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RSS Britannica Blog via RSS RSS Posts by admin via RSS print Print Brave New Classroom 2.0 (New Blog Forum) October 20th, 2008 - (Brave New Classroom 2.0) homeimage12Students at every level, from grade school to grad school, face dramatic changes in the institutions they attend thanks to new digital technologies. PCs, the Internet, whiteboards, presentation software, and other high-tech devices, once considered educational aides for the library, the media lab, and the home, are increasingly a central part of the classroom curriculum itself, with results that have yet to be fully understood. The new classroom is about information, but not just information. It's also about collaboration, about changing roles of student and teacher, and about challenges to the very idea of traditional authority. It may also be about a new cognitive model for learning that relies heavily on what has come to be called "multitasking." Many educators voice ambivalence about the power of educational technologies to distract students and fragment their attention. Do the new classroom technologies represent an educational breakthrough, a threat to teaching itself, or something in between? Utopian and dystopian visions tend to collide whenever the topic comes up.

good articles on current state of e learning

Social Software Introduction When the web was originally introduced to the world it was seen as a means of dramatically improving the way in which people communicate and socialise. Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, saw it as a place where people could share information through a series of hyperlinked pages. "In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute." (Tim Berners Lee, 2005) Unfortunately, although the web became an excellent repository of information, it became a place where only technically adept users and organisations would author content. The arrival of new services (often referred to as 'Web 2.0') has helped to remove many of the barriers preventing users from participating. Thanks to this wave of new services we have seen a massive rise in the uptake of web authoring and collaboration. The term this new wave of social activity has been given varies i.e. Social Software, Social Media and Social Computing. The key word is 'Social'! Social software tools, such as blogs, wikis and bookmark sharing services, offer exciting new ways to communicate and collaborate online. Their potential is already being keenly explored in teaching and learning, but they also offer considerable possibilities for research and the business and community engagement (BCE) sectors within higher and further education, since their flexibility and ease of use are particularly well-suited to collaboration across different sectors. As a recent article explained, "The advent of social software has brought a new culture of sharing, and this time around, people are willing to give up some of their knowledge..." (Tebbutt, 2007). Furthermore, social software's increased emphasis on multimedia, as well as text-based content, means that universities can find new ways of harnessing and making their knowledge and research accessible, thus creating what has been described as "a new form of acade

'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'.

Rolling Your Own Newsroom by Robert Passarella Financial professionals by their very nature are news junkies. I've always enjoyed building my own quick tools to parse information and share it with my co-workers, friends, and family. When I was at Bear Stearns I built a few subject-related iGoogle tabs and shared them with clients or co-workers. I looked at these tools as the poor man's version of Bloomberg, since you could cobble together Yahoo or Google finance data with news feeds to make a focused custom page. Recently my friends and family were asking me how to keep track of the "Wall Street Crisis." I gave them sites and feeds--but they kept asking me for what I was reading. I spend a considerable amount of time reading, watching, and listening to news all day long. I email, Twitter, and forward links and stories throughout the day. So in essence, I am my own news editor. I enjoy tools like Snackr (thanks Marshall) which allows me to have a real time ticker-like interface for my feeds, and digg the giant social news filter. But one of the key tools I love to use is Google's Reader.

New tools for new news Journalists need new tools to work online. I started building this online database of such tools as a personal project, just a way to keep track of everything I was using. It has since grown into something I think others will find useful.

"Howard Rheingold There are a lot of voices talking about social media today, but Howard Rheingold defined the field before it existed. A noted author and commentator, Rheingold has a proven record of accurate technology and social forecasting, over two decades of syndicated columns, best-selling books, and pioneering online enterprises. His latest research and forthcoming book focuses on 21st century literacies -- how individuals and organizations learn to use digital media effectively and credibly. He coined the term "virtual community" in 1987 An acknowledged authority on the marriage of mobile phone, PC, and wireless internet, Rheingold's previous work reveals how this convergence has changed the way we meet, mate, entertain, govern, and conduct business. His book Smart Mobs, named one of the Big Ideas books of 2002 by The New York Times, chronicles the new forms of collective action and cooperation made possible by mobile communications, pervasive computing, and the Internet. Rheingold is the recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Knowledge-Networking Grant through the Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition. He was founding Executive Editor of Hotwired, the first commercial webzine where the web-based discussion forum and the online banner ad were invented. Rheingold has appeared on Today, Good Morning America, ABC Primetime Live, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, Macneill-Lehrer Report, NPRs Fresh Air and Marketplace. He currently teaches at Stanford University. To learn more about Howard, please visit his web site at http://www.rheingold.com."

