Group items tagged

Very disturbing findings. Here's a quick excerpt: "There is still debate over whether scientific collaboration leads to better results. Jonathon Cummings, an associate professor of management at Duke University, and his colleagues got a grant from the National Science Foundation to look at 491 research collaborations funded by the foundation. They discovered something unsettling: Collaborations of more universities fared worse than projects primarily executed at a single university. More collaborators meant fewer patent applications, fewer published papers, and less chance of the group seeking additional funding to keep projects going." "Dr. Cummings says it appears that the amount of coordination required to make progress on research-everything from setting up meetings to integrating knowledge among group members-outweighed the potential benefits of collaboration. In the wake of the study, he says, the science foundation now requires grant applicants for some programs to detail how they expect to manage the collaboration."

Pew Foundation Quiz on whether you are "millennial"

This is a webinar chat that I sat in on today (A few questions I posed are featured in the Q&A at the end.) With the new SimCity release, they have also partnered with a company called GlassLab that has designed a teacher resource hub and also modified game that enables teachers to easily use the game in classrooms. There will be specific inquiry based challenges that allow students to interact in the game environment to investigate community issues (ranging from water shortages, power outages, labor disputes, earthquakes, budget concerns, etc.) and work with citizens and government to solve the issues. There is also an exciting multiplayer format where neighboring cities are controlled by other students and they must work together to solve problems. Glass Lab is partnering with EA Games, Gates Foundation, and ETS to build the teacher hub where educators can design and share best practices, lesson plans, etc. In addition, they will be doing a long term study to measure educational outcomes. It appears as though they are using this game as a pilot opportunity to build the framework for larger commercial game integration into the classroom.

This blurb announces a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop software tools that detect student engagement while using educational software--and use the data to improve learning. "To study engagement, robust learning, and emotion in real classrooms, [Ryan S.J.d. Baker's] research combines quantitative field observations of student behavior while using educational software with data mining to detect patterns in the ways students tackle the tasks that [his educational] software presents."

For those who are interested in the discussion of ethics, politics, citizenship, this seems to be a potential platform for more public engagement! 

Within five years, Yale-designed robots may be helping teach children. A Yale-led team of researchers from across the country received a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation on April 3 to pursue the creation of "socially assistive robots" to help young children learn basic skills and in some cases overcome cognitive disabilities.

Etherpad is a hosted web service that allows really real-time document collaboration for groups of users. Etherpad is open source; you can host your own Etherpad by downloading the source code or try Etherpad for free on one of the Public Sites.

Is computational thinking a fundamental skill that should be added to every student's analytical ability?

As I read this article, I thought about how many friends I have that are in non-technical professions, but who have been asked to take on technical tasks as part of their roles (managing databases, building organization websites, etc.) They've all been able to figure out how to do these things, but have found it very challenging to do so on their own and without any prior experience/contextual knowledge. So while I'm not sure that it's an absolute necessity, I do think that an increasingly broad range of vocations expect some level of technological fluency that could be built upon a computational thinking foundation. (There was a nice quote from a librarian in a NY Times article posted by Tom Keffer that illustrates this as well - the librarian says that all librarians rely upon software now, and that it's up to them to become technically empowered if there is something IT-related that their library needs.)

Related to the Pew Foundation Study on Tagging we read earlier in the course... Topic models provide a simple way to analyze large volumes of unlabeled text. A "topic" consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together. Using contextual clues, topic models can connect words with similar meanings and distinguish between uses of words with multiple meanings. Coupling the use of such tools with blogging allows students (plural) to spot trends in their collective writing. The key is to "share-out" their pieces in weekly class review sessions. This "ups" the level of engagement.

The University of Colorado Boulder exceeded its own researchers' expectations with its iDREAMS Scalable Game Design Summer Institute, and that success has been rewarded with a new $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. CU-Boulder researchers are tracking how video game design engages students in computational thinking and STEM simulation design.

With a new $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MIT Education Arcade is about to design, build, and research a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to help high school students learn math and biology.

"Initiatives seek to give students permanent online records for developing specific skills"

A quick overview of digital badges (including pros/cons re intrinsic/extrinsic motivation) and introduction of "Badge Economy" ["With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla has developed an Open Badge Infrastructure, or OBI, designed to become the underlying technical scaffolding for badges," where user can collect badges earned in a digital backpack.]

Webcast about digital media created by urban students.

$50, 000 grant for developers to develop engaging video games for children that promote learning. I am thinking about it!

MacArthur funds a game for girls

The 24 new courses will use video, interactive software, games, social media and other digital materials to present math lessons for kindergarten through 10th grade and English lessons for kindergarten through 12th grade..