Skip to main content

Home/ Future of Learning/ Group items tagged data

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Sasha Thackaberry

Reclaiming Innovation Can we reclaim innovation? - 0 views

  • what's not to like about innovation?
  • Yet as 2014 churns on, the glow is wearing off. Today, innovation is increasingly conflated with hype, disruption for disruption's sake, and outsourcing laced with a dose of austerity-driven downsizing. Call it innovation fatigue.
  • Audrey Watters has noted the essentially apocalyptic flavor of what she describes as "the myth and the millennialism of disruptive innovation" — mythic in the sense that it prophesies "the destruction of the old and the ascension of the new" and constitutes a narrative that "has been widely accepted as unassailably true." When applied to education, disruptive innovation promises nothing less than "the end of school as we know it."
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Benjamin Bratton has argued: "'Innovation' defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo."3
  • Will a countervailing vision of grassroots, generative innovation dedicated to strengthening higher education do better?4 If we think the open web and public education are ideas worth preserving, we have no option but to try to find out.
  • The demands of sustaining infrastructure have continued to dominate institutional priorities, and the recent promise of Web 2.0 has been unevenly integrated into campus strategies: instances of broad, culture-shifting experimentation along these lines in higher education can be counted on one hand
  • Meanwhile, IT organizations are often defined by what's necessary rather than what's possible, and the cumulative weight of an increasingly complex communications infrastructure weighs ever heavier.
  • Higher education overall, perhaps concerned about the untamed territories of the open web and facing unquestionably profound challenges in extending its promise beyond the early adopters, cast its lot with a "system" that promised to "manage" this wild potential and peril.
  • before we even begin to encounter the software itself, we privilege a mindset that views learning not as a life-affirming adventure but instead as a technological problem, one that requires a "system" to "manage" it.
  • Systems.
  • But environments matter, and disturbingly often these systems promote formulaic and rigid instruction.
  • Silos.
  • There is a discussion to be had about where/when student interactions might merit or benefit from some degree of privacy and where/when we need to consider protections of identity and personal privacy. But that discussion happens too rarely; it is easier to default to locking everything behind digital slabs of access controls and inaccessible online spaces. Worse yet, this enclosure not only cuts the academy off from the wider world but also cuts students off from each other and the institution. Courses are severely limited in the ability to access other courses even within the institution (so much for "connecting silos"), and when courses end, students are typically cast out, unable to refer to past activity in their ongoing studies or in their lives (so much for "promoting lifelong learning").
  • Missed Opportunities.
  • even in an era when it is widely understood that we need to guide our students into an information age of immense complexity, promise, and uncertainty, we force them to spend countless hours on computers in a virtual environment that does nothing to equip them with practical web skills
  • Costs.
  • And any technologists who have been involved in a migration from one system to another, or in significant upgrades of the same system, can testify to how time-consuming and troublesome these processes will be. As Martin Weller argues: "This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution.
  • The myriad costs associated with supporting LMSs crowd out budget and staff time that might be directed toward homegrown, open-source, and user-driven innovation.
  • Confidence.
  • LMSs are seen as, at best, a "necessary evil." But perhaps they're not so necessary.
  • Before directing activity to a complex, locked-down system, ask: "Do we really need to do it this way? Is there a simpler, cheaper, open alternative that will do the job?"
  • Can We Reclaim Innovation?
  • , Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have become the poster child of innovation in higher education over the last two to three years. This approach was started by two Canadians — George Siemens and Stephen Downes — at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 2008. The professor (Siemens) and the government researcher (Downes) decided to put into practice the connectivism and connected learning theories that they had been writing about and experimenting with for years. Their 2008 course, Connectivism and Connected Knowledge (CCK08), christened the idea of the MOOC and provided a brilliant example of educational technology praxis using the open web. Significantly, these origins of the MOOC arguably mark it as the first web-native learning environment, as opposed to e-learning that grafts old-style distance learning onto online platforms.
  • Yet within a couple of years, the experimentation and possibility of the MOOC movement had become co-opted and rebranded by venture capitalists as a fully formed, disruptive solution to the broken model of higher education.11 The most distressing part of the story is that many higher education administrators and even IT professionals seem to have little or no idea where the innovation started.
  • One encouraging result of the MOOC mania is the rising interest in open online learning, even if in this case innovation has become synonymous with how to scale a single course for many users.
  • MOOCs, currently being reimagined (and resold) by proprietary environments designed for scale and simplicity, lack the basic Web 2.0 premises of aggregation, openness, tagging, portability, reuse, multichannel distribution, syndication, and user-as-contributor.
  • These courses and systems are also distracting colleges and universities from the conversation that we should have been having since the late 1990s: how can we leverage open platforms and open access to augment our teaching and learning mission?13 Open-source, searchable, syndicated, and collaborative authoring systems can provide numerous efficiencies, such as publishing to multiple environments and ensuring interoperability and long-term digital preservation.
  • Imagine what higher education institutions could do if they started approaching academic publishing platforms as collaborative, open spaces for community-authored materials. What if educational institutions start reclaiming innovative learning on the web?14
anonymous

