Group items tagged

Article arguing that MIT should make a bold move to promote Open Access to honour Aaron Swartz.

Some interesting stats but doesn't really explain the title although I haven't checked out academic-connect yet.

Why the digital divide is a problem in the academic workplace.

A high level view of the the academic process of assessment and feedback.

The Department of Education's (ED) Office of Educational Technology today released a draft issue brief - Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics - representing the results of a months-long discourse among 8 academic and 15 industrial data mining and learning analytics experts conducted by SRI International. The brief, inspired by ED's 2010 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), articulates the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in improving student outcomes and overall productivity of K-2 education systems. It focuses on three key research areas - educational data mining, learning analytics, and visual data analytics - and offers a set of corresponding recommendations, categorized by various stakeholders. ED is now seeking public comment on the draft.

Article proposing that a revolution is coming to academia because of social media and web technologies. Possibly a rather optimistic view given the attitudes of some academics and institutions...

"What I mean by 'enterprise LMS' is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A 'learning platform', by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing - multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS)."

"A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities."

Developing a real web presence rather than an idealised one. UMW web site and UMW blogs. Not online learning but learning online.

Using food as an analogy for the Internet & copyright and academic publishing houses.

Publishers of humanities and social science journals could go bankrupt if all academic papers became freely available after six months, a report >>commissioned by publishers<< has warned.

12 academic essays on the eportfolio.

Backwash effect of running a MOOC leads a Harvard academic to revises his FTF classes - less lectures more 'flipped'. Not sure what the comment about Google hangouts is about.

Schuman's piece deriding the Mooc movement based on Thrun's 'pivot'. It's crap journalism but it's the article getting all the comments. As an academic maybe she should read Hattie before bigging up her own contribution to learning.

Resource page using the 3E Enhance. Extend, Empower framework to encourage academic use of Moodle. Would be interesting to know the success rate.

The (non) importance of academic experience to getting a job at Google.

Useful account from an academic on the whys and why nots of open text books.