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Contents contributed and discussions participated by gary chinn

gary chinn

MIT Will Offer Certificates to Outside Students Who Take Its Online Courses - Technolog... - 3 views

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    MIT steps into credentialing world. sounds like they are adding interactive pieces, a la stanford's growing portfolio of courses, but also offering certificates for fee. interesting on many levels.
gary chinn

Think You're An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely : Shots - Heal... - 0 views

  • When he reviewed studies of learning styles, he found no scientific evidence backing up the idea. "We have not found evidence from a randomized control trial supporting any of these," he says, "and until such evidence exists, we don't recommend that they be used." Willingham suggests it might be more useful to figure out similarities in how our brains learn, rather than differences. And, in that case, he says, there's a lot of common ground. For example, variety. "Mixing things up is something we know is scientifically supported as something that boosts attention," he says, adding that studies show that when students pay closer attention, they learn better.
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    along with the whole generational differences in learning (netgen, etc) angle, learning styles have always seemed suspect. perhaps it's the way it has been communicated, but regardless I thought this story was an interesting one.
gary chinn

Flipped Classroom Infographic #flippedclassroom #blendedlearning #edtech - 4 views

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    infographic about classroom flip use case in K12.
gary chinn

How Big Can E-Learning Get? At Southern New Hampshire U., Very Big - Technology - The C... - 0 views

  • In a former textile mill in downtown Manchester, the university's president, Paul J. ­LeBlanc, has installed a team of for-profit veterans who help run a highly autonomous online outfit that caters to older students, with classes taught mostly by low-paid adjuncts. Their online operation is the institution's economic engine, subsidizing its money-losing undergraduate campus, known as University College, whose 2,350 students enjoy a new dining hall, Olympic-size pool, and small classes taught largely by full-time professors. "The traditional campus, in some ways, now has the resources to be even more traditional," Mr. LeBlanc says in his office on the suburban main campus, four miles from the online college. "And the nontraditional, with this split, has the ability to be even more nontraditional."
  • "It doesn't seem to me to be the 'disruptive innovation' that's going to transform things," says Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University and one of the authors of Academically Adrift, a harsh critique of undergraduate learning. "It seems to me like just business as usual.
  • But can a mainstream organization harness a disruptive innovation? "With few exceptions," he writes in The Innovator's Dilemma, that approach has succeeded only when managers "set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology."
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  • A lucrative one, too. With 7,000 online students, up from 1,700 four years ago, the College of Online and Continuing Education is on track to generate $73-million in revenues this year and more than $100-million next year. It posted a 41-percent "profit" margin in the 2011 fiscal year. The university plows the surplus into new buildings, employee salaries, financial aid at the traditional campus, and improvements in the online program.
  • Ms. Cohen, the math professor, has felt that some online courses failed to match those offered face to face. She is in a unique position to judge, as a full-time professor who teaches both in classrooms and online, and who also serves on the Web college's curriculum committee. Visiting online classes in past years, she found personal interaction with students lacking. Online faculty were teaching without any tests, only assignments and discussion. "That's not teaching a math course," she says.
  • Nationally, undergraduates complement their educations with online classes, but little evidence exists that students under 23 are actively pursuing all or the majority of their study online, says Mr. Garrett, of Eduventures
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    very interesting article from the chronicle, touching on online teaching, innovation, instructional quality, faculty roles, and the needs of different student populations.
gary chinn

Now You See It: How the Science of Attention is Changing Work and Education | Brain Pic... - 1 views

  • Davidson uses the insights from these experiments as a lens through which to examine the nature and evolution of attention, noting that the educational system is driven by very rigid expectations of what “attention” is and how it reflects “intelligence,” a system in which students who fail to meet these expectations and pay attention differently are pigeonholed somehow deficient of aberrant, square pegs in round holes. Yet neuroscience is increasingly indicating that our minds pay attention in a myriad different ways, often non-linear and simultaneous, which means that the academy and the workplace will have to evolve in parallel and transcend the 20th-century linear assembly-line model for eduction and work.
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    am currently reading 'brain rules' & 'how learning works,' and I think this book might be a good addition to the list.
gary chinn

