College students love their smartphones. They use them in a myriad of ways and there's the data to prove it. A new infographic visualizes the current state of smartphone usage by college students and it's a sight to see. The infographic below from Online Degrees shows the 12 most popular ways students are using smartphones as well as the types of news they're reading, and more.
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.
Site to Phone is a free service designed to send links and text from your computer to your phone or tablet. Once you have a Site to Phone account you can download a selection of extensions and browser addons that let you send information to your phone. Once your phone is setup you can recieve the information by opening a homescreen app or bookmark. If you regularly type out links from your computers web browser onto your phone Site to Phone could save you a lot of time.
"How about this infographic from Turnitin to start the week? From a survey of nearly 900 educators (Plagiarism Today) Turnitin are trying to "understand what kinds of plagiarism were the most common in academia and, equally importantly, which were viewed as being the most problematic"."
"Microsoft Research Cliplets is an interactive app that gives users the power to create "Cliplets" -- a type of imagery that sits between stills and video, including imagery such as video textures and "cinemagraphs". The app provides a simple, yet expressive way to mix static and dynamic elements from a video clip."
"Some might argue that the analytics tools at our disposal are currently mainly used for boring purposes, such as improving processes and making money. In this paper we will try to define learning analytics and their purpose for learning and education. We will ponder on the best possible fit of particular types of research methods and their analysis. Methodological concerns related to the analysis of Big Data collected on online networks as well as ethical and privacy concerns will also be highlighted and a case study of the use of learning analytics in a Massive Open Online Course explored."
"A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities."
"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."
Very interesting post dissecting the flaws of conferences and beginning to suggest alternative ways of organising conference type events. Might be something for a strand in WCELfest.
"We propose a framework for organizing multiple metadata specifications in a container that can be handled as a whole. This framework, named Information for Learning Object eXchange (ILOX), is developed as part of the IMS Learning Object Discovery & Exchange (LODE) specification that aims to facilitate the discovery and retrieval of learning objects stored across more than one collection. While thus far ILOX has been demonstrated to resolve a number of challenges specific to the e-learning domain, it is a generic framework that can be profiled to organize metadata about any type of digital content."