construct.
  • From a grant or contract compliance standpoint, the operational definition of open educational resources is often collapsed to:Open educational resource, (n). Any artifact that is either (1) licensed under an open copyright license or (2) in the public domain.
  • “In the public domain” means that, while the nature of the artifact qualifies it for copyright protection, the artifact is not subject to copyright restrictions.
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  • defining an “open educational resource” in terms of copyright status is that the definition implies that all OER belong to the universe of copyrightable things. This explicitly precludes ideas, concepts, methods, people, places, events, and other non-copyrightable entities from being OER. (This helps us avoid some of the nonsense that went on with “learning object” definitions.)
  • onsequently, every community, individual, or institution’s ideal OER will be different, and it is important that we pause and acknowledge this.
  • Below, I work from the position that “an ideal OER would help every person in the world attain all the education they desire.” In this specific context, I believe the ideal OER would have three characteristics. It would: 1. Be always, immediately, and freely accessible by every person in the world 2. Grant the user the legal permissions necessary to engage in each and every possible usage of the resource with no restrictions whatsoever 3. Effectively support the educational goals of the user
  • The notion of access, and whether or not a specific OER is accessible, is highly context-dependent.
  • 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.
  • Note, however, that a student with access to the high school library and enrolled in the class using the LMS still has access to these materials, so those copies of the resources simultaneously are OER to her while they are not an OER for others.
  • some definitions limit OER to “high-quality” materials. However quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
  • it is meaningless to talk about OER being “high quality” without simultaneous reference to the user
    • tim mcnamara
       
      Context is critical in defining and determining OER
  • much of what makes an OER ideal is context specific
  • ideal to whom, for what purpose, to be accessed in what way, to be used in what fashion, etc
Rob Parsons

A Pedagogy of Abundance : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly... - 0 views

  • If we use this perspective to examine education we can consider how education may shift as a result of abundance. Traditionally in education expertise is analogous to talent in the music industry – it is the core element of scarcity in the model. In any one subject there are relatively few experts (compared with the level of knowledge in the general population). Learners represent the ‘demand’ in this model, so when access to the experts is via physical interaction, for example, by means of a lecture, then the model of supply and demand necessitates that the learners come to the place where the experts are located. It also makes sense to group these experts together, around other costly resources such as books and laboratories. The modern university is in this sense a solution to the economics of scarcity.
  • As a result, a ‘pedagogy of scarcity’ developed, which is based around a one-to- many model to make the best use of the scarce resource (the expert). This is embodied in the lecture, which despite its detractors is still a very efficient means of conveying certain types of learning content. An instructivist pedagogy then can be seen as a direct consequence of the demands of scarcity.
  • It may be that we do not require new pedagogies to accommodate these assumptions as Conole (2008) points out: Recent thinking in learning theory has shifted to emphasise the benefit of social and situated learning as opposed to behaviourist, outcomes-based, individual learning. What is striking is that a mapping to the technologies shows that recent trends in the use of technologies, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 echoes this; Web 2.0 tools very much emphasise the collective and the network.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      Though i think it is true that students learn collaboratively, and always have done, they don't act as if they do (any more than teachers act as if they do, and quite often less). Perhaps our students still come from experiences that value authority and, whatever is said, do not value constructivism and collaboration.
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  • Any pedagogy of abundance would then, I suggest, be based on the following assumptions:
  • Jonassen (1991) describes it thus: Constructivism … claims that reality is constructed by the knower based upon mental activity. Humans are perceivers and interpreters who construct their own reality through engaging in those mental activities … What the mind produces are mental models that explain to the knower what he or she has perceived … We all conceive of the external reality somewhat differently, based on our unique set of experiences with the world.
  • Given that it has a loose definition, it is hard to pin down a constructivist approach exactly. Mayer (2004) suggests that such discovery-based approaches are less effective than guided ones, arguing that the ‘debate about discovery has been replayed many times in education but each time, the evidence has favoured a guided approach to learning’.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      Interesting, because my immediate reaction was that there's no contradiction between guided learning and constructivism. Just don't expect that your students will always go where you guide them.
  • When Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) claim, with some justification, that ‘the epistemology of a discipline should not be confused with a pedagogy for teaching/learning it’ that only highlights that the epistemology of a discipline is now being constructed by all, so learning how to participate in this is as significant as learning the subject matter of the discipline itself.
  • However, the number of successful open source communities is relatively small compared with the number of unsuccessful ones, and thus the rather tenuous success factors for generating and sustaining an effective community may prove to be a barrier across all subject areas. Where they thrive, however, it offers a significant model which higher education can learn much from in terms of motivation and retention (Meiszner 2010).
  • Abundance does not apply to all aspects of learning; indeed the opposite may be true, for example, an individual's attention is not abundant and is time limited. The abundance of content puts increasing pressure on this scarce resource, and so finding effective ways of dealing with this may be the key element in any pedagogy. However, I would contend that the abundance of content and connections is as fundamental shift in education as any we are likely to encounter, and there has, to date, been little attempt to really place this at the centre of a model of teaching.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      Agreed. Great conclusion. At the moment, if I had to single out one key point Martin makes, it is this.
kathleen johnson

