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The primary benefits of GBL [game-based learning] are that it is engaging, user-centered, authentic, inspires creativity, and promotes literacy in many different ways. When considering the Maker Movement and GBL the most natural alignment is to have students designing or making games. ...it has the potential to engage students in a wide variety of activities that can support the development of many valuable skills. Designing and developing a game requires planning and research, teamwork, technical skills, computer literacy, imagination, and creativity. A well-supported design project can help students develop all of these skills will simultaneously enhancing knowledge of any subject. The Maker Movement already supports interactions that would meet these objectives.

Designing Technology and Pedagogy to Promote 21st Century Literacies in the Humanities A talk by Brian Johnsrud (Stanford) and Emily Schneider (Stanford) at the Digital Humanities Focal Group "We've been told time and again: the information landscape is shifting, creating new ways of interacting with multimedia, sprawling archives, and digital, participatory cultures. These changes are (slowly) being echoed in the humanities classroom, as reading digitally, communicating online, and analyzing interactive, multimedia artifacts are being integrated into existing practices traditionally valued in the humanities. In this talk, Brian Johnsrud and Emily Schneider will share their research on how traditional humanistic practices can be enlivened and extended with new digital tools and objects of analysis. The key questions inherent to this research include: What kinds of "21 st century literacies" are required for productive engagement with new media and learning practices,both in and outside of classrooms? And how might courses in the humanities support students in developing these literacies? Lacuna Stories, a digital reading and writing platform currently being developed in the Poetic Media Lab, takes on this challengeby merging academic texts and media with the interactive affordances of the Web. This talk will give an overview of"21 st century literacies," discuss their connection to the overall learning goals of the humanities, and showcase several "old"and "new" literacies that Lacuna Stories is designed to support."

"The LRMI is working to make it easier to publish, discover and deliver quality educational content on the web by creating a standard tagging framework for learning resources. Through its proof of concept project, the LRMI aims to document best practices for tagging to the LRMI specification and provide support for publishers by helping them understand the "real world" application of the LRMI. T"

"Published March 21, 2013 Kelly A. Lack As online courses continue to gain in popularity at colleges and universities throughout the country, knowledge about the effectiveness of this mode of instruction, relative to that of traditional, face-to-face courses, becomes increasingly important. A 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education provides a meta-analysis of studies published up to 2008, examining the relative effectiveness of the different delivery formats in helping various populations of students learn different types of course content. This Ithaka S+R literature review complements that effort. It examines several studies that are not included in the DOE report, focusing on research that compares online or hybrid learning to face-to-face instruction in the context of semester-length, undergraduate-level, credit-bearing courses. The review yields little evidence to support broad claims that online or hybrid learning is significantly more effective or significantly less effective than courses taught in a face-to-face format, while also highlighting the need for further studies on this topic. The value of research of this kind will only grow as even more sophisticated, interactive online systems continue to be developed, and as the current budgetary constraints and enrollment pressures on postsecondary institutions strengthen the case for improving productivity."

"The University Innovation Fellows program offers undergraduate students in engineering and other fields the training and support to become leaders who catalyze change on their home campuses. The Fellows, nominated by their deans and faculty, help attract students to innovation and entrepreneurship movements on campus. Read more about the Fellows' activities » The program is run by the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), which is funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Stanford University and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). Visit the home of the University Innovation Fellows: dreamdesigndeliver.org"

"EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A new business landscape is emerging wherein a multitude of small entities will bring products and services to market using the infrastructure and platforms of large, concentrated players. The forces driving this are putting new and mounting pressures on organizations and individuals while also opening up new opportunities. But traditional postsecondary educational institutions are not supporting individuals in successfully navigating this not-too-distant future, nor are the educational institutions immune to these forces. Perhaps more than any other sector, postsecondary education is being affected by changing demand as the learning needs and preferences of the individual consumer rapidly evolve. Increasingly, individuals need both lifelong learning and accelerated, on-demand learning, largely as a response to the pressures of the broader evolving economic landscape. Rarely seen amid gross national statistics on the skills gap, employability, completion rates, and tuition hikes is a serious discussion of the unmet, and increasingly disparate, needs and expectations of individual learners. The costs to the individual are increasing, and the payoff is less certain. Students of all ages are more comfortable with technology and are less tied to traditional notions of the academy as fewer American adults between the ages of 18 and 22 achieve a four-year, full-time, campus-based degree.1 At the same time, technological advances reduce the lifespan of specific skills, and an increasingly globalized and automated workforce needs to continuously learn and retrain."

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn. Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example: Learning a language Studying for medical and law exams Memorizing people's names and faces Brushing up on geography Mastering long poems Even practicing guitar chords!"

In this 2014.06.16 guest post and extensive follow-up comments about an evolving educational technology rubric, Thornbury draws upon second language acquisition literature to generate "a list of 'observations'" (¶3), upon which in turn to base general questions about the "fitness for purpose" (¶1) of various products and services available to facilitate and support language learning.