Group items tagged

Stephen Downes lists the 10 most important skills that learners (and us all) need.

Bebo is bombing in NZ while Facebook use is going up, up, up.

Interesting post flagging the info overload things that we have all come across. The second point in the 5 point list is part of the concept that Downes & Siemens have used in the Connectivism MOOC i.e. don't even attempt to read everything - that's not what it's about. Instead choose & filter your information, create networks and trust platforms for 3rd party filtering.

"Writing notes with a pen and paper helps you remember more, whereas typing gives you greater quantity of notes."

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed

A way to get citations into docs using Zotero and further down the page a simpler method.

The Net lost a freedom when W3C agreed to allow embedded DRM

Wikipedia entry about Moocs.

Excellent article from Audrey Watters on the rewriting of Mooc history and why it is important that such things are not twisted to develop a new narrative that suits those doing the rewriting.

Excellent post on maximising the benefit from conferences.

Great description of DS106 and what it means to be creative.

Report from the UK Royal Society on the needs for computing in schools.

A year by year history of the Internet in NZ beginning with the first onshoring of the 'Net at Waikato Uni

Dave Cormier on what Moocs mean to him. Good background and miles away from the Udacity hype.

Good article exploring a fundamental difference between news in Twitter and (lack of) news in Facebook