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Nils Peterson

Innovating the 21st-Century University: It's Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 4 views

www.educause.edu/...195370

educause university2.0

shared by Nils Peterson on 06 Feb 10 - Cached
  • change is required in two vast and interwoven domains that permeate the deep structures and operating model of the university: (1) the value created for the main customers of the university (the students); and (2) the model of production for how that value is created. First we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created.
  • Research shows that mutual exploration, group problem solving, and collective meaning-making produce better learning outcomes and understanding overall. Brown and Adler cite a study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education: "Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students' success in higher education . . . was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own."
  • Second, the web enables students to collaborate with others independent of time and geography. Finally, the web represents a new mode of production for knowledge, and that changes just about everything regarding how the "content" of college and university courses are created.
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  • As Seymour Papert, one of the world's foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, put it: "The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery."14 Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have — to "construct" new knowledge structures and meaning.
  • Universities need an entirely new modus operandi for how the content of higher education is created. The university needs to open up, embrace collaborative knowledge production, and break down the walls that exist among institutions of higher education and between those institutions and the rest of the world.To do so, universities require deep structural changes — and soon. More than three years ago, Charles M. Vest published "Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University" in EDUCAUSE Review. In his concluding paragraph, Vest offered a tantalizing vision: "My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university — a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure." Vest wrote that the meta-university "will speed the propagation of high-quality education and scholarship. . . . The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the Web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials, scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, teleoperation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a noble and global endeavor."17
  • Used properly, wikis are tremendously powerful tools to collaborate and co-innovate new content. Tapscott wrote the foreword for a book called We Are Smarter Than Me (2008). The book, a best-seller, was written by Barry Libert, Jon Spector, and more than 4,000 people who contributed to the book's wiki. If a global collaboration can write a book, surely one could be used to create a university course. A professor could operate a wiki with other teachers. Or a professor could use a wiki with his or her students, thereby co-innovating course content with the students themselves. Rather than simply being the recipients of the professor's knowledge, the students co-create the knowledge on their own, which has been shown to be one of the most effective methods of learning.
  • The student might enroll in the primary college in Oregon and register to take a behavioral psychology course from Stanford University and a medieval history course from Cambridge. For these students, the collective syllabi of the world form their menu for higher education. Yet the opportunity goes beyond simply mixing and matching courses. Next-generation faculty will create a context whereby students from around the world can participate in online discussions, forums, and wikis to discover, learn, and produce knowledge as networked individuals and collectively.
  • But what about credentials? As long as the universities can grant degrees, their supremacy will never be challenged." This is myopic thinking. The value of a credential and even the prestige of a university are rooted in its effectiveness as a learning institution. If these institutions are shown to be inferior to alternative learning environments, their capacity to credential will surely diminish. How much longer will, say, a Harvard undergraduate degree, taught mostly through lectures by teaching assistants in large classes, be able to compete in status with the small class size of liberal arts colleges or the superior delivery systems that harness the new models of learning?
  • As part of this, the academic journal should be disintermediated and the textbook industry eliminated. In fact, the word textbook is an oxymoron today. Content should be multimedia — not just text. Content should be networked and hyperlinked bits — not atoms. Moreover, interactive courseware — not separate "books" — should be used to present this content to students, constituting a platform for every subject, across disciplines, among institutions, and around the world. The textbook industry will never reinvent itself, however, since legacy cultures and business models die hard. It will be up to scholars and students to do this collectively.
  • Ultimately, we will need more objective measures centered on students' learning performance.
Matthew Tedder

A New School Teaches Students Through Videogames | Popular Science - 1 views

www.popsci.com/...es-students-through-videogames

education

shared by Matthew Tedder on 11 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Matthew Tedder on 11 Jan 10
     
