Group items tagged

"... wearable computers allow people to do things like google information straight into their eyeballs while chatting on the street corner - or project a map overlay on the street in front of them, labeling every store. Or turn the local vacant lot into a wonderland filled with Pokemon characters ready to do battle. This is an augmented reality scenario. Now our technology can actually do this, using smart phones as a crude mobile interface. In these demo videos below, we're getting a first glimpse of what happens when the internet comes out of the box and into the real world"

This week the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of opencourseware. Are universities about credentials or research? Are they a repository of knowledge? It's important, O'Reilly argued, if you want to be innovative "to think about what job you do for your customers (for your students) and not just think about how you do that job today but why you do it."

In this article I want to reflect on the rhetoric of 'Web 2.0' and its potential versus actual impact. I want to suggest that we need to do more than look at how social networking technologies are being used generally as an indicator of their potential impact on education, arguing instead that we need to rethink what are the fundamental characteristics of learning and then see how social networking can be harnessed to maximise these characteristics to best effect. I will further argue that the current complexity of the digital environment requires us to develop 'schema' or approaches to thinking about how we can best harness the benefits these new technologies confer.

JISC output to support thinking about learners needs, abilities, backgrounds in regard to ICT & digital literacy. "Think about the learners at your institution, or in the context for which you have a digital literacy role/responsibility. What do you know about their current access, skills and strategies for learning in a digital environment? What challenges do you think they face in becoming digitally literate?You can also use these questions with teaching staff to check their knowledge of their own students' ICT use, and to prompt thinking about how they support learners in a digital age."

Have you ever wondered how to download and share digital content legally? How do you let people know that you want them to reuse your own work? Creative Commons licences can help you do both. We'll show you how. To find out more about Creative Commons in New Zealand visit us at

"The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available online.  All works eventually fall out of copyright - from classic works of art, music and literature, to abandoned drafts, tentative plans, and overlooked fragments. In doing so they enter the public domain, a vast commons of material that everyone is free to enjoy, share and build upon without restriction.  We believe the public domain is an invaluable and indispensable good, which - like our natural environment and our physical heritage - deserves to be explicitly recognised, protected and appreciated.  The Public Domain Review aims to help its readers to explore this rich terrain - like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance of an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond. "

"Learning Space as Creation Space The next generation of learning spaces will take all the characteristics of an active learning environment-flexibility, collaboration, team-based, project-based-and add the capability of creating and making. Project teams will be both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and will likely need access to a broad array of technologies. High-speed networks, video-based collaboration, high-resolution visualization, and 3-D printing are but a few of the digital tools that will find their way into the learning space. The ability to rearrange furniture and technology quickly and easily will be highly desirable. Some project activities will need nothing more than comfortable furniture, food, and caffeine. Others will require sophisticated computational analysis and the ability to do rapid prototyping. Acoustics will be a concern and will need to accommodate a wide range of activities. It seems likely that such space will support more than one team or activity simultaneously. That will be a highly desirable trait, fostering serendipitous discovery and innovation. The ability to quickly and easily capture the group's activities and progress will also be desirable. An emerging class of powerful and effective collaboration tools enables project teams to save and store project elements, resources, concepts, plans, designs, models, and renderings-in short, all the "stuff" that a team might find or make."

Two Potential Futures Our forecast suggests that the learning ecosystem is going to diversify, and indeed has already started to do so. At the American Alliance of Museums' convening on the future of education Glimpses of the Future of Education By Katherine Prince, Senior Director, Strategic Foresight, KnowledgeWorks A detail of a KnowledgeWorks infographic on the future of learning. For the complete infographic go to knowledgeworks. org/strategic-foresight. 1 ® Glimpses of Future Educationin September, I had the pleasure of sharing two plausible scenarios for how the future may take shape. We could find ourselves living in: * a vibrant learning grid in which all of us who care about learning create a flexible and radically personalized learning ecosystem that meets the needs of all learners, or * a fractured landscape in which only those whose families have the time, money and resources to customize or supplement their learning journeys have access to learning that adapts to and meets their needs.

"The key question though is: what is your 'core' mission? Are we a teaching and learning institution, and if so, why would we contract this out to someone else? If they can do teaching and learning better than us, why are we doing it? Or is our mission to become just an accreditation agency that also does research?"

