"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."
While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can't freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They've even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission. It continues to be a major issue in the area of movies and video too. Join us in working to eliminate DRM!
This is the fourth year we've run the international Day Against DRM. In previous years we've focused on music, held events at the Boston Public Library and more!
On May 4th, the Defective by Design DRM Elimination Crew will of course be running an event in Boston. But for this day to send a strong message against DRM, we need people all over the world to join us and hold their own events!
As well as attending or running events, you can join other activists in blogging about DRM, putting up banners on your Web sites and blogs, talking about DRM on your social networks and more.
"Digital literacy is not word processing or watching movies on an iPhone, but instead using technology to create, code and collaborate. In today's world, that necessarily includes the Web. Building a generation of young 'webmakers' is key to job creation, international competitiveness and engagement in civil society.
In this webinar, Mozilla will talk about their work in this area to define key Web literacy skills, create pathways for innovative learning experiences around them and build a network of instructors and facilitators with a shared mission."
"Teamie is a cloud-based social platform that makes learning collaborative & fun, enables educators to engage & teach, and drives performance & behavior."
"The Internet Blackout was just the beginning. Together, our websites and personal networks can mobilize the planet to defend the internet from bad laws & monopolies. Are you in?"
"Data visualization is a running theme of visual literacy here, and Manuel Lima has been one of its biggest advocates since 2005 when, shortly after graduating from the Parson School of Design, he launched VisualComplexity - an ambitious portal for the visualization of complex networks across a multitude of disciplines, from biology to history to the social web."
"If we think of OERs as we think of physical artifacts, we might focus on their design, production, storage and distribution. We could quantify their number, calculate their popularity, and track their use. However, in open, distributed, networked learning environments, the emphasis is not be on the resources but on the engagement between participants who create, use, modify, and share experiences."
"The Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) is an inter-disciplinary network of leading international researchers who are exploring the role and impact of analytics on teaching, learning, training and development.
SoLAR has published a concept paper on Open Learning Analytics"
Google hurriedly introduced business/brand pages feature into its latest social networking platform Google Plus (Google+) on Monday, to serve the equivalent of the ever popular Facebook Pages. It intends to serve as a means of promoting businesses and brands, whereas such feat is only attainable with great pool of users on hand.
"Feedback, group work and a visible papertrail are all effortless gains. Display student work for class discussion, comment on student posts as feedback; set homework to post short peer critiques; devise project tasks requiring reading multiple peers' work and synthesising an overview with linked references."
"Last month I shared 40+ networks that you could consider depending on your niche or interests. As part of my commitment to this community, I shared that I will expand on this list throughout 2012. So here is the first addition to that build! The topic- Curation!"