Group items tagged

"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. "

By Laura S. Quinn, Idealware, January 2012. Looks at a variety of software tools that can support program evaluation. Report includes a category on Analyzing and Displaying Your Measures, which might be most relevant. There are recommendations for report builders, tools that help create data visualizations, both quantitative and qualitative analysis tools, and dashboard recommendations.  Also reference to an organization called Innovation Network, which might be of interest.

With the tagline "search, recommend, collaborate, remix," Folksemantic claims over 110,000 OERs. The product was developed for the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. At the current time (Sept 2010), they are asking for help evaluating their recommender tool.

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.

By Lev Grossman, Time Magazine, May 27 2010. This article provides an overview of recommendation engines and how they work, looking at sites like Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube, but really concentrating on Pandora/Music Genome Project.

Posted by Kelly Tenkely on her blog, Dreams of Education. In this post (n.d.), Tenkeley describes (and seeks funding for) her Learning Genome Project. Based on behind Pandora, this project would apply recommender data to curriculum based (K-12) lessons. The project also seeks deep analysis of the students (learning styles, etc.) and the teachers (called "lead learners"). Any time a lesson is used, both teacher and student are to rate it.

By Justin Reich on Educational Technology Debate on December 8 2011. Reich argues, from his research on the use of wikis in the schools, that educational technology tends to benefit affluent students, rather than under-served students, primarily because there are more resources for students and teachers in the affluent environment, so teachers can use technology to its best advantage. He recommends technology initiatives that specifically target low-income and under-served students as a solution, and cites some interesting programs.

Press release from The Century Foundation, Feb 2 2012. With President Obama's increasing emphasis on community colleges, "The Century Foundation is assembling a task force of distinguished individuals from two-year and four-year institutions, scholars of higher education, and representatives of the business, philanthropic, and civil rights communities to consider strategies to strengthen community colleges. "

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.

By sleslie on edtechpost (blog), Feb 14, 2012. In this post on authoring "open textbooks," the author looks at the process of book sprints, which were borrowed from coders in the open source and hacker communities. In a book sprint, a group of interested participants come together with the goal of creating a book (or book-like) project. In addition to a very general outline of the process, the post recommends some tools that a group might use, as well as a link to some sample books.

Both the tools and the process seem interesting. How might this process be applied to a KPI project...in lieu of a Jam? In conjunction with a Jam? As the Jam take-away?

By Chuck Frey, posted to Mind Mapping Software Blog October 21 2008. This blog concentrates on mind mapping software. In this post, they make recommendations about software that will be useful in project management, though presumably some PM tools will also include such mapping features.

From AlternativeTo.net, software recommendations for password storage.

By Steve Lohr, July 7, 2009 in Technology section, The New York Times. A contest set up by Netflix offered a $1 million prize for improving its movie recommendation system.

By Leon Benjamin on KnowledgeBoard, July 1 2009. Recommendations about using social media within a company (or organization) and not just to network with the outside world.

By Isaac Gube, published in Six Revisions (blog), March 2, 2010. Article explores collaborating with colleagues in different time zone. Recommendations include regular (virtual) meetings, organization and task management, virtual brainstorming, and more.

Posted by Hans de Zwart to his blog, Technology as a Solution..., July 19, 2011. de Zwart conducted an experiment with his virtual team (18 people) asking them to "narrate their work," using the microblogging tool Yammer. He tried to make the rules as easy as possible, so there was no requirement on how frequently they blogged, etc. At the end, he conducted a survey, which is summarized in this post. I strongly recommend reading the original post as well (link in 1st paragraph).

Is this the equivalent of our "Rants and Raves" or coffee klatch? Would microblogging seem less onerous a task, so that we might do it more frequently? Is this the "killer app" for project management?

from the U.S. Department of Education. Plan calls for applying the advanced technologies used personally and professionally to the U.S.'s entire education system. The plan presents five goals with recommendations for states, districts, the federal government, and other stakeholders. Goals address the five essential components of learning powered by technology: Learning, Assessment, Teaching, Infrastructure and Productivity. This page has a link to the plan (PDF).

By Jonathan D. Becker on his blog, Educational Insanity, August 9 2011. Becker makes recommendations not just on how we should reform education, but also why. And how we should talk about it. Thought-provoking.

A slideshow by Scott Brown and Joe Murphy, originally presented at the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Annual Conference, 2011. If you use Android, i-Phone, or i-Pad, here are some apps recommended for librarians and "info pros."

BuddyPress is an LMS application developed using WordPress.

Diana recommended this site, too, as a tutorial in our expanding use of WordPress.