Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

Presentation was part of Ignite Great Lakes, July 30 2011. Maria Anderson is a futurist and math professor at Muskegon Community College. It's not enough to bookmark (or digitally hoard); we need a "learn this" button. Essentially, this is a more efficient bookmarking system where we revisit sites of interest and actually ask ourselves questions about the topics.

This MOOC is being developed by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier. For this particular MOOC, they will be introducing over 30 speaker/instructors (one a week) with a global perspective (faculty representing 11 countries). Links to course registration, outline and other details from this page.

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.

Links on this page for the Proceedings, abstracts, and conference guide.

By Kim Parker, Amanda Lenhart and Kathleen Moore, published by the Pew Research Center/Pew Social & Demographic Trends, August 28, 2011. The big take-away seems to be that 51% of college presidents surveyed find that "online courses offer an equal educational value compared with courses taken in a classroom," but only 29% of the general public agrees with this statement.

No author or date listed, this blog posts promotes a guide to Google+ for educators, written by Steven W. Anderson. I bookmark this post for two reasons. First, obviously, the opportunity for educators to learn more about Google+ and it's potential educational applications. But also the format, LiveBinder, is an interesting way to present and share resources.

By Cathy N. Davidson, Viking, 2011.

An interesting and provocative read...the case studies (both of schools and of workplaces) are exciting and the writing is lively. Davidson stresses "collaboration by difference."

very interesting article on Forsyth County schools in GA (I just drove through there the other day and had no idea of their innovativeness!) encouraging students to bring their own technology to classrooms to use in project and inquiry based learning. Amazing openness by school district to open up learning.

wide range of free chart, mindmapping, drawing(?), and diagramming tools

home page for Change.mooc.ca

Interesting list of social networks for educators

Flipped Classroom on how students use classroom time to apply their learning in group activities and out of class time to watch videos or other online resources that convey the content.

Great curation tools to find and organize online resources

Very good infographic on the growth in digital education and need for students, teachers and professors at all levels to be prepared to play on this field. How does or should this trend affect ePD? How does or should this trend affect high school student learning and pedagogy in the classroom whether online, blended, or face to face?

By cmcraft (Dr. Chris Craft) on his blog, Crucial Thought. Craft posts his criticisms of 2.0 and his experience transitioning to Haiku.

Note that Craft works with 6th graders, so his use of Moodle is quite different from ours.

This course, offered by P2PU (Peer to Peer University) looks at Mozilla's upcoming release of an Open Badges framework and asks questions about how community/peer-rated online badges might stand in for more formal assessment/recognition of learning, particularly in new or non-traditional fields. This is formally a 4-week course which began August 13 2011.

Sharing both for the look & feel of this course and for the ideas around "badge" assessment.

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.