Group items tagged

MIT announcing next Monday that they will launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world. This course will not offer M.I.T. deploma, but will offer a M.I.T. certificate of completion. How will this impact for-profit online universities, such as, University of Phoenix?

In 2006 - The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (the folks that seem to sponsor everything on PBS and NPR) launched its 5 year initiative to explore how youth are engaged in digital media.

In 2006 - The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (the folks that seem to sponsor everything on PBS and NPR) launched its 5 year initiative to explore how youth are engaged in digital media.

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.

report from T-Mobile + infographic on mlearning 

Ford T. Smith is helping to bulldoze one of the most durable pillars of academic life: the semester.

Jennifer Dick shared this on the TIE2012 Facebook page.  Looks like a great forum to check out on topics relevant to T-561.   Topical groups included "Badges for LifeLong Learning," "Pedagogy", and "Semantic Web."  check it out.

James- I had a really interesting conversation about badges for lifelong learning yesterday, and as I'm sure you know it's a controversial topic, especially among academics who resent the premise that people need extrinsic motivators like badges as incentives to be lifelong learners. One major advantage to badges, according the the people I was talking with, is that they can be used as a kind of shorthand validation of somebody's credentials. So, for example, if you wanted to hire a freelancer to build you a website, write you some content, or re-tile your kitchen, you would be able to get a quick idea of how good they were by seeing what kinds of badges they had earned. I found this to be an interesting application to the badge system, whereas I was quite against the idea before of incentivizing lifelong learning. What does everyone think of HASTAC badges?

Predictive ads about "future" technologies from 1993 (by AT&T). How many of these predictions have come true?

In my opinion, one of the least realized of the predicted technologies is the one about education. What do you think?

Dr. Saxberg's blog on an interesting research finding about teachers' misconceptions about how learning works. He also mentions (towards the end) his upcoming book. As you would recall Professor Dede had mentioned Dr. Saxberg in the context of EdX a few weeks ago.

Site with a lot of links to AR info

A darker side to an emerging technology?

Getting excited about Sesame Street&AR idea that was posted earlier, went to find if Lego is doing anything as Lego Education is getting more active lately to my understanding.  I only found this. This to me is not AR although it is utilizing some level of digital technology (social network/sharing work with others).  I would be more interested to see more work from traditional game/toy players to be aggressive in the tech space. 

Chris Lehmann is the founding principle of an innovative science and technical high school in Philadelphia (Science Leadership Academy) and will be the keynote speaker at the next ISTE conference. This is an interview where he discusses where he thinks technology and education are headed.

How test designers are trying to move away from standardized tests to computer programs that can measure a myriad of skills simultaneously through simulations and "stealth monitoring."  Both Chris Dede and Howard Gardner are mentioned.

"This contribution to Seton Hall's Center for Mobile Research & Innovation is about more than just teaching the students to develop mobile apps - it is also teaching them professional and life skills, motivating them and preparing them for college, and instilling community service values"

This articile describes the educational effect of the Time To KNow Digital Teaching Platform used with low SES students in Isreal.

"Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique."

For those of you interested in trying out a bit of augmented reality at home, try out this green energy augmented reality application available from the GE web site. You will need a printout of the glyph (the black square design provided on the web site) and a webcam in order to get this to work. Audio volume adjust according to the distance of the glyph away from the webcam. This little AR app was designed using ARToolKit originally created by Dr. Hirokazu Kato.

Augmented Reality Sample created for General Electric using ARToolKit. You will need a webcam and a printout of the glyph (the black box design that the AR object will need to anchor to).\n\nI can't directly anchor to the augmented reality sample, so please bring your mouse pointer down to the bottom of the browser window to where it says, "Navigate the Smart Grid," and click the augmented reality icon on the far right of the navigation bar that appears.

To what extent should videogames be used in classrooms, and what is the research support for this?

Note the author characterizes the National Educational Technology Plan as a "manifesto." Quoting this article, "... in March, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, released a draft National Educational Technology Plan that reads a bit like a manifesto for change, proposing among other things that the full force of technology be leveraged to meet "aggressive goals" and "grand" challenges, including increasing the percentage of the population that graduates from college to 60 percent from 39 percent in the next 10 years. What it takes to get there, the report suggests, is a "new kind of R.& D."

A bunch of especially interesting quotes toward the end: "This concept is something that Will Wright, who is best known for designing the Sims game franchise...refers to as 'failure-based learning,' in which failure is brief, surmountable, often exciting and therefore not scary... According to Ntiedo Etuk, the chief executive of Tabula Digita...children who persist in playing a game are demonstrating a valuable educational ideal.... 'They'll fail until they win.' He adds: 'Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It's completely aspirational.' It is also, says James Paul Gee, antithetical to the governing reality of today's public schools. 'If you think about kids in school - especially in our testing regime - both the teacher and the student think that failure will lead to disaster,' he says. 'That's pretty much a guarantee that you'll never get to truly deep learning.'"