Did you love watching lectures from your professors? - The Hechinger Report - 2 views

  •  
    found that video lecturers were the least effective way to learn. Students who primarily learned through watching video lectures did the worst both on the 11 quizzes during the 12-week course and on the final exam. Students who primarily learned through reading, or a combination of reading and video lectures, did a bit better, but not much. This story also appeared in U.S. News & World Report The students who did the best were those who clicked on interactive exercises. For example, one exercise asked students to click and drag personality factors to their corresponding psychological traits.  A student would need to drag "neuroticism" to the same line with "calm" and "worrying," in this case. Hints popped up when a student guessed wrong. On the weekly quizzes, the "doers" who did nothing but the interactive exercises scored about the same as the "doers" who also did some combination of watching and reading. It almost seems as if you don't need to watch lectures or read at all. Thankfully, reading and lecture-watching mattered a bit on the final exam.
smartstudent01

Find any kind of school in one click - 0 views

  •  
    Kids are grown up and you are looking schools for them? Let's try smartstudents to better school searching experience. In smartstudents you can find and search best pre-schools to high schools according to your need at sitting your home, you don't need to go out and travel for finding the best school for your children's.
anonymous

Navigating the CBE Frontier: At the Educational Crossroads | The EvoLLLution - 2 views

  • The question is not how to help an adult student engage in a university-designed learning community; it’s how institutions can help students incorporate quality educational experiences and opportunities into their existing lives.
  • First, the need for citizens with postsecondary education could not be higher. From the White House to the Lumina Foundation, national calls are for 60 percent of the U.S. population to have a postsecondary degree by the year 2025. Currently, just 41 percent of the population has such a degree. This means we need to increase the number of graduates by about 20 percent, or almost 64 million more U.S. citizens, in the next ten years. Given that about 18 million people in the entire U.S. are seeking any kind of post-secondary education now,and the average graduation rate is less than 50 percent in six years, we simply can’t “get there” for the U.S. population to reach 60 percent with college degrees in ten years if we don’t attract more students and expand the variety of educational models that we offer people.[2]
  • Second, most students seeking higher education, by far, are “non-traditional” “degree completers:” adults 25 years and older, with some college and no degree, working part or full time, often with family.[3] In my state of Wisconsin, recent census data indicate that 21 percent of our state (or over 800,000 adults) fits this description. Contrast that with the fact that Wisconsin only has about 60,000 college students who are “traditional” (18 to 24, attending full time, and living in or around a university).[4]
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Does it really make sense to expect, even implicitly, that a person already engaged in work and family should step out of that life in order to participate in an institution-based learning community? Instead, shouldn’t we be asking how to provide educational experiences that foster collaborative learning, supporting growth and development, to people who are already fully engaged in their lives outside of an educational institution?
  • The question is not how to help an adult student engage in a university-designed learning community; it’s how institutions can help students incorporate quality educational experiences and opportunities into their existing lives.
  • Adult learners need multiple opportunities to earn degrees, including educational models that differ greatly from traditional college programs.[9] They need new models that are structured around the entire 12-month calendar, where one can start and stop without penalty, and quickly move forward when mastery over material is demonstrated. We need to make use of new technologies and the latest in the science of learning to allow students to integrate their education into existing lives and careers. In short, to educate the population that is currently not served well by our traditional institutions of higher education, we need new models and methods that allow education to fit the interests, motivations and lives of our adult learners, not ask them to fit their lives into an educational system geared to 18- to 24-year-old full-time students. This is the promise of CBE.
  • The best CBE programs will design competencies that articulate the skills and abilities needed by productive citizens, and evaluate mastery of those competencies through assessments that blend seamlessly into students work and family.
« First ‹ Previous 121 - 129 of 129
Showing 20 items per page