Group items tagged

In addition to bookmarking the home page of this site (follow tag: wep), I have bookmarked the About page where James Gee welcomes users and explains his vision for worked examples.

By Paul G. West and Lorraine Victor, prepared for The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, May 2011. This paper appears to be an excellent resource for collections of OER, both in the US and around the world.

Published by the University of Nottingham (UK). This site is a "continually updated collection of peer-reviewed academic development resources...[ranging from] "2-5 minute videos [to] 500-1000 word texts...." There are a variety of entry points to access the materials, ranging from discipline areas (on this page) to themes (see Teaching & Learning themes at the top). I also like the Guest editor block (this page, lower left), where a faculty member writes a brief editorial and selects resources of interest.

Posted by Tony Bates to his blog on August 1, 2011. Bates, who runs a consultancy to teach about e-learning, argues that online learning is ever more important in post-secondary education (he writes from Canada, but his statistics are for all of North America), but that most post-secondary teachers have been trained very little in pedagogy and "teaching" at all, less so in online teaching and learning. He seeks comments and feedback to his argument.

Based in Washington State, the stated goals of this project are: (1) "aligning standards and expectations for mathematics....(2) increasing student success in completing math requirements in high school and college....(3) building capacity of teachers and instructors to align curriculum and instruction to standards....(4) communicating math expectations to students...." The project bridges the high school/college divide.

No author or date listed, published on Edudemic. This post promotes a guide to Google+ for educators, written by Steven W. Anderson. I bookmark this post for two reasons. First, obviously, the opportunity for educators to learn more about Google+ and it's potential educational applications. But also the format, LiveBinder, is an interesting way to present and share resources.

By Kim Parker, Amanda Lenhart and Kathleen Moore, published by the Pew Research Center/Pew Social & Demographic Trends, August 28, 2011. The big take-away seems to be that 51% of college presidents surveyed find that "online courses offer an equal educational value compared with courses taken in a classroom," but only 29% of the general public agrees with this statement.

Presented on P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University), "a grassroots open education project," this new course on online, self-directed learning is being presented by Anya Kamenetz. In this particular course, participants are directed through the processes of writing a personal learning plan, building a personal learning network, and finding a mentor, all while sharing the process with their fellow learners. Unlike many of the other P2PU courses (which have a more topical focus), this is open to those who want to learn on any subject.

Posted by George Siemens on his blog elearnspace, September 5 2011. Siemens argues that instructors can't provide "coherence" for knowledge just by "broadcasting" a course. He suggests that coherence is about how "*we* connect information elements and how we use artifacts and narratives to share that coherence." I am interested in the idea of "information foraging," especially in the context of content curation.

Edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, MPublishing, 2011. (Print edition forthcoming) This site is an open-access version of a volume of over 300 responses to questions posed by the editors in their social networks. Contributors were allowing only one week to respond. The approach, encouraging interactivity as well as a time limit, and the questions intended to provoke thinking on how digital media and technology can beneficially reform the academy. The editors convincingly state a good case for their choice of the word "hack."

This course, offered by P2PU (Peer to Peer University) looks at Mozilla's upcoming release of an Open Badges framework and asks questions about how community/peer-rated online badges might stand in for more formal assessment/recognition of learning, particularly in new or non-traditional fields. This is formally a 4-week course which began August 13 2011.

By Lloyd Armstrong on his blog Changing Higher Education, May 23 2011. Announcement of a new Gates Foundation grant to aggregate data from several large post-secondary systems that are members of WICHE (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Ed) in order to get a better picture of outcome data.

Videos of the Learning Design Support Environment and the Online Pedagogical Pattern Data Collector on Vimeo