Group items tagged

Short piece from a US VC on the importance of technology.

Google site with stories of how to transform your business or work.

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. Version 2.0 introduces a new extensions architecture, a reconciliation framework for linking records to other databases (like Freebase), and a ton of new transformation commands and expressions.

"what is required is a radical re-conceptualizing of the teaching and learning process, where the goal becomes "helping students learn" rather than 'teaching.'"

Attempt to solve the opposite problem - the anti-problem - to help you see how best to proceed with your real problem.

"Social media is about conversation. This increasing emphasis on two way communication and conversation has transformed organisational communications and is crucial to effective online knowledge sharing. Communicators using online media use the term 'engagement' to describe the process of moving to a situation where users and producers interact online, discussing and sharing content."

"'Massive open online courses: Higher Education's digital moment?' tracks the development of MOOCs from a small selection of specialist courses to major online platforms, offering hundreds of courses with millions of users.  The report explores MOOCs' surge in popularity and discusses whether this signals the beginning of a significant transformation in higher education, similar to those seen in other sectors, such as the newspaper industry. It pulls together the recent trends in online education delivery and looks at how universities can respond to the changing online environment."

"Published February 25, 2013 Matthew P. Long & Roger C. Schonfeld In this report, we present the results of Ithaka S+R's study of the scholarly practices of academic chemists. This study, funded by Jisc, presents information meant to empower research support providers in their work with chemists. The report covers themes such as data management, research collaboration, library use, discovery, publication practices, and research funding.   The report describes the findings of our investigation into academic chemists' research habits and research support needs. The digital availability of scholarly literature has transformed chemists' research by creating an environment where they can easily search for journal articles and chemical information. However, they often feel overwhelmed by the amount of new research available, and they need better tools to remain aware of current research. Furthermore, despite their heavy use of technology for research, many academic chemists have been slow to adopt new models of sharing data and research results such as online repositories and open access publishing. Our interviews highlighted the importance of the research group as a unit of academic life, and revealed some of the challenges inherent in working in groups that span institutions and national boundaries."

Educational transformation / innovation group

"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."

Using paper technology to engage classes, lectures etc.

"The problem is that most classroom assessments fail to ask students to use course knowledge in a different context in a meaningful way."

"Mobile computing is transforming information technology and the student learning environment in higher education, yet educational institutions everywhere are just scratching the surface of the capabilities of mobile computing. This report is based on 369 student survey responses and 26 focus-group participants from the mobile-device-heavy student population in Education City, Qatar."

Article from John Egenes at Otago Uni on remix culture. "The internet and our digital convergence are rapidly transforming long-held views regarding the traditional relationship between performer and audience ("creator" / "consumer"). This change is giving a new voice to the audience, literally bringing them into the mix. With unprecedented access to the creative process, and with an audience for their creations, consumers of music are also its producers, and are reshaping concepts of creativity, individuality, and intellectual property. This paper examines fundamental shifts in the way the "Folk Process" works within this context. Remix culture, once a bastion of beat-driven dance mashups, is expanding to include all styles of music, film, theatre and art. I will argue that its long-term significance lies in the notion that it blurs lines between the traditionally separate roles of creator and consumer, and challenges long-held concepts of intellectual property and copyright. Over the protests of many traditional folk musicians and devotees, folk music is entering this new digital arena, where the Folk Process is changing from gradual to immediate, from slow to rapid, adapting to fit the new digital paradigm."

"Musical instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music. Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders, radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. A device such as a wind-up music box produces sound and reproduces music. A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced - the record player becomes a musical instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device, in effect reducing a distinction manifested by copyright."

"As the world becomes increasingly more connected to media, the consumption of music as cultural goods rises as well. It is speculative to assume that this proven increase in quantity will make music a more central part of peoples' lives, but it will certainly attract more scientific attention to the behavior and perception transformations associated with it."

"The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, collaborative, constructive, authentic, and goal directed (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2003). The TIM associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells." Described at school level but a handy model. Perhaps we could adapt.

"Key Takeaways Education built around digital portfolios not only ties together various student-generated artifacts into a coherent whole but also creates an environment in which technology use has a clearly identified purpose. Hundreds of services provide free hosting and website creation tools and are ideal platforms for digital portfolios because they can support just about any type of digital content. Turning consumers of knowledge into producers of knowledge transforms learning into an active experience."