"Today Blackboard announced that ANGEL's Ray Henderson will be the new President of the Blackboard Learn division. This is great news. Ray is one of the best executives in educational technology today, known for his competence, his integrity, and his leadership in supporting open standards and openness in general. Does this mean a new beginning for Blackboard?"

"Twittering the News: The emergence of ambient journalism My paper looks at new para-journalism forms such as micro-blogging as "awareness systems". For this I have drawn from literature on new communications technologies in computer science to suggest that these broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on systems are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them, giving rise to awareness systems that paper describes as ambient journalism."

A story has a beginning, a middle, and a cleanly wrapped-up ending. Whether told around a campfire, read from a book, or played on a DVD, a story goes from point A to B and then C. It follows a trajectory, a Freytag Pyramid-perhaps the line of a human life or the stages of the hero's journey. A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that's what a story used to be, and that's how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow.

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University Tags: * Essays * Teaching and Technology * anthropology * Assessment * information revolution * multimedia * participatory learning * Web 2.0 2 Comments | 9313 Page Views Knowledge-able Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative. As I recently wrote in a Britannica Online Forum: There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.1 This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.

Essential multimedia tutorials and resources for do-it-yourself training Wednesday, March 25, 2009 The funny thing about the new wave of journalism is that news organizations are requiring journalists to learn additional technical skills, but aren't making the necessary training readily available. In order to be or remain employed in this industry its essential to hunker down and learn some new skills. The following tutorial sites will take you from journalist to multimedia journalist, something that looks great on any business card.

"The Invisible Technologies of Goffman's Sociology Trevor Pinch Old technologies live on alongside new ones. Often the old technologies become invisible, just part of the stuff of life while attention is focused on a subset of technologies deemed new and interesting. For example, David Edgerton points out that whereas the Second World War is often seen as the crucible for new technologies from microwave radar to the atomic bomb, the extensive role of horses in the war is frequently overlooked.1 These invisible, mundane technologies are my focus here, and I wish to address how making such technologies more visible might contribute toward our sociological understanding of technology."

"With each new wave of technological innovation, the traditional way to explore the evolution of the educational model is to focus on how to best integrate the new technology into the learning process without influencing the traditional pedagogical principles and policies imposed by formal educational institutions. Recently, with the rise of new Web 2.0 tools and services (e.g. blogs, wikis, RSS, mashups, social tagging), many researchers are going the same way by exploring how to best include these tools into the traditional academic and corporate learning process. I believe however that in doing so, educational Web 2.0 technologies will go the way of previous technologies (e.g. LMS, LCMS, CMS, LO, LOR); i.e. much hype followed by a slow death. "

In March 1987, the AAHE Bulletin first published "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." With support from Lilly Endowment, that document was followed by a Seven Principles Faculty Inventory and an Institutional Inventory (Johnson Foundation, 1989) and by a Student Inventory (1990). The Principles, created by Art Chickering and Zelda Gamson with help from higher education colleagues, AAHE, and the Education Commission of the States, with support from the Johnson Foundation, distilled findings from decades of research on the undergraduate experience. Several hundred thousand copies of the Principles and Inventories have been distributed on two- and four-year campuses in the United States and Canada. (Copies are available at cost from the Seven Principles Resource Center, Winona State University, PO Box 5838, Winona, MN 55987-5838; ph 507/457-5020.) - Eds. Since the Seven Principles of Good Practice were created in 1987, new communication and information technologies have become major resources for teaching and learning in higher education. If the power of the new technologies is to be fully realized, they should be employed in ways consistent with the Seven Principles. Such technologies are tools with multiple capabilities; it is misleading to make assertions like "Microcomputers will empower students" because that is only one way in which computers might be used. Any given instructional strategy can be supported by a number of contrasting technologies (old and new), just as any given technology might support different instructional strategies. But for any given instructional strategy, some technologies are better than others: Better to turn a screw with a screwdriver than a hammer - a dime may also do the trick, but a screwdriver is usually better. This essay, then, describes some of the most cost-effective and appropriate ways to use computers, video, and telecommunications technologies to advance the Seven Principles.

