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HOW TO CREATE A ONE-MINUTE LECTURE Professors spend a lot of time crafting hourlong lectures. The prospect of boiling them down to 60 seconds — or even five minutes — may seem daunting. David Penrose, a course designer for SunGard Higher Education who developed San Juan College's microlectures, suggests that it can be done in five steps: 1. List the key concepts you are trying to convey in the 60-minute lecture. That series of phrases will form the core of your microlecture. 2. Write a 15 to 30-second introduction and conclusion. They will provide context for your key concepts. 3. Record these three elements using a microphone and Web camera. (The college information-technology department can provide advice and facilities.) If you want to produce an audio-only lecture, no Webcam is necessary. The finished product should be 60 seconds to three minutes long. 4. Design an assignment to follow the lecture that will direct students to readings or activities that allow them to explore the key concepts. Combined with a written assignment, that should allow students to learn the material. 5. Upload the video and assignment to your course-management software.   http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 55, Issue 26, Page A13

What is a Driving Question? Once you have the project theme or a "big idea" for a project, capture the theme in the form of a problem or a question that cannot easily be solved or answered. Click the button next to each guideline below to view example questions.

In other cases, the same digital economics have spurred entirely new business models, such as "Freemium," a free version supported by a paid premium version. This model uses free as a form of marketing to put the product in the hands of the maximum number of people, converting just a small fraction to paying customers. It's an inversion of the old free sample promotion: Rather than giving away one brownie to sell 99 others, you give away 99 virtual penguins to sell one virtual igloo. (Confused? Ask a child: This is the business model for the phenomenally successful Club Penguin.)

A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions.

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts.

"We need teachers that are performance-driven."

we were looking for the teacher that transcended the bureaucracy that often plagues the public school system, the myriad forms of student malaise, and really got into the faces of students intellectually.

teachers that thrived on chaos, that were reflective in times of high levels of uncertainty, and that were always, regardless of popular opinion, willing to reinvent themselves for the sake of learning.

Story HighlightsChristensen, Horn: Federal spending on schools is set to jumpThey say it would be a big mistake to use money to let failing schools resist changeCo-authors: Federal money should go to innovators challenging traditional waysThey say technology should be used to create new forms of schooling

The most likely result of this stimulus will be to give our schools the luxury of affording not to change.

Fourth, direct more funds for research and development to create student-centric learning software. Just a fraction of 1 percent of the $600 billion in K-12 spending from all levels currently goes toward R&D. The federal government should reallocate funds so we can begin to understand not just what learning opportunities work best on average but also what works for whom and under what circumstance. It is vital to fund learning software that captures data about the student and the efficacy of different approaches so we can connect these dots.

Education 3.0 schools produce knowledge-producing students, not automatons

Education 3.0 schools share, remix and capitalize on new ideas.

schools will express new forms of leadership within the communities that they serve.

Download-style education fails when we try to provide students with knowledge and skills that will enable them to lead in a future that is very different from what exists today –and, in a future that defies human imagination.

Teaching in Education 3.0 requires a new form of co-constructivism that provides meaningful extensions to Dewey, Vygotsky and Freire, while building the future.

Specifically, teaching in Education 3.0 necessitates a Leapfrog approach with: Adults who are eager to imagine, create and innovate with kids Kids and adults who want to learn more about each other Kids and adults who partner to collaborate in teaching to and learning from each other Kids who work at creative tasks that mirror the innovation workforce An understanding that kids need to contribute to all economic levels, and with better distribution of effort than in the past

Appellate Court Overturns Blackboard Patent; Blackboard To Press On By David Nagel07/27/09 [Updated 3:22 p.m. with comments from John Baker of Desire2Learn.] Blackboard's patent on learning management system technologies has been overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The court ruled Monday in favor of Desire2Learn and invalidated some claims in patent No. 6,988,138, also known as the "Alcorn patent" or the "138 patent." But the saga will continue.

Today's decision invalidated claims 36 through 38 of the Alcorn patent and upheld a lower court's invalidation of claims 1 through 35--all of the claims for which Blackboard had been suing Desire2Learn in this particular case

But Blackboard is continuing its litigation against Desire2learn on other intellectual property issues involving patents that the company has been granted since the Alcorn patent.

It has taken years of acclimatizing our youth to stale artificial environments, piles of propaganda convincing them that what goes on inside these environments is of immense importance, and a steady hand of discipline should they ever start to question it.

Last spring I asked my students how many of them did not like school. Over half of them rose their hands. When I asked how many of them did not like learning, no hands were raised. I have tried this with faculty and get similar results. Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.

They tell us, first of all, that despite appearances, our classrooms have been fundamentally changed.

Instructional design faculty are frequently criticized for delivering information about innovative new pedagogical methods to their students in the form of traditional lectures - for talking the talk but failing to walk the walk.

On the other hand, the course is a massively multiplayer role-playing game in which students select a character class, develop specialized expertise, complete a series of individual quests, join a Guild, and work with members of their Guild to accomplish quests requiring a greater breadth of skills than any one student can develop during the course.

Despite the impressive work of Constance, JSB, and others, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever designed and implemented a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game. In addition to helping students gain a working knowledge of the field of open education (i.e., knowledge they can actually put to work), this course is a design experiment exploring the effectiveness of running a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game.

While reading OECD’s publication Education Today, I noticed a StatLink option under each of the tables/charts. StatLink is part of OECD’s ongoing initiative to make data available in original form. A simple click and data is downloaded into a spreadsheet for happy manipulation by the user. A simple, but important idea. OECD also offers a tool to visualize data. The data is somewhat limited (employment, productivity, educational attainment, GDP, etc) in scope, but the willingness to share not only original data but also software to assist in making sense of data is a welcomed gesture!