Skip to main content

Home/ Diigo In Education/ Group items tagged tiny

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Maureen Greenbaum

SNHU: How Paul LeBlanc's tiny school has become a giant of higher education. - 1 views

  • Students are referred to as “customers.”
  • t deploys data analytics for everything from anticipating future demand to figuring out which students are most likely to stumble.
  • “Public institutions will not see increasing state funding and private colleges will not see ever-rising tuition.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt
  • school spends millions to employ more than 160 “admissions counselors” who man the phones, especially on weekends, guiding prospective students into the right degree program
  • vast majority are working adults, many with families, whose lives rarely align with an academic timetable.
  • “College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience
  • low completion rate can be blamed partly on the fact that college is still designed for 18-year-olds who are signing up for an immersive, four-year experience replete with football games and beer-drinking. But those traditional students make up only 20 percent of the post-secondary population.
  • online courses are created centrally and then farmed out to a small army of adjuncts hired for as little as $2,200 a class. Those adjuncts have scant leeway in crafting the learning experience.
  • An instructor’s main job is to swoop in when a student is in trouble. Often, they don’t pick up the warning signs themselves. Instead, SNHU’s predictive analytics platform plays watchdog, sending up a red flag to an instructor when a student hasn’t logged on recently or has spent too much time on an assignment
  • highly standardized courses, and adjuncts who act more like coaches than professors
  •  
    The Amazon of Higher Education- How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth.
Roland Gesthuizen

YouTube - Crabfu $5 iphone microscope mod - 35 views

  •  
    "how to adapt a tiny field microscope with an iPhone camera and iPad"
  •  
    Amazing technology hack, adapting a cheap microscope with an iPhone to create a scientific instrument :-)
Tony Baldasaro

The Fischbowl: Copyright: Living Life Against the Law - 42 views

  •  
    "Lawrence Lessig (now at Harvard) has another thoughtful presentation regarding copyright that he gave at EDUCAUSE 2009. He makes a compelling case about how "things have changed" but that our copyright laws have not kept up with those changes. In the past, "copyright had a tiny role."
Martin Burrett

D Richard's Online Mindmaps - 30 views

  •  
    A sleek looking online mindmapping tool. Save your mindmaps to your computer as tiny files. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools
Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

  •  
    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
Bill Maginnis

Linux Journal | The Original Magazine of the Linux Community - 10 views

  •  
    very cool mini-series on setting up virtualized Linux servers and a host PC took learn about web servers, email servers, DNS, etc. Looks like a great resource for a classroom
David Hochheiser

The Best Thing To Ever Happen To Google Drive For Teachers - 183 views

  •  
    "cloud-based, tablet-friendly voice feedback and commenting for documents, allowing you to provide thorough feedback and guidance for writers without making endless notes in tiny margins on papers that can get misinterpreted or lost."
Marsh Feldman

Online Education - Introducing the Microlecture Format - Open Education - 4 views

  • in online education “tiny bursts can teach just as well as traditional lectures when paired with assignments and discussions.” The microlecture format begins with a podcast that introduces a few key terms or a critical concept, then immediately turns the learning environment over to the students.
  • “It’s a framework for knowledge excavation,” Penrose tells Shieh. “We’re going to show you where to dig, we’re going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we’re going to oversee that process.”
  • It clearly will not work for a course that is designed to feature sustained classroom discussions. And while the concept will work well when an instructor wants to introduce smaller chunks of information, it will likely not work very well when the information is more complex.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the microlecture format similarly requires teachers to get the key elements across in a very short amount of time. Most importantly, it forces educators to think in a new way.
  • 1. List the key concepts you are trying to convey in the 60-minute lecture. That series of phrases will form the core of your microlecture. 2. Write a 15 to 30-second introduction and conclusion. They will provide context for your key concepts. 3. Record these three elements using a microphone and Web camera. (The college information-technology department can provide advice and facilities.) If you want to produce an audio-only lecture, no Webcam is necessary. The finished product should be 60 seconds to three minutes long. 4. Design an assignment to follow the lecture that will direct students to readings or activities that allow them to explore the key concepts. Combined with a written assignment, that should allow students to learn the material. 5. Upload the video and assignment to your course-management software.
    • Marsh Feldman
       
      Good luck! Some of my (upper-division college) students don't even read the handouts I give them about assignments. Instead, they come during office hours and ask me to tell them how to do the assignment. When they do read things, like a textbook commonly used in 100-level courses, they misinterpret concepts through their own preconceptions. For example, the textbook says, "In this field there are these eight schools of thought: ...." So one student writes, "All eight schools are good ways to understand. There's no right way." (Even though each school is highly critical of the others.) The rest of the class comments, with things like "Good insight, Oscar." The textbook is about the field, so it doesn't go into any detail about the schools' criticisms ot the others. I can either tell the students or give them additional reading they probably won't do. Unless you can anticipate every student misunderstanding and have time for microlectures on every one of them, I think you'll need to do things the old fashioned way. At least this way you can make a valiant attempt at helping them understand the material correctly.
Ed Webb

