Group items tagged

Phoebe, a "pedagogic planner" is, per the website "a web application designed to provide inspiration and practical support for learning design." In addition to building learning designs in Pheobe, users can also look at the learning design of others.

Exellent article on formal learning designs and why they don't work so well

By Geoff Cain on his blog, Brainstorm in Progress, October 27 2012. Cain looks at the instructional design of MOOCs -- and what instructional designers can borrow from MOOCs and apply to more traditional courses. His big take-aways are to provide paths toward community for the students (ideally even open the model to students from previous cohorts who may now be actively using these acquired skills in the field) and to model the behaviors (e.g. technologies) that you are teaching.

Pachyderm is an easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author's website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.

This is no longer managed by NMC. The website for the Pachyderm open source community is http://www.pachyforge.org/

This graduate program at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education offers an MA in Digital Media Design for Learning, a PhD, and an advanced certificate in Digital Media Design for Learning. There is a lot of emphasis on games and gaming and the primary focus appears to be K-12.

Shared because there are likely affinities between some of the students (or faculty) in this program and our own interests.

According to Professors Anderson and McCormick, the Ten Principles may help designers to construct pedagogically sound e-learning materials and related activities. The principles may also help teachers to choose resources; design teaching and learning activities based on those resources; and support such activities while they take place.

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.

By Rosemary Luckin, published by Routledge (UK), April 2010. Luckin is Professor of Learner-Centred Design at the London Knowledge Lab. This book has just been released in the UK, and may not yet be available in US markets or libraries.

From About Us, "OpenIDEO is a place where people design better, together for social good." Using an online platform and a very structured approach to problem-solving (inspiration, concepting, and evaluation) are followed, ideally, by implementation, all the while, harnassing the power of crowd-sourcing. See How It Works tab for a video that more effectively explains the process.

I found the video inspiring. OpenIDEO's work is very similar to ours, though they use the power of the crowd while ours is (usually) at least somewhat restricted. But I love the clearly delineated process, the idea that more is better, and the fact that each of us might be stronger in one aspect of the process than the other(s). The website, too, is inspiring, as the homepage lays out all of the projects, with a barometer to describe where each project is in the process.

Videos of the Learning Design Support Environment and the Online Pedagogical Pattern Data Collector on Vimeo

"Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is therefore an application domain that generally covers technologies that support all forms of teaching and learning activities. Since information retrieval (in terms of searching for relevant learning resources to support teachers or learners) is a pivotal activity in TEL, the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest. This chapter attempts to provide an introduction to recommender systems for TEL settings, as well as to highlight their particularities compared to recommender systems for other application domains. "

WHEN a college textbook, "Principles of Biology," comes out from the Nature Publishing Group in January, one place it won't be is on the shelves of school bookstores. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic in "Principles of Biology," an electronic textbook from Nature Publishing, teaches students about the symptoms of a stroke. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic from Wolfram Research lets readers change the display parameters of an oil spill. That's because the book was designed to be digital-only. Students will pay not for a printed edition at a bookstore, but for permanent access on the Internet ($49).

If we are to achieve our goal of leading the world in education, we must be leaders in the design and implementation of a more effective education system. To that end, this plan calls for a new approach to R&D for education that focuses on four areas:

by Derek Bruff, November 6, 2011. The best justification of the Innovation Lab premise that I have seen. "Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."" Often our students engage in what Ken Bain, vice provost and a historian at Montclair State University, calls strategic or surface learning, instead of the deep learning experiences we want them to have. Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient-they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning. Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community. My students might not see the beauty and power of mathematics, but they can look forward to participating in a community effort to learn about math. Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

By Marc Parry, Technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18 2012. This piece profiles some of the new "Big Data" innovations at Arizona State University, the largest public university in the US. There are systems to track students against the requirements of their majors; recommendations about classes in which they might be successful, etc., all towards the goal of improving retention and graduation rates.

Many provocative ideas in this article, not the least of which is how these applications speak to various "recommender systems," whether telling students what courses to take, professors how to teach, administration how to track, etc.

iRubric is a tool that helps faculty design rubrics for assessment. This tool is part of the Rcampus suite of opensource tools.

By Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, June 7 2010. This article explains the whys and hows of wireframing, and includes descriptions of 10 free web-based tools that can help.

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.

By Ian Quillen of the Digital Education (blog) in Education Week, September 2 2010. This study suggests that "Algebra I teachers who were trained in and used a program that allowed them to monitor students' progress on graphing calculators led to significantly improved achievement by their students on a researcher-designed test." This blog post (and the video link) both stress that it is the combination of technology AND professional development that has provided these positive results. \nNOTE: First link to Summary of Findings is a Texas Instruments report (TI produces the graphing calculator that is part of the study). However, the study was conducted with outside consultants, including SRI.

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."