Group items tagged

Interesting points on video production values.

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.

Sugata Mitra (TED talks and hole-in-the-wall computer innovator) critiques traditonal 'pencil and paper' exams and learning and gives an alternative which is (I think) a problem-based learning approach which he calls SOLE (Self-organised learning environment). 

"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."

NY Times article about the University of the People, which offers degress for free. Volunteer lecturers - which makes me wonder how sustainable this is... Also only offers degrees in computing and business administration

Digital curation - overview by Lisa Oldham, development specialist at the National Library of NZ published in Computers in New Zealand schools.

"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)."

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"

Using a cutlery analogy with personal devices - we choose the best one for the job in hand and use multiple types.

Interesting article on the fracturing of the computing market and why Windows may become an also ran.

Interesting for geeks.

Guardian article on flash uni buildings. Students want space for groupwork, computers, better temps and air.

Don't read, do! Using the Raspberry Pi to learn computer science.

The key attributes that a computer grad needs today. "What all of the employers want is the right attitude and aptitude. With these, any gaps in the knowledge and experience of a student fresh from studies can easily be overcome.  Heck, the industry moves so fast that they need to be updating those on the first day."

Plug-in for Moodle that allows for viewing of Word documents (2003 or 2007), Excel files, PowerPoints, PDFs and Open Office without the viewer needing the relevant program (eg Word) on their computer.

Enterprise immersive software is a collection of collaboration, communication, and productivity tools unified via a 3D or pseudo-3D visual environment. In this computer-generated environment, one or more people engage in work activities like meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The software provides a shared, interactive, multichannel experience through presence awareness, voice chat, active speaker indication, text chat, and many other features, often including avatars. The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present "if/then" scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The report offers guidance on how to: 1) ask core business questions to frame the discussion, 2) choose a research-and-demo, do-it-yourself, or combination approach, 3) identify requirements based on your use case, and 4) filter your options based on important limiters.

"Which of the following predictions about the future of libraries were made by university administrators? Within five years, libraries will focus exclusively on electronic resources Academic computing and libraries will merge. Librarians who do not produce will be reassigned or fired. The library will only house materials that are actively used. Libraries will shrink, in both collection size and staffing, and funding will be redirected from libraries to more critical and productive areas of the university." Sound familiar?

scary