Group items tagged

"TASCAM's iM2 turns the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch into a high-quality stereo recorder. A pair of condenser microphones---the same high quality as TASCAM's best-selling DR-series recorders---plugs into the dock connector of your Apple device. The microphones are adjustable over 180 degrees for the best sound placement."

""In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all," Liberman wrote me. "In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like 'This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.'""

"More troubling is the microphone. The TV boasts a "voice recognition" feature that allows viewers to control the screen with voice commands. But the service comes with a rather ominous warning: "Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party." Got that? Don't say personal or sensitive stuff in front of the TV."

"The challenge of presenting alternative "views" of symbolic and semantic content makes up the leading edge of accessibility research today and many problems have yet to be solved. This document presents an overview of approaches currently in development or in use in fields such as: Mathematics Sciences Simulations and immersion Robots and telepresence Charts, diagrams, and tables Geography and maps Music Languages"

"OpenSalt is a powerful tool for creating and managing competency frameworks. PCG provides a hosted service for managing and providing CASE API interfaces and support and maitenance for the platfrom. OpenSALT is also an Open Srouce platfrom you can run yourself or contrbute to. You can learn more about open salt "

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"

Of course the current big buzz in the LMS arena is analytics: over the past few years each and all of the LMS providers, on their own or in partnership with other firms, have announced an analytics strategy and analytic applications that allow faculty, departments, and institutions to leverage student transactional data extracted from the LMS for analytic purposes intended to aid student academic performance, course completion, student retention, and learning outcomes.

"Note that Virtual Worlds is chugging out of the Trough of Disillusionment, with only 5-10 years to arrive at the Plateau of Productivity. Big Data and Gamification have a bit more hype to hype before their demise. In-Memory Analytics and Text Analytics are just now descending into the Trough! On, no! While Predictive Analytics is cruising!"

"Where's Sakai headed?   Toward interoperability without sacrificing customizations, flexibility, diverse feature set, peer-based innovation and lower costs. Sakai 10 is about to be released. This release celebrates ten years of Sakai providing flexibility, control and cost savings.  Sakai 10 is the first of a series of releases that will respond to the needs of higher ed stakeholders everywhere."

"Since most students can type very quickly, laptops encourage them to copy down nearly everything said in the classroom. But when students stare at the screen of their laptops, something is lost. The students shift from being intellectuals, listening to one another, to being customer-service representatives, taking down orders. Class is supposed to be a conversation, not an exercise in dictation. "

The result, should the trend continue, might not be a learning management system, but what analysts call a "learning ecosystem." Not a black hole where content is dumped at one end of the semester and grades at the other, but an open platform where faculty members are free to browse and embed the tools they want to use -- for example quizzes from Khan Academy, plagiarism detection from Turnitin or a homegrown solution -- regardless of whether they logged into Learn or Sakai, and regardless of whether their system has its own, similar tool.