Group items tagged

post by Brian Hurley in Technology Innovation Management Review on how business ecosystems are led by keystone organizations in networks that provide opportunities for suppliers, customers, partners, and competitors. August 2009.

New tool being developed that is supported by Knight Foundation that creates a contextual archive of discussions that might happen presumably on Facebook and elsewhere. Interesting.

POST (people, objectives, strategies, and tactics) method for using social media effectively, 3.27.13 by John Haydon at the Razoo Foundation. Has some merit.

Article by Timothy Stafford, November 2014, eLearn Magazine. Reports on study of 25 instructional designers who had at least three years of experience in p.i. design and one year of implementing social media into their instructional design platforms. Most interesting to me is the equal weight given to 3 learning theories to drive design and very broad definition of social media (which I agree with). Conclusion "Learning is shifting, but in many ways it is the foundations of learning that are having the most profound effect on contemporary instructional designers. Defining social media, digital literacy and learning, knowing, and expertise are only the tip of the iceberg for the future of learning within digital environments."

Blog post by Jeff Cobb, February 2011, Tagoras site, on adults' self-concept of being responsible for their own decisions and how this is as odds with their frequent relapse into their K-12 expectations/habits/behaviors in adult learning situations. Explanation of Malcolm Knowles's concepts of the Adult Learner: 1. Adults need to know why they need to learn. 2. Adults have a self-concept of being responsible for their own decisions - they have a psychological need to be seen by others as capable of self-direction. 3. Experience is often the best foundation for adult learning activities - often the "richest resources for learning reside in the adult learners themselves." [66] 4. Adults tend to be most interested in learning that has immediate relevance to their jobs or personal lives. 5. Adult learners tend to be life-centered (or task-centered, or problem-centered) rather than subject or content-centered. 6. Adults are typically more responsive to internal motivators (job satisfaction, self esteem, quality of life, etc.) than external motivators (promotions, higher salaries, etc.). Excerpt on how online learning environments are not always recognized as such and how facilitation of learning networks is critical: "Finally - something I have been arguing in one way or another for years - the problematic side of "self-concept" pretty much flies out the window if you remove the obvious, traditional labels like "seminar" or "Webinar." This is a key reason why social networks are so powerful as learning environments - people tend not to consciously acknowledge them as such even though learning is typically the key social object in any professional community that survives and thrives over time. Educators must recognize this and learn to facilitate learning within networks if they want to truly lead learning in their fields and industries."

blog by Dave Kerpen, January 28, 2013, that came to me via Linkedin in my daily mail on 11 simple concepts to become a better leader. Offers a pyramid of traits/behaviors starting with listening, storytelling, passion, and team playing as the foundation, surprise and delight, responsiveness, and simplicity on the second tier, authenticity/transparency and adaptability on the third tier, gratefulness on the fourth tier, and Golden Rule for treating others as you like to be treated at the top..

Blog site named "e-Literate" catchy, no? (Wish I had thought of it! But maybe we can use e-literacy for the foundations course?) This blog post written by Michael Feldstein, one of multiple bloggers on this site, quotes extensively from a New Republic article written by Kevin Carey. What I think is interesting for us is how we must add value (coaching, badging, mentoring, etc.) as private providers of learning to what most people could do on a DIY basis if they had all the skills--technological, contextual, and others--to proceed on their own. Excerpt: "Other providers might take advantage of the fast-growing body of open educational resources-free online courses, videos, lectures, and syllabi-and add value primarily through mentoring, designing course sequences, and assessing learning."

"The Varied Functions of Badges" summary from HASTAC discussion, 9/2012 My interest in the functions of badges was spurred along when the MacArthur Foundation asked for help documenting the design principles for using digital badges that emerge across the 30 projects underway by the awardees in their Badges for Lifelong Learning project. We needed to come up with a manageable number of categories. Here is what we came up with: Recognizing Learning. This is the most obvious and arguably the primary function of badges. David Wiley has argued cogently that this should be the primary purpose of badges. If we focus only on purposes, then he may well be right. His point is that badges are credentials and not assessments. This is also consistent with the terrifically concise definition in Seven Things You Should Know About Badgesby Erin Knight and Carla Casilli. Assessing Learning. Nearly every application of digital badges includes some form of assessment. These assessments have either formative or summative functions and likely have both. In some cases, these are simply an assessment of whether somebody clicked on a few things or made a few comments. In other cases, there might be a project or essay that was reviewed and scored, or a test that was graded. In still other cases, peers might assess an individual, group, or project as badgeworthy. Motivating Learning. This is where the controversy comes in. Much of the debate over badges concerns the well-documented negative consequences of extrinsic incentive on intrinsic motivation and free choice engagement. This is why some argue that we should not use badges to motivate learning. However, if we use badges to recognize and assess learning, they are likely to impact motivation. So, we might as well harness this crucial function of badges and study these functions carefully while searching for both their positive and negative consequences for motivation. Evaluating Learning. The final category of

Great article on the top 16 foundational literacy skills, competencies, and personal characteristics students need for 21st century skills. Good graphics and video. Also has a section on how to teach these skills. The skills apply to everyone, not just students.

excellent explanation by Tom Vander Ark on why parent-managed learner profiles are becoming more important all the time for young people.  Is the corollary true for adults owning their learning in portable, digital carry-alongs for sharing with potential employers, etc.  