Will a Harvard Professor's New Technology Make College Lectures a Thing of the Past? - ... - 3 views

  • Mazur sold attendees at the recent Building Learning Communities conference on this new approach by first asking them to identify something they're good at, and then having them explain how they mastered it. After the crowd shared, Mazur pointed out that no one said they'd learned by listening to lectures. Similarly, Mazur said, college students don't learn by taking notes during a lecture and then regurgitating information. They need to be able to discuss concepts, apply them to problems and get real-time feedback. Mazur says Learning Catalytics enables this process to take place.
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    anyone familiar with Learning Catalytics? sounds like it's invite-only, but might be worth a look.
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    an engagement initiative seems like a good idea. many of the approaches are implementations of active learning strategies, and I think having faculty from multiple disciplines exploring and sharing is a good way to test the effectiveness of various approaches. we just met with faculty from architectural engineering who've been flipping since 2008. one observation they made was that they flipped to allow student teams to work on group projects during class time. I had always thought that was a good idea for logistical purposes (especially in a team-heavy college like engineering), but they made a point I had not thought of: using classroom flip in that manner also allowed for the teams to have access to faculty advice and guidance while they were meeting to work on their projects. that seems like it may have huge benefits, especially at key points in a group assignment. all a long way of saying, there's much to learn. the blended learning initiative was essentially a 'classroom flip' approach as well, so some of the ways faculty adapted instruction for those courses might be relevant here too.
gary chinn

Chomp, chomp chomp! Welcome ScreenChomp and TechSmith Labs! (Visual Lounge) - 5 views

  • ScreenChomp is a digital whiteboard that users can write and draw on with the touch of a finger. You can draw using twelve different pen colors. All activity on ScreenChomp can be easily recorded and then if you want, edited through Camtasia for Mac or Camtasia Studio. The videos produced in ScreenChomp can be downloaded as MP4 files, making them easy to share on ScreenChomp.com, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, Blackboard and other video hosting platforms.
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    another ipad app for screencasting. as far as I know, this is the first example of an app from one of the big established screen capture software companies.
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    we had the same delay complaint with showme. also didn't like that there were no export options outside of posting to their site.
gary chinn

Where to hack education and where to stack it | VentureBeat - 0 views

  • It’s great to have smart people and money helping to discover and build innovations in education. But does Fred Wilson really advocate getting rid of schools entirely in favor of teaching each other on the internet? If not, then how far do we want to go? Indeed, we need to make distinctions here. Education is a many fangled thing, not all of it served well by hacking. In some areas, our kids will be better served if we stack (that is, double down on what already works) instead of hack their experiences
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    interesting perspective, I like the notion that education isn't a monolith but instead a collection of intertwined areas.
gary chinn

Interactive Whiteboard Meets the iPad | MindShift - 2 views

  • Kim told me he wants to enable anyone to build their own portfolio of educational content – to build hundreds of Khan Academies. That’s a goal that puts teacher- and student-generated content at the center of education, one enabled by a simple, but smoothly functioning app — all on a portable device.
  • At the same time as many educators are rethinking the hardware involved with instruction, some are rethinking other ways in technology can change the classroom. Some are experimenting with the “flipped classroom” — the idea, made quite famous lately thanks to Khan Academy, that videotaped instruction can be assigned as homework, while in-class time can be used for more personalized remediation, for collaboration among teachers and students, and for the types of exercises that have typically been seen as homework. A new app taps into both of these phenomena: bringing an interactive whiteboard-like experience to the iPad and to the Web and making it easy for iPad owners to create their own instructional videos.
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    very interesting development. we've been holding off on ipads in engineering because of a lack of streamlined screencasting workflow. I wonder if other example-heavy STEM disciplines at PSU (chem, math, stats, etc) might be interested in a pilot of some kind?
gary chinn

