Knowledge in the Public Interest (KPI)

Unbelievable!!!!

OTAN--Outreach and Technical Assistance Network for adult educators may offer ideas for KPI to consider in working with national membership organizations of educators.

Under the auspices of the US Department of Education, discussions are held via a listserve about professional development. This wiki contains an organized multi-day discussion on using video in teaching and staff development carried out through the list-serve. The list-serve is subscriber based but I guess both the discussion and accompanying wiki are open to the public. Issues for me: Should KPI consider offering the organized Jam transcript in the form of a wiki? Should it be open for discovery or only available to Jam participants?

Published by the University of Nottingham (UK). This site is a "continually updated collection of peer-reviewed academic development resources...[ranging from] "2-5 minute videos [to] 500-1000 word texts...." There are a variety of entry points to access the materials, ranging from discipline areas (on this page) to themes (see Teaching & Learning themes at the top). I also like the Guest editor block (this page, lower left), where a faculty member writes a brief editorial and selects resources of interest.

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."

Conference dates: July 11-14, 2011. Conference organizer Gary Stager. This annual convening is somewhat like an "unconference" and invites teachers to take on the role of learners for the duration. The focus is on personal project development, with lots of good resources in the form of guest speakers and "mentors." On this News page, you can see blog posts describing the conference. 2012 conference (5th annual) to be held July 9-12, 2012 in Manchester, NH.

A program of the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Australia), this is an online project that aims to help teachers "gain a working understanding of successful online teaching pedagogies that they can apply in their own unique teaching situations."

JISC is a UK-based group that "inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies...." The e-learning program offers 5 tracks to will help teachers learn how to teach in the e-learning environment. Support includes OER.

Website for the new textbook Key Concepts in Geomorphology by Paul Bierman and Dave Montgomery, published by W.H. Freeman. This text is, in effect, being "crowd-sourced," with members of the community invited to vet the work and to submit "vignettes," which are brief electronic supplements.

By Avdi Grimm and a service of ShipRise LLC. This site does not appear to be updated too often, but contains podcasts and posts about "geographically dispersed" workers, or those who, like us, work on virtual teams. The tabs Tips & Hacks and Toolkit both seem useful.

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?

Posted by Clarance Fisher on his blog Remote Access, July 19 2011. Per his post, Fisher first wrote about a tool that would help "global kids in global classrooms to connect with each other." He then used the site vworker.com, where people post their projects, inviting coders to bid on them. Once he had a price for his project, he used ChipIn.com (for only one week) to raise the money for his project.

I've bookmarked for several reasons: (1) Love the idea of online community for kids around the globe (2) Vworker.com sounds like a great resource (3) Very interesting to see a social fundraising tool like ChipIn.com in action

Blog post by Paul Farol in the Blog Herald, published July 20 2011. The post describes how one might keep regularly scheduled blog posts interesting. While the focus is on writing posts for a corporate client, the ideas should apply equally to the posts we (eventually) write for our KPI readers.

A blog that features information about education-related MOOCs, with schedules, information about participants, and study groups (including one for librarians).

This site (currently in Beta) was founded by James Gee and is essentially a database of in-progress projects, begging for feedback/interaction/collaboration with and by others.

Another way to think about Pathfinder 2.0? Or an opportunity to working examples from our own work (guided digital environment? effective online communities?) in order to get feedback from others.