Group items tagged

Queen's University Belfast have a website which is provided for students to show evidence of learning and skills learnt from extra-curricular activities and achievements. "Many activities you participate in - whether you serve as a Course Rep or have a part-time job or are engaged in voluntary work - may be allowing you to acquire important employability skills such as teamwork, leadership, communication and commercial awareness.  The Degree Plus Award allows these skills and this experience to be formally recognised" The Award is awarded by the University and is a 'value added' item which students can get in addition to their formal qualification. 

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.

Learning from digital natives: bridging formal and informal learning LDN Final Report.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Example of a formal university module aimed at 'digital literacy' for university students. Maybe could be adapted for UoW?

Grainne Conole proposes 12 dimesions for better classification of MOOCs. the degree of openness, the scale of participation (massification), the amount of use of multimedia, the amount of communication, the extent to which collaboration is included, the type of learner pathway (from learner centred to teacher-centred and highly structured), the level of quality assurance, the extent to which reflection is encouraged, the level of assessment, how informal or formal it is, autonomy, and diversity. She then evaluates five example MOOCs against these dimensions.

Deakin trying out a MOOC with some interesting assessment ideas - mainly assessed via peer review and awarding of badges, formal credit on payment of $495 fee involves an interview with the student as well as learning artefacts. 

A new set of design features developed by the BBC drawing on informal as well as formal learning. Learner and user centred, it pays particular attention to the emotional aspects of learning.

"Children love to learn, but at some point they lose that and become adults that don't like formal learning. Let's explore why 'play' has gotten such a bad rap and figure out how to get it back in education." Nice use of prezi.

"We are developing dynamic Web-based maps, which are a fusion of formal curriculum maps, personal learning records, and community-driven maps. Using established technologies and standards the maps provide 'mash-ups' of information from curriculum databases, ePortfolios and other sources. The project aims to enhance understanding and navigation of the curriculum and provide a means for students to actively map, contextualise, reflect on, and evidence their learning. The maps will also support collaboration, including sharing, rating and discussion of learning resources linked to specific topics in the maps."

This document outlines a proposal for a new Software Sustainability Maturity Model (SSMM), which can be used to formally evaluate both open and closed source software with respect to its sustainability. The model provides a means of estimating the risks associated with adopting a given solution. It is useful for those procuring software solutions for implementation and/or customisation, as well as for reuse in new software products. It is also useful for project leaders and developers, as it enables them to identify areas of concern, with respect to sustainability, within their projects.

A critique of the 70-20-10 workplace learning model, suggesting that the formal part can strongly influence the ability to learn in the informal part.

"Being connected changes learning. When those connections are global, the experience of knowledge development is dramatically altered as well. Over the past four years, a growing number of educators have started experimenting with the teaching and learning process in order to answer critical questions: "How does learning change when formal boundaries are reduced? What is the future of learning? What role with educators play in this future? What types of institutions does society need to respond to hyper-growth of knowledge and rapid dissemination of information? How do the roles of learners and educators change when knowledge is ubiquitous? ... (The result is) a MOOC with each week being facilitated by an innovative thinker, researcher, and scholar. Over 30 of them. From 11 different countries."

Crystal's relaxed style and unassuming manner are at the forefront as he discusses the impact of texts and tweets on written language use. Crystal is actually quite positive about their impact and discusses findings relating the number of texts a student sends and their attainment in formal testing - contrary to conventional wisdom texting is actually positively related to school achievement. 

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

I guess you WCEL folks knew about this? Do eGressive do any LMS related work?... Catalyst IT has taken over fellow open source developer, Christchurch-based Egressive. Egressive will formally become Catalyst's South Island branch from the end of this month (November). The takeover is friendly, says Egressive director Dave Lane.

"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?

Why conferences and blogging are both good for academics.

Tony Bates on why the current PD model is broken (and how to fix it). Note the paragraph on PD depts? Sound familiar?