"But how do we get students to realize what they themselves value? How do we get students to think about their blogging as something other than work for a grade?"

Cory Doctorow on moves to get congress to allow business to plant malware on your computer just in case you do something they think is wrong.

The government of Switzerland has issued a statement declaring that it will not take action to alter current copyright laws allowing the downloading of music and movies for personal use. The statement is the result of a lengthy study conducted by the Swiss government into the impact of so-called "piracy" on the entertainment industry. Despite the industry's claims that downloading undermines their business, this study shows that the effect of unauthorized downloading on the industry's bottom line is negligible. One key finding of the study is that downloaders spend as much if not more to acquire content legally as those who do not download. Researchers found no change in amount of disposable income spent on music and movies, despite the fact that roughly one third of Swiss people engage in some form of downloading. The government concluded, then, that no change to the current legal structure was necessary, and urged the entertainment industry to grow and adapt with the changes in technology and in consumer habits, rather than trying to suppress progress.

Excellent piece on the changing digital landscape and what it means for content. "Look around the next time you're sat on a crowded city bus during commuting hours. Most people's headphones are now plugged into their phones. If by some chance they're not listening to music then they're reading the paper, a book, checking twitter, posing on facebook, writing an email, updating their diary or taking a photo and sticking a vintage filter on it while on their phone, or tablet, or e-reader. And they probably are listening to music while doing all the above."

The nature of the academic lecture has changed with the introduction of wi-fi and cellular technologies. Interacting with personal screens during a lecture or other live event has become commonplace and, as a result, the economy of attention that defines these situations has changed. Is it possible to pay attention when sending a text message or surfing the web? For that matter, does distraction always detract from the learning that takes place in these environments? In this article, we ask questions concerning the texture and shape of this emerging economy of attention. We do not take a position on the efficiency of new technologies for delivering educational content or their efficacy of competing for users' time and attention. Instead, we argue that the emerging social media provide new methods for choreographing attention in line with the performative conventions of any given situation. Rather than banning laptops and phones from the lecture hall and the classroom, we aim to ask what precisely they have on offer for these settings understood as performative sites, as well as for a culture that equates individual attentional behavior with intellectual and moral aptitude.

"The nature of the academic lecture has changed with the introduction of wi-fi and cellular technologies. Interacting with personal screens during a lecture or other live event has become commonplace and, as a result, the economy of attention that defines these situations has changed. Is it possible to pay attention when sending a text message or surfing the web? For that matter, does distraction always detract from the learning that takes place in these environments? In this article, we ask questions concerning the texture and shape of this emerging economy of attention. We do not take a position on the efficiency of new technologies for delivering educational content or their efficacy of competing for users' time and attention. Instead, we argue that the emerging social media provide new methods for choreographing attention in line with the performative conventions of any given situation. Rather than banning laptops and phones from the lecture hall and the classroom, we aim to ask what precisely they have on offer for these settings understood as performative sites, as well as for a culture that equates individual attentional behavior with intellectual and moral aptitude."

Where do students go to study? Where do they come from? UIS data on the mobility of students shed light on the shifting demand for higher education, particularly in the developing world.

Why do Intro to Sociology @Waikato & pay for the privillege when you can do it for free from Princeton? http://t.co/Dzhxeruw #waitalk #yam

Blogging can be quite a process. First you may have to do some research, then put your thoughts together, and of course add any necessary screenshots and images. Let's not forget the optimization part (SEO, keywords, etc) and sharing your content on the Web so that others will read it and hopefully share it. With all of these steps involved, blogging can be quite time-consuming and many bloggers get burnt out rather quickly doing these things on a daily basis.

Great little app that lets you grap the license and other details from a flickr image.  Intended to be used when you link to an image and ensure you attribute it correctly. "With ImageCodr.org, there is no need to do all this manually, you simply enter in the URL of the picture page (as seen in your browser) you are interested in and ImageCodr.org will generate the ready to use HTML code. It will also display a brief and easy license summary, so you don't get in legal trouble because you missed something."

"So here's something neat that I figured out how to do on Jim's DS106 class (soon to be available on my own course site). As you may know, both sites are syndicating in feeds from students' blogs using the amazing FeedWordPress plugin. We use this plugin all over UMW Blogs to allow faculty to manage course "mother" blogs into which students' blogs are fed."