Group items tagged

"Lack of civility in online forums within learning communities is manageable in small, closed online learning communities where an instructor is in control of a class of up to thirty, or even forty students. However, as classes expand, with MOOCs, and other types of learning communities growing, in combination with platforms that allow anonymity (such as Coursera) it will become an issue for educators [and their institutions] involved in online learning at some time or another. Peers within my network have shared their experiences as students and instructors within MOOCs that involve politically charged or contentious subject matters where discussion forums are fraught with offensive, even toxic comments and vitriol discussion.  It is for this reason that I write this post; to provoke thought and discussion in order for educators to be proactive and develop appropriate strategies."

"For example, there's a lot of overlap in the processes of reading and the processes used for understanding speech - processes that assign syntactic roles to words. Do we see any evidence that people are having a harder time understanding spoken language? Or does the problem lie in the mental processes that build understanding of larger blocks of language, as when we're comprehending a story? If so, habitual Web users should have a hard time understanding complex narratives not just when they read, but in television and movies. No one should have watched The Sopranos, with its complicated, interweaving plotlines."

"How much time does it take to teach an online course? Does teaching online take more or less time than teaching face-to-face? How much time does it take instructors to develop an online course?"

"I have argued the futility of continuing to call the connectivist-style online courses by the term MOOC. In popular culture MOOC means Udacity, Coursera or EdX, and Andrew Ng's keynote on Wednesday showed the tone-deafness of the dominant paradigm. At #OpenEd13 debate continued among the group of experts (and this conference was full of experts) regarding how we properly define a MOOC, akin to the debate at Educause where Mathieu Plourde argued that every term in the acronym is negotiable. My argument at #OpenEd13 is that such thinking is counter-productive to the political and cultural conversation about distance, online and open education: those of us in that world are still arguing about the definition, but in the mainstream the ship has sailed, and we need to accept that the term MOOC no longer means what it did in 2008."

"We're very excited to recognize these cool tools, leaders and trendsetters in the education technology space. We intend to continue contributing to the forward motion of this revolution, and we salute those dedicated souls that create the human energy involved in such an undertaking. Well done! Continue! With that, here are the finalists and winners…"

"Creating and Curating a Digital Identity is a serious responsibility. I want to be open as I learn, yet feel shy about opening myself up to the world. I want to contribute to my own learning and to others learning. I want to connect to others in as many ways and on as many venues as possible to add to that learning, all while conducting myself in as professional a manner as possible. Having tools like Twitter and Google+ available can make those connections happen, bringing the right people and information together for the learning to occur, but the very nature of these tools…bringing together the world…is a reason to be cautious. I need to be careful in conduct and choice of words to be sure that only my best foot is forward and that I am seen as a serious learner and professional."

"Self-determined learning or heutagogy is fast gaining interest from educators around the world interested in an evidence-based approach to learning. Grounded as it is on brain research and extensive research into how people learn self-determined learning is particularly popular among those interested in innovative approaches to learning. This edited book is the perfect primer on self-determined learning or heutagogy. It consists of an introductory chapter explaining the main concepts and principles of this exciting approach to educational practice. This is followed by 16 chapters describing the experience of practitioners in using the approach. These experiences come from a wide variety of interests including school education, higher education, workplace learning, consulting, lifelong learning, training, and community education. Full of links to resources, curated sites,and discussion forums, this is a valuable 'how to' book for the interested practitioner and theoretician alike."

"I think the most significant change is in the recognition of information literacy as a set of multiple literacies. This means that information literacy will need to redefined (and it was ill-defined to begin with). It also means that the pedagogy of information literacy will have to change. It will become a pedagogy of multiliteracies."