Group items tagged

"EDMONTON - These days, online literacy is part of classroom learning. However, for one Alberta school division, navigating social media isn't enough. It's making sure students are using the medium for good. In Parkland School Division, teachers and children are encouraged to learn about social media. "As adults, we really need to understand this world, and help the kids navigate it as opposed to just saying, 'hey just do whatever, we're too old to do this,'" explains Division Principal George Couros. "

"I was recently contacted by Allison Morris and asked to share her excellent info-graphic examining the pros and cons of digital research. Allison makes an important observation, while nearly all students use the internet for research, few students receive sufficient training in information management. This lacking of training makes it difficult for many students to shift through the often overwhelming amount of information available on the internet."

If Google is to achieve its stated mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible," says Wiley, it must find out about those hidden needs and learn how to serve them. And he says experience sampling-bugging people to share what they want to know right now, whether they took action on it or not-is the best way to do it. "Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology, and it's getting us better information that we really haven't had in the past," he says.

"After a decade of teaching at the university level, David Preston decided to stop ignoring the ills we all know haunt those halls and dropped back to high school. He's now trying to reform a place that desperately needs it. I got the chance to participate in a discussion with his literature and composition classes, thanks to David, Ted Newcomb, and Howard Rheingold, all of whom are hacking education in various ways. I can tell you with no reservations that David is making the difference. I want to keep this introduction as brief as possible and just let him tell you about it. Some men just want to watch the world learn. "

"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."

"Welcome to Starfish Retention Solutions! Never before has helping students cross the finish line been more important. Every day, we work with leading academic institutions around the world to help students complete their academic goals. How? Starfish makes it easy for your institution to enlist your whole community as active participants in your student success initiatives by automating student tracking, early alert, online appointment scheduling, and assessment. The results are powerful. The outcomes are measurable. The impact is personal. "

"As it turns out, its decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company's history-driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation. IBM lets employees talk-to each other and the public-without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM's, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense. "We're very much a knowledge-based company. It's really the expertise of the employee that we're hitting on," Christensen says. No Policing IBM does have social media guidelines. The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information."

I'm proud to announce that Stephanie Schipper will be joining Mozilla Foundation as VP, Web Strategy. At it's most basic, Stephanie's job is to make sure we are awesome on the web. More specifically, she is joining us to bake participation into everything we do online.

" Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other -- using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), and learn more at tedprize.org. "

"A simple Google search of "digital citizenship" nets 15,100,000 hits. Fifteen million! How do we make sense out of all that information? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the ridiculous from the sublime? I've selected these three blog posts because each represents a unique and thoughtful perspective on digital citizenship. You may like them so much you will want to follow these bloggers!"

"I would like to open by paraphrasing Dobzhanzky's well-known title (1973) and assert that nothing in human psyche and society makes sense except in the light of cultural evolution. Having written the paraphrase I must confess that, alas, I cannot affirm it. The study of cultural evolution will not yet support such an assertion. It is too scattered and incomplete. Yet I believe that such a paraphrase indicates the proper scope for a robust investigation of cultural evolution. Accordingly I'll offer a few observations on what we must do to move in that direction."

"The Tin Can API (sometimes known as the Experience API) is a brand new specification for learning technology that makes it possible to collect data about the wide range of experiences a person has (online and offline). This API captures data in a consistent format about a person or group's activities from many technologies. Very different systems are able to securely communicate by capturing and sharing this stream of activities using Tin Can's simple vocabulary."

Home Blogs Think Tank Better Than Free: How Lynda.com Made a Pay Wall Pay by Megan Erickson January 26, 2012, 12:00 AM Computer What's the Big Idea? Free is easy. In an age when just about anything can be shared, the hard part is getting people to pay for it. For ten years, content creators have argued that if you want watch, read, or listen to something, you have to support the writing, editing, and production work that has gone into it. Usually, this translates into nothing more than guilt-tripping or flattering an audience into making a donation, since it's widely assumed that putting content behind pay wall is a sure way to kill a site's traffic.

"Spaced Learning is a learning method in which the condensed learning content is repeated three times, with two 10-minute breaks during which distractor activities such as physical activities are performed by the students.[1] It is based on the temporal pattern of stimuli for creating long-term memories reported by R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American in 2005.[2] This 'temporal code' Fields used in his experiments was developed into a learning method and tested by Paul Kelley as reported in Making Minds[3] in 2008."

"Homeschooling is spreading all around the world, but it is also being outlawed-particularly in Sweden and Germany, which use harsh, punitive, authoritarian actions to breakup homeschooling families. It is fascinating to see a common motivation for homeschooling's worldwide growth to be dissatisfaction with conventional school practices and a desire for more personalized learning, though, as Germany proves in particular, religious motivations for homeschooling continue to challenge European policymakers and make news. Here's a roundup of homeschooling news from abroad I'm following; please send me your news or other information to help spread the word about what's happening around the world for homeschoolers."

Grockit, a company that applies social networking and gaming mechanics to studying, just closed another $7 million round of financing to fuel its international growth. Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/17/grockit-raises-7m/#yCtOzoULuGdjfEC3.99