HGSET561

UT-Austin professors pilot "Synchronous Massive Online Class" (SMOC)

Omosa is a virtual learning environment which helps students to learn ecology and biology. It aims at the current condition that students are having fewer opportunities to go on real field trips and work with real animals. It's cool in helping students learn the biological circle of animals and the environment.

Innovation Excellence provides a top ten list of emerging educational technologies and how they are being used.

The Foundation for Learning Equality is working to get content to the 65% of the world who live without internet. Currently their only project involves offlining Khan Academy lectures and loading them on SD cards which can be loaded onto Raspberry Pi servers and sent along with e-readers to anywhere in the world. To me, this seems like an incredible opportunity to simultaneously address quality and access issues in remote parts of the world, though I don't think Khan Academy's content is necessarily the best. As a technological innovation, however, I think there is a real possibility to scale this, insofar as there are on-the-ground resources in each location facilitating the learning on the e-readers. Does anybody have any critique or insight to curb my excitement?

One of the few uses of advanced technologies in the history curriculum

As delivery of history teaching to students becomes more and more realistic, it is more important than ever to ensure that we have in place a robust and diverse oversight network to ensure that the narrative being suggested is an accurate representation of the time and place, as opposed to a history-as-written-by-the-winners narrative, which is pervasive throughout many textbooks. For many students, this sort of immersion will overwhelm any alternative streams of knowledge coming from Harlem in the 20s, so it is vital that the VR be constructed in a way that captures the context of why it was such a dynamic time in New York. As for the creators of this technology having to turn to the porn industry for technical support, that should not come as a surprise, as many claim that porn has revolutionized, or at least been instrumental in, the emergence of many new industries from VHS to the internet.

I'll be working on this project through the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT Media Lab this semester

This is very cool...I haven't seen much on cross-generational learning, but I think that there are very valid benefits to it (as well as multi-generational living). Anyways, it seems not so different from the research that Uche is doing in the class. Look forward to hearing how your semester goes!

Application of FreshAir

brief overview of some of the themes addressed in the readings

Articles gets into the details of how the tech is designed. I'm more interested in the implication of touch screens that are flexible and thus potentially made more ubiquitous than we can currently imagine. Like in the Microsoft video, what if every surface we interact with is a digital portal? What implications not only for technology, but all forms of human action and interaction?

I'm sharing this more for an example of author bias & incentives in writing about edtech, than because I think he's right: he doesn't think tech will replace teachers at all. (Keep in mind who his customers are.)

Makerspaces are potentially powerful ways of making academic learning lifewide

Like most Facebook users, many educators use Facebook to connect with friends new and old, but the Internet's most popular site can also be a great learning (and teaching) tool. There are many Facebook pages that have been created as a resource to collect, share, and disseminate information about education and education technologies.

10 Beneficial Facebook Pages For Educators To Check Out

Interesting article about a multimedia tool for teachers with the main goal of implementing best methodologies in the classroom. Teachers can share students' performance via text, photo, audio or video.

A fascinating approach to internet privacy for children. In addition to a "no post" policy for content related to their daughter, these parents have created a "digital trust" of pre-registered accounts and domain names for her to access when she's mature enough.

This is a very interesting use of tablets in the classroom. Students are using iPads to create 'Screencasts' that allow the them to create a kind of 'tutorial' using a mixture of elements (audio, images, drawing and text) to showcase what they have learned.

A good place to find and learn more about the ins/outs/good/bad of MOOCs.

A different way of thinking about what educational technology is "transformational."