    Nothing more powerfully engages students than video games. It's just be very difficult finding ways to exploit this for educational purposes without destroying that affect in the process. My own best idea on the holy grail of a truly addictive game useful for very general and comprehensive educational purposes is an RTS game from an FPS perspective beginning the neolithic times, in a persistent world. A student would begin as a primitive man and gradually work his way toward inventing all the technologies of the modern world in building his civilization. He'd invent each tool by learning the physics and usefulness of it. Then he could add it to the village he founds to expand it. The village and eventual civilization would be, along with its annals, would be a e-portfolio (why the world needs to be persistent, not starting fresh each time the student logs on--he must always be building upon the foundations already established). The student would design the economic system, etc. and his "subjects" would follow the rules he stipulates. He could trade with the villages of others for items he might need to get ahead but cannot produce them himself until he learns the principles behind the technology. The population might be given needs also for entertainment, thus poetry, etc. for a more pacified people. Many ideas can be added within this framework. It's a student's own world in which he can feel safe and for which he should develop more interest as it continue to operation even when he is offline (to increase engagement). And being multiplayer can also provide the social aspect and teamwork for shared goals.... like say, building a trading route and defending it from bandits, investing materials for construction of a dam and irrigation... etc. I have a basic design to build the infrastructure for this. There wouldn't by chance be any grants out there that might apply?
  • Matthew Shirey on 11 Jan 10
     
    I really like this game idea. Seems like it would be a monster of an undertaking not just for the game engine itself, but more so for the content. Let me know if you get this one off the ground.
  • Matthew Tedder on 12 Jan 10
     
    I realized while writing this that it would be difficult to for education professionals to understand this concept. I should have known Shirey would get it. After so much experience in software, one starts to see two personality types--those who design software from a philosophical perspective and those who do so from an immediate, practical point of view. The philosophicals enjoy designing and writing new kinds of software. They are also the kind of people who tend to enjoy RTS games. The immediates struggle trying to write software from scratch, except for where they understand some pre-known framework for writing software of the particular class. They are more often relegated to debugging and tweaking software. These people tend to prefer FPS games. Systems administrators tend to fall more into this category, as well. It's a good complement, I think. I design and they maintain. Philosophicals tend not to be such good maintainers. Immediates tend to make good systems administrators, too. What this all suggests to me is that the only way non-philosophicals (the particular type I mean--don't use the term too generally) are unlikely to "get" the concept until the can see and use it. I would love to be proven wrong. I designed a framework that I think would make building it not so difficult or time consuming. But yes, building content is a chore. Therefore, the way I designed the framework is to allow run-time additions and modifications. That is, you can start simple and gradually add content over time. I think this makes sense in any case because as knowledge changes, so should educational content. Educational methods may also evolve. So I think it is very important that the mechanism for adding and editing be as easy to use as possible. This is where you want the input of non-software engineers.....even non-gamers.
Nils Peterson

Edge 313 - 1 views

www.edge.org/...edge313.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10 - Cached
  • So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code. Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      US vs Euro thinking about the Internet
  • TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY 1.  No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.
  • Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished? 4. It has increased not the quality but the quantity of our writing — "our" meaning society's as a whole. The Internet for its part has increased not the quality but the quantity of the information we see. Increasing quantity is easier than improving quality. Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.
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  • Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search.
  • Will you store your personal information on your own personal machines, or on nameless servers far away in the Cloud, or both? Answer: in the Cloud. The Cloud (or the Internet Operating System, IOS — "Cloud 1.0") will take charge of your personal machines. It will move the information you need at any given moment onto your own cellphone, laptop, pad, pod — but will always keep charge of the master copy. When you make changes to any document, the changes will be reflected immediately in the Cloud. Many parts of this service are available already.
  • The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses).
  • In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen.
  • The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The "velocity of information" is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today's typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it's not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure. 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      jayme will like this for her timeline portfolios
  • There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it's obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it's easy to blend any group of streams, it's easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for "snow" means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn't deal with snow. Subtracting the "not snow" stream from the mainstream yields a "snow" stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      is Yahoo Pipes a precursor? Theron sent me an email, subject: "let me pipe that for you"
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      Google Buzz might also be a ersion of this. It bring together items from your (multiple) public streams.
  • Internet culture is a culture of nowness. The Internet tells you what your friends are doing and the world news now, the state of the shops and markets and weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. The Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many different places at one moment in time.
  • Once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact. Such timelines are not history, but they are the raw material of history.
  • Before long, all personal, familial and institutional histories will take visible form in streams.   A lifestream is tangible time:  as life flashes past on waterskis across time's ocean, a lifestream is the wake left in its trail. Dew crystallizes out of the air along cool surfaces; streams crystallize out of the Cybersphere along veins of time. As streams begin to trickle and then rush through the spring thaw in the Cybersphere, our obsession with "nowness" will recede
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 07 Mar 10
       