Why Learning Should Be Messy | MindShift - 2 views

    • kathleen johnson
       
      They have always been interconnected. We just could not see it until we had the internet.
  • “If you were to hike the Appalachian trail, which would take you months and months, and you reflect upon it, you do not divide the experience into the historic, scientific, mathematic, and English aspects of it. You would look at it holistically.”
  • In practice, this means the elimination of English, mathematics, history, and science class.
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  • arrange the curriculum around big ideas, questions, and conundrums
  • Diana Laufenberg, former teacher at the Science Leadership Academy, described to me, “The role of inquiry is the starting point of learning.
  • School-based education has always been about telling and getting of information, rather than exploring or investigating
  • the pedagogical unit of Brightworks is the arc, which is divided into three phrases.” Each arc, he says, has a central theme.
  • first phase of the arc is called exploration
  • The second phase is expression
  • take the ideas to completion — within the deadline
  • The final phase is called exposition, where the public gets to view what the kids have done.
  • “The point is to see the topic in as many ways as you possibly can,” says Tulley.
  • “T-shaped” students
  • depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines.
  • David Kelley, whose mission is to transmit “empathy” into his students to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges
  • The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world, sustainability, health and wellness, and K-12 educatio
  • Similarly, the M.I.T. Media Lab has an anti-disciplinary approach to learning
  • “Suppose you and I decided to build a boat. Our hypothesis might be: we can build a boat under $30 using recycled materials and sail it across the Hudson River. Our teacher or mentor can help us shape that to ensure that the challenge meets our cognitive and intellectual development
  • At the Brightworks School, students will leave with an iPad, filled with all the projects they completed in their term
  • The role of the teacher in project-based learning as Laufenberg likes to say is an “architect of opportunity.
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    Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab's Human Dynamics group.
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

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.
Rob Parsons

Digital Resilience : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Prac... - 1 views

  • George Siemens (2010) has argued that academia should take ownership of the open education debate before it is hijacked, and given the above history, I would agree.
  • The loss of ownership of some of these core academic functions occurred not because of the technology but rather because the scholarly community failed to engage with it
  • commercialisation of education did indeed occur, but not because academics went along with it unwittingly but because insufficient numbers engaged with the technology itself.
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  • So what does engagement with technology mean? First, I would suggest, it acknowledges that the changes afforded by new technology are not peripheral but fundamental to all aspects of scholarship.
  • In his 1973 paper on the stability of ecological systems, Holling defined resilience as ‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables’.
  • Hall and Winn (2010) have applied the concept of resilience to education and open education in particular.
  • It is undoubtedly the case that the vast amount of online content means that people now conduct a lot of their learning informally, using free resources. Combined with financial pressures, this creates a pressure or an alternative competition for learning that is new to higher education.
Allan Quartly

Five critiques of the Open Educational Resources movement | jeremyknox.net - 5 views

  • One of the most noticeable effects of the privileging of learning in the OER movement is the lack of consideration with regards to pedagogy and the place of the teacher.
  • Given that movements such as OER are not advocates of chaotic, unpredictable learning, but in fact appear to desire similar outcomes to those achieved by organised education, we might contend that reasoned thinking must play some part the structuring of the OER project.  Therefore, it is not the concept of negative liberty itself that is problematic, but rather the premise that its realisation will achieve predefined goals; that an expected order will somehow emerge from unrestrained action.
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Ideas from the thirteen weeks of MOOC « Not Worth Printing - 4 views

