Group items tagged

JISC output to support thinking about learners needs, abilities, backgrounds in regard to ICT & digital literacy. "Think about the learners at your institution, or in the context for which you have a digital literacy role/responsibility. What do you know about their current access, skills and strategies for learning in a digital environment? What challenges do you think they face in becoming digitally literate?You can also use these questions with teaching staff to check their knowledge of their own students' ICT use, and to prompt thinking about how they support learners in a digital age."

"The educational thought experiment I wish to undertake concerns curriculum. Not the specific content of curriculum, but the idea of curriculum, what any curriculum is, regardless of subject. Like Copernicus, I propose that for the sake of better results we need to turn conventional wisdom on it is head:  let's see what results if we think of action, not knowledge, as the essence of an education; let's see what results from thinking of future ability, not knowledge of the past, as the core; let's see what follows, therefore, from thinking of content knowledge as neither the aim of curriculum nor the key building blocks of it but as the offshoot of learning to do things now and for the future."

"Real teaching is not about passing on the 'the material', as if knowledge were some sort of mass-produced commodity that ships from Amazon. Real teaching is about conveying a way of thinking. How can a teacher convey a way of thinking when he doesn't genuinely think that way?"

Testing a gamified course against a normal course. (I think this isn't really gamification but just reward. I think for it to be gamified there has to be a challenge intrinsic to the activity not just marking activities as complete.)

"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."

Free book on future of the internet download under read now) Bunch of essays about impact of internet on society, how internet should be managed, privacy, intellectual property etc . Various perspectives but published by a libertarian think tank. Critical of Lessig for proposing controls on internet development. Some good reads (Dean, beware - lawyers). Also check out the video presentations - panel discussions - some fascinating stuff. This book is both a beginning and an end. Its publication marks the beginning of TechFreedom, a new non-profit think tank that will launch alongside this book in January 2011. Our mission is simple: to unleash the progress of technology that improves the human condition and expands individual capacity to choose.

Good little video on Critical Thinking and its importance.

"From January 2011 Childnet along with the SWGfL and the IWF will be the UK Safer Internet Centre. One of our jobs as the UK Safer Internet Centre is to get as many people involved in Safer Internet Day as possible! We challenge you to think about the Safer Internet Day theme for 2011: Virtual Lives : It's more than a game, it's your life! It's important for all users of the internet to be aware of the consequences of their online actions - both good and bad! Taking care, being safe and responsible online and offline is an important part of child development. Childnet International is producing a Safer Internet Day resource pack to help educators participate in Safer Internet Day. Below is an outline of the target areas related to this year's theme. We hope this will help educators to get thinking and planning for Tuesday 8 February 2011. Alongside this content will be a short film and banners for VLEs from the European commission promoting Safer Internet Day."

Interesting specification comparison between 3 Sony eBooks and 3 Kindles. Think of the comparisons that they didn't make but still think the Sony easily trumps the Kindle.

"Our Space is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation. For more information, download the Introduction to Our Space [pdf], FAQ [pdf], and Road Map [pdf]. All curricular units and lessons are free and available for download below. The full casebook [pdf - 133MB] can be downloaded using the link at the bottom of the page." Critiqued by @downes for not addressing the issue properly "This is "a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments." The content divides into five major subject areas: participation, identity, privacy, credibility, and authorship and ownership. I'm not sure these are the top five things I would list when thinking of ethical dimensions of new media environments. While it's useful that there is a section on flamers, lurkers and mentors I think there should be something about hate, racism and bulling. And while a section on credibility is a good idea, it should be based on the principles of reason and inference, not outrageously bad definitions like this: "Networking-the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information." And this: "Collective intelligence-evidence that participants in knowledge communities pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal." Wow, those are just wrong. Maybe I need to review this and criticize it more closely."

Post arguing that teachers should keep a professional distance from their students. I think I profoundly disagree with this post, not around the act of staying distant but about the power differential built into his argument. Acting ethically and modelling good and realistic practice in life is more fundamental to a useful educational stance. This post refers I think to non-adults and emotional transference is something that teachers need to be conscious of. I'm not arguing that teachers should friend all their pupils online, rather that his reasons for this are flawed.

"A Radically Different World If you think our future will require better schools, you're wrong. The future of education calls for entirely new kinds of learning environments. If you think we will need better teachers, you're wrong. Tomorrow's learners will need guides who take on fundamentally different roles. As every dimension of our world evolves so rapidly, the education challenges of tomorrow will require solutions that go far beyond today's answers. Browse this website to explore the forces shaping our world. Work with us to explore your organization's role in creating the future of learning."

This week the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of opencourseware. Are universities about credentials or research? Are they a repository of knowledge? It's important, O'Reilly argued, if you want to be innovative "to think about what job you do for your customers (for your students) and not just think about how you do that job today but why you do it."

RT @timbuckteeth @e_trude: "Digital literacy is less about tools & more about thinking" Horizon Report http://bit.ly/linX28 <--@TraceyMorgan

Doug Belshaw posts about "Attendance" and what that means at University. Some good slides to accompany on using digital media to improve L&T. "Embracing OERs, mobile learning and digital literacies looks to me like the mark of a forward-thinking learning organization."

I like the way he brings in Hattie's research--great minds think alike ;-)

(Article not new and thought I had already bookmarked it) Reports on work by OU 'debunking' Prensky native/immigrant thesis. Don't think it does at all and I argued at time that we ad to stop viewing concepts in such dichotomous ways.

Don't >add< learning in the workplace but use the workplace to >extract< learning. Useful article.

Excellent post on the blindness of the majority to discrimination on their part - often unintended but still existing because of their position of power.  It's something that we need to be conscious of since we all come from a position of being white, middle class, and majority male. It's not what we do in the office (but still needs to be applied there!) but how we think about the people we support and also how they might design for their classes.