Group items tagged

Paper by Reuven M. Lerner, Dept. of Learning Sciences, Northwestern University, Sharona T. Levy, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa and Uri Wilensky, Depts. of Learning Sciences and Computer Science, Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University. Paper describes underlying principles of the Modeling Commons, a community for NetLogo modelers to share and collaborate.

Design principles for fostering public sharing and collaboration: Focus on artifacts; provide multiple entry points; be forgiving; maximize findability; provide flexible permissions; keep users informed.

Conrad Wolfram presentation on TED.com (filmed July 2010; posted Nov 2010). Wolfram argues that math applications are all around us, and that people in a ever-wider variety of workplaces are excited about math...but students are not. Wolfram argues that bringing computers into the math classroom would help improve math's relevancy -- and build excitement as well. Use the tag wolfram to look at his "knowledge engine," Wolfram Alpha.

beta620: Experimental Projects from The New York Times. "The Recommendation Engine allows us to leverage the power of distributed computing to reference each user's personal browsing history, then leverage connection via our semantic tags...." Deep Dive offers the ability to dig deeper on a requested piece of content and bring connected items together.

Published in Spectrum > Mobile Learning, Libraries, And Technologies, March 12, 2009. "MLE-Moodle is an out-of-the-box mobile Learning (mLearning) system, designed for mobile phones." With MCNC in particular, we've discussed how it might be helpful to be able to engage students/faculty/administrators in Polilogue via mobile phone in addition to computer.

Interesting academic opportunity in London, an MSc in Learning Technologies offered by the London Knowledge Lab. The program directors are Diana Laurillard and Alex Poulovassilis. The program focuses both on computer science and on learning theory. Link to application details on this page.

Posted by Gerry in Spectrum > Mobile Learning, Libraries, and Technologies (blog), June 17 2010. Cites Kelly Truong in Chronicle of Higher Ed (June 17 2010) on a study by Ball State University indicating smartphone use among college students has almost doubled in one year.

Part of Edutopia (The George Lucas Educational Foundation), there are some really interesting and inspiring portraits of young people (ages 11-18) and how they use technology. While some have ready access to cell phones and computers, others do not; examples of students who are self-taught, as well as those who have learned in the classroom.

by Nick Anderson, Washington Post, September 2 2010. As part of the Race to the Top, grants were made to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers ($170 million) and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium ($160 million). The Partnership "would potentially replace a single, high-stakes test with a series of assessments to be averaged into one score for accountability purposes." SMARTER "would assess students through computer-adaptive technology..." Both assessments hope to do away with the existing "bubble tests" and hope to roll out in the 2014-15 school year.

Website of the MIT Media Lab. From their Mission and History page, "Now, in its third decade, the Media Lab continues to check traditional disciplines at the door. Future-obsessed product designers, nanotechnologists, data-visualization experts, industry researchers, and pioneers of computer interfaces work side by side to tirelessly invent-and reinvent-how humans experience, and can be aided by, technology."

By CC (Community College) Times, published April 21 2010. This article reports on Bill Gates's visit to Foothill College to observe the Math My Way program. From the article, "Math My Way groups cohorts of students who have similar math skill levels." Students then work in small groups, and one-on-one with instructors, as well as using both computer and paper drills and games.

"The London Knowledge Lab is a unique collaboration between...the Institute of Education and Birkbeck" (both UK). Computer scientists and social scientists work together to study issues in education, sociology, media, the semantic web, etc.

Headed by Amy Bruckman, Associate professor at Georgia Tech, this Electronic Learning Communities center engages Ph.D. level students in studying the application of constructionist social learning online. They are doing some fascinating work, such as developing software to support leaders of learning communities, offering young A-A males the chance to be game testers and to use that experience credential as a route into computer science studies and careers, etc. These are but two research examples; there are more.

By Richard Schwier, Proceedings of EMEDIA 2009, Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education, June 2009. Schwier works out of the Virtual Learning Communities Research Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan, and this paper looks at some of their key findings.

In ScienceDirect - Procedia Computer Science, Volume 1, Issue 2, Pages 2773-2998 (2010)

"Based at New York University, the Institute brings together 14 game designers, computer scientists, and education researchers from 9 partner institutions, including Columbia, City University of New York, Dartmouth, NYU, NYU-Poly, Parsons, Chile's Pontifica Universidad Catolica, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Teacher's College. "

By Christian Kohls (Knowledge Media Research Center, Germany); Joachim Wedeknd (Knowledge Media Research Center, Germany), Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. 2011. Design patterns have become popular in the domains of architecture, software design, human computer interaction, Web 2.0, organizational structures, and pedagogy as a way to communicate practical knowledge. Patterns capture proven solutions for recurrent problems with respect to fitting context. This publication addresses both e-learning practitioners and researchers, using an accessible language to communicate sophisticated knowledge and important research methods and results.

Title: Companies are Erecting In-House Social Networks, June 26, 2011, This article intrigued me from the get-go because: 1) it speaks to the desire for people to be connected socially in their work; 2) it provides forums (opportunities) for the distantly-connected worker(s)/network member(s) to 'trickle-up' by sharing innovative practice/ideas; 3) it resembles Facebook for its ease of participation and entry level; 4) it creates a social network, which is the beginning of conversation, which is the beginning of collaboration, no? :-) We know that high school students LOVE the SLI because it gives them the opportunity to meet and greet and sometimes talk about meaningful social justice issues. But the hook is social, then learning. We have been talking about trying Facebook this year to ease the way in for up to 200 kids, but many school districts do not allow students to access Facebook from school computers. Maybe we need to explore Yammer or Chatter or look to see if there is a comparable open source app?

By Amanda Coffey, Cardiff School of Social Sciences. Coffey has conducted ethnographic research in a digital environment. This powerpoint hits on some keywords and key features of her projects.

Keywords/acronyms: CAQDAS (computer aided qualitative data analysis software); enthographic hypermedia environment. Interesting ideas: multimodality (different insights with different media); activity of writing interwoven with analysis; archiving data; managing complexity; readers can potentially interact with entire data set; secondary analysis; innovative publications; new ways of "reading" qualitative inquiry

2011 Horizon Report is a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. Report focuses on six technologies to watch for future adoption. On near-term horizon (within next 12 months): electronic books, mobiles. 2-3 year horizon: augmented reality and game-based learning. Far term (four to five years): gesture-based computing and learning analytics (data-gathering tools & analytics to study student engagement, performance and progress with goal to adapt curricula accordingly).