Group items tagged

"Unlike most traditional academic conferences, sessions at an unconference don't consist of one or three or five people delivering papers to an audience. Instead, they might feature project demonstrations, discussions, creative work sessions, or other formats that build on the knowledge and expertise of whoever attends. For the Texas THATCamp (and I think this is fairly typical at others), participants posted session ideas beforehand on the website, followed by a 45-minute scheduling process as THATCamp began. Topic headings generated by those initial session ideas were posted on the walls of a large meeting room, and participants circulated through the space to meet up with others interested in similar topics. After some productive chaos (which admittedly tested my structure- and schedule-loving personality a bit) the group developed a schedule of sessions that represented not only a variety of interests but also the desire to cluster certain topics into tracks. Like any conference, I frequently wanted to be in two places at once - which I see as one marker of the event's success."

Guest post by Gaurav Mishra on Beth's Blog, July 22, 2009. Mishra describes the 4Cs: content, collaboration, community, and collective intelligence.

Posted in Wikipedia. Wikipedia describes sensemaking (also sense-making) as "the process by which people give meaning to experience."

SM - need to pursue add'l research on this topic

By Naava Frank in e-Jewish Philanthropy, May 2 2013. The author compares online communities to cocktail parties, in order to remind community sponsors that "guests" must be cultivated and introduced to each other. She describes a "relationship infrastructure" of equal importance to the technology infrastructure. The article concludes with a protocol that includes working in pairs, requiring an "assignment" (e.g. common goal) and for participants to post their responses -- and then to reply to each others' responses.

Frank's protocol matches KPI's findings in terms of engagement.

Website for the PBS Frontline documentary, originally aired September 2012. According the blog post, Introducing "Dropout Nation" (March 23 2012), this Frontline episode is part of the American Graduate: Let's Make It Happen campaign. The story follows a group of students in Houston Texas.

Posted by Melissa Terras in her eponymous blog, April 3 2012. Terras, a scholar in the Digital Humanities in the UK first uploaded her published papers to her school's digital repository and then blogged and tweeted about the papers. She has seen great growth in the download rate for these papers, though not across the board. To wit, she's increased her prominence (and that of her papers), but some of her papers are of greater interest than others. In future, she hopes to track her citation index over time, though it's too soon to measure at present.

This nicely summarizes Terras's lessons learned: "If (social media interaction is often) then (Open access + social media = increased downloads)."

By Dennis M. Walcott, National column, The Atlantic.com, May 1, 2012. Walcott is the chancellor of New York City's public schools. In this post, he discusses how the City has improved high school graduation rates, but must still raise the bar on preparedness. One step is adoption of the Common Core standards. This page also includes a link to New York City's Common Core Library, instructional resources created by NYC teachers.

By Angela Alcorn on the blog MakeUseOf, October 8 2010; shared by IdealWare in their Best of the Web email, May 8 2012. The post offers some tips, links to tutorials, and then 10 free tools, with brief annotation to describe what each is good at.

By Ryan Tracey on the blog E-Learning Provocateur, May 14 2012. Tracey, a blogger and corporate e-learning manager, puts forth some in-depth thoughts on why digital influence might be more significant than "traditional" influence, and what one might do to garner digital influence. At the bottom of the post, he summarizes with three "determinants."

Part of the Solve for X project, posted on YouTube by wesolveforx on Feb 7 2012. Crow is president of Arizona State University and his "moonshot project" (in the parlance of Solve for X) is to re-think higher education. In this brief video, he describes some of the changes he's brought to ASU in the last 10 years. For more on this project, follow tag solve_x.

Doesn't talk about technology, per se, but does talk about the need to shake up the institutions.

Part of UD's Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education, this program offers workshops at the K-12 or post-secondary level for how instructors can integrate problem-based learning into their own classrooms. The PBL Clearinghouse, a "peer-reviewed online resource" collects PBL problems and articles. Additionally, the site offers resources including sample syllabi and projects.

This video, by the "amazing" but otherwise anonymous Valerie, is posted to Nancy White's Full Circle website on Dec 13 2011. Nancy presented on change, social artists, and social artistry at a Change MOOC. This video attempts to both summarize and apply what Valerie learned from Nancy's presentation.

What do you think of the term "social artistry" to describe KPI? Or "social artists" to describe the work of the KPI team?

MDEC serves post-secondary education in Michigan with a network for educators to research and share best practices, refine strategies for quality programs, and to advocate for developmental education. This is not an online network - most meetings "held using a conference call format."

By Ben Betts on his (corporate) blog, Ben Betts is stoatly different, July 23 2012. Tin Can is "the latest iteration of the SCORM family." [According to Wikipedia, "Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based e-learning."]. It appears to relate to learning analytics, and the blogger describes applications in the workplace (not merely for post-secondary education).

From Stephanie: This is a bit over my head, but might be of interest to the more technical among us.

By Steve Hargadon, posted to his eponymous blog on August 6 2012. Hargadon is the host of the FutureofEducation.com lecture series. Scroll down for links to the recording of the event and a link to the "Mighybell" discussion and resource space. Panelists were Stephen Downes, Howard Gardner, Alfie Kohn and Gary Stager.

Oxford Brookes University (UK) is developing a 5-week MOOC based on the content of their course, First Steps Into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. The project is being funded by the Higher Education Academy. Many of the February 2012 posts to this blog describe the project. Stay tuned for more information.

Users of Aggregage are Bloggers, Marketers and Readers."Aggregage creates online communities by bringing together content from the best sources around particular topics. We identify a topic (Social Media, eLearning, Careers, Leadership, etc), find high-quality blogs around that topic, and then display their posts on a new site dedicated to that given topic. The original site on eLearning has become the highest traffic site on that topic."

Posted by Graham R. Gibbs on June 19 2010. This is part 2 of 4 on open coding, part of the grounded theory technique of qualitative analysis.

Posted by speaker Graham R. Gibbs on YouTube, June 19 2010. Gibbs discusses open coding for qualitative analysis. Part 1 of 4.

By Lanwitches on Langwitches blog, March 29, 2010. This blog post includes a slideshow that describes 70 web-based tools that might be of interest to educators. The tools are only roughly categorized. As the author notes, "It is not about the tools, it's about the skills." That said, there are some interesting tools here.