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Mashable Jobs listing and information in social media

This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award. For more information on Sir Ken's work visit: http://www.sirkenrobinson.com

Helen, I like Sir Ken Robinson's stuff, but I do take it with a grain of salt as well. Like Gladwell, he's a good storyteller and can inspire, but everything's got to be taken in context. I love that you ask your students to follow their train of thought. I do that with my kids, and find I often have to explain my own train of thought to others. I like the way you are in tune with the benefits and risks of reflective practice. It can get messy, and it isn't always the best thing for every student. It sounds like you take extra steps to make sure they understand the value of it.

Helen, thanks for underlining the Evoke game. I did find it - www.urgentevoke.com - and was impressed by what a great representative of eLearning this was. Organized, engaging, lots of information - but what I liked most was that it led to action - i.e., the gaming playing is not just on the computer - but actions you take or are encouraged to take to make a difference.

I have made some personal comments on obtaining the skills and not being able to get the job one trains for.

To elaborate on your: " My point is this, giving my student the skills to do the job they hope to do in the future is not the end of the learning process." School has the dual purpose of both enlightening us as people and preparing us for a profession. As this article points out, obtaining a degree or going to school does not guarantee of a job. It may not guarantee a job, but without you can't have the insight or credential to eventually get there.

What deeply saddens me is technical and community colleges may give you the skills; but then they may drop the ball by not helping beyond that point. Without internships and situations for obtaining experience...one cannot overcome the obstacle of needing experience in the field. Same goes for my hope to teach...which may just be a dream I am holding onto with no basis in reality. Then the feds paid for the courses, the college got the money and I am in fact the loser.

Check out some of the videos here about how your social networking affects your job prospects.

I'll attach the file to the email I send today.

Thanks Jen.

Joy, Your posts are quite sobering, regarding your own experiences working towards completing your university education. I strongly agree with the following quote in your post: "In sum, it is time for educators to make college and higher learning relevant to their students. It is not about us, it is about them. We are the facilitators of their learning. We must prepare them for the world they will find themselves in when they leave the protected walls of our colleges and universities" I found the recent events in Cairo to be fascinating, where large numbers of people suddenly rose up against an authoritarian and out-of-touch government. This largely peaceful uprising was fueled by the same Web2.0 technologies that are underpinning this class. It's possible that many traditional schools will soon find themselves in a similar situation to the Egyptian government, where students pass them by in favor of lower cost and more relevant educational experiences - many of them available online. Bill Gates recently came under fire for making the statement that valid online college degrees may soon be available for $2000. He may have said this to exaggerate a point, but the evidence of a growing number of online low cost educational resources can't be ignored. One of them is the Khan Academy - run by an MIT graduate who has created a large free archive of mathematics courses that are used by students all over the world - many who claim they are better than their university courses. Colleges and universities ignore this development at their own peril. It's not clear yet how we'll make this transition to relevancy for students, but the next decade will be very interesting...

Thanks you for your comments Mary Ann...the bottom line reads, we may be killing off our aged population by sentencing them to give up and give in to old out-moded concepts!

Joy: I've been following your blog postings for some time now and have been meaning to let you know I always learn and find your postings valuable. Keep the information coming our way.

This is my portfolio post for week 5

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_17396167?nclick_check=1 - This is an OpEd piece by David Brooks of the New York Times, which came out this week. "It could be that the nature of technlogical changes is (causing) a shift in values". This is not an opinion about education, but goes to the point about preparing students for the future/present even that assumes technology. Maybe our values are and how we assess things has to evolve, as well.

I truly thought that blog was thought provoking! I absolutely agree about changing values. But, I think that change must come from this generation and what they want for themselves, for their community and for their country. Hopefully they can think that broadly about themselves and the world. I believe they can and do!

As part of the lesson 8 readings (Boettcher, Page 146), there is a description of the characteristics of quality on discussion postings. This outline is helpful and an extremely important element of eLearning course design that I had not previously thought about so succiently. Analogously, the link above - lists the guidelines - one should consider for good job postings. I think the underlying messge is to post a depth of detail (like salary range) which with all the information we have to consider is probably quite helpful.