  • Search: Not Worth Printing open source, elearning trends, ethics in technology and education About
  • In terms of formal learning, Tony Bates believes that changes can occur within the existing education institutes
  • Martin Weller points to the importance of academic institutes recognizing digital scholarship, moving away from the inefficient and costly publishing model and moving towards online publications that better promotes interdisciplinary endeavours
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  • David Wiley and Rory McGreal urge universities to open their content; Wiley further envisions the future of education consisting of learner-generated materials;
  • Building rhizome-like learning networks can foster an environment more conducive to continuous knowledge acquisition and constructio
  • This does not match the way our brain process information, as we are better at learning incremental chunks of knowledge in a meaningful and authentic context.
  • Dave Cormie
  • Clark Quinn’s idea of slow learning
  • Here Jon Dron reminds us that tools themselves are not technology
  • Dron’s definitions of hard vs soft technologies relevant to both formal and informal learning, further help us to undertand that soft technologies are perhaps more useful in building learning and support communities and equipping learners with the ability to  navigate information in networks, thereby promoting lifelong learning.
  • The learners will end up leading the way, as they should.
Allan Quartly

Workers, soldiers or nomads - what does the Gates Foundation want from our ed... - 5 views

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    David Cormier
Allan Quartly

Musing from the bush - Why are we so slow to adopt new technologies in education? - 1 views

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    It asks what needs to be done to get technology adopted by education.
Rob Parsons

Openness in Education : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly P... - 3 views

  • Anderson (2009) suggests a number of activities that characterise the open scholars, including that they create, use and contribute open educational resources, self-archive,
  • From my own experience I would propose the following set of characteristics and suggest that open scholars are likely to adopt these.
  • Leslie (2008) comments on the ease of this everyday sharing, compared with the complexity inherent in many institutional approaches:
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • citation levels of articles that are published online versus those that are in closed access journals. Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras (2005) compared 1,307,038 articles across a range of disciplines and found that open access articles have a higher citation impact of between 36 and 172 per cent. So publishing in an online, open manner aids in the traditional measures of citation.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      Openness as a working method, and openness as a movement, with a definable set of values.
  • This section will look at the most concrete realisation of the open education movement, namely that of open education resources. In particular I want to revisit the notion of granularity and how changes in this, afforded by new technologies, are changing scholarly behaviour.
  • Zittrain (2008) terms ‘generativity’, which he defines as ‘a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences’. Little OERs are high in generativity because they can easily be used in different contexts, whereas the context is embedded within big OERs, which in turn means they are better at meeting a specific learning aim.
  • Big OER projects have a variety of models of funding, and Wiley highlights three of these demonstrating a range of centralisation: a centralised team funded by donors and grants (such as MIT), linking it into teaching responsibilities (as practised at Utah State University) and a decentralised collaborative authoring approach (e.g. Rice Connexions, http://cnx.org).
  • The reasons for this are varied, including technical complexity and motivation. One other reason which the OpenLearn team suggest is that the ‘content provided on the site was of high quality and so discouraged alteration’.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      I wonder how much of a barrier the final integration of the material is - in a well structured object internal integration is high so the cost rises of extracting part or repurposing even the whole.
markuos morley

YouTube - David Wiley's Keynote on Open Education - 5 views

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    David Wiley 2009 Keynote on Open Education (50mins)
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    Thanks marcuos. This is more good info on Wiley's approach. Well worth watching.
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

David Wiley ~ #change11 - 2 views

  • I worked on “learning objects,” which can be characterized as educational materials designed with the understanding that they will be reused in a broad variety of contexts
  • humans are too “expensive
  • the “reusability paradox.
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  • – a great resource that is essentially impossible to reuse, or a really poor resource that you can easily reuse
  • an interest in providing teachers real-time suggestions about the best way to use their next 10 minutes, are relatively new areas for me.
  • • Online Self-Organizing Social Systems. http://opencontent.org/docs/ososs.pdf
  • I would like to invite students to reflect on the practical impact on people they would like to their educational technology / educational research work to have.
Maha Abdelmoneim

2011 The Year of Open « Paul Stacey - 4 views

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    Summary of Open Education accomplishments in 2011
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