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Andrew Barras

The Ed Tech Journey and a Future Driven by Disruptive Change -- Campus Technology - 0 views

  • What is “disruptive change”?
  • On April 28, 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, and on April 3, 2008, less than five years later, it became the largest music retailer in the US, with 50 million customers and 4 billion songs sold. Then about two years down the road, this past February, Apple more than doubled that sales figure to 10 billion songs. This is what I consider to be disruptive change.
  • As educators, we must ask: Could there be a parallel in our own industry, or the potential for other disruptive changes ahead? What might higher education look like in a future filled with disruptive change?
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  • a quick historical review of the digital revolution shows us: huge increases in data speeds and transfer rates, exponential growth in computer power, massive increase of storage capacity—again, all while the technology is getting cheaper and smaller.
  • In a 1960s lecture hall you might typically find TV monitors
  • Then if you jump 30 years into the future, to the 1990s, you find that analog technology was replaced by digital technology: projection systems that were considered very, very sophisticated at that time.
  • ask yourself: What did not change? The instructors still lectured, delivering in a broadcast/absorb model the very same way they did in the 1960s. In terms of learning, this was just a little bit of a shift. While the digital revolution disrupted so much of our society and our lives, it impacted education only in small, incremental ways. And generally, that is still true today in 2010.
  • I often make the argument that over the past 50 years, we’ve been primarily focused on automating education
  • but we haven’t really geared up to change or transform the basic way we’re teaching
  • Open Education Trends
  • At the core of the open content movement in higher education are illustrious efforts that have been going on now for almost a decade, to make high-quality university-level course materials free and openly available to the world, via the web.
  • Connexions has focused on building an environment that allows experts to collaborate on developing textbook content.
  • People have raised questions about the sustainability of open content models.
  • But what we’re starting to see now—and it is still relatively early in the unfolding story of open content—is a commercial ecosystem beginning to grow up around existing open content.
  • Impact of Open Content
  • We’re on the verge of seeing the cost of education content fall dramatically. The $150, $200 textbook model, I believe, is simply unsustainable, and we are going to see that model fall apart in the not-too-distant future.
  • I also think we may see an important movement toward best-of-breed content.
  • For example, I might put out a particular piece of educational material. Someone may take that material, modify or tweak it, and bring his own innovation to it. Over a relatively short period of time, we end up with high-quality, innovative, best-of-breed materials.
  • We’re entering an age when it’s becoming more and more ridiculous that our faculty are, every year, re-creating Econ 101 over and over again at our institutions.
  • largest population of users of MIT/OCW materials are not educators, and they’re not students. They are self-directed learners. They’re people who are coming to MIT because they have a passion to learn something.
  • Personal and Open Learning
  • Let’s move on and look at learning technology trends, especially the emergence of the personal learning environment [PLE] and the open learning network [OLN], e-portfolios, and the semantic web.
  • you’re probably aware of the “post-LMS era” that people feel we’re entering.
  • I have yet to find a standard definition of the PLE, but some of its characteristics include that it tends to be a highly customized environment, built by the learner himself.
  • Learners use web 2.0 tools to aggregate content and connections—so you can gather information from many sources, while at the same time making connections with other people around that content.
  • we see that while the LMS has been out there and in development for 10-20 years or so, it has really been built just to support status quo teaching—lecturing and very traditional forms of education—while personal learning environments like mine tend to be much more open and participatory, as well as learner-centric.
  • The question becomes: Will the LMS and the PLE diverge?
  • The idea here is to leverage some of the open standards that are emerging—the IMS Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability standards, plus standards outside of education like the open social API standards from Google—and to use these standards to allow us to mash up the LMS and personal learning environment.
  • Next, electronic portfolios: Since 2003, the use of e-portfolios on our campuses has tripled.
  • Reflection is a critical component of any really good e-portfolio implementation; it’s a great way for students to engage in learning.
  • A missing piece, I would argue, especially on the reflective side of e-porfolios, is a credentialing model. A new credentialing model will open the doors for better uses of e-portfolios, and possibly unlock the floodgates of disruption in fundamental education practices.
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    Great article about disruptive change in education!
Andrew Barras

News: The Thinking LMS - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • What can colleges learn from Facebook?
  • Where Facebook has shown unique value is as a data-gathering tool. Never has a website been able to learn so much about its users. And that is where higher education should be taking notes, said Angie McQuaig, director of data innovation at the University of Phoenix, at the 2010 Educause conference on Friday.
  • If Facebook can use analytics to revolutionize advertising in the Web era, McQuaig suggested, colleges can use the same principles to revolutionize online learning.
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  • The trick, she said, is individualization.
  • The most successful commercial websites are already moving in this direction, and higher education — which itself is growing increasingly Web-based — needs to catch up, McQuaig said. “What we really need to do now is deeply understand our learners,” she said.
  • This is where the University of Phoenix is headed with its online learning platform. In an effort ambitiously dubbed the "Learning Genome Project,” the for-profit powerhouse says it is building a new learning interface that gets to know each of its 400,000 students personally and adapts to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of their “learning DNA.”
  • “[Each student] comes to us with a set of learning modality preferences,” McQuaig said. The online learning platform Phoenix wants to build, she said, “reject[s] the one-size-fits-all model of presenting content online.” In the age of online education and the personal Web, the standardized curriculum is marked for extinction, McQuaig said; data analytics are going to kill it.
  • Phoenix is certainly not the only institution focusing on how data logged by learning management systems can be used to improve learning.
  • envoys from the South Orange Community College District had unveiled a project called Sherpa, which uses information about students to recommend courses and services. McQuaig said Phoenix has been in conversations with a number of universities that are working toward similar learner-centered online platforms.
  • In any case, she said, it will be expensive to make.
  • But that is where online education, and the Internet as a whole, is headed, McQuaig said.
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    Very cool article. Shows how personalization will arise in Higher Ed
chris deason

