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"The focus of this paper is on describing how, after countless millennia of gentle evolutionary change, the Internet is challenging us to discover new forms of sociality and, with it, new forms of social literacy to help us become more effective learners and citizens."

"The 2014 Best Websites for Teaching & Learning foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. They are free, Web-based sites that are user friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. "

This is fantastic! I just shared this on twitter, and will forward the link to teacher colleagues. Teachers are always looking for ways to make learning fun and different, and they also like those resources to be free!

Awesome! This site definitely will help teachers to have different and productive classes.

"When you're reading for information, you should ALWAYS jump ahead, skip around, and use every available strategy to discover, then to understand, and finally to remember what the writer has to say. This is how you'll get the most out of a book in the smallest amount of time." This has been a very useful article for me. After reading this the first time I found that every thing that I did when I was reading was the opposite of what I "should" be doing according to this article. I treated all the definitions, table, and sections that were highlighted as if they were advertisements and just ignored them. This was a very useful article in helping me get back on track when it came to learning how to study in an academic environment, and I was very happy to get new and better skills from it as well.

Muy útil para todos, gracias.

Thanks for sharing! Great refresher and reminder on how to read (esp. for a communications student where reading and writing is essential!)

Some preliminary findings from the MOOC Research Initiative.

Interesting that most people who do well in MOOCs are generally people who have a "growth mindset" and are not necessarily the people in most need of learning. I think any research on MOOCs is interesting since it is such a new phenomenon and it's going to be interesting to see how they evolve.

Very interesting indeed that it is not necessarily those people who are most in need of learning who do well in MOOCs. The question is how MOOC's can, indeed, become more beneficial and attractive to those who need them the most. Access to internet in rural areas around the globe, and availability of cheap computers are both key.

Fair Use as Market F...

The Digital Humanities field is addressing this at the academic level. There is so much resistance to collaboration when sharing means someone else may publish your idea first, while at the same time, multiple operating/networked computers can leveraged to do a lot more work and discover a lot more when people work together. HASTAC is a good resource for learning about digital collaboration in the Humanities. In fact they have just launched a competition about building trust in collaborative environments focusing on education, youth and privacy issues.

YouTube, Full Sail University, Published on Mar 12, 2014 "Technology has made it easier than ever to publish your own work. This Full Sail University panel discusses how to successfully self-publish your own work, and how to do it without getting lost in the sea of all of the other content that's out there." A panel of successful self-published authors talk about the flexibility of new technology within the publishing realm to sell books/music: formatting your work, business models, copyright , print on demand options, music aggregators,, marketing, worldwide distribution, etc.

The video length of one+ hour might seem a bit daunting at first, but I ended up watching most of it in one go - this is really an excellent and easy-to-follow overview of all the important aspects of self-publishing. (I was especially pleased that this video listens to well in the background, as opposed to most other videos that I find require more "involvement" and that do not fit well with a busy day schedule.) What is best about this is that it is all based on actual people experiences - successful self-published authors participating in the panel, and sharing their knowledge & tips in real-time. I was especially curious to find out about the marketing side of of self-publishing a book, and was pleased to discover quite a few helpful ideas and tips. As someone who is thinking about self-publishing soon, this has answered a lot of questions and definitely sparked confidence in the process as a whole. Thank you very much for sharing! Hopefully, this will help and encourage many more self-publishers to be.

In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher "was a complete illusion, a house of cards."

The thing that I liked most about this article (and I really liked it!) was the mention of numerous research studies that have looked into the effects of active learning. Also how Mazur himself collects data on his students' results. The fact that interactive learning can be backed by empirical research only adds to its strength as an effective pedagogical method.

OpenGeoportal.org is a new site that brings together geospatial professionals, developers, metadata specialists, and librarians to coordinate the Open Geoportal (OGP) project. The Open Geoportal is a collaboratively developed, open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple repositories.

A number of universities are partnering on developing geospatial metadata and a tool that can scrape datasets from various sources to display (and overlay!) on a single, federated interface.

Note: This journal list allows you to discover whether the Library subscribes to a certain journal title (in either online, print, or microform formats).

This is an excellent article which explains how Sugata Mitra's teaching models helped to transform a failing school in Mexico. It's a story which completely changed my attitude to learning and education and inspired me to discover as much as possible about cloud-based and student-centred learning.

Thanks for posting. I have heard of similar ideas from my girlfriend who works with learning disabled people, helping them make goals and follow through with them. The way the criticized traditional 'top down' eduction system is set-up, learning disabled people end up with the impression that they are failures and burdens. This goes beyond learning disabled people though, anyone who finds no inspiration for math, English and the sciences is bound to under perform at school, fail at the competitive aspect of it and get told their failures as a result, implicitly or explicitly. I also found that at design school when I realized that math and English were important for the projects I was working on I started to learn effectively and enjoy doing so. This is after failing my secondary education (pre university in New Zealand). You say this changed your attitude towards cloud learning, have you done much else as a result?

This blog is especially great because it talks about the motivation and mindset behind adopting an ope approach. Open is not simply about making or using open resources but open as a 'way of being'

"The only problem with off the grid living is that corporations lose their ability to control others. With a completely self-sustaining life style, no body would ever have to work. What would happen then? Think about that for a moment. We would be free to expand and create, to discover our full potential as a race and move forward into the world of exploration and discovery, all the while living in harmony with nature, not against it."

"Logan Laplante is a 13 year-old boy who was taken out of the education system to be home schooled instead. Not only was he home schooled, but Logan had the ability to tailor his education to his interests and also his style of learning, something traditional education does not offer." I realise this article (and the video on which the article is based) does not fall neatly into any category we've studied yet, though I hope many of you may find it as interesting and inspiring as I have. At core, this is about "hacking" the educational system. As Logan explains, his methods can be applied in mainstream schooling (or indeed for anyone interested in lifelong/lifewide education). There's also the element of "participatory culture" embedded in the production of this video: Logan is sharing his experiences, allowing others to comment and contribute so that he might learn as others are learning from him.

This is a truly amazing talk, I was especially pleased to discover your post since I was just about to share a talk that speaks to many of the same issues! My shared video talks about how schools simply aren't made for boys - for many reasons - and what should be done to reengage them in education. (You can check it out here, if you're interested - https://groups.diigo.com/group/okmooc/content/gaming-could-the-ultimate-tools-to-re-engage-boys-in-education-12782090) The part about "writing about butterflies and rainbows" quite literally made me chuckle, here's why: (from my video) "Boy comes home from school, and he says, "I hate writing." "Why do you hate writing, son? What's wrong with writing?" "Now I have to write what she tells me to write." "Okay, what is she telling you to write?" "Poems. I have to write poems. And little moments in my life. I don't want to write that stuff." :) The boy then goes on to saying "I want to write about video games. I want to write about leveling-up. I want to write about this really interesting world. I want to write about a tornado that comes into our house and blows all the windows out and ruins all the furniture and kills everybody." ...which is one of the main points of "hackschooling" -writing through experiences & interests. Also, speaking from personal experience as someone who also left a diploma behind, I can confirm that leaving a rigid non-functional study environment for an open world of possibility can be the best thing you can ever do. All in all - thumbs up for sharing the talk!

Thanks for sharing - what an inspiring talk. Many of his lessons are just as valuable for adults, who often seem to lose any sense of creativity after settling in to their lives, careers, and relationships. FYI - my wife and I have done some limited homeschooling with one of our kids who really doesn't thrive in traditional school settings. I wish we could have done more, but at the very least I encourage each of our kids to explore other ways to learn to either supplement (or question) what they are learning in school. Traditional education just isn't supportive of creative thinking and creative thinkers.