Group items tagged

"Top 10 skills for the future A while ago, I came across a 'top 10 skills for the future' image, formed by the World Economic Forum following their Future of Jobs report. It really caught my attention and a lot of other people found it useful too. After recently experimenting with creating images for our Twitter page (@refthinking) and this blog, I loved the idea of mixing it up a little and adding some images. Feel free to share it, but please let us know by mentioning us if it's a tweet, as it's great to see it being shared even more! "

June 25, 2012 Customization Is the Future of Teaching, Harvard Researcher Says Rick Friedman for The ChronicleChris Dede (shown here on screen), a professor of learning technologies at Harvard, says classrooms of the future will have "a more complicated model of teacher performance that, when they know how to do it, teachers are going to appreciate."Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young Most college courses are one-size-fits-all-a lecturer delivers the same information to everyone in the room, regardless of whether some students already know the material or others are utterly lost. It doesn't have to be that way, says Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University. He outlines a vision of how technology can help personalize learning in a new book that he co-edited, called Digital Teaching Platforms: Customizing Classroom Learning for Each Student. His research focuses on elementary- and high-school classrooms, but he says the approach has implications for colleges as well. The Chronicle talked with Mr. Dede about his strategy, and why he sees big changes on the horizon. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Assessment Futures Many students currently graduate without appropriate skills in assessment. Assessment serves many purposes, including: * helping students improve their learning, and * certifying their learning. This website is about an important additional purpose for assessment. It is about equipping students for the learning and assessing they will need to do after completing their course and the challenges they will face after graduation.

STELLAR briefing 2: the Future of TEL An overview on interim results from the STELLAR delphi study.

"Transforming the knowledge and skills of society through fostering digital literacies The Australian Digital Futures Institute explores and influences digital literacies through innovation, research and collaboration for positive social change."

June 25, 2012 A Conversation With Bill Gates About the Future of Higher Education By Jeffrey R. Young Bill Gates never finished college, but he is one of the single most powerful figures shaping higher education today. That influence comes through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, perhaps the world's richest philanthropy, which he co-chairs and which has made education one of its key missions.

Reversing the dire hope of the future is in our hands - excellent utube vid

Bill Gates on Higher Education, Part 2 June 26, 2012, 6:31 pm By Jeffrey R. Young

"Why Google Captions Video Google's mission is to make all information universally accessible. Ellis and his team have embraced this directive by attempting to remove barriers to video captioning. Whether using captions to assist those with hearing disabilities, or because translated captions help international audiences, video accessibility is a priority to YouTube from the top down. Building Accessibility into YouTube YouTube has more than 1 billion unique visitors each month. So how does YouTube approach captioning on such a mind-numbingly large scale? "The captions team at YouTube doesn't actually go in and type in captions for anything. But we build a platform that allows anybody to upload captions in 20-plus different formats and then display those captions on all YouTube players," says Ellis. "We also build tools for people who are creating captions for their content on their own to easily and quickly create captions for their videos. Our goal is simply to make every video understandable to every user. A very long-term goal, but that's what we're aspiring to.""

Russell T. Osguthorpe Center for Teaching and Learning Brigham Young University