MoodleMayhem - 0 views

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    "The Moodle Mayhem Group is a community of Moodle-using educators who have joined together to pool their creative innovations regarding the use of Moodle with K-12, as well as adult learners"
chris deason

Technology4JewishEducation - home - 0 views

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    "This course examines the theoretical foundations for best practice in teaching the 21st century Jewish learner. Educational theory will be applied to the analysis of critical elements of Web 2.0 inspired learning, including connectivity, communication, collaboration, problem solving, transformational play, creative expression and customization. Class work is be based on hands-on exploration of various digital applications that will provide the backdrop for analysis. Participants are challenged to envision educational solutions that align Jewish education with the social and technological developments of the 21st century. Registration in this course is limited to graduate education students."
Reo McBride

Follow Great People With Great Ideas on Twitter - 0 views

  • I believe students should experience their success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information. Author of For the Love of Learning.
    • Reo McBride
       
      This is a sticky note for educators
    • Reo McBride
       
      Page for educators II
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    A great thought on teaching students
Andrew Barras

The Wild World of Massively Open Online Courses « Unlimited Magazine - 0 views

  • In a traditional university setting, a student pays to register for a course. The student shows up. A professor hands out an outline, assigns readings, stands at the front and lectures. Students take notes and ask questions. Then there is a test or an essay.
  • But with advancing online tools innovative educators are examining new ways to break out of this one-to-many model of education, through a concept called massively open online courses. The idea is to use open-source learning tools to make courses transparent and open to all, harnessing the knowledge of anyone who is interested in a topic.
  • George Siemens, along with colleague Stephen Downes, tried out the open course concept in fall 2008 through the University of Manitoba in a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or CCK08 for short. The course would allow 25 students to register, pay and receive credit for the course. All of the course content, including discussion boards, course readings, podcasts and any other teaching materials, was open to anyone who had an internet connection and created a user profile.
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  • Course facilitators, Siemens and Downes, gave learners control over how they learned.
  • The concept was enough to lure in D’Arcy Norman
  • He was one of the 2,300 students who signed up for a free account that would allow him to access class documents, receive emails from the facilitators and participate in online class discussions.
  • Norman was one of the more passive participants, while others participated fully, doing all the reading and the assignments, without receiving recognized credit for their work. The instructors only marked papers and the final project from for-credit students, but others were free to post papers on the course website for other students to view and comment on.
  • “At the beginning, we had quite a number of students feeling quite overwhelmed because you would get 200 or 300 posts going into a discussion forum per day and that’s just about impossible to follow,” Siemens says.
  • “You have people in there who were really interested, but they were afraid to explore the technologies that were being used and they got lost,” Lane says.
  • Even if students in massively open online courses master the technology and overcome their virtual stage fright, a third problem remains: how to recognize the value of a learning experience that isn’t for credit.
  • “If you’re in a business and you’re a young professional and you want to take an open class, how do you get your superiors to respect that, and say ‘Wow, that’s really good professional development. We should put that in your personnel file,’” Lane questions. “If it’s open and everyone can drop in and drop out, it’s just not seen in the same way.”
  • Wend Drexler, a professor and grant administrator at the University of Florida who also took Siemen’s class as a for-credit student, says that as more professors are posting their content online, figuring out how to recognize non-credit learning will continue to be an issue.
  • “You could really piece together a good undergraduate education based on what’s available out there, but how do you prove to an employer that you have done that?” Drexler questions. “I don’t know, but it’s something that everyone is trying to work through.”
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    More details on MOOC
Andrew Barras

Needed: A New Model of Pedagogy : : Don Tapscott - 0 views

  • The film Waiting for Superman
  • argues that teachers are at the center of the problem and that the solution is charter schools.
  • But it’s wrong to blame teachers, who are usually a) underpaid, and b) striving to do the best with the limited resources they are given. Nor does the research show that charter schools achieve better outcomes.  The root of the malaise in our schools is the outmoded model of pedagogy.  Teachers and text books are assumed to be the source of knowledge.  Teachers “teach” – they impart knowledge to their students, who through practice and assignments learn how to perform well on tests.
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  • This is the very best model of pedagogy that 18th century technology can provide.  It’s teacher-centered model that is one way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. It’s time for a rethinking of the entire model of learning.  We need to move to a customized and collaborative model that embraces 21st century learning technology and techniques.  This is not about technology per se – it’s about a change in the relationship between the student and teacher in the learning process.
  • Are we willing to accept that an Industrial Age form of education isn’t much good for children who have to work in a digital age?
  • Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.
  • The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.
  • too often, in the American and Canadian school system, teachers still rely on the traditional model of education. Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that’s more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.
  • First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher’s information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.
  • simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.
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    Fantastic article about 1:1 classrooms
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