News: 'Now You See It' - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

  • Q: What are some of the ways that you've applied ideas and research about attention and learning in your own classroom? A: I rarely lecture anymore. I structure my classes now with each unit led by two students, who are responsible for researching and assigning texts and writing assignments and who then are charged with grading those assignments. The next week, two other students become our peer leaders. Students learn the fine art of giving and receiving feedback and learning from one another. I structure midterms as collaborative “innovation challenges,” an incredibly difficult exercise which is also the best way of intellectually reviewing the course material I’ve ever come up with. In other words, more and more I insist on students’ taking responsibility for their learning and communicating their ideas to the general public using social media.
  • If you want to learn more, you can find syllabuses and blogs on both the HASTAC and the DMLCentral site. I posted about “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” and “Twenty-First Century Literacies.” I also led a forum on interactive pedagogy in large lecture classes.
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    haven't read the book, but it might have some good stuff...
gary chinn

On the Benefits of Lectures - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

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    this topic seems to come up every year, but at least this story is tied to a study. the comments are actually pretty interesting. might turn into a decent conversation.
gary chinn

Students Say Tablets Will Transform College, Though Most Don't Own Tablets - Wired Camp... - 1 views

  • More than two-thirds of a large group of college students say that tablet computers will change the way students learn, according to survey results released today
  • Most of the students were not speaking from experience: Only 7 percent of the college students and 4 percent of the high school seniors owned one. Still, 69 percent of the college students said that tablets will transform higher education, and 48 percent said tablets will replace textbooks—at least as we currently understand textbooks—within the next five years.
  • That attitude may change once they try to study with tablets for an exam. Several pilot projects with tablets have found that students are frustrated with the difficulties in adding notes to digital books
gary chinn

Tim Harford's Adapt: How to fund research so that it generates insanely great ideas, no... - 2 views

  • What did Capecchi do? He took the NIH's money, and, ignoring their admonitions, he poured almost all of it into his risky gene-targeting project. It was, he recalls, a big gamble. If he hadn't been able to show strong enough initial results in the three-to-five-year time scale demanded by the NIH, they would have cut off his funding. Without their seal of approval, he might have found it hard to get funding from elsewhere. His career would have been severely set back, his research assistants looking for other work. His laboratory might not have survived.In 2007, Mario Capecchi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for this work on mouse genes. As the NIH's expert panel had earlier admitted, when agreeing to renew his funding: "We are glad you didn't follow our advice."
  • Whichever way they sliced the data, Azoulay, Manzo and Zivin found evidence that the more open-ended, risky HHMI grants were funding the most important, unusual, and influential research. HHMI researchers, apparently no better qualified than their NIH-funded peers, were far more influential, producing twice as many highly cited research articles. They were more likely to win awards and more likely to train students who themselves won awards.
  • The HHMI researchers also produced more failures; a higher proportion of their research papers were cited by nobody at all. No wonder: The NIH program was designed to avoid failure, while the HHMI program embraced it. And in the quest for truly original research, some failure is inevitable.
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    not specific to education at all, but a fascinating & well-written article about innovation, risk-taking and societal choices.
gary chinn

In college, it's not so much who lectures as how the teaching is done, Nobelist's study... - 2 views

  • He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
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    story about clicker use that vicki williams found. I'd be less inclined to think it was that big a deal (it's only one study, not a meta-analysis, etc), but it's being published in Science is huge in terms of visibility.
gary chinn

Is Your School Ready for Google's Chromebooks for Education? | MindShift - 2 views

  • Are Your Teachers Ready? Successful one-to-one computing initiatives aren’t as simple as just passing out devices to each student. One-to-one computing requires rethinking how instruction happens, how resources are accessed and allocated. Are your school’s teachers ready for not just one-to-one computing — a huge shift in itself — but for one-to-one computing that’s solely focused on Web resources? Are you using Web-based applications, for example? How much does your school rely on software installed on machines, and can you make the transition to other online tools instead?
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    aimed at k12 readership (as far as I can tell, anyway), but brings up some interesting points.
gary chinn

How Do We Prepare Kids for Jobs We Can't Imagine Yet? Teach Imagination - Education - GOOD - 3 views

  • Instead of simply putting their research on how to foster imagination, creativity, and conceptual thinking into a report, King and Fouts decided to create a free, easy-to-use web portal that's full of the ideas and solutions that they've found work best. Interestingly, instead of the model of individual success and standardized test taking that currently exists in schools, the education approaches they've found best foster imagination also teach kids to collaborate to solve problems.
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    I like the idea behind the project, as well as the portal-style organization. fun to take a look at some of these.
gary chinn

