EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

So my Sunday morning session at EduCon was entitled Beyond Googling: Building the Conditions for Structured Inquiry. The slide-deck is at the bottom of post. It was an evolution of a workshop I've done before, but my whole goal was to really think about the session on both the real and the meta-session level.

"I made a series of posters that I often hang around the room when I facilitate workshops. It's fun for participants to get up and scan them at break time. Each poster features a quote about education or technology. Part of the quote or its author is missing and has been replaced with a QR code."

New education standards place more emphasis on nonfiction reading and writing over fiction works. Some say this could lead students away from a passionate engagement with literature.

The Open Learning Initiative offers online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. Our aim is to combine open, high-quality courses, continuous feedback, and research to improve learning and transform higher education.

The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) links learning and work. CAEL is a nonprofit that works at all levels within the higher education, public, and private sectors to make it easier for people to get the education and training they need.

StraighterLine has been recognized as a revolutionary, innovative force in higher education by major news organizations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Fast Company named StraighterLine one of the 10 Most Innovative Companies in Education , and our students have reported that our college credits have been accepted by hundreds of accredited colleges and universities nationwide.

after teaching the class once and seeing the historical grade distribution instantiate itself, it seemed to me that if I wanted to do something about this acculturation problem, I needed to do three things that weren't happening already:

"Game-based learning is still little understood and underutilized within the Scottish Educational system. Minecraft is a sandbox game similar to Lego that allows the user to create a world using blocks. Minecraft is being used in America and around the world to enhance pupils learning[i]. This study will aim to show that Minecraft corresponds to many of the learning outcomes within the Scottish national performance framework Curriculum for Excellence"

Boundless is pleased to offer open introductory textbooks in the following subjects. These textbooks are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, which means anyone is welcome to quote, mashup, reuse, and republish any portion of any book, anywhere, so long as proper citation is given.

Boundless has been met with a number of lawsuits from top textbook publishers and is currently trying to resolve these differences in court. But, in the meantime, it's pressing on and is today officially adding a familiar name - some legitimacy - to its open textbooks through Creative Commons.

I have somewhere around 25-30 pages of visual notes, which I will share in the next few days. For now, I wanted to share our community mural and the little video we created to introduce it to the world.

While the participants in each conversation deserve the most credit for jumping into play as a pathway for transforming professional practice, the aforementioned facilitators helped scaffold dynamic settings for learning during our time together which felt both entirely awesome and all too short. In response to both on-site and online feedback, I wanted to share some notes on practice before too much time goes by.

Anyone who has ever tried to teach a kid how to multiply knows how hard that job is. (Try teaching a child what an adverb is long enough and you'll develop a facial tic.) But set the student up with an interactive, electronic game that is fun, competitive, and self-diagnostic, and suddenly teaching these basic subjects becomes both efficient and effective. Does that make teachers obsolete? Quite the opposite: it frees them to teach the higher levels of the cognitive domain-analysis, problem solving, synthesis, and creative thinking. The parts teachers normally never get around to because they're too bogged down in the basics.

BY DECREE OF THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS IT SHALL HENCEFORCE BE ORDERED THAT AMERICANS SHALL NOT UNLOCK THEIR OWN SMARTPHONES. PENALTY: In some situations, first time offenders may be fined up to $500,000, imprisoned for five years, or both. For repeat offenders, the maximum penalty increases to a fine of $1,000,000, imprisonment for up to ten years, or both.* That's right, starting this weekend it is illegal to unlock new phones to make them available on other carriers.

At one session here at Davos, the presidents of Harvard, Stanford and MIT all readily acknowledged that the experiments in new models of online learning will soon radically disrupt higher learning. One expert suggested many universities are facing the early days of bankruptcy. Another predicted there may only be 10 universities that survive this transition.

The first two-dimensional bar codes, or QR codes, as they're known, were installed Friday at Arpoador, a massive boulder that rises at the end of Ipanema beach. The image was built into the sidewalk with the same black and white stones that decorate sidewalks around town with mosaics of waves, fish and abstract images.

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.

Each SLC Camp is a combined Codeathon and Tagathon. These are volunteer events to help build usable applications to help teachers, parents and students in K-12 Education. Volunteers will use the open source sample code and APIs available at dev.slcedu.org, as well as tools available on the same site for bulk data ingestion, data format transforms, and meta-tagging of educational content.