This is just brilliant!

I don't think people get up in the morning and say I am going to do a bad job today. I think teachers have so many other things they deal with that have nothing to do with direct education that their job becomes very demanding. I think this 'grade-in' was a kind way to make the point.

What a cool idea!

An introduction to careers in the future by today's futurists. Children are an asset and treasure this country cannot afford to leave behind or to be out done by foreign governments. If they work collaboratively, what a wonderful world they could create, inspite of the not so wonderful things that exist in our world.

Cute! It's always amazing to listen to a child and hear what they imagine for the future. It will be interesting to see what they make out of some of the things we've messed up!

Nice! I'm teaching a wiki workshop at Skagit Valley College today. May I share this?

There will be! My post on my blog listed above has an article about how to do this. You might want to click on it and read the blog.

Great job, Joy! I enJOYed the videos and loved the layout of your wiki. Your eSkills really are apparent!

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome. Please take the survey and provide your thoughts and experience with Module 4. Thanks.

Thanks for the kind words. Next week-end we have out-of-town guests, so that's one of the reasons for my early focus. Your directions were fine and helped the logistical process. I prefer this to a screencast, but that might be reflective of my technology knowledge and learning style. Two things, though, that took me a while to figure out were: 1. Sharing. It might be a default setting, but new documents I create have a privacy share indicated. You have to specifically change the setting (the share button is on the top of the screen) for people to be able to access it. 2. Editting. When you go back into Google docs, I got an excel spreadsheet. To actually update the form, you have to go to the form button and select "edit" in the pulldown screen.

I had fun responding to your survey, Ann! You did a great job--I liked the questions and the color format!

I thought I'd start posting some job listings related to e-learning, so you can get an idea of the diversity of opportunities. Feel free to share anything you find!

My reflections on Module 2, and some questions about the future.

Appreciate you showing us, from the instructor side, how the class is going and asking for our input. I'm taking notes as how to incorporate this into my online classes.

What we really need is for something to go terribly wrong so we can solve it together. Maybe this week I'll share what's been going on in my day job, so you can learn what not to do!

Based on an article in Time Magazine

This website is a repository for "policy research from leading think tanks worldwide." There are many articles posted in PDF format for your perusal. I looked at several, among them, one regarding blended (hybrid) learning classes in Colorado Public Schools and another about the impact of digital learning in the US and the world.

I read the article on What Determines the Return to Education. This was basically a study about how in 1973 Scotland raised the minimum time to leave school was based on a calendar event - the end of Easter and not just the age of the student. The result was that it added about a year to the student's staying in school and this resulted in more people getting more formal acadmic qualifications and helps them in the job market, but the impact of how much more they learned wasn't measured. A good website for the latest.

This well written article gives pointers to teachers on how to discourage plagiarism in their classes as well as how to teach students about plagiarism in a positive light before it occurs. Very helpful!

I think this Virtual Salt article does a good job outlining the reasons why students plagiarize. While poor time management and procrastination are major factors, I also think that students are afraid of looking stupid by using their own writing styles - especially with international students. My policy regarding plagiarism now is to "fire a shot across the bow - to make sure that a student understands how serious un-cited work or ideas can be. What follows is an example of an evaluation that I wrote for what I consider to be very good student, who should've known better. It was simple to discover the plagiarized material by putting a suspected plagiarized phrase in quotes and pasting into a Google search box. That approach works very well in my experience. *********** Evaluation note to a student who plagiarized content **************** Your assignment was copied and pasted directly from an online essay called "The Impact of the Information Revolution", written by Kerby Anderson at the following URL: a href="http://www.lifeway.com/" This is plagiarism. I can't emphasize how serious this is. Repeat occurrences can get you kicked out of school and can have a long term impact on your academic record. It also represents a careless and irresponsible attitude towards your work at Bellevue College. On a personal level, I'm also surprised and disappointed, since you've been a good student up to this point in the class. Since this is a 100 level communications class, I'm giving you zero points for this project. If it happens again, I'll fail you from this course, and will also notify the office of the Dean of Student Services, to let them know that there were instances of plagiarism on your part. If you feel that this action is unfair or unreasonable, you may contact XXXXX, Chair of the Communications Department at xxxxx@bellevuecollege.edu.

