Group items tagged

replication of our own studies

I note the underlying issue of "credibility" as the core of accreditation. It raises the question, again:  Why would standardized tests be presumed, as Excelsior does, to be a better indicator than a model of stakeholder endorsement?

"The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses. Think of it as online book clubs for open educational resources. The P2PU helps you navigate the wealth of open education materials that are out there, creates small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and weare building pathways to formal credit as well."

"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."

CRITIQUE OF E-LEARNING IN BLACKBOARD "Just as utopic visions of the Internet predicted an egalitarian online world where information flowed freely and power became irrelevant, so did many proponents of online education, who viewed online classrooms as a way to free students and instructors from traditional power relationships . . ." In "A Critical Examination of Blackboard's EˆLearning Environment" (FIRST MONDAY, vol. 14, no. 6, June 1, 2009), Stephanie J. Coopman, professor at San Jose State University, identifies the ways that the Blackboard 8.0 and Blackboard CE6 platforms "both constrain and facilitate instructorˆstudent and studentˆstudent interaction." She argues that while the systems have improved the instructor's ability to track and measure student activity, this "creates a dangerously decontextualized, essentialized image of a class in which levels of 'participation' stand in for evidence of learning having taken place. Students are treated not as learners, as partners in an educational enterprise, but as users."

"What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven't changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user's contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more. The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that's a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we've come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology."

 SAGE Journals Online for the next 3 weeks.

I am dismayed to see Longanecker's position on this.

"Visualising CoAuthors in Open Repository Online Papers, Part 3 In Visualising CoAuthors in Open Repository Online Papers, Part 2 I described an approach for pulling author information out of the OU ORO repository and displaying it in various ways, such as using a Graphviz plotted graph. I knew that ORO was scheduling an update, which has been pushed in the last few days, so the screen scraper I wrote to work with the old repository is now broken (of course...). The new ORO engine is capable of generating RSS search feeds though, so looking forwards, the whole system is far easier to play with it..."

Free Education: 200 Online Courses from Great Universities

" The two articles presented here discuss the possibilities of using online technologies to respond to these challenges. Authors Jennifer Meta Robinson and Tom Carey consider the question of how online environments might not only house collections of SOTL contributions and reflections on pedagogical practice, but also host ongoing exchanges about how these contributions can be used and developed more fully by both teachers and researchers. While Robinson and Carey share much common ground--indeed, as will be obvious, they have participated together in many discussions about these issues--they come at the challenges from different perspectives."

the letters are more interesting than the article--especially the Boston Globe link where Mazur weighs in.

The whole issue of online evals is a big one, esp relevant as part of prog eval. Perhaps a design circle topic? (...I couldn't find Mazur's comments)

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

Jon said "I wrote a post last year exploring the spider-starfish tension between Personal Learning Environments and institutionally run CMSs. This is a fundamental challenge that institutions of higher learning need to resolve. On the one hand, we should promote open, flexible, learner-centric activities and tools that support them. On the other hand, legal, ethical and business constraints prevent us from opening up student information systems, online assessment tools, and online gradebooks. These tools have to be secure and, at least from a data management and integration perspective, proprietary. So what would an open learning network look like if facilitated and orchestrated by an institution? Is it possible to create a hybrid spider-starfish learning environment for faculty and students?"

"Some students say they prefer the free videotaped lectures to the live lectures they are paying for at their own institutions. Others say they use the online talks to focus on topics they didn't quite get when they first heard them in their own courses. And some high-school students use them to get a jump on material they will encounter when they get to college."

If lectures make education, we're out of business. If not, then why are we spending time and money on them?

"Online programs are generally profitable. But despite the buzz about Web 2.0, the education they provide is still dominated by rudimentary, text-based technology." "Any innovation... [is] really to supplement what is still a pretty rudimentary core."

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."

It is interesting to see the resistance to what is sometimes considered student-centered approaches to learning.   One wonders whose "convenience" will have primacy in the education market, and at what....cost?

Browsealoud makes using the Internet easier for people who have: * Low literacy and reading skills * English as a second language * Dyslexia * Mild visual impairments Browsealoud is _not_ a replacement for a screen reader, but is convenient for some classes of users. As critical learning functions move increasingly online, we will need to know about this kind of affordance.