Digital Learning

Promethean opened on the London Stock Exchange in March 2010 trading at 198 pence ($3.12) and is now trading at 24 pence ($0.39). SMART Technologies, the leader in interactive-whiteboard technology is faring better, but not by much. After opening at $16.62 on the NASDAQ in June 2010, it is now trading at $1.70 per share.

"There was a uniform assertion at all types of institutions that faculty feel much better about teaching repurposed courses or reusing course materials created elsewhere if they are able to do some customization." Providing a way for instructors to "brand courses as their own" is the most glaring barrier to machine-learning adoption at traditional universities, according to the report. Inconveniently, it might also be the most difficult to solve. "To date, no sustainable platform exists that allows interested faculty either to create a fully interactive, machine-guided learning environment or to customize a course that has been created by someone else (and thus claim it as their own)," Bacow and Bowen write. "This is perhaps the largest obstacle to widespread adoption of ILO-style courses."    

Born to Learn is the first animation in a fascinating series aimed to provide easy-access to the exciting new discoveries constantly being made about how humans learn!

Crocodoc launched in 2010 to kill off Acrobat. The startup's initial Flash-based technology allowed you to upload a PDF, and receive a version of the same document in your browser, which you could then share with coworkers and annotate with notes, highlighting, text, and a pen tool, with changes that show up to other users in real-time. Last year, Crocodoc launched this technology in HTML5 for mobile embedding.

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced the launch of edX, a transformational partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners.

One of the best features of the new Notebook 11 software is the ability to record and attach audio to an object directly inside the program. However, using specialized sounds (i.e. - sound effects) is extremely important and teachers need to be able to find and use various sounds to make their lessons more effective. Since Notebook requires "mp3″ audio files, it's also helpful if these resources provide "mp3″ formatted audio files so teachers don't have to convert the file to use in their Notebook lessons.

most of those systems do not yet allow instructors to deeply tailor the material to meet their course needs. And highly-interactive systems are often too complex for pioneering professors to adopt and sustain on their own.

"Aside from a few institutions' references to improvements in retention or pass rates, most interviewees did not explicitly mention a desire for better learning outcomes as a main factor behind their decisions to increase their online offerings," write Bacow and Bowen. To the contrary, "the belief that students in online courses may learn the material better than their traditional-format counterparts did not appear to be widely held."

According to an Associated Press analysis of data from 2011, 53.6 percent of college graduates under the age of 25 were unemployed or, if they were lucky, merely underemployed, which means they were in jobs for which their degrees weren't necessary. Philosophy majors mull questions no more existential than the proper billowiness of the foamed milk atop a customer's cappuccino. 

ECAR Recommends See the 2011 Report for a full list of actionable results. Investigate your students' technology needs and preferences and create an action plan to better integrate technology into courses and information systems. Provide professional development opportunities and incentives so instructors can better use the technology they have. Expand or enhance students' involvement in technology planning and decision making. Meet students' expectations for anytime, everywhere, Wi-Fi access on the devices they prefer to use. Nail the basics. Help faculty and administrators support students' use of core productivity software for academic work.

They "don't want to ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that," she says. "It's more the informal networks that they're using."

Call it the "learning paradox": the more you struggle and even fail while you're trying to master new information, the better you're likely to recall and apply that information later. The learning paradox is at the heart of "productive failure," a phenomenon identified by Manu Kapur, a researcher at the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore.

"I think all I want to do here is point out that all the things professors use Blackboard for here most (as well as a few of the things that not many people use Blackboard for) can be done for a lot less money than whatever our Blackboard license costs. Sometimes they can be done for no money at all."

According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, of all Black, Native American, and Hispanic students who aspire to a STEM degree in their first college year, just 19 percent, 20 percent and 22 percent, respectively graduate from a STEM department.

Readium, a project of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and supporters, is an open source reference system and rendering engine for EPUB publications. EPUB is the industry-standard open format for eBooks and digital publications. The latest version, EPUB 3, is based on Web Standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and the DOM. The overall aim of the Readium project is to ensure that open source software for handling EPUB 3 publications is readily available, to accelerate adoption of EPUB 3 as the universal, accessible, global digital publishing format. Readium is built on WebKit , the embeddable open source Web content engine.

a collaborative catalogue for online tools for participation

Why don't even the brightest students truly grasp simple science concepts? These video programs pick up on the questions asked in the Private Universe documentary and further explore how children learn. Based on recent research, as well as the pioneering work of Piaget and others, Minds of Our Own shows that many of the things we assume about how children learn are simply not true. For educators and parents, these programs bring new insight to debates about education reform. 1. Can We Believe Our Eyes?  Why is it that students can graduate from MIT and Harvard, yet not know how to solve a simple third-grade problem in science: lighting a light bulb with a battery and wire? Beginning with this startling fact, this program systematically explores many of the assumptions that we hold about learning to show that education is based on a series of myths. Through the example of an experienced teacher, the program takes a hard look at why teaching fails, even when he uses all of the traditional tricks of the trade. The program shows how new research, used by teachers committed to finding solutions to problems, is reshaping what goes on in our nation's schools

Part 1 of edited highlights of a talk given by John Hattie who has led a team at Auckland University, New Zealand which compares the effect on learning of over 100 classroom interventions. This section looks at methods with negative, or very low effect sizes. Hattie points out that most educational debate is about things which do not really work well. See also Part 2 of the lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pD1DFTNQf4&feature=related

Today we move that effort forward by providing a number of videos that help us better understand how these devices work and what we can do with them in the classroom.

Today's kids don't just write for grades anymore. They write to shake the world. Moreover, they are writing more than any previous generation, ever, in history. They navigate in a bewildering new arena where writers and their audiences have merged. These are among the startling findings in the Stanford Study of Writing, spearheaded by Professor Andrea Lunsford, director of Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric. The study refutes conventional wisdom and provides a wholly new context for those who wonder "whether Google is making us stupid and whether Facebook is frying our brains," said Lunsford.