"The Cognitive Edge Network is evolving a series of open source methods based on naturalising sense-making through the Method Development Cycle. The full list of methods can be accessed here. The Method Template is designed to provide some guidance to users of the Cognitive Edge Wiki and also a cut and paste capability to assist in setting up a new page. In general the following principles should be followed: 1. Consistency: should be consistent with the principles of naturalising sense-making. In other words it should avoid idealistic approaches based on defining future states rather than enabling evolution 2. Minimalism: a method template should contain the essence of the method and should be written so that a practitioner can quickly glance through the sheet (especially the work flow) during use without the need to navigate through a large amount of text. 3. Use HTML: additional material, illustrations, detailed check lists, supporting documents, action forms or whatever can also be stored as files or as new articles and then referenced from the method document. 4. Object based: methods should be descrete items, which can easily be combined with other methods. As such they should be codified at a level which allows that. Assemblies can be written up as Offerings 5. Non-specificity: as far as possible do not make the method description specific to a particular application area or industry sector. If there is a good example of the application then create a new article and create a link to that article 6. Avoid recipes: the Cognitive Edge method is object based, it is not a recipe. We expect adaption in context. Methods should therefore not read like recipes, or encourage people to repeat past practice. The method document is an original from which context specific practice can be developed. "

Curriculum-free, interactive, self-service learning is the way of the future, but it's a future most training departments are not quite ready to adopt. Most of us agree on where we're headed: to ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, where members of self-sustaining communities of professionals participate because they take pride in maintaining their standards and doing a great job, and where everyone strives to be all she can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that's what we're after. If only it were that simple. Learning professionals are already over-burdened. Budgets are tight. The economy is a shambles. Management demands cost-effective, rapid-impact solutions. And they want them up and running tomorrow. Pulling this off requires choosing among a myriad of new technologies, coordinating with IT, cobbling together social networking tools, CYA with legal, monitoring social network performance, and answering demands for new approaches, all the while doing the old job with fewer resources and more demands.

The eXe project developed a freely available Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. Resources authored in eXe can be exported in IMS Content Package, SCORM 1.2, or IMS Common Cartridge formats or as simple self-contained web pages. eXe is currently supported by CORE Education, a New Zealand-based not-for-profit educational research and development organisation. eXe grew out of the New Zealand Government Tertiary Education Commission's eCollaboration Fund and was led by the University of Auckland, The Auckland University of Technology, and Tairawhiti Polytechnic. It has also been greatly assisted by a global group of participants and contributors. eXe was named a finalist in the New Zealand round of the IMS Global Learning Impact Awards 2008 and went on to claim a Leadership Award at the international judging. (eXe was rated Best in Show for "Content Authoring", and also one of the top 3 participant rated projects!)

PETlab is a joint project of Games for Change and Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. It is a place for testing prototyping methods and the process of collaborative design with organizations interested in using games as a form of public interest engagement. Through our work, we connect with scholars and designers in the field of digital media, practitioners working in the spheres of education and social issues, and people of all ages at play. In the first year, we are working on a number of gaming platforms including Flash, Xbox XNA, and mobile phones. We are also working with a wide range of partners such as MTV, Microsoft, Boys and Girls Clubs, and New York Public Library. Support for PETLab comes from the John D. Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative.

Over the years, social networks have lured us from the confines of our existing realities into a new genre of digital domains that not only captivated us, but fostered the creation of new realities. As George Bernard Shaw observed, "Life is not about finding yourself, life is about creating yourself." Such is true for social networks and the digital persona and resulting experiences we create and cultivate. It was the beginning of the shift in behavior toward an era of digital extroversion, self-defined by varying degrees of sharing, connections, and engagement.

From Participation to Creation This 2020 Forecast illuminates how we are shifting toward a culture of creation in which each of us has the opportunity - and the responsibility - to make our collective future. People are creating new selves, organizations, systems, societies, economies, and knowledge. We are seeing "educitizens" define their rights as learners and re-create the civic sphere. Networked artisans and ad hoc factories are democratizing manufacturing and catalyzing new local economies. These creators are highlighting the significance of cooperation and cross-cultural intelligence for citizenship and economic leadership. Furthermore, advances in neuroscience are creating new notions of performance and cognition and are reshaping discussions of social justice in learning. Communities are beginning to re-create themselves as resilient systems that respond to challenges by replenishing their vital resources and creating flexible, open, and adaptive infrastructures. Together, these forces are pushing us to create the future of learning as an ecosystem, in which we have yet to determine the role of educational institutions as we know them today.