Group items tagged

Edupunk From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from other articles related to it. (February 2009) Edupunk is an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude.[1][2] The New York Times defines it as "an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard, and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of '70s bands like The Clash to the classroom."[3] Many instructional applications can be described as DIY education or Edupunk. Jim Groom as "poster boy" for edupunk The term was first used on May 25, 2008 by Jim Groom in his blog,[4] and covered less than a week later in the Chronicle of Higher Education.[1] Stephen Downes, an online education theorist and an editor for the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, noted that "the concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire".[5]

What it Means to Educate Today's Students February 4th, 2009 Comments The Carnegie Foundation is focusing on where and how technology can add value as we seek to advance more ambitious learning goals for all students, and where we can assist educators as they move toward making these new learning goals universal. The Foundation has enlisted expert advisers to help us look at how technology is transforming how we educate. One of these advisors is Nichole Pinkard, Director of Innovation at the Urban Education Institute, University of Chicago.

SmartPen as Digital Ethnography Tool Mar 11th, 2009 by Prof Wesch This little smartpen from livescribe just might revolutionize my note-taking in seminars, discussions, and ethnographic interviews. If you have never seen it before, check out some of the demos on YouTube. In short, it records audio as you write and links what you are writing to the audio (by recording what you write through a small infrared camera near the tip of the pen). When you are done recording you can actually tap the pen anywhere on your page and the pen will play the audio that was recorded at the time you were making that specific pen stroke. Students are already sharing lecture notes in the community section of livescribe.com. As recording devices become increasingly embedded into everyday objects the days of protecting lectures from being recorded seem numbered.

Digital Citizenship April 15th, 2009 Introduction: Out of Control A spectre is haunting the classroom, the spectre of change. Nearly a century of institutional forms, initiated at the height of the Industrial Era, will change irrevocably over the next decade. The change is already well underway, but this change is not being led by teachers, administrators, parents or politicians. Coming from the ground up, the true agents of change are the students within the educational system. Within just the last five years, both power and control have swung so quickly and so completely in their favor that it's all any of us can do to keep up. We live in an interregnum, between the shift in power and its full actualization: These wacky kids don't yet realize how powerful they are.

"Sakai is an alternative Learning Management System, similar to WebCT. Brock evaluated WebCT and alternatives such as Sakai for use as Brock's primary Learning Management System (LMS) starting in the 2009 academic year. A Pilot of Sakai with 50 courses and 27 instructors was conducted for the 2007 academic year. Instructors had the option to include the course that they were teaching in this pilot. Sakai is a free and community source based product that offers a different take on learning on-line. Moodle, which was also being evaluated in a smaller scale is a free open source option. A representative advisory group was struck to co-ordinate the pilot and help shape the decision. Please feel free to leave informal feedback below. This group conducted a pilot and submitted the results (below) to the University Senate and the Provost and Vice-President. A decision was made by the Provost and Vice-President based on this information to implement a Sakai-based system as Brock's Primary LMS."

Alex Spiers' slides from his webinar on using Wimba Voice Tools

"Before Christmas I did an interview over Skype with Janine Schmidt, Dennis Brüntje, Franz Büchl, Oliver Härtel from the University of Ilmenau in Germany. the title of the interview was 'Identität 2.0 durch E-Portfolios' - Indentity 2.0 through e-Portfolios. They have very kindly sent be a transcriot of the interview. A slighly edited versiona appears below. You can also see n more of teh project work on the students' web site."

"You've probably heard people talk about Google Wave (Google Wave) being a game-changer, a disruptive product, or maybe even as an email killer. But while keywords and phrases like these grab people's attention, they don't explain why or how Google Wave could be a paradigm-shifter. In this article, we explore these questions by highlighting some of Google Wave's most unique and promising features. By exploring these features, we can better understand the potential of this new technology."

The Future of Work - good-bye martini lunches, hello working poolside Posted by Erik Larson at 04:28 PM Will social networking and instant messages replace the standard business phone call, the client lunch and the handshake? The Acrobat.com team recently completed a survey with Directions Research, Inc. that points toward an evolution in office workplace culture, including the changing ways white-collar workers are interacting and coordinating their tasks, and how business will be conducted in the social media-rich environment of the 21st century. The survey identified four key categories of knowledge workers: Leaders - Young professionals who use a variety of emerging technologies both at work and in their personal lives Actives - Largely over-35 year old professionals who have adapted to emerging technologies to meet the changing demands of the workplace Followers - The less technically-inclined who rely on e-mail at the exclusion of other technologie Resistors - Generally older workers who are reluctant to adjust to shifts in the workplace and office technologies

Online Education - Introducing the Microlecture Format by Thomas Most college students would likely concur - fifty minute lectures can be a bit much. With current research indicating that attention spans (measured in minutes) roughly mirror a students age (measured in years), it begs the question as to the rationale behind lectures of such length. teddY-riseDGiven that it is tough to justify the traditional lecture timeframes, it is no surprise to see online educational programs seeking to offer presentations that feature shorter podcasts. But in an astonishing switch, David Shieh of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently took a look at a community college program that features a microlecture format, presentations varying from one to three minutes in length.