I found both comments and the presentation an interesting read. Maybe students plagiarize because of the pressures inside the system of education and in the business world. I have never felt the need; but I have felt the need to get good grades. I use to spend three days studying before finals and sometimes without sleep (no drugs) and then crash for 24 hours...sleeping. I did more than most students and worked hard to stay on the Dean's list. By the time I entered my doctoral program it was so cocmpetitive, I started rethinking the reason I had for being there. It was not a pleasant expereience. You had to be a 3.65 or higher just to get into the program and then write a reseach paper and defend it before a committee of three to just get in the door.

This is a powerful post. I'll let you read it and see what you think.

Excellent example of why our country scores poorly on many global studies. We do not prioritize and protect our educational institutions from some of the major declining social and economic issues we are currently facing. We shouldn't allow our school systems to suffer from current declining tax bases. This teacher's account is an excellent testimony of what results!!! and this scenario is what many of our classroom teachers are facing daily. Imagine having to face a classroom of 30+ kids everyday, by yourself, under these working conditions! Very sad . . .

An interesting comment regarding global competitiveness. It is actually my understanding that some countries - like Japan - who do better than the U.S. in math, science, and literacy - actually have larger class sizes and that per student expenditure is lower. The culture, however, supports education. Teacher's are honored.

In the Summer of 2010, I taught an online class called the Fundamentals of Interactive Entertainment for the University of Tasmania, via the Human Interface Technology Lab under the sponsorship of Dr. Thomas Furness of the University of Washington. This course provides an overview of interactive media - video games and real-time interactive simulations. It includes information concerning the history, theory, technology, design, and social impact of these emerging communications media. The course consists of thirteen modules, and in the Summer of 2010, was made up of two weekly events: 1) A lab session which met every Tuesday to provide discussions, team planning meetings, and hands-exercises and 2) a live classroom session which was videocast directly from Seattle to a University of Tasmania classroom in Launceston, Australia. I posted more information regarding this project on my Web2.0 Chronicle blog. PLEASE NOTE: This narrated screencast runs two minutes past the 5 minute recommendation given by Jennifer.

Bruce, applying the Boettcher/Conrad 10 Best Practices to a course you have already taught, was brilliant! It is always a source of learning when we can go back and critique our own work, finding needed areas of improvement or simply discovering how "right on" we were from the get-go! I enjoyed seeing this piece of your creativity!

I found your presentation very smooth and professional.

Hi guys. This is not and I repeat not a video you want to watch in total. I was trying to fix my sound and needed a video to put on the site, so I could ask you if it was better than the sound on my final presentation. So if you can find the time to give a listen...I would truly appreciate it1

I agree. The sound sounds fine. Good meeting you in person tonight.

I say ditto to that one Ann...Luckily Mary Ann, Bruce and You and I will be in the next class! WooHoo!

A few days ago, I went to an excellent workshop sponsored by the Center for Career Connections at Bellevue College about using LinkedIn. This Web 2.0 networking application has now become the most important online tool for presenting your professional profile and work experience to the public. One of the speakers, Web tools guru Miles Austin, said that if you don't have a developed presence online, you don't exist as far as potential employers are concerned. According to a recent survey, 78% of all job recruiters use LinkedIn as their primary application for finding new employees. The link above provides some useful background information about LinkedIn, based on the workshop. It also reinforced in my mind the importance of developing strong network contacts and carefully building an online persona. If you have an account on LinkedIn or create a new one - please add me to your network!

This was interesting, as I personally thought it was too inclusive - anyone can post and your network was too broad to be meaningful. But obviously this type of "advetisement" does make a difference in employment.

LinkedIn is very different from other social networks. I'm extremely careful about my connections there. I only connect with people I know in person, people I've collaborated with online for a while, or people who already have a good reputation. I don't even connect with all my family members there, only the ones with careers related to mine.