Group items tagged

We will look at facets of each of these five literacies and engage in learning activities that can both increase our own competencies and provide public useful public goods

 We have pieces of the puzzle ( smaller chunks, content models) and we have the tools (individualized delivery, semantics), but putting them together really hasn’t been done yet.

 We still have to figure out what our design process would look like,

 It’s really trying to build a system that is more mentor like than instructor like.

You have more small chunks of content, and more distributed performance model.

The point is to take the fact that technology is no longer the limit, our imaginations are.

: "Are you trying to teach information or skills? Okay – a skill. Well, that will require practice.

that calling it “slow learning” gives the opposite impression of what it actually is

and one could argue that what you are describing could actually be FAST learning

“spaced learning”

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

It’s about knowing how and knowing who and knowing who knows who knows what. Whatever you call this blend of craft and community, one of the most important challenges posed by the real-time, ubiquitous, wireless, always-on, often alienating interwebs are the skills required for the use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.

bite-sized pieces

Programming is the new literacy

real-life meetups

a Q&A feature within its web product to let people talk to each other

skills are the most important factor

Michael Bloomberg

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.

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’.

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.