Group items tagged

"Educational technology companies and entrepreneurs may face the risk of a "tech bubble," similar to the massive boom-and-bust that rocked the technology market in the late 1990s, according to market analysts and a recently released paper. A relatively new focus on K-12 educational technology as an investment vehicle, a surge of investors looking to cash in on the latest innovations, and fewer barriers to developing an ed-tech business have merged in ways that have some market observers wary of what's ahead. The flurry of activity is prompting comparisons to the dot-com crash of the late 1990s, which brought the failure of many technology-related businesses that had drawn huge sums of money from investors. "

"Black Mountain SOLE (BMS) opens this year as the world's first tuition-free, residential, self-organized learning environment for higher education. The novel institution provides a much-needed educational alternative for the country's most talented and driven learners. It provides blended learning and personalized one-on-one mentoring within an intellectually stimulating and supportive community. Its innovative programs embrace open-source content and novel educational technology to empower self-directed learning."

Education Applications (EA) Proposal Due Date: Decemeber 03, 2012 Please all inquiries about this topic to Glenn Larsen (glarsen@nsf.gov) Administrative Information The required 400-word project summary should discuss the intellectual merit and broader impact in two separate ~200 word paragraphs that specifically answer the following questions: Paragraph 1) Intellectual merit: What is the problem to be solved? How will the problem be solved? What is the specific innovation in the proposed approach? Paragraph 2) Broader impacts: Why is your solution better than competitive technologies? Who is going to buy your solution? Who are the other key players? Tools that build real-time information from data-mining on complexity, diversity, and similar types of information to generate knowledge that can be used to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment such as in learning analytics. Gesture-based computing applications that enable collaborative work with multiple students interacting on content simultaneously. Education tools that benefit from objects having their own IP address or location based services for new types of communications, assistive technologies, and new applications of benefit primarily to education.

"Founded in 1992, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) is the premier professional association for school district technology leaders. CoSN is committed to providing the leadership, community and advocacy tools essential for the success of these leaders. Our Mission Empowering educational leaders to leverage technology to realize engaging learning environments. CoSN's core beliefs are shared by our members, drive our strategies, and determine our goals and priorities. "

"A new-media learning platform that uses cutting-edge instructional design, rich media, and simulations to educate teens and empower them with the skill set to leverage technology safely and effectively."

"He compares traditional teaching to "giving people thousands of rubber mallets and asking them to drill a hole through a mountain." He said, "We need nitroglycerine." His "nitroglycerine" is Saylor.org, a nonprofit online university he backs as sole trustee of the Saylor Foundation. Saylor's model is to offer students a free, one-stop shop for self-paced college courses. Saylor.org aggregates free content offered by open-source providers like MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Yale Courses, and groups it so that students can pursue a continuous sequence of courses in a major. The model takes a different approach than that of high-profile providers of massive open online courses, or MOOC's, mainly in its role as an aggregator of online content into comprehensive courses. Instead of following a professor through a series of video lectures and peer-graded exercises on Coursera, for example, students in Saylor courses read, listen to, and watch material from different sources and grade themselves using answer keys."

The Worst Consequence of Your Best Ideas You have to wonder why desks in rows and textbooks on the desks have survived as long as they have as the dominant instructional model when so few people think that it's actually a good way to teach and learn. And then you realize that while it never goes all that right, it rarely goes all that wrong either. Teachers don't usually get in trouble when administrators walk into their classroom and see kids with books open, doing work, even if the work isn't worth doing. And all those other ideas that we love so much - inquiry, project-based learning, technology, real world application of student work - they get so… messy. And something always seems to go wrong. And we have to face that education is a somewhat reactionary field to work in. The death of so many good ideas is when something goes wrong and someone decides that we should never do that again.

"Basic Technology Advice for Students"

That's really good stuff. Here's the main doc https://docs.google.com/a/nitle.org/document/d/1X074ZTCmZrs591jWM3iaaNPBFBCNqQ45pknHp3MQ43A/edit

"In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor's degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students."

