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"Recently I asked a student in my Digital Culture class what she hoped to get out of it. Other students have said they hope to get more proficient at blogging or becoming more informed about digital issues. But she surprised me. In fact, she seemed to push back a bit. Why should I learn yet another thing to do online when I already waste enough time there?"

One of the questions about badges that came up seems like a crucial issue as we grapple with different ways of characterizing and describing badges. This post aims to add the category of badge functions to other badge taxonomies like the one by Carla Casilli.

Value of using tablets and are they effective for educational purposes k-12

"This approach doesn't entirely invalidate existing computational idea patents, because they would continue to apply to implementations using special-purpose hardware. This is an advantage because it eliminates an argument against the legal validity of the plan. The U.S. passed a law some years ago shielding surgeons from patent lawsuits, so that even if surgical procedures are patented, surgeons are safe. That provides a precedent for this solution."

The purpose of this document is two-fold: - to offer an online history of the development of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - to use that history to describe major elements of a MOOC

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.

"The session was insightful, and several readers may find the tips shared helpful, which is the purpose of this post. Strategies shared in the session are applicable to online course design in general and are not exclusive to Canvas. I'll include the highlights of the session-an insiders look at MOOCs based on Andersen's experience supporting thirty MOOCs in her role with Canvas as Director of Learning, and the methods she shared for creating activities that drive learning and sustain student interest. I have no doubt that many readers will find what Anderson has to say instructive and helpful, even more so for to those considering developing a MOOC, and/or planning to teach one in the future."

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC): an online course or content aiming at large-scale interactive participation and open access. Open Educational Resources (OER): freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. ($): Requires some financial investment

Hoarders stockpile online information for their use ONLY. They have no intention to share it, remix it or even think deeply about it. Such information isolation is unhealthy and unproductive. It's not something to model for colleagues or students. However, all was not lost. I found redemption by beginning to store information with a larger purpose: to share it.

"China just began a major education reform effort that is aimed at reducing the importance of standardized testing in determining school quality and including factors such as student engagement, boredom, anxiety, and happiness. It also seeks to cut back on the amount of school work students are given. As scholar Yong Zhao notes in the following post, the approach is the opposite of the education reform path in the United States, which in recent years has increased the importance of test scores for accountability purposes."

Lecturers in higher education often consider the incorporation of web technologies into their teaching practice. Partially structured and populated course site templates could aid them in getting started with creating and deploying webbased materials and activities to enrich the teaching and learning experience. Discussions among instructional technology support staff and lecturers reveal a paucity of robust specifications for possible course site features that could comprise a template. An attempted mapping from the teaching task as understood by the instructor to the envisaged course website properties proves elusive. We conclude that the idea of an initial state for a course site, embodied in a template, remains useful and should be developed not according to a formula but with careful attention to the context and existing pedagogical practice. Any course template provided for the use of lecturers should be enhanced with supporting instructions and examples of how it may be adapted for their particular purposes.

"These dual characteristics of "open" are also core to Open Educational Resources (OER). Hewlett's updated OER definition begins: "OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." That is, for an educational resource to be "open" it must be both gratis (available at no-cost) and libre (everyone has the legal rights to repurpose the resource). An OER cannot be freely available or openly licensed - it must be both freely available and openly licensed (or in the public domain) to be an OER."

"Despite statistics showing that more college admissions officers, as well as hiring managers, check applicants' Facebook pages, many teenagers are still lax about social media security, continuing to post content that is detrimental to their online reputation. Michael P. Grace, president and CEO of Virallock, spoke with AllFacebook about the mistakes that high school and college students are making on Facebook and how they can clean up their acts for a better future."

"Instead of using Facebook primarily as a communication device with friends (there's Facebook messages for that purpose), Grace said students should use their profiles as secondary resumés. If a student is applying to a college and their application shows that they were involved in, say, Model U.N. or the choir, they should have some kind of evidence of their activities. Likewise, if volunteer work is mentioned, teens should make sure they have photos of that on their Facebook page. When a college admissions officer or a hiring manager sees a prospect's Facebook page, they want to see evidence of positivity and accomplishments. Grace says taking this kind of approach can help young people stand out from their peers."

"The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news - from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

"One of the key insights I learned in the process was that mature companies establish purpose to create the kind of holistic alignment that inspires and drives enterprise-wide change. I consistently found that customer experience (CX) often served as a primary catalyst for driving change with CMOs and CIOs helping them come together to jointly lead common efforts."

"Wirearchy is an emergent organizing principle that informs the ways that purposeful human activities and the structures in which they are contained is evolving from top-down direction and supervision (hierarchy's command-and-control) to champion-and-channel … championing ideas and innovation, and channeling time, energy, authority and resources to testing those ideas and the possibilities for innovation carried in those ideas."

"Creating infographics is a skill much needed in the 21st century classroom. They can serve a wide variety of learning objectives and they are not really hard to make. They are very useful in the sense that they can be used for illustrative purposes. For instance, teachers  can use graphs, diagrams , and colorful templates to present information in such a way that catches students attention."

""Cheating" is defined in different ways but for the purpose of this blog, I would like to use the following definition as it applies best to the field of education.   Cheating is to break a rule or law usually to gain an advantage at something.  Did I get that right?  It really doesn't sound that horrible except for the breaking a rule or law part, right?"

Udacity's Terms of Service specify that content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License, the most restrictive version. This means Udacity videos are sharable only for non-commercial purposes, and derivative works are expressly prohibited. In other words, you may not edit or alter any of those Udacity videos on YouTube, even though they are freely accessible. Creative Commons Director of Global Learning Cable Green specifically recommends that CC NC ND works not be considered OER.

The Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmeier decision, passed in 1988, gives principals and advisors the right to prior restraint of the student press. The justices claimed that the student press was not a "public forum" for expression. Administrators argued that they need to make sure that the school environment is conducive to teaching and learning. They don't want stories that could disrupt the educational atmosphere of the school This was poor judgement on the part of the justices since the purpose of the student press is to encourage students to participate in the public forum.