      barrett has been using lifestream. this guy claims to have coined it lonf ago...in any event, it is a very different picture of portfolio -- more like "not your father's" than like AAEEBL.
  • The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing just what we like and ignoring the rest. On the Net we have the satisfaction of reading only opinions we already agree with, only facts (or alleged facts) we already know. You might read ten stories about ten different topics in a traditional newspaper; on the net, many people spend that same amount of time reading ten stories about the same topic. But again, once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add "drift" to the net, so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you're tired) into places you hadn't planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.
Nils Peterson

AAC&U News | April 2010 | Feature - 1 views

www.aacu.org/...feature.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 01 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests
  • First, the university, a public institution of about 40,000 students in Ohio, needed to comply with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), which requires that state institutions provide data about graduation rates, tuition, student characteristics, and student learning outcomes, among other measures, in the consistent format developed by its two sponsoring organizations, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).
  • And finally, UC was accepted in 2008 as a member of the fifth cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a collaborative body with the goal of advancing knowledge about the effect of electronic portfolio use on student learning outcomes.  
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  • outcomes required of all UC students—including critical thinking, knowledge integration, social responsibility, and effective communication
  • “The wonderful thing about this approach is that full-time faculty across the university  are gathering data about how their  students are doing, and since they’ll be teaching their courses in the future, they’re really invested in rubric assessment—they really care,” Escoe says. In one case, the capstone survey data revealed that students weren’t doing as well as expected in writing, and faculty from that program adjusted their pedagogy to include more writing assignments and writing assessments throughout the program, not just at the capstone level. As the university prepares to switch from a quarter system to semester system in two years, faculty members are using the capstone survey data to assist their course redesigns, Escoe says.
  • the university planned a “dual pilot” study examining the applicability of electronic portfolio assessment of writing and critical thinking alongside the Collegiate Learning Assessment,
  • The rubrics the UC team used were slightly modified versions of those developed by AAC&U’s Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) project. 
  • In the critical thinking rubric assessment, for example, faculty evaluated student proposals for experiential honors projects that they could potentially complete in upcoming years.  The faculty assessors were trained and their rubric assessments “normed” to ensure that interrater reliability was suitably high.
  • “It’s not some nitpicky, onerous administrative add-on. It’s what we do as we teach our courses, and it really helps close that assessment loop.”
  • There were many factors that may have contributed to the lack of correlation, she says, including the fact that the CLA is timed, while the rubric assignments are not; and that the rubric scores were diagnostic and included specific feedback, while the CLA awarded points “in a black box”:
  • faculty members may have had exceptionally high expectations of their honors students and assessed the e-portfolios with those high expectations in mind—leading to results that would not correlate to a computer-scored test. 
  • “The CLA provides scores at the institutional level. It doesn’t give me a picture of how I can affect those specific students’ learning. So that’s where rubric assessment comes in—you can use it to look at data that’s compiled over time.”
  • Their portfolios are now more like real learning portfolios, not just a few artifacts, and we want to look at them as they go into their third and fourth years to see what they can tell us about students’ whole program of study.”  Hall and Robles are also looking into the possibility of forming relationships with other schools from NCEPR to exchange student e-portfolios and do a larger study on the value of rubric assessment of student learning.
  • “We’re really trying to stress that assessment is pedagogy,”
  • “We found no statistically significant correlation between the CLA scores and the portfolio scores,”
  • In the end, Escoe says, the two assessments are both useful, but for different things. The CLA can provide broad institutional data that satisfies VSA requirements, while rubric-based assessment provides better information to facilitate continuous program improvement.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 01 Apr 10
       
