Group items tagged

"The wait is almost over. A weeklong exercise in withdrawal from social media usage will end for the campus community at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology shortly. The Pennsylvania university, which performed a similar move last year, has been blocking network access to 10 popular sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Twitxr, and Plurk, as well as texting outlets. This year's activity has been dubbed, "Back to Blackout." The intent of the blackout is to inspire thinking about how, when, and where people use and abuse social media, according to Eric Darr, executive vice president and provost. "We believe that technology is not inherently good or bad. Rather, technology becomes useful or destructive in the hands of users. This exercise is an attempt to better understand an important technology, social media, that clearly impacts how we live and work. It might inspire students, faculty, and staff to think more about their social media habits and to further raise awareness about the impact that social media has on daily life and work.""

These skills and competencies for digital curators include seven areas: 1) Communication and interpersonal competency: This competency is required for clear and effective communication with a variety of audiences, including users, creators, managers, researchers and collaborators. 2) Curating and preserving content competency: This competency is required to understand and carry out a range of activities as defined in the digital curation lifecycle model, including the creation, acquisition, management, representation, access, organization, transformation and preservation of digital content. 3) Curation technologies competency: This competency is required to identify, use, and develop tools and applications to support digital curation activities. The context of this competency is the information technology infrastructure, including the tools and applications deployed to support digital curation. 4) Environmental scanning competency: This competency is required to identify and use resources to stay current and on the leading edge regarding trends, technologies and practices that affect professional work and capabilities within the field of digital curation. 5) Management, planning and evaluation competency: This competency is required for planning, coordinating, implementing, and assessing programs, projects and services related to digital curation. 6) Services competency: This competency is required to identify, understand and build services to respond to a community's and/or institution's digital curation needs. 7) Systems, models and modeling competency: This competency is required for high-level, abstract thinking about and critical analysis of complex systems, workflows and conceptual models related to digital curation.                                                                      Robin Good

"Most Significant Metatrends for the Next 10 Years 1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. 2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. 3. The internet is becoming a global mobile network--and already is at its edges. 4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. 5. Openness--concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information--is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. 6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. 7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. 8. The internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. 9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. 10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Excerpts of the 10 top metatrends identified in A Communiqué from the Horizon Project Retreat, January 2012, an NMC Horizon Project publication under Creative Commons attribution license. "

"At a recent retreat to mark the tenth anniversary of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, which produces an annual report on technology trends affecting higher education, participants identified 28 important metatrends. The 10 most significant are: the world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative; people expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to; the Internet is becoming a global mobile network -- and already is at its edges; the technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media; openness is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world; legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society; real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success; the Internet is consta ntly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy; there is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training; and business models across the education ecosystem are changing"

"This is the 6th annual conference on blended learning sponsored by COHERE (Collaboration for Online Higher Education & Research) and CSSHE (Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education). It will feature Dr. Tony Bates, the well known scholar and commentator on the use of technology in higher education. His latest book is Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2011). In addition to taking an active part in the entire conference and doing the conference wrap-up, Tony will deliver the following keynotes: Meeting the challenge of technology: are we failing as managers? Designing university teaching to meet the needs of 21st century students The conference will also feature a number of concurrent sessions, for which we invite proposals related to one of the following streams: 1. Taking stock of blended learning in higher education: Management, policy, and research issues 2. Case studies of teaching and learning issues related to blended learning"

The next edition of the Horizon report - identifies 6 technologies that will have a profound impact on higher ed

"This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements. Advocates for giving schools a major technological upgrade - which include powerful educators, Silicon Valley titans and White House appointees - say digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets. "

"Explore the conference program: * Keynote Speakers * Monday Seminar Intensives * Track 1: Digital Tools and Instructional Designs * Track 2: Technology Infrastructure and Mobile Learning * Track 3: Information Technology Leadership and Institutional Intelligence * Track 4: Industry Directions"

Looks like a very relevant conference - bad timing around Refresh Conference

Given that a recent viral video on Youtube found that most young people wouldn't give up the Internet for a million dollars, schools need to find new ways to engage students using the technology that they relate too best.

"College technology went on the move in the 2010-11 academic year, venturing into mobile platforms like smartphones and tablets such as the iPad. The devices were used within classes and without for teaching, reading texts, student affairs, contacting alumni, and recruiting prospective students. But the movement-driven by the recognition that people were spending more time on mobile devices-went in fits and starts. Higher education, never a rapid adapter, struggled to figure out how best to make use of mobile devices and new capabilities."

"Around fall 2010, the college began looking for a tool that could be distributed to faculty and students for user-generated content. Said Palson, criteria for evaluation focused on two areas: "It had to be accessible via mobile. And it had to be easy to use." Ease of use included the ability for a new user to "jump into it, create something, and it would be ready to go." The instructional technology staff began a pilot using Brainshark and, according to Palson, immediately saw that it was different from what had been used in the past."

Brainshark - another tool for generating online presentations

Food for thought - this could be a interesting experience

"Providing feedback to students about their in-class presentations can be a juggling act, and students may not be able to connect instructor comments with specific moments in their talks. In this essay, Drs. Curto and Laudato describe a technique for providing feedback via rich media capture. Much like comments in the margins of a written assignment, feedback is received at the appropriate time point in the presentation."

Several instructors have asked over time about different ways to give students feedback on their in-class presentations. This is a PDF article that addresses this specifically.

"Discover the innovative work taking place in colleges and universities across Ontario in the area of technology applications, course development, student support services, marking, exams, and many other aspects of online and mobile learning."