Group items tagged

"the first four levels is that they illuminate the path from attending a webinar, to learning a new skill, to applying the skill, and to measuring the change as a result of the skill. Each step along the way can be captured and measured by using the framework, and each step can be easily understood and described to decision makers."

Presented on TED.COM, filmed Feb 2010 and posted April 2010. Wujec discusses his experience using the Marshmallow Challenge in team-building exercises. Observing the challenge 100s of times, he sees that kindergarteners do better than recent business school grads (better at prototyping, less jockeying for leadership), CEOs do well, but do even better with an executive admin on their team because facilitation is important. High stakes (he's offered a cash reward) works better once the team has acquired skills; high stakes with no skills is a disaster.

Published by Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute, 2011. Rather than predicting actual careers or job types, this report looks at Six Drivers of Change, and the resulting 10 Key Skills needed in the future workforce, including Virtual Collaboration.

The authors find similarities between gaming and virtual collaboration and posit that, to be successful, virtual collaboration must include "immediate feedback, clear objectives and a staged series of challenges [in order to] significantly drive participation and motivation."

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.

Produced by McKinsey & Company, McKinsey on Society division, December 2012. McKinsey & Company notes that, in many countries, we are faced with "high levels of youth unemployment and a shortage of job seekers with critical skills." In this report, they have compiled case studies of best practices from around the world (with the goal of high employment of program graduates) as well as surveying students about their own prospects based on their education. On this page, links to the report itself (as well as Executive Summary) as well as access to some of the case studies.

If the goal of postsecondary education is employment, this report starts to posit some innovations and solutions.

"ISC provides consulting, facilitation, network building, leadership development, and training services so that our clients can innovate, think strategically and take vision to action. We build the capacity of all with whom we work by modeling the behaviors and transferring the skills and tools of collaboration. Today, one focus of our work is on integrating technology and new social media to achieve greater social impact in all of our collaborative efforts."

by Jon Marcus on The Hechinger Report, December 26, 2011. Open University, a successful British online public university to be used as a model in the U.S. The goal is to help students who are intimidated by higher education adapt to and succeed in college. Next Generation Learning Challenges, a Gates funded initiative, will adapt two free Open University, at-your-own-pace online courses for use at about a dozen U.S. colleges and universities this academic year: one to help students be more comfortable with math so they do better on placement tests or move more quickly through remedial courses, and another to teach students skills to prepare them for college.

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.

By Garry Boulard in Community College Times, published May 4 2010. The article looks at the finding that, the more times a student takes a specific developmental math course, the less likely he or she is to pass it. Quotes Paul Nolting, learning specialist, enrollment services advisor, and author of Winning at Math: Your Guide to Learning Mathematics Through Successful Study Skills.

A program of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Statway focuses on helping community college students learn basic skills in statistics, data analysis, and quantitative reasoning as part of a one-year pathway. The ultimate goal of this pathway is preparation for college-level statistics. This home page to Statway also includes links to the project blog (called Pathways Connection) and to the project's mailing list. There are 19 community colleges affiliated with this project.

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.

"But many of the problems we face today are COMPLEX, and methods to solve simple and complicated problems will not work with complex ones. One of the ways we addressed simple & complicated problems was through training. Training works well when you have clear and measurable objectives. However, there are no clear objectives with complex problems. Learning as we probe the problem, we gain insight and our practices are emergent (emerging from our interaction with the changing environment and the problem). Training looks backwards, at what worked in the past (good & best practices), and creates a controlled environment to develop knowledge and skills."

"What used to be known as remedial education now goes by either developmental education or basic skills. Lexicon aside, it's become apparent that these classes don't work. At least half a dozen reports released in the past year (two in the past couple of weeks alone) warn that the United States is headed for an economic calamity unless we can figure out how to get more students to successfully complete some type of postsecondary education program. It doesn't have to be a baccalaureate degree. It could be an associate's degree or a professional certification, but by the year 2018 about two-thirds of all jobs will require some college education, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Of those, 22 million will require actual degrees, AA or better, but at the current rate, we're already off track by some 3 million degrees."

By Stephen Sawchuk in Education Week, published online August 5 2011. A look at some new teacher training programs that have been recently approved by the New York (State) board of regents. The article also briefly discusses some of the debate about practical teaching skills vs. theoretical ones.

Interesting approach by PARCC on through-course assessments for K-12 students with particular significance for HS students as they assess how college ready they are, how they are growing content and skills to analyze, understand the content and apply, and how through-course assessments drive interventions, classroom practice, and support needed for teachers to understand CCSS and help their students to achieve them. Really like logic model on p 17. How does this, should this, could this affect MCNC's epi modeling? I-Lab practicum?

Goog*lio noun (1) a hybrid next generation e-portfolio that utilizes emerging open, social, web2.0, and Google applications such as blogs, wikis, social networks and software to create a student created and controlled personal learning environment and lifelong content management system that can be shared and viewed from different perspectives, within various contexts, and for multiple purposes. noun (2) a free and easy to use portfolio web site for individuals to design as a space, story, and system that functions as a workspace and showcase for learners to collect, select, reflect, publish, link, archive, and demonstrate knowledge, skills, reflections, through multimedia artifacts. verb (3) "googlio it" to publish and connect a digital artifact to your webfolio. origin: rooted in the word folio (as in Da Vinci) + Google (as in all the free Google Apps & Tools) and evolved from portfolio -->

"TeamUp Form teams based on skills and interests, record teams' progress."

By ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee, June 2010. Full text PDF is also available from this page.

Part of the Information Society Policy Research Unit, from the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective Technological Studies Centre (EC - JRC - IPTS). This is a resource page that looks innovative ways to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in education.