      CLA did not provide information for continuous program improvement -- we've heard this argument before
  • Gary Brown on 01 Apr 10
     
    The lack of correlation might be rephrased--there appears to be no corrlation between what is useful for faculty who teach and what is useful for the VSA. A corollary question: Of what use is the VSA?
Gary Brown

In Hunt for Prestige, Colleges May Undermine Their Public Mission - Government - The Ch... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65640

research future of educaiton

shared by Gary Brown on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • many large research universities are placing too much priority on activities that raise the profile and prestige of their institutions but do little to improve undergraduate education.
  • "In some of these places, undergraduate education has never been a top priority," says Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.
  • While its grants and gifts have gone up, the percentage of money it spends on core teaching and student services has gone down. Many students, of course, benefit from the private support and research dollars, as the university has built better facilities and attracted world-class faculty members.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But the research aspirations of many large universities are in conflict with their founding principles, Ms. Wellman says, especially as undergraduate admissions has become more selective
  • another result of the chase for research dollars is that measures for faculty assessment and promotion rely too heavily on the research output and publication and too little on the quality of classroom teaching.
  • "I'm not pushing for banning research," he says, but there should be more flexibility and balance in the criteria."
  • Gary Brown on 21 May 10
     
    Nothing new, but affirmation of our perceptons.
Nils Peterson

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education | Page 4 | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...who-needs-harvard.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 24 Sep 09 - Cached
  • WGU constantly surveys both graduates and their employers to find out if they are lacking in any competencies so they can continue to fine-tune their programs.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Sep 09
       
      Here is our community providing feedback on the rubric and helping with the norming
  • So far, the open-education movement has been supported, to an astonishing extent, by a single donor: The Hewlett Foundation has made $68 million worth of grants to initiatives at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Rice, Stanford, and Tufts. Today, such foundation money is slowing, but new sources of financing are emerging. President Barack Obama has directed $100 billion in stimulus money to education at all levels, and he recently appointed a prominent advocate of open education to be undersecretary of education (Martha Kanter, who helped launch the 100-member Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources and the Community College Open Textbook Project)
  • Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions.
Theron DesRosier

Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards - 0 views

research.google.com/...marketingresearchawards

google research grants

shared by Theron DesRosier on 07 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 07 Apr 09
     
    "Google and the WPP Group have teamed up to create a new research program to improve understanding and practices in online marketing, and to better understand the relationship between online and offline media. The Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program expects to support up to 12 awards in the range from $50,000 to $70,000. Awards will be in the form of unrestricted gifts to academic institutions, under the names of the researchers who submitted the proposal. Award recipients will be invited to participate in a meeting highlighting work in this area and will be encouraged to make their results available online and in professional publications."
Gary Brown

History Is Scholarship; It's Also Literature - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...2009071701c.htm

shared by Gary Brown on 17 Jul 09 - Cached
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 17 Jul 09
       
      consider relationship of writing to critical thinking; grades to competencies....
  • For me, the biggest challenge in teaching a course like this is getting students engaged in the difficult task of analyzing the exercises
  • The deeper institutional issue is granting credit to graduate students for such a course
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "good writing" seems to mean, for many faculty members, that "You need to write in the style I like," or "I want to do less copy editing."
  • Without departmental support, however, writing with literary imagination is not only difficult to teach but detrimental to graduate students because they will not get credited for the work nor be allowed by dissertation committees to use what they have learned
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 17 Jul 09
       
      And why assessment cannot be extricated from teaching....
  • History Is Scholarship; It's Also Literature Before we can educate graduate students about good writing, we may have to re-educate their professors
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