Good history of Mozilla's open badge project, a joint venture between the Mozilla and MacArthur foundations. The open badge system is now called Badgr and is launched by a new entity for this purpose, Concentric Sky in partnership with edX. It is still open source and badge criteria still displays with the badge when awarded and displayed on a web site, profile, etc.

Written by Yuhyun Park , the chair of infollutionZero Foundation. Great graphic of the digital literacies children must learn as "they spend, on average, 7 hours a day in front of screens from television and computers to mobile phones and various digital devices." He defines these skills as Digital Intelligence, or DQ: Digital Safety (behavior risks, content risks, contact risks), Digital Security (password protection, internet security, mobile security), Digital Emotional Intelligence (empathy, emotional awareness/regulation, social and emotional awareness), Digital Communication (online collaboration, online communication, digital footprint), digital literacy (computational thinking, content curation, critical thinking), digital rights (privacy, intellectual property rights, freedom of speech), digital identity (digital citizen, digital co-creator, digital entrepreneur), and Digital Use (screen time, digital health, community participation).

list of Florida nonprofit alliance members includes their establishing charter members and consultants (only one of whom I know and she is excellent), and other regular members including quite a few in Tampa Bay area. Marlene Spalten, CEO of Community Foundation of Tampa Bay, is also member of the FNA Board.

Absolutely fabulous video (6 minutes) on Connected Learning and how we must change the outcomes based focus of education to awaken the curiosity of each learner and engage with them in learning how to learn given the distribution of resources, ideas, experts, etc. while preserving the learners' autonomy, access to diversity, openness to others for learning, interactivity with similar and diverse co-learners, etc. Film by Nic Askew at Soulbiographies.com interviewing McArthur Foundation person and two professors of education

Tony Carr, Shaheeda Jaffer, and Jeanne Smuts devised a really good course on facilitating online learning groups for course leaders in the context of courses and conferences by the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Capetown, underwritten by a Ford Foundation grant. 2009. 114 pages

Wonderful explanation of the power of pull and its exploration in books written by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information author among many other foundational books), and Lang Davison (former director of Deloitte Center for the Edge and editor-in-chief of the McKinsey Quarterly). Endorses community of practice and "socially embedded practice in driving knowledge creation and performance improvement." From April 9, 2010

Interview with Vera Michalchik published by DML Research Hub, funded by the McArthur Foundation. Michalchick heads up research on Informal Learning Environments in SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning. "I'm paraphrasing Richard Feynman who said that the more that we have a monoculture of learning, the less chance we have of producing creative, innovative, capable thinkers. We really want diverse learning environments, and assessment is always the tail that wags the dog. People are beholden to systems of accountability, and what knowledge is valued and how that knowledge is valued really shows up in an assessment system. Besides reducing the diversity of learning environments by having common metrics, we short-change a natural process. This is what we mention in the Naturalizing Assessment article. " Offers pros and cons on badging system (is disinclined but open-minded about their usage) and suggests various kinds of informal learning assessments that do not following the standardized testing model such as: continual monitoring of where kids are in the program, for when kids are "getting it", "minimally invasive studies of behavior and performance" to support documentation of participation and capacity building, ethnology, video documentation, data mining methods of video archives, embedded assessment in learning games, etc.

Harold Jarche from 2014 on engaging knowledge artisans. "Complex environments are the new normal. Relationship building is needed in order to share complex knowledge. Implicit knowledge takes time to share, so time has to be set aside for sense-making, reflecting, and conversing. These are significant workplace changes, but can be mastered with a stable foundation of PKM practiced by interdependent and autonomous knowledge artisans. When everybody is engaged in sense-making, then any organization can better sense where it needs to go."

Guide for organizations to plan how to convene f2f diverse groups to top into groups' shared intelligence and problem solving skills. Based on the Foundation's extensive experience with convening, they created this guide to foster more collaboration outside of their funding. The link to the guide, entitled Gather, is contained in this web page.

great study on costs of intermittent employment on low-income wage earners and their families, by Nancy K. Cauthen, Annette Case, Sarah Wilhelm, September 2015, funding by Annie B. Casey Foundation