A group looking to extend education beyond testing and into life skills.
"A gulf has opened up between what education systems provide and what children and young people need. Our schools and colleges rightly try to to ensure that young people are literate, numerate and gain academic qualifications. But the emphasis on testing and passing exams often squeezes out other skills that are just as vital in today's world.
The leading non-political and non-profit-making organisations that have come together to form Whole Education are determined to change this. They want all young people to receive a well-rounded education that they can relate to. They want all to learn practical skills such as communication and teamwork, to develop qualities such as resilience and empathy and to acquire knowledge that goes beyond literacy and numeracy to an understanding of our culture. A Whole Education will combine practical skills with theory, vocational and academic study for all young people whatever their ability."
"...a long video from November 2009 in which Eric Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, describes the main innovations he has made in how he runs his courses - and the painstaking empirical research that he has used to guide these changes. "
This resource is intended to distil lessons learned from various JISC innovation programmes into a "Good Practice Guide for Sustaining and Embedding Innovations". It is intended to support project steering groups and management teams in further and higher education in decision-making in this area and focuses on: Changing people and culture.Working with existing institutional structures to influence organisational change.Embedding or aligning with strategies, processes, systems, initiatives and services.Creating usable tools and resources (as part of project outputs) to meet stakeholder needs.Developing commercial and open approaches to sustaining and embedding innovation.
"Learning in Networks of Knowledge is a new paradigm for higher education, based on the changing nature and form of knowledge work in contemporary digital networked conditions. The LINK site explores and supports this knowledge - network - learning approach. LINK contains dozens of ideas about teaching and learning via the Internet, as well as tools (freely available web-based applications) that you can use."
"When I heard a teacher tell me that they were creating recorded lectures for courses as homework assignments and spending classroom time on discussions and more active learning, I knew right then the value of the lecture capture tools."
Changing the focus of Docs. Recently users were allowed to add any file to their Docs space - this project will make that a primary function, bit like MS Skydrive maybe.
At school or college? Have an idea to change the world?
ITU Telecom World 2011 brings together thousands of influential delegates from the telecommunications and technology industries to discuss what steps need to be taken to get more of the world connected. And they need your help!
We are inviting 10,000 global school children (8-18) to design the innovations that could make a real difference to their world.(((( Sign up your school or class now, and your students can start influencing thousands of decision-makers in information and technology communications.
Spaces for Knowledge Generation is an ALTC project which was undertaken as a partnership between La Trobe University as lead institution, Charles Sturt University, Apple and Kneeler Design Architects. The context of the learning experience necessarily changes over time, with technological, economic and social developments influencing the types of learning spaces learners and teachers require to achieve their learning outcomes, and this $220,000 project was designed to inform, guide and support sustainable development of learning and teaching spaces and practices, maximising flexibility so as to be used by as many disciplines as feasible. The project was based on the philosophy that constructivist approaches to learning, as well as to research and study, should make use of technologies and approaches that students favour, and that learning spaces should therefore be organised to accommodate learner-generated aspects of learning. Spaces for Knowledge Generation provides a model for designing student learning environments that is future-focused and sustainable for the medium term.
"All students today are increasingly expected to develop technological fluency, digital citizenship, and other twenty-first century competencies despite wide variability in the quality of learning opportunities schools provide. Social network sites (SNSs) available via the internet may provide promising contexts for learning to supplement school-based experiences. This qualitative study examines how high school students from low-income families in the USA use the SNS, MySpace, for identity formation and informal learning. The analysis revealed that SNSs used outside of school allowed students to formulate and explore various dimensions of their identity and demonstrate twenty-first century skills; however, students did not perceive a connection between their online activities and learning in classrooms. We discuss how learning with such technologies might be incorporated into the students overall learning ecology to reduce educational inequities and how current institutionalized approaches might shift to accommodate such change."
"To gain the full educational benefits of the major new investments in corporate technologies supporting online teaching and learning it is argued that a strategic, systems based approach to academic professional development (APD) is required. Such an approach requires a clear view of the key areas of potential and enduring teaching and learning benefit which can be realised from online developments, including an understanding of the changing role of the academic teacher in higher education, the identification of the desired professional capacities to educate online, and the implementation of a number of coordinated initiatives to develop these professional capacities in order to engage constructively with the learning and technology opportunities. Based on previous work, we propose a 6three model of Academic Professional Capacities Development for effective APD of online teaching and learning. The model can help inform the actions of policy makers, executives and practitioners in ways that promote an authentic learning organisation."
"... 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"
What is the Story of Stuff?
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.