Group items tagged

"I recently created a stand-alone page for my video Web 2.0 and your own Learning and Development... ... it has been found by a few people, including Marian Thacher, who discusses it here. One note: she says, "all of this only works for the very motivated learner... what about that learner who isn't so motivated, who has some learning challenges, for whom school was more of a misery than a joy?" Quite so - which is why I stress enabling students to manage their own learning and to follow their own interests. Otherwise, they won't be motivated, and the rest of this stuff is not nearly as effective as it could be. Marian Thacher, Adult Education and Technology, March 17, 2009. [Link] [Tags: Schools, Twitter, Online Learning, Web 2.0, Video, Google, YouTube] "

Nevada universities are preparing to close colleges, departments, and programs; demoralized professors are fleeing the state; and thousands of students are being shut out of classes at community colleges. The prospect of shutting down an entire institution remains a "distinct possibility" for the future, the chancellor says. The resiliency of public financial support for American higher education is threatened, putting quality, capacity, and the underlying ability to meet student and societal needs at risk.

Washington is not the hardest-hit state. Our work can be seen as having a direct bearing on this crisis.

"This course attempts to teach the literacies I believe are needed to flourish in a connectivist environment." --Downes

Item Gary emailed around

Note our friends Randy Bass (AAEEBL) and Mary Huber are prominent.

Fine piece, transformative. "were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources."

Whuffie From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.

"In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive. This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.org/futureofeverything/), brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus. Date: May 19, 2009 Place: Norwood, MA"

The feedbook is a collection of feeds (including podcast, blogs and someday soon hopefully vlogs) contained in an open ended opml first seeded by a course instructor and added to (or pared down) according to student needs.

"The traditional notion of hierarchical, top down, government has always been an imperfect match for the decentralized governance system of the US. However, much of what government does requires co-production of policy among agencies that have no formal authority over each other, fundamentally undermining the traditional Weberian image of bureaucracy. Networked governance refers to a growing body of research on the interconnectedness of essentially sovereign units, which examines how those interconnections facilitate or inhibit the functioning of the overall system. The objective of this program is two-fold: (1) to foster research on networked governance and (2) to provide a forum to discuss the challenges of networked governance."

The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler's high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros' Networked Teacher. I hope that teachers will use it to help their colleagues, parents, and students understand networked learning in the 21st century. Anyone is free to use this video for educational purposes. You may download, translate, or use as part of another presentation. Please share.

This video should be required viewing for incoming faculty. Especially the end of the video; it gives a good description of the new roles faculty can take when they leave the lecture stand. Thanks Stephen

The Official Google Blog reports that Google detected a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" originating in China against them and against at least 20 other large business. Google says they have "evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists." Google says "We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."

Some suggestions fort Scientists about blogging. "So what should you put in your blog? (1) Talk about your research. What have you done in the past? What are you working on at the moment? There is some controversy as to how transparent you should be when talking about your research (OMG, someone is going to steal my idea if I write it down! No wait, if everyone knows I said it first, then they can't steal it!), so it's up to you to decide how comfortable you are about sharing your research ideas. I'm old-fashioned enough that I tend towards the side that thinks we should be discreet about the details of what we're working on, but I also understand the side that wants everything to be out there. (2) Talk about other people's research. Do you agree with their results? Do you think that they missed something important? You may feel unqualified to criticize somebody else's work, but science does not advance through groupthink. Remember, part of your job as a scientist will be to review other people's papers. Now is as good a time as any to start practicing. (3) Talk about issues related to your research. Are you working on smartphones? Talk about how they're being integrated into museum visits. Working on accessibility issues? Talk about some of the problems that the handicapped encounter during their daily routine. Just make sure you choose to talk about something that interests you so that you feel motivated to write to your blog. "

Students pay tuition to work for free ... unpaid internships are growing in this down economy, favoring the wealthy who can afford them. But internships are generally valuable for students, administrators say. The complementary courses involve journals, essays, oral presentations, or work portfolios. Independent studies lean toward academics. Companies often see academic credit as substitute compensation that qualifies interns as legally unpaid trainees and keeps them on their colleges' liability insurance. Advertisements specify: "Candidates must be able to receive academic credit." That makes some campus officials bristle. "What they're saying is holding the institution hostage," says Kathy L. Sims, director of career services at the University of California at Los Angeles. Employers don't know colleges' academic standards, she says. "It's really not their call whether their experience is creditworthy." Colleges have dealt with that quandary in various ways. Some, especially those with traditions of experiential learning, vet and monitor internships, enrolling students in courses designed to complement their real-world work. Others let professors sponsor independent studies based on internships. More and more have devised some form of noncredit recognition to try to satisfy employers without altering academic philosophies or making students pay tuition to work free. At Bates College, the game is up. "We're quite adamant about our refusal to play along," says James W. Hughes, a professor of economics. As chairman of the department eight years ago, he got dozens of calls from students, parents, and employers asking for credit for unpaid internships, mainly in the financial industry. "Why is it that we have to evaluate this experience," he says, "just so some multibillion-dollar bank can avoid paying $7.50 an hour?" But the law is vague, and arguably antiquated. In the for-profit sector, guidelines for legally unpaid internships come from a 1947 U

As we continue to refine the rubric, this short post is a useful reminder of the challenge....and the limits. We struggle in part because the formal assessment experience of many of our partners is not wide or deep, which in turns increases the language challenges.

You Only Get This Type of Education in Class - Mythic Attributes of the Lecture Good discussion of the use of the lecture in online learning, both on whether it is advisable, and on how to approach the idea. Given that the lecture has such a bad reputation, why do I produce so many of them? What I have found is that I do some of my best thinking though speaking. Giving a talk forces me to reconceptualize my thoughts. So for me, a lecture is inevitably a learning experience. As for my audience, well, I have often maintained that they learn very little from the content of the lecture, and much more from my mannerisms and approach. A lecture (like a demonstration) isn't a learning event (except for the speaker), it's an enabling event, a celebration of what we already know and believe. Lectures challenge, invigorate, enliven, enable and enlighten, but they do not teach (much). Experience teaches. David Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, June 9, 2009. [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Experience] [Previous][Next]

This is a provocative description of the lecture

Harvard University's priorities examined in the light of its use of its tremendous wealth. It's not hard to see a trickle-down effect in other universities closer to home.

nothing to add here. I will miss this affiliation.