An introduction to massive, open, online courses (MOOC) by EDUCAUSE.

high school and college students may be "digital natives" but they're wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the author's credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can't read. Today the question is why can't Johnny search?

Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.

Digital higher education - both its software and content - has managed to remain untouched by good design. Design is not even on the agenda. The importance of design to digital education starts with this simple fact: by moving the locus of education from the classroom to the digital environment, we necessarily change the factors that determine the quality of the student's experience. In the digital environment, design plays a far more important role as a determinant of quality than it does in the classroom.

Kelli Marshall's blog is a candid and detailed post on using Twitter as a discussion tool in some of the film courses Marshall has taught. She explains that while some students have resisted using the site, they have generally produced great comments about the course's content and have participated in thoughtful conversations, even beyond the classroom.

You don't have to know much about the psychology of learning to realise that a series of once-only, delivered lectures is pedagogic nonsense. We learn next to nothing from once-only experiences like unrecorded lectures. Indeed, everything we know about learning shows that repeated access to content is necessary for learning.

The question we are faced with, then, is this: how do we prepare our students to write effectively in environments that don't yet exist? While I'm sure there is more to add to this list, I suggest that there are three domains of literacy that, if students become aware of them, will prepare them for new digital writing environments. Namely, students should be aware of the speed of digital communications and the types of interactions that speed encourages, the ways in which digital writing environments preserve and provide access to data, and how writing technologies manage the divide between public and private.

Students don't write mathematics correctly. They throw down a mess of symbols with the answer underlined at the bottom and rely on the examiner's intelligence to get the marks. Teaching them to write in a more orderly and logical way has numerous advantages: it makes marking easier; allows students to demonstrate understanding (or not); forces an improvement in their thinking skills. Expressing their ideas clearly and correctly is a valuable skill for graduates in further study, employment and life in general.

I am getting more an more convinced that in high school it is imperative for teachers who want to 'get into blogging' to understand the under pinning nature of 'writing communities'.

Currently, we have a mass production model of education. But until we personalize things and require each student to learn. Until we do things in creative ways that make sure kids each learn and have to think and process, we will continue to have the select few do the thinking. It is human nature. Education shouldn't be one size fits all. I don't think that getting outside the standardized work we do in education should be considered jailbreaking. But for now, in most schools it is.

A slideshow about connected knowledge and collective learning.

Connectivism as a pedagogical theory is typically thought of in terms of networks, but the major practical implication of connectivism occurs in the organization of learning eventes and resources. Unlike traditional educatioinal modalities, in which people work collaboratively, in a connectivist model, people work cooperatively.

"The first Networked Learning Conference Hotseat with Peter Goodyear has attracted a lot of interesting discussion. Most of the discussion has centred on what is meant by networked learning and there seem to be as many definitions as there are people in the forum."

"Bring your own device (BYOD) and bring your own technology (BYOT) policies are growing in education and the workplace. Teachers are taking advantage of mobile devices for "m-learning,""

These techniques can provide lots of access points to information.

"This is the second year of the GFW High School One-to-One iPad Initiative where every GFW High School student has access to an iPad tablet to use in their classes. Students can use their iPad: -as an organizational tool to track assignments, homework and class projects. -to access the internet to research information needed for class projects. -to create on-line presentations -to word process class papers and projects -to run a variety of applications to enhance their learning experience in class -to read electronic books, tests, newspapers and magazines"

Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She's now on her way to "flipping" the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan's videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids' own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It's when they're doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck.

Are we seeing a shift from text to video as a primary form of expression? Perhaps in pop culture this has already happened with television, movies, youtube, and the web-but what if it stretches into academia? In fact, we're already seeing this with math.

Creating data visualizations and word clouds is quite easy with the following tools.

A data visualization tool from IBM.