The SPINNER project from the Responsive Environments Group at MIT Media Lab is the first research platform designed to investigate the world of ubiquitous video devices. The Spinner can automatically edit video to fit a narrative structure. It uses video from cameras installed at the Media Lab and sensor data from people generated by wearable smart badges to track their activity and location. The system then creates a video using the characteristics detected from the sensor data with the video captured by the cameras.
"Minerva..... is an entirely different pedagogical species. The San Francisco-based company aims at a soup-to-nuts undergraduate education, resulting in a traditional bachelor's degree, but all via the Web, and with all of the social cachet of the country's priciest sheepskin.
....Nelson, its 36-year-old founder, has no experience in education; .....But Nelson managed to not only score a huge investment from Benchmark - the same VC firm that backed the likes of eBay, Yelp, and Mint -but also persuaded a group of A-list luminaries, including former Harvard president Larry Summers, to be on its board of advisors.
This virtual conference is running round-the-clock. All sessions are recorded. Have a look at the extensive list of offerings.
"Our free, online conference started Monday, November 12 and runs around the clock for five days. All sessions take place in Blackboard Collaborate webinar rooms linked from our web site. No registration is required but we do encourage you to join this network for email updates and to connect with presenters and participants."
"In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it's a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs."
Afghanistan has launched a new literacy program that enables Afghan women deprived of a basic education during decades of war to learn to read and write using a mobile phone.
This is really deep, Janet. I sense that sometimes there's a double standard between our expectations of what children's education should be versus adult education. There's always push-back when we consider using mobile devices as a primary teaching tool for kids. But I sense there's less push-back when we offer it in adult education. Is this because we think adults can learn better on their own? Or perhaps teachers are important in children's socialization process? Or that education is a basic right for all children, but not necessarily for adults? At the core, these women were once children deprived of an education during their most formative years.
I really appreciate your comments on this topic, Pearl. And, like you, I wonder at the effectiveness of a mobile literacy program. But I also find it interesting that there is even an attempt to reach women who were deprived of an education earlier in their lives.
"The personal essays, which first appeared in the Voices from the Learning Revolution group blog, include images, clickable links and videos - plus selected comments by readers of the original posts."
You may have heard of Will Richardson or seen a TED talk of his. He is the co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice, an organization which does online and blended teacher development. As they launch Powerful Learning Press, they are giving away their first e-book.
Our increasing connectedness -- the always-on smartphone, the ever-present social networks, the daily media deluge -- is affecting our lives in ways we can't even yet fathom. So this week, as summer kicks off across the U.S., MediaShift is looking at how and why people are choosing to "unplug" from technology.
This is a suite of free online learning games to introduce middle to early high school-age youth to a variety of STEM-based professions -- recently was released at a launch event from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Tapping into the Internet and using several iPads as video cameras, Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, connected his Harvard students in Sanders Theatre on Friday with students in Japan, China, Brazil, and India for a wide-ranging discussion that explored the complicated question of the ethics of solidarity and the dilemmas associated with patriotism, membership, and collective responsibility.
Interesting- Bellow's latest project is eduClipper, an educational "digital clipboard" that curates educational content online. "eduClipper works on the same 'shared resources' premise as eduTecher," he explained, "but now I'm flipping the equation and instead of providing information to the masses I'm getting teachers and students to the eduClipper site to share their own information."
An online education directory that's shutting down after five years, never had its breakout moment, but it still had an outsized effect on the region's startup community.