Group items tagged

"While I am not a huge fan of MOOCs (See, "MOOCs - The Opium of the Masses," I think that there is one area in which they might actually be extremely useful - ongoing teacher professional development (PD). They are a good fit to help meet a very specific need, which they could do quite well given teachers' experience with education."

Cory Doctorow on moves to get congress to allow business to plant malware on your computer just in case you do something they think is wrong.

Sugata Mitra (TED talks and hole-in-the-wall computer innovator) critiques traditonal 'pencil and paper' exams and learning and gives an alternative which is (I think) a problem-based learning approach which he calls SOLE (Self-organised learning environment). 

Report by think tank on the future of HE in UK. Recommends credit from Moocs, all academics to have training in teaching & assessment, and a teacher track for academics.

Leaderboarded - interesting little tool to allow comparisons or display of data. I think it can get used with more dynamic data than this video shows.

I think this is an important stating of the assumptions built into technology and the outcomes resulting from these assumptions and inherent biases. "... we need to understand how the shape of information access controls the intellectual (and, ultimately, financial) opportunities of some college students. If we emphasize the consequences of differential access, we see one facet of the digital divide; if we ask about how these consequences are produced, we are asking about digital redlining. The comfortable elision in "edtech" is dangerous; it needs to be undone by emphasizing the contexts, origins, aims, and ideologies of technologies."

How do we move out of the content based right/wrong assignment? Some good thinking here.

Making the move forward ...

How deep or broad are different social networks. Thinking about community vs network. Don't entirely agree that community not possible on Twitter but get her point.

This Guide comprises three sections. The first - a summary of the key issues - is presented in the form of a set of 'Frequently Asked Questions'. Its purpose is to provide readers with a quick and user-friendly introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and some of the key issues to think about when exploring how to use OER most effectively. The second section is a more comprehensive analysis of these issues, presented in the form of a traditional research paper. For those who have a deeper interest in OER, this section will assist with making the case for OER more substantively. The third section is a set of appendices, containing more detailed information about specific areas of relevance to OER. These are aimed at people who are looking for substantive information regarding a specific area of interest.

"Eighth-graders who thought a passage about a pineapple and a hare on New York state tests this week made no sense, take heart: The author thinks it's absurd too."

"The message to students is clear: the internet is not looking out for you, and it's certainly not going to do the thinking for you. Educators miss the chance to teach such valuable lessons when they restrict the use of the internet for research."

Interesting flexible learning PD programme @UNE. Some ideas I think we could steal, oh and it's COMPULSORY!

Excellent account by the excellent Audrey Watters on the really expensive, really disruptive conference populated by really rich and really cool people (well at least that's what they think when they look in the mirror).

The classic 1945 article describing the Memex machine - a pre-cursor to hypertext linking and the web.

"I think we ought to take Chris Anderson seriously and start giving the course away."

Dated now (last post 2007) but shows Scott Wilson's thinking in the PLE Project.

What is it about copyright that doesn't work in the digital society? Why do millions of people think it's OK to break the law when it comes to file sharing in particular? Sociology of law researcher Stefan Larsson from Lund University believes that legal metaphors and old-fashioned mindsets contribute to the confusion and widening gaps between legislation and the prevailing norms

"The book is intended to help administrators gain a basic knowledge base, think critically about some key issues, and get some concrete suggestions for instructional and organizational uses of various digital technologies."