Group items tagged

"On Sunday, a salacious article flew across numerous news channels. In print, it was given titles like "Teenagers can no longer tell the real world from the internet, study claims" (Daily Mail) and "Real world v online world: teens do not distinguish" (The Telegraph). This claim can't even pass the basic sniff test, but it was picked up by news programs and reproduced on blogs."

"BCcampus organized an open textbook summit again this year (the first one was last year). I attended, because I'm writing my own open textbook on 'Teaching in a Digital Age.' BCcampus has published its own blog post on the lessons learned, but I came away with something different, from a potential author's perspective."

"Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Essays on meaning and learning networks May 19, 2012. Connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. The bulk of this work is devoted to tracing the implications of this thesis in learning. Yes, this could have been a shorter book - and perhaps one day I'll author a volume without the redundancies, false starts, detours and asides, and other miscellany. Such a volume would be sterile, however, and it feels more true to the actual enquiry to stay true to the original blog posts, essays and presentations that constitute this work."

"When we started using Google Apps in our elementary district a few years ago, we figured it was time to test out electronic ways to present a year's worth of work, instead of the traditional binder. Our fourth, fifth and sixth grade students love using Google Sites to create their own portfolio as a web site. They can be creative, show their personality, and present an easy to navigate body of work to their parents . We continue using those portfolios each year and when it's time to update their portfolios, students get excited to see where they started. "

"I'm pleased to say that there are other faculty at my school who have adopted this same "Declaration" system, and I am always happy when a student remarks in a blog post that they did Declarations in some other class they have taken."

"One of the key components of the IT&DML program is that we're big believers in "open" and to that end as much of the content of our program is open, and available online for your use. The rationale for this is two-fold. I believe this helps us adapt and react to changes in the industry and classroom. I also believe that if our materials are open and online, then anyone can use them…but also they can be critiqued and reviewed by anyone. To that end, I have been, and will continue to reflect on the texts and tools, and the components of the program here on this blog."

There are 3 categories of audio or video recommendations that I found. Each had slightly different requirements for faculties or staffs: Real time meetings or online courses in real time. Here the recommendations are mainly to contact the Disability Resource Office well ahead of the need to set up a real time captioning service if there is an individual who needs it, or if it will be archived online for more than one term. There is also the important guidance to set it up and test it in the same environment before it will be used. Audio or video materials that faculty or staff produce and upload onto the institutional web (this includes courses). The prevailing wisdom is that if the faculty produce it themselves, they should also take responsibility for captioning; whether they do it themselves or not. Considering how easily this can be done in YouTube with a transcript and the synch captions feature, it is probably not too high a bar for someone who has the sophistication of producing the video in the first place. Of course it requires that a transcript is available or produced. Audio or video materials that faculty or staff find for use (e.g., link or upload materials from other sources). On this point there seem to be differences across institutions around what faculty and staff members should do. The section below details these differences.

"FOAM is the movement that has spontaneously emerged from the exploding collection of constantly evolving, collaborative and interactive open access medical education resources being distributed on the web with one objective - to make the world a better place. FOAM is independent of platform or media - it includes blogs, podcasts, tweets, Google hangouts, online videos, text documents, photographs, facebook groups, and a whole lot more."

"The University of Florida made an unusual offer to more than 3,000 high-school students who would otherwise have been rejected for admission: Pass two semesters of online coursework, and then you can enroll on the campus. But less than 10 percent of them took the offer. Joseph Glover, the provost, defended the new option, called the Pathway to Campus Enrollment, or PACE, saying it hadn't been well explained. "This year, now that the program is in place and there is time to advertise and explain what it is all about, we hope to get a better response," he told The Gainesville Sun. Pathway builds on UF Online, the online-only undergraduate program that state legislators pushed for about two years ago."

"The first type of 'Domain' took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn't necessarily empower."

If you are like millions of consumers around the globe, you jump on Twitter, Facebook, your social media site-du-jour or your blog, and complain to friends, family, followers and the world about the lousy service you are experiencing. Perhaps you even locate the company's Twitter handle, if it has one, and complain directly. Will people there answer? How quickly? Will they actually help? And will you go back on social media and report you are now a satisfied customer, or fume even more about their misguided (or lack of) response?

"Of the various professional development opportunities available, social media reigned supreme as the most popular way for educators to keep themselves up to speed on current issues in the education world. And while the report does note, "Most survey participants were pooled from social media websites, resulting in a sampling bias," other sources of information educators use to stay afloat extend beyond social media--Internet search, blogs, academic/education conferences, and news articles all topped 70% (see graph to the right)."

"People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses? That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations."

"When I first began tweeting, I came up with the following "formula" to help guide my work. Identify>Engage>Leverage This approach was (as it is today) pretty simple. If I could find the people I was interested in following, I could engage with them (e.g., retweet their posts, promote their blogs, share their professional achievements, etc.) and then "leverage" these connections; this "leveraging" process would include followers responding to my "Questions of the Week," retweeting my posts, and/or reaching out to me directly referencing my handle in their tweets.) The challenge, of course, is actually finding these "influencers" and in this post I'll share some research approaches that have worked for me."

Mr. Henderson and Michael Phillips, a colleague on the education faculty, have been doing it this way for about five years. They say their students prefer video feedback, finding it clearer and seemingly more sincere than written notes, notwithstanding the lack of polish. And making the videos takes the instructors less time, on average, than would writing out comments longhand.

Some authors will always prefer CC BY-NC-SA or CC BY-NC-ND, for a myriad of different reasons, and we support their choice to do so - but CC BY is widely considered to be the gold standard for open access, as it allows for maximum re-use and discovery. It is also preferred by many funders, and we continue to be compliant with all open access funder mandates.

The TSA might not be the first name you associate with savvy social marketers, but it's gained a wave of media attention (and 235,000 followers) since opening an Instagram account in June 2013. Every Friday, Burns-also known as Blogger Bob-posts a weekly blog that recaps all of the prohibited items found that week.

"Although there have been many claims that technology might enhance university teaching, there are wide variations in how technology is actually used by lecturers. This paper presents a survey of 795 university lecturers' perceptions of the use of technology in their teaching, showing how their responses were patterned by institutional and subject differences. There were positive attitudes towards technology across institutions and subjects but also large variations between different technologies. Two groups of technology were identified-"core" technologies, such as Powerpoint, that were used frequently, even when lecturers felt that they were not having a positive impact on learning, and "marginal" technologies, such as blogs, that were used much less frequently and only where they fitted the pedagogic approach or context. Rather than there being "leading" universities that were the highest users of all technologies, institutions tended to be heavier users of some technologies than others. Similarly, subjects could be associated with particular technologies rather than being consistent users of technology in general. The study suggests that university technology policy should reflect different disciplines and contexts rather than "one size fits all" directives."

"In the wake of the Pearson social media monitoring controversy, edubloggers like Audrey Watters and D'arcy Norman have announced their policies regarding code that can potentially track users on their blogs. This is a good idea, so we are following their example."

"expect to see more colleges turn to these providers, said Michael Feldstein, a consultant and co-publisher of the popular e-Literate blog, who has long followed the OPM market. A survey released last week by The Chronicle of Higher Education and P3-EDU, a conference on public-private partnerships to be hosted by George Mason University, found that 42 percent of provosts, chief financial officers and presidents surveyed said that expanding online programs was the area they most considered turning to a private company to help with."