"Digital Devices Invade Campus, and Networks Feel the Strain"

"5 Excellent Tools for Teachers to Use with Google Hangout "

"Our interests centre around creating and conducting inquiry on learning environments. This focus includes both formal school settings, non-school settings (museums, science centres, public spaces, and the Internet), and the points of intersection between these environments. These interests combine work in both real and virtual, on-line and off-line spaces. For us, an understanding of the nexus of learning and community relies upon analysis of each context to ascertain the expectations of participants and the task demands of the environment. We accordingly recognize the diversity of virtual environments, and also the interconnections that exist between on-line and off-line communities. What connects communities, virtual or otherwise, are the possibilities offered for learning; it is not just "school-based" or specifically an educational institution's private preserve. "

"Can you go to college on your computer? Some say yes, and others respond with a resounding no. But one thing is for sure: there is a boatload of public money to be vacuumed off an overcrowded, underfunded educational establishment desperate for at least the appearance of a quick fix. "

"Focus Forward films highlight exceptional people and world-changing ideas that are impacting the course of human development, changing our lives for the better. We are looking for professional quality 3-minute stories about visionaries and thinkers and in some cases everyday folks who have brought a quantum leap to human progress by their efforts and inventions. Your film may encompass anything from jaw-dropping medical advancements to renewable energy breakthroughs; open-source architecture to the development of wireless technologies in Third World countries; computer programming wizardry to sci-fi-worthy robotics; or any other sphere of art and knowledge that inspires you. We're especially interested in the accomplishments of inventors, engineers, educators, surgeons, scientists, techies, artists, programmers, backyard tinkerers-i.e. anyone making a difference, utilizing their skills and vision to innovate, share their work, and help sow the seeds of a brighter future."

"On Loving (and Leaving) LearnBoost Rafael Corrales, co-founder and CEO of one of my favorite education technology startups, LearnBoost, recently announced that he has stepped down from the helm of the company and has moved on to join a venture capital firm. I admit: I'm fairly devastated by this news. I have long been a supporter of LearnBoost, first covering its official launch back in August 2010 when I was still a tech blogger for ReadWriteWeb. There I covered many of the startup's tech and product updates - including, for example, the development and open-sourcing of its crowdsourced translation interface - even though the editors were always quick to tell me not to cover ed-tech startups. ("Nobody cares, Audrey.") Nevertheless, when I was assigned to write the end-of-year story "Top 10 Startups of 2010," I put LearnBoost on the list alongside other exciting new startups from the year, including Instagram, Flipboard, Quora, Square, and Hipmunk."

"With Howard and Andrew Gardner Wednesday, November 7 The field of education is undergoing a revolution precipitated not only by the rapid growth of new technologies, but by the demands of an evolving global economy. These changes combined require collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. "What role should a museum play as a place of learning in the 21st century?" and "What unique value will museums add to the field?", "

Nikolaos Tselios University of Patras, Greece Educational Technology - Human Computer Interaction - e-learning - Social Computing - Web Science Verified email at ece.upatras.gr

"Andrew Rasiej is a professional doer, futurist, social entrepreneur, and Founder of Personal Democracy Media, which produces Personal Democracy Forum and other events about how the intersection of technology, politics, and civil society is empowering new levels of citizen engagement. Among its offerings are TechPresident an award winning blog and Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference held in New York City in June. He is also the Founder a not for profit organization called MOUSE.org focused on 21st century public education,"

"The big theme of Mr. Shirky's talk was openness. Taking advantage of technology, he argued, will require "doing more sharing than we're used to and then learning to live with results." He underscored the power of sharing with an anecdote about what happened when the Smithsonian Institution made a cache of photographs available on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users catalogued the archive with tags that reflected an unpredictable range of interests, including facial hair, the history of photography, and the fiction genre known as Steampunk. "There's all kinds of hidden value in our systems which you can't even understand until you open them up to see what people do with them," Mr. Shirky said. "The thing that drives me craziest in conversations with large institutions about large data sets is they want to know in advance what will happen. Why should we open up our data? To which the answer is, you open up your data to see where the value is. It's the value you can't even predict until you try it that you get back.""