Group items tagged

"New York Times to Suspend Online-Education Program"

"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."

It is not uncommon for true visionaries to perform poorly in the constraints of a classroom. No matter how progressive the teacher, a classroom has a certain level of restriction. Teachers have preconceived notions about what students need to learn and how they should learn it. The most forward-thinking, creative students often tend to be frustrated by those restrictions. As a result, they are limited by instructors who cannot accept, or do not want to accept, new possibilities. Shortly after Sir John Gurdon won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year, a report circulated that had been written by one of his high-school biology teachers. The report lambasted the young scientist, stating: "Several times he has been in trouble, because he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way." This perfectly illustrates how teachers can fail to recognize a new way of thinking. In our most obstinate moments, the mere suggestion that a student can do something contrary to the way we teach it and still become successful is inconceivable.

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.

"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."

"All Our Ideas is a research project that seeks to develop a new form of social data collection by combining the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods. Using the power of the web, we are creating a data collection tool that has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing for new information to "bubble up" from respondents as happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups. "

"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,"

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.

"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. "

Freelance Professors December 14, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain "Self-employed professor" could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them and share the tuition revenue. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/14/two-companies-give-faculty-more-control-online-courses#ixzz2J7h5IRxb Inside Higher Ed

Disintermediating students and teachers.

"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."

How can you transform a classroom full of students into a community of learners? Betsy Page Sigman, a distinguished teaching professor in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., has tried over the years to add new types of technology to her database and e-commerce classes to engage her students.

"Aldous Huxley vs. George Orwell "Amusing Ourselves To Death" is a very cool infographic showing a comparison between Aldous Huxley's view of the future from "Brave New World" and George Orwell's fears or vision expressed in "Nineteen-Eighty-Four". Enjoy!"

"Over the last couple of months we at Mozilla have been hosting community calls in an attempt to come to a consensus around a new, open learning standard for Web Literacy. This is a contested area, for many of the reasons I point out in my yet-to-be-published paper on different types of ambiguity."

"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?", "

"In 2020, the annual amount of digital data created, replicated and consumed will total more than 5,200 gigabytes for every man, woman and child on the planet, according to a new International Data Corp. report. That's 50 times the amount of per-person data than in 2010. Once it's consumed, almost all of the rough information today effectively vanishes in the overall ocean of data. Yet within the data are tidbits of facts on customers, suppliers and business operations that, if linked, could prove useful or even profitable. Seeing the potential, some businesses are sizing up the trove - the data they control and other's. We are on the cusp of the data wars."

The Evolution of Cognition William L. Benzon and David G. Hays Abstract: With cultural evolution new processes of thought appear. Abstraction is universal, but rationalization first appeared in ancient Greece, theorization in Renaissance Italy, and model building in twentieth-century Europe. These processes employ the methods of metaphor, metalingual definition, algorithm, and control, respectively. The intellectual and practical achievements of populations guided by the several processes and exploiting the different mechanisms differ so greatly as to warrant separation into cultural ranks. The fourth rank is not completely formed, while regions of the world and parts of every population continue to operate by the processes of earlier ranks.

"University Ventures (UV) is the premier investment firm focused exclusively on the global higher education sector. UV pursues a differentiated strategy of 'innovation from within'. By partnering with top-tier universities and colleges and then strategically directing private capital to develop programs of exceptional quality that address major economic and social needs, UV expects to set new standards for student outcomes and advance the development of the next generation of colleges and universities on a global scale. "

"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."

"In his new book To Sell is Human, author Daniel Pink reports that education is one of the fastest growing job categories in the country. And with this growth comes the opportunity to change the way educators envision their roles and their classrooms. Guided by findings in educational research and neuroscience, the emphasis on cognitive skills like computation and memorization is evolving to include less tangible, non-cognitive skills, like collaboration and improvisation. Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas."