Group items tagged

The #Facebook Effect: College Students' Perceptions of #Online #Discussions in the Age of #SocNet http://t.co/YzecYeoP (PDF via @hrheingold)

"A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6th confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, looks at the efforts of publishers and colleges to increase the availability of textbook price information and "unbundled" buying options as required under provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA"

I think this is an important stating of the assumptions built into technology and the outcomes resulting from these assumptions and inherent biases. "... we need to understand how the shape of information access controls the intellectual (and, ultimately, financial) opportunities of some college students. If we emphasize the consequences of differential access, we see one facet of the digital divide; if we ask about how these consequences are produced, we are asking about digital redlining. The comfortable elision in "edtech" is dangerous; it needs to be undone by emphasizing the contexts, origins, aims, and ideologies of technologies."

"This 31-page report analyzes the results of a recent Gartner research study performed between August and October of 2011. The study focused on enterprise mobility and was designed to generate qualitative data using in-depth conversations and qualitative analysis. Trends, observations, and recommendations are the core of this research. The report includes recommendations that are appropriate to colleges and universities today."

"The OERu anchor partners have shortlisted eight university- and college-level courses to be developed as prototypes for refining the OERu delivery system". I wonder whether the psychology course might be of interest to us?

"Back in March I served on a panel along with Liz Gross, Ed Cabellon, and Greg Heiberger at the #sxswEDU conference. Here are some of the highlights: Greg and I talk about our latest research on using Twitter to support students throughout their first year of college. I summarize my recent research on using Facebook in education. Greg explores the future of higher education and how new technologies can be used to effectively improve student success. Liz discusses how to use Facebook to market your institution and programs. Ed explains how to frame productive social media use to administrators. I get snarky about EdTech startups and how they don't communicate with educators."

"NPR reports that Harvard physicist and professor Eric Mazur has largely gotten rid of the lecture in his classes, after finding that in lecture-based classes, students tend to commit to memory formulae and heuristics, but fail to develop deep understanding of concepts. Mazur has tried - and seemingly succeeded - to cultivate deeper learning with a combination of small group peer-instruction and a tight feedback loop based on in-class polling about particular problems."

Hey guys. Happy new year, hope yaz had a nice break. The idea posted in this thread at /. no doubt isnt new to you all, neither the whole learning-styles thing, but the thread itself is actually not a bad read, lots of differing opinions, not all geeks.

(Note - free ebook version) - At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online.

Self paced, online, lab based maths.

Book Review "This book examines various views and perspectives on digitisation. As Simon Tanner, Director Digital Consultancy, King's College London says in the Foreword: "Digitisation has become a cultural, scholastic, economic and political imperative and raises many issues for our consideration." Furthermore, that the book: "...seeks to address and answer some of the big questions of digitisation"

Help pages at Austin College for staff.

A briefing paper by The Higher Education Academy and JISC highlighting the benefits to UK universities and colleges of creating, sharing and using open educational resources (OER). 

By this autumn, every university in England will have published a new set of information about every undergraduate course on offer. These Key Information Sets will include data on areas such as contact hours, graduate salaries and student satisfaction. But with little fanfare, one institution has already put itself ahead of the game by displaying information about its graduates in a way that could set a benchmark for the sector. The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates' careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 - undergraduate and postgraduate - sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college.

"The University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development has saved students $145,000 on textbooks over three semesters through its iPad initiative and 140-volume open textbook library, the Minnesota Daily reported earlier this month."

Imagine being in a college class where the instructor challenges students with questions and comments that ellicit active discussion by a majority of students.

Crisca the visiting academic from The University of Michigan pointed to their use of this system as an alternative to clickers

" links to free on-line services that allow you to provide your students with enhanced learning opportunities which you can then embed into, or link from, your school/college/university's website, course blog or VLE/MLE."

Another case study of increasing teacher engagement with online teaching through a graded 'awards' system.  Going for positive reinforcement rather than a compliance model while still suggesting that there should be a minimum standard.

A UK FE college brings in graded standards to improve the quality of its courses.  Based in Moodle and uses some automated system. 

Students keep learning when video lectures available. Some useful comments.

News article about Sherpa - course recommendation software