Academia 2.0: What Would a Fully Interactive Journal Article Look Like May 14th, 2009by Sean Gorman We've been collaborating with our co-founders back at George Mason for the last few months on a paper modeling oil dependency/vulnerability from a geographic perspective. We wrapped up the paper yesterday and it got me thinking about what a fully interactive version of the paper would look like. What if all the maps and charts were embeds? What if you could download all the data sets used for the analysis right from the paper? While many journal have come online and some even in openly accessible venues - I don't think we've really tapped the power of the Web for interactivity, data sharing, innovation, or peer review. Having more interactivity in charts and maps could make research more accessible and engaging. Further, having the data for a paper downloadable could provide better peer review, and create the opportunity to innovate and extend the research. A fellow resercher could have an idea to extend or optimize an equartion test it on the same data set and see if it yielded better results.

'Meta-reading': the generational differences in consuming news May 13th, 2009Posted by Judith Townend in Events, Online Journalism, Social media and blogging Turi Munthe, CEO and founder of the citizen journalism site, Demotix, shared an interesting thought with participants of the Voices Online Blogging Conference on Monday. The young Demotix interns consume news differently from the way he does. He elaborated to Journalism.co.uk after the panel. 'Meta-reading': "There is a generational split, but not in the way everyone imagines. It's much more recent than that," he said. People only ten years younger - he is in his 30s - consume news differently from the way he does, Munthe told Journalism.co.uk. The interns in the office ('who play a hugely important role: they're regional editors and they get properly stuck into what we do') read slightly differently, he said. "They are getting the Twitter feeds, and the blog posts, and the Facebook messaging and the free papers, and everything else, and are very happy with it. Much more happy with it than I am." "Essentially, they process information differently. It's a 'meta-reading'. It's not about individual brands. They are fully aware of all the back-stories of all the stories they're getting," he says. It's a 'degree of sophistication,' he said, 'which reads the interests behind the news as an integral part of the news'.

Some of us on the Friends of Live Earth team recently had the opportunity to sit down with Charles Porch from ning, who gave some general pointers on network building best practices. Porch has worked with thousands of the 1.1 million communities now using the ning social community platform. So here's your quick jujitsu: 1) The network should have a purpose. It shouldn't be just a fan club, instead it should try to achieve something, and if it's a nonprofit have a clear call-to-action.

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

The "Google generation" of today's students has grown up in a digital world. Most are completely au fait with the microblogging site Twitter; they organise their social lives through Facebook and MySpace; 75% of students have a profile on at least one social networking site. And they spend up to four hours a day online. Modern students are happy to share and participate but are prone to impatience - being used to quick answers - and are casual about evaluating information and attributing it, and also about legal and copyright issues. With almost weekly developments in technology and research added to increasingly web-savvy students' expectations, how are British universities keeping up? Pretty well, according to Sir David Melville, chair of Lifelong Learning UK and author of a new report into how students' use of new technologies will affect higher education.

How Many Chores Does It All Add May 5, 2009 · Comments milking cows In the morning, I open up Google Reader and start by checking out who's talking about me, my company, PodCamp, and a few other choice terms. I read a few blogs (around 700). I check on some other searches for clients that I've loaded into my reader. When I'm done, I check Facebook to see who's looking for a friend request (because they have a limit on friends, I have to be picky). I see who's sent me Facebook mail (normally junk inviting me to someone's dumb marketing webinar). I try to remember to check the birthdays.

Ten commandments of e-learning (content design) Cath Ellis recently set out her ten commandments of e-learning and this prompted me to try and articulate my own. Now e-learning's a big subject if you include all its many variants - formal and informal, synchronous and asynchronous and so on - and if you take into account all the issues relating to its management and marketing. So, what I've done is restrict my thoughts to the design of interactive, e-learning content, drawing heavily from the 60-minute masters:

Daily Awesome Tips, Tricks, Cheats And Review!! Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins And Services with 2 comments Twitter is hot and making an impact on social networking on the web. With the recent Twitter race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN as well as Tweetie just released for the Mac, Twitter is becoming more and more significant in the social networking and social media world. It is no wonder Twitter is a great platform for many awesome extensions to develop. In this post, we will show you to 70+ Twitter apps, add-ons, services, mashups and plugins to enhance your Twitter experience. Please help us spread this post on Twitter if you liked this article!! All of the Twitter apps listed below are free unless otherwise stated:

Participatory media may be the future, but a look at most comment threads shows that technology hasn't figured out a good way to force humans to act like citizens instead of fifth graders. UC Berkeley's Center for New Media hopes it has a way to fix that mess in its Opinion Space visualization tool, which provides a planetarium view of users opinions. Opinion Space, which launched Wednesday, is quite pretty, mildly addictive and full of rich possibilities for visualizing a community's opinions. Wired.com would love to have such a tool at its disposal, though its almost certainly going to be an addition to, rather than an substitute for, traditional comment systems. The center built the tool as a response to President Barack Obama's call for greater civic participation, which it says is "designed to go beyond one-dimensional polarities such as left/right, blue/red to actively encourage dialogue between people with differing viewpoints."