Group items tagged

"Being connected changes learning. When those connections are global, the experience of knowledge development is dramatically altered as well. Over the past four years, a growing number of educators have started experimenting with the teaching and learning process in order to answer critical questions: "How does learning change when formal boundaries are reduced? What is the future of learning? What role with educators play in this future? What types of institutions does society need to respond to hyper-growth of knowledge and rapid dissemination of information? How do the roles of learners and educators change when knowledge is ubiquitous? ... (The result is) a MOOC with each week being facilitated by an innovative thinker, researcher, and scholar. Over 30 of them. From 11 different countries."

"It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy and a statement of commitment. It is meant to spark dialogue, to inspire action and to help the open education movement grow. Open education is a living idea. As the movement grows, this idea will continue to evolve. There will be other visions initiatives and declarations beyond Cape Town. This is exactly the point. The Cape Town signatories have committed to developing further strategies, especially around open technology and teaching practices."

"The Higher Education Academy published the book Transforming Higher Education Through Technology Enhanced Learning in December 2009. Although the book has its genesis in the e-learning Benchmarking & Pathfinder Programme led by the Higher Education Academy from 2005-2008 readers will find that the book contains a thought-provoking edited collection which offers far more than a straightforward account of outcomes of one national programme; you will find that it is both broad in scope and reflective in tone"

"The Connexions Consortium is a group of organizations and individuals, including the world's foremost leaders in education, who work together to advance open source educational technology and open access educational content. Members join the Consortium to work and exchange ideas with other members"

Facilitating Online is a course intended for training educators as online facilitators of fully online and mixed mode courses. The Centre for Educational Technology (CET) produced a Course Leader's Guide as an Open Educational Resource to assist educators and trainers who wish to implement a course on online facilitation within their institution or across several institutions. The guide contains the course model, week-by-week learning activities, general guidance to the course leader on how to implement and customise the course and specific guidelines on each learning activity.

It's inevitable-technology changes education. In the first book of the "Next is Now" series, Rob Reynolds, Ph.D., analyzes the meaningful impact new e-reader and tablet technology is having on the education industry, and how these devices are making publishing, teaching-and learning-easier.

White paper from Hewlett Packard. Suggests that NZ is very lacking in producing a digital ready workforce and having a dacent digital technologies curriculum in education.

"This web site synthesises outputs from the JISC Learner Experiences of e-Learning programme. The programme spanned two phases over four years from 2005-2009. It comprised nine research projects in total (two in phase 1 and seven in phase two), employed mixed method approaches, and had the sustained involvement of over 200 learners and more than 3000 survey respondents. Five national workshops were run disseminating the methods and findings. The programme focussed on the learner voice. Learners allowed us into their worlds and showed us what it is like to study in a technology-rich age. The projects produced a huge collection of rich, detailed data that sheds light on what learners expect from the use of technology in post-compulsory education and the choices they make about using technology to support their study."

"Evidence shows that engaged students perform better academically than disinterested students. Measurement of engagement with education is difficult and imprecise, especially in large student cohorts. Traditional measurements such as summary statistics derived from assessment are crude secondary measures of engagement at best and do not provide much support for educators to work with students and curate engagement during teaching periods. We have used academic-related student contributions to a public social network as a proxy for engagement. Statistical summaries and novel data visualisation tools provide subtle and powerful insights into online student peer networks. Analysis of data collected shows that network visualisation can be an important curation tool for educators interested in cultivating student engagement."

Interesting post and some great comments on the role of the Khan Academy in education and whether it pedagogically sound.

University of Southern Queensland: all teaching staff at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) will have access to use virtual classrooms, online study groups and other innovative educational tools from semester two this year. The tools are part of the Wimba suite of educational technologies that USQ

Supported by the principal bodies and agencies in UK post-compulsory education, the Committee was set up in February 2008 to conduct an independent inquiry into the strategic and policy implications for higher education of the experience and expectations of learners in the light of their increasing use of the newest technologies.

Short news piece

Useful post.

Special issue on Technology and Social Media in education

"Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution's ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada's Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing."

Very interesting and political article on the things that are really biting HE - big global things that will affect us all.