Wired Campus: Politicians, Students Videoconference About Climate-Change Solu... - 0 views

  • a delicate process involving poking “lots of tiny holes in the Congressional firewalls.”
    • Ed Webb
       
      A metaphor for our times. We should do this more, and not just with Congress.
  • the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions, a nationwide event involving more than 750 colleges and schools.
Martin Burrett

Telescopic Text - A tiny sentence to a huge paragraph - 0 views

  •  
    Need to explain to students the need to develop and explain their writing in a visual, interesting way? Try this.
  •  
    A great example to your class of how a short simple sentence can be expanded. Make your own at http://www.telescopictext.org/write/ http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
Marc Young

Bit.ly - oneforty - 63 views

psaunders

www.AllAboutGermany.NET | Moving to Germany | Visiting Germany | Living and W... - 19 views

    • psaunders
       
      Wouldn't it be better to start with this anecdote. It's got real impact. As it is, it's buried too far down and there's too much tame scene setting to start with. 
  • There’s a sort of proletarian parochialism to be found in Berlin
  • the parochial attitude of many western Berliners towards eastern Berlin
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I’ve been to parties and social gatherings there many times where one set of people stay at one end of the room and another -- the newcomers -- at the other end.
  • Gentrification in Berlin has now started to make itself felt in staunchly working class and immigrant Neukoelln
  • A video has recently appeared on YouTube about the phenomena of gentrification in Neukoelln
  • t that time I also had the pleasure of viewing a tiny, squalid, almost windowless one roomed apartment that had just become free for letting in Neukoelln. It had until very recently been previously occupied by a mentally disturbed alcoholic whom the police had found dead drunk on the street a few blocks further down. When the police entered his apartment they found a large collection of knives, hammers, baseball bats, knuckle-dusters, axes and other weapons scattered around the flat. When I visited the now empty apartment, these items were all still laid out on the kitchen table awaiting their removal by the police. Apparently the apartment had also by necessity just been fumigated. Needless to say, I declined to take up a rental contract with the agent for that particular property.
  • can understand some of the points he makes about the superficiality of the hipsters with their “Starbucks standards and expectations” and how they just want to party for a few years before moving on again somewhere else. But I don’t entirely agree with his point of view. Berlin needs newcomers, it needs new creativity and new enterprise. It can’t afford to stagnate and just remain a working class city in a city with little for the working class to do anymore. I find this hostility towards “Aerzte, Architekten und Anwaelte” rather parochial and narrow-minded. Why be against these people? Because they are doing well for themselves? What are they supposed to do? Sweep the streets or draw Stuetze (unemployment benefit)?
  • funny rant, critical of the newcomers and their standardized Latte Macchiato attitudes.  The video was also featured on Dutch TV recently.
D. S. Koelling

5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

  • 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.
  • 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.
  • 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people.
  • 5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run.
  • I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies.
  • Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time.
  • Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?
  • Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.
  • One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
  •  
    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
  •  
    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Chuck Holland

Eight Ways To Build Blended Learning Class Culture | EdSurge News - 60 views

  • the following eight actions have a positive impact on the blended learning culture among our students.
  • 1. Identify Online Learning Behavior You Want To See
  • 128 27 Romain Bertrand · May 15, 2014Eight Ways To Build Blended Learning Class CultureHow to get students to value and care about the work they do onlineRomain Bertrand
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 2. Model and Narrate These Behaviors Constantly
  • 3. Celebrate Rock Star Online Learners!
  • 4. Make Students Explain Their Reasoning Online
  • 5. Provide Students With Written Feedback
  • 6. Use Data To Make The Right Connections In Class
  • 7. Provide Support During Online Learning Time
  • 8. Create Activities Tailored To Student Needs
Enid Baines

In Gatsby's Tracks: Locating the Valley of Ashes in a 1924 Photo | Literary Kicks - 54 views

  • In Gatsby's Tracks: Locating the Valley of Ashes in a 1924 Photo
  • Desolate enough? The sight of workers toiling among these giant piles may have even reminded Fitzgerald of Dante, and Fitzgerald's real-life encounter with this spot must have played a part in the genesis of the entire novel.
  • If Gatsby's caravan took this southern route, the railroad and highway would have merged exactly as described in the novel. Here, then, is the bridge they would have crossed. I can't tell for sure that it's a drawbridge, but I'm willing to believe it must be one. The tiny settlement to the right, then, is exactly the spot where Dr. Eckleburg's billboard would have stood, and where George Wilson would have kept his auto garage.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 1939 Worlds Fair and then the 1964-65 Worlds Fair. Shea Stadium was built to host the New York Mets on the northern side, and was then replaced by CitiField on the same spot. Every year the US Open Tennis Tournament is held at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center south of the baseball fields. Here's what the same spot looks like in an aerial photograph from 2009. Shea Stadium is on the top left, the US Open tennis courts on the bottom left.
1 - 19 of 19
Showing 20 items per page