Wcel_Team

Now that Google+ with Google apps has been released it's time to think about the possibilities... some good starting points here.

Exploration of narrative, openness, digital storytelling

Excellent article from Australia on why people pirate and why it's often the copyright owners (big business, not the creators) to blame.

"This is the first of a series of three posts on e-learning plans. This posts discusses why an e-learning plan is needed..."

YouTube doesn't have to be a place where viewers passively watch video. Free annotation tools allow content creators to provide interactive opportunities to engage content. The resulting video can be used as part of a flipped classroom model or to time-shift any kind of instruction.This video tutorial shows you exactly how to create buttons that can be placed on your video to jump forwards and backwards within the timeline.

Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities.

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed

Keynote presentation delivered to Instituto Cervantes, Providence, Rhode Island.Social network technologies are reforming the way we communicate with each other inside and outside our learning environments. In this presentation, Stephen Downes offers an inside look at these technologies, how they work, what they can do, and where they will likely lead the future of learning online. Downes will first outline some well-known technologies such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, describing how they are used and outlining how they manage online communication in general. [Slides] [Audio]

Nowadays, the digital version of print magazines and newspapers are becoming increasingly popular among publishers as they can save printing and postage costs as well as they are able to reach a whole new audience in the online world. The continuing interest of digital in the adaptation of digital replica editions of newspapers and magazines encourages web developers to create websites that are offering service to allow anyone to create their own digital magazine and newspaper. Some of these websites are very easy to use, simple and provide you with unlimited access to their resources for free.

"This website is for educators who want to learn about using iPads in education."<--focused on K12, but still over relevance to highered.

Google and the AND or the OR or the Plus + Search changes but also instructive on the attitude and way that Google makes decisions about change.  It might be really important to you but being part of 10% of a user base that likes versus 90% who don't like or are indifferent means you've lost.

Interesting article on the difference between personalisation and context in how Google returns results for your searches.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

"Three-quarters of students prefer a bound book over the digital equivalent"

Hypothesis: Students judge quality of information based on position in Google search results. Intervention: Switch the order. Result: Students "used the (falsely) top-ranked pages".

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

Interesting read

One for the plagiarism group maybe?

Clark's take on the WISE conference in Doha with world leading figures.  By Clarks account, most were living in a dark age of education (at least as far back as the 1990's) and only Gordon Brown had vision and solutions.