Group items tagged

Interesting discussion tool, lightweight & simple.

Open conversation software

Twenty-seven-year-old researcher, lecturer and journalist Jennifer Jones has a fluid but pared-down working approach. She openly conducts her work as a researcher and lecturer through her personal website, using her blog and Twitter, on which she has 3,000 followers. She works virtually as she travels between two university employers in the Midlands and the West of Scotland. Her inspiration comes from media activists and groups like Occupy, who use the free resources of the net to group like-minded people for action and discourse. All of her activity is open for scrutiny and for tracking - there are no pseudonyms - and she records everything she does on her website.

Twenty-seven-year-old researcher, lecturer and journalist Jennifer Jones has a fluid but pared-down working approach. She openly conducts her work as a researcher and lecturer through her personal website, using her blog and Twitter, on which she has 3,000 followers. She works virtually as she travels between two university employers in the Midlands and the West of Scotland. Her inspiration comes from media activists and groups like Occupy, who use the free resources of the net to group like-minded people for action and discourse. All of her activity is open for scrutiny and for tracking - there are no pseudonyms - and she records everything she does on her website.

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.

This report outlines some technology trends and issues of interest and relevance to CETIS. It should be seen as a set of un-processed perceptions rather than the product of a formal process; a great deal of ground is not scanned in this paper and it should be understood that no formal prioritisation process was undertaken. The CETIS Horizon Scan should be seen as a set of potentially-idiosyncratic "takes", material on which discourse and disputation may occur to make possible futures more clear.

Includes description of Discourse, a StackOverflow developed discussion forum.

via Downes: Brian Lamb's presentation is smooth, polished and informed. Culture, he says, is something that historically we have participated in by creating and not merely consuming. And we are returning to those days, where we can create content for ourselves that we used to pay for and merely consume. Indeed, for any content company, placing a barrier - such as price - between the content and readers is a fatal mistake. Culture is something that is ours - it's not simply the creation of the best, it's an act that is a part of being there (like the million people who have photographed Barack Obama). And when each person records his or her own presence, we can create something larger than life, something real. Knowing that you are making a significant contribution to public discourse is motivation to create and contribute. There's this and a lot more in this presentation.

"To meet the goal of "preparing people for an ever-changing world", instructional programs need to apply strategies that focus on the development of critical thinking, problem solving, research, and lifelong learning. Those goals require a sociocultural approach to instruction emphasizing learning from experience and discourse. Sociocultural instructional designers question the applicability of traditional ID models because their molecular approach focuses on controlling the learner and environment, which often leads to inert knowledge. This article develops a sociocultural ID model and compares views of learning, roles of learners and teachers, instructional strategies, and the use of tools with the traditional ID approach."