Can Gamification Boost Independent Learning? | MindShift - 0 views

  • The question now is whether (or how) gamification can be used in education. Are there ways in which it can be used to similar ends, to help students feel more involved and engaged in their learning?
  • Even without the new rewards system for helping, plenty of users on OpenStudy already offer each other help. Some of the most loyal users of the site happen to also be some of the most active with offering their assistance. The gamification elements will recognize these helpful users, and encourage the behavior to spread.
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    haven't looked too closely at openstudy, might have to check it out. who wouldn't want to be a superhero? :)
gary chinn

PR-USA.net - Flat World Knowledge Puts Faculty in Control With "Make It Your Own" Textb... - 0 views

  • Flat World Knowledge, the largest publisher of free and open college textbooks for students worldwide, today announced the release of a new platform called MIYO (Make It Your Own) (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/miyo). The fully-automated system gives professors greater control over textbook content, and the ability, with one click, to make their modified book available to students free online or in multiple, low-cost digital and print formats.
  • The new system uses familiar drag-and-drop and click features that allow instructors to easily move or delete chapters and sections; upload Word and PDF documents; add notes and exercises; insert video and hyperlinks; edit sentences; and incorporate other content that is free to reuse under a Creative Commons open license.
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    story about release of new platform from one of david wiley's projects.
gary chinn

Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl's "Fisch Flip" | Connected Principals - 4 views

  • If kids can get the lectures, can get the content delivery and skill modeling as well (or often better) by computer lecture than in person, why do we have use precious class-time for this purpose?  Why do we, in the status quo,  replicate in person in our classrooms what is easily available elsewhere, the content delivery/skill modeling, and then have kids apply their learning to difficult problems at home, without us there to help? Increasingly,  education’s value-add is and will be in the coaching and troubleshooting when students are applying their learning, and in challenging students to apply their thinking to hands-on learning by doing and teaming:  so let’s have them do these things in class, not sit and listen.   We know that collaboration is a critical skill set which can’t be developed easily either on-line or at home alone– let’s have students learn it with us in our classrooms.   Let every classroom be a collaborative problem solving laboratory or studio.
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    not a new article, but I just found it. I think these kinds of strategies are good to have in mind when thinking through implications of lecture capture. "classroom flip" is one example, and a different spin on one that the Blended Learning Initiative at PSU explored; in this case, instruction would be delivered via video instead of text/graphics web pages, but the goal of freeing classroom time is the same.
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    has great potential for mid-week short example problems or "muddiest point" videos as well. it seems like an important part of the roll-out would be communicating the possibilities beyond the straight lecture capture, many of which we've probably not thought of yet.
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    I think pink's an interesting guy & good writer. we actually emailed his reps when we were planning an innovation & engineering workshop because his book "drive" talks a good deal about mastery and that was a topic we were interested in. but the quote we received was ~$45k, which was over 3 times our speaker budget. who knows, though, he might have an ed discount. :) I always found esther hargittai's work to be very interesting, though she is perhaps too 'academic' for the purposes of the symposium.
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    I certainly don't envy the symposium planning group; it's a diverse audience, so finding a speaker who resonates with most attendees seems like a daunting task. as for the book, a few friends have told me that pink's 20 minute ted talk has pretty much everything that's in the book, save some examples. very interesting topic, though. would be good fodder for a 'book club' discussion. the other book that might be good for a group read is digital habitats: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Habitats-stewarding-technology-communities/dp/0982503601/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304001207&sr=1-1 there's info in there about communities of practice & technology stewardship that I really liked. who knows, perhaps Etienne Wenger could be an intriguing potential speaker? FYI, I have an extra copy of the book in my cube if anyone wants to borrow it.
gary chinn

10 Ways Open CourseWare Has Freed Education | MindShift - 1 views

  • The decision by the MIT faculty in 2001 to allow anyone to use their course content was a seminal move,  one that had a profound effect on democratizing education.
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