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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
anonymous

Own It: Social Media Isn't Just Something Other People Do - 4 views

  • We look at a generation that has grown up online, and we worry about how "they" can't put down their iPhones, how "they" can't hold a real conversation, how "they" prefer distraction to presence. How will they form relationships? How will they learn to listen, or to be heard? The real and difficult questions are not about them, but about us. How will we choose to live online? How will we sustain conversations, build relationships, and cultivate genuine connection? And for those who are experiencing the kind of angst Turkle describes, an even more challenging question: How can I change when, where and how to plug in so that I actually like my life online?
  • We can have what Turkle terms a "big gulp of real conversation" -- through a chat window that keeps us connected, all day, to a best friend on the other side of the country. We can embrace the value of solitude and self-reflection, writing a blog post that digs deeply into a personal challenge -- perhaps choosing to write anonymously in order to share a deeper level of self-revelation than we'd brave offline. We can truly listen, and truly be heard, because online affinity groups help us find or rediscover friends who are prepared to meet us as we really are. These are the tools, practices, and communities that can make online life not a flight from conversation, but a flight to it. But we will not realize these opportunities as long as we cling to a nostalgia for conversation as we remember it, describe the emergence of digital culture in generational terms, or absolve ourselves of responsibility for creating an online world in which meaningful connection is the norm rather than the exception. We are making that digital shift together -- old and young, geeky and trepidatious -- and we are only as alone as we choose to be.
Robert Maxwell

CALIBRATED PEER REVIEW - 2 views

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    Calibrated Peer Review (CPR)™ is a free Web-based program that enables frequent writing assignments even in large classes with limited instructional resources.
Allan Quartly

News: Academic Publishing and Zombies - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

  • Fitzpatrick argues that journals should throw the door open to all comers, then deputize their readers to usher sound articles to a pedestal and banish bad ones to the margins. Scholarly journals would serve their constituencies better “by allowing everything through the gate, and by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received,” she writes, “rather than whether it should be out there in the first place.”
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.
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