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"By publicly displaying your learning, you are inviting readers to challenge or extend you. You are radicalising the democratisation of education by making transparent the process of academia."

Well, except enrollments *are* down slightly at VCU...

"I'm talking about @HistoryInPics, which, as I discovered, is run by two teenagers: Xavier Di Petta, 17, who lives in a small Australian town two hours north of Melbourne, and Kyle Cameron, 19, a student in Hawaii. "

Certainly an interesting debate unfolding in the comments. Sadly, I'm on the side of 40 years of history over 15. I'm not holding my breath for the pendulum to swing back at this point...

"Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet-and how the Internet uses them back. By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi's bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they're more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation-ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free. "

Imagining learning as cartography.

Via Stephen Downes's recent post; a nice accessible summary discussion for non-techies about how technology is changing teaching. Good teaching resource, I think.

"It's not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideas with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don't have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name. When I need the title of a novel someone recommended, I just scroll back to the day we were at the bookstore together. Looking through my photo stream, there is a caption about Thomas Jefferson smuggling seeds from Italy, which I want to research; a picture of a tree I want to identify, which I need to send to my father; the nutritional label from a seasoning that I want to re-create; and a man with a jungle of electrical cords in the coffee shop, whose picture I took because I wanted to write something about how our wireless lives are actually full of wires. Photography has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write. Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return."

A distinctly different feel/tone than the VCU CT article...

Hmmm... "Discussions about the future of education should never undersell the social import of sitting side by side, of holding conversations with students vastly unlike oneself, and of students being able to see their peers respond to their newly acquired insights..."

Apparently, "confrontation" is the sole province of f-2-f teaching. I say, "hogwash!"

Certainly no one argues about or discusses difficult concepts online.

""We were initially torn between collaborating with universities and working outside the world of college," Thrun tells me. The San Jose State pilot offered the answer. "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," he says. "It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit.""

I wonder what this would look like as an integrated curricular/thematic element at VCU? I'm not a fan of the video style but certain elements about the whole site are worth noting/exploring.

"More than a technique, PCR is a concept, that enables molecular biologists to think in new ways of their object of study, DNA, to ask genes new questions. Opening the way to new experiments, it literally frees the imagination. Some even use PCR machines as fridges. After all a thermocycler is nothing but an intelligent heating and cooling block. It can be set on 4ºC for 48 hours, to conserve the result of an experiment over the week-end. "

""One of the things I learned about the world of art," Teller says, "is there are people who really want to believe in magic, that artists are supernatural beings-there was some guy who could walk up and do that. But art is work like anything else-concentration, physical pain. Part of the subject of this movie is that a great work of art should seem to have magically sprung like a miracle on the wall. But to get that miracle is an enormous, aggravating pain." To see Vermeer as "a god" makes him "a discouraging bore," Teller went on. But if you think of him as a genius artist and an inventor, he becomes a hero: "Now he can inspire." "

Purdue NExT online learning program set to debut: http://t.co/CpezXKRsKS #elearning #highered #onlinelearning #xlearning