EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"Mr. Bridges represents a new but promising category in the American labor market: people working in so-called new-collar or middle-skill jobs. As the United States struggles with how to match good jobs to the two-thirds of adults who do not have a four-year college degree, his experience shows how a worker's skills can be emphasized over traditional hiring filters like college degrees, work history and personal references. And elevating skills over pedigree creates new pathways to employment and tailored training and a gateway to the middle class."

"Effective immediately, the single sign-on and gradebook syncing capabilities between the two companies are available for all current and prospective Canvas users. This is especially important for the many faculty who would like to enjoy the benefits of OER but have not had adequate tools and services to support this. With panOpen, not only can faculty make use of the platform tools, but also of panOpen's editors and instructional designers to help ensure that both faculty and students have the best possible experience with open content."

"Florida Virtual Campus is pleased to announce Florida's first Open Educational Resources Summit. Hear from Cable Green, director of Open Education and other national and campus leaders involved in defining and driving OER strategy and initiatives."

"This is the fifth post in a series to dig deeper into the relationship between literacy and documenting learning. HOW does documenting learning have an effects on awareness, skills and developing habits around the so called 21st century "Now" literacies."

"To enable learning environments of greater quality, scale, and power, with continuous and instantaneous digital connections to information, services, and communities, the learning management system of today must be reimagined. New systems are needed that capitalize on the transformative possibilities of technology to personalize instruction and integrate the diverse resources that support learners."

Mission U provides students career-focused, online courses with zero up-front costs. After graduating, students don't pay any tuition until they're earning a yearly salary of $50,000 or more, in which time they would pay 15% of their paycheck to Mission U for 3 years. After those three years are up, students are completely debt free.

"Canvas integration with new Credly rules engine allows digital credentials to be triggered by completion of Canvas modules, assignments or other important achievement milestones"

"the automated text-analysis tool will be tested in a statistics course this fall. For three semesters, students in that class have responded to the same writing prompts, producing hundreds of essays on the same topics. The M-Write team has pored over those papers, identifying the features of papers that met the assignment criteria and those that missed the mark. The findings will be used to design an algorithm that makes the text-analysis tool look for those features."

"The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and Columbia University Libraries have released the Digital Literacy Competency Calculator (DLCC) on GitHub. The DLCC is a web-based tool for representing the connection between digital literacy competencies and the teaching and learning practices that produce them."

"The results are in, and the top landing pages are heavy on content and light on color. At Crayon, we recently analyzed the top 1,000+ landing pages from our web design inspiration site Crayon Inspire. We looked at how they used text, video, and colors, and we even dug into the structure of the most popular landing pages of the last year."

Tool to generate questions by and for a community of students.

"Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements, in Pictures and Words"

"Given our current, collective limitations, what are we to do? Instead of searching out alternative platforms, we might partner with LMSs to reconceptualize the LMS as a platform. In many ways, the LMS is already beginning to evolve in this direction. Canvas has their App Store, which is a more individual faculty-driven model. John Baker of D2L recently utilized the oft-referenced Lego analogy. LMSs in general are moving away from individual building blocks or custom integrations towards open standards like LTI, but the robustness of that interoperability is still inconsistent across what version of LTI their product meets."

"To streamline online course development, the ID Team at CIRT uses course templates to develop online courses for programs transitioning to fully-online."

"Teachers who have begun to challenge these assumptions engage in alternative practices that begin to help us articulate the commitments of connected teaching. These commitments and practices include: COLLABORATION: Connected teachers work collaboratively. CURIOSITY: Connected teachers bring an inquiry mindset to classroom practice. COURAGE: Connected teachers give up some of their control over the learning experience. CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: Connected teachers engage their students in public life. CARE: Connected teachers share their interests and learning with their students."

"The paper's authors measured two types of goal setting, performance based and task based. After surveying close to 4,000 college students in two field experiments, they found that performance-based goals -- setting a goal to earn a certain grade in the class used for the survey -- didn't have a statistically significant effect on whether a student actually got that grade. But when students set their goals on the tasks required to earn those grades, they performed better over all, even though that wasn't explicitly their goal."

"At the time, DeRosa was an English professor teaching a course with the Heath Anthology of American Literature, a textbook she said cost about $90. In May 2015, she and a group of student volunteers began work on what would become her free open textbook, the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature."