3 He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
4 Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
Lessons from Nature: The Organic Learning & Performance Ecosystem – Resources Shared at #EcoCon — from davidkelly.me by David Kelly
From DSC:
I appreciate David’s perspective as he references nature in his presentation — it speaks to living organisms that are changing, adapting, growing, dying, etc. I especially liked his question, “Do you know where the bees are in your ecosystem?” Check out his presentation to find out what he means.
To me, I’ve entitled this blog Learning Ecosystems because the components that help us learn are constantly changing throughout our lifetimes. Those components might be people, tools, processes, sources of information, and the information itself. For example, people who mentor us and help us grow come in and out of our lives at different times — teachers, coaches, pastors, trainers, mentors, supervisors, parents, good friends, etc. are in our lives for a time…and then they’re gone. The people within our social/learning networks change over time. The tools, platforms, and ways of obtaining information also change over time. So change is constant…like a living organism within a greater ecosystem.
6 ways Virtual Reality will change filmmaking — from indiewire.com by DJ Roller
Excerpt:
From the Chauvet Cave paintings of 30,000 years ago, to 6K digital cinema today, we’ve always told stories, we just do it differently as media changes. There’s a new leap in storytelling happening now. Virtual Reality (VR) is going to change the way we express ourselves, communicate with each other and experience the world. That may sound like hyperbole. If anything it’s an understatement. There are innumerable ways VR will change filmmaking that we can’t see yet. Here are a few changes that have already arrived:
From seeing to experiencing
The leap from film to VR is even bigger than the leap from radio to film was. There was sound, then sight. With VR, an even more immersive sensation is added: presence. People who try it say, “I was at the Golden Gate Bridge,” not, “I saw the Golden Gate Bridge.” They describe it as if they’re there. And with live VR, it’s an almost indescribable sensation of being there. It’s different from VR that’s recorded. People will regard it as an experience they’ve never had before.
…
The leap from film to VR is even bigger than the leap from radio to film was.
Drawings in Space: Wooden Wireframe Sculptures of Everyday Objects by Janusz Grünspek — from thisiscolossal.com by Christopher Jobson
MIT study shows how educational videos could be better — from bostinno.streetwise.co by Clinton Nguyen
Excerpt:
Subgoal labeling turned out to be a big success for users, and that mode of thinking transferred to newer tasks beyond the initial one.
“Immediately [after the first task], we asked people to attempt another problem, and we found that the people who got the subgoal labels attempted more steps and got them right more often, and they also took less time,” said Mark Guzdial, a professor at Georgia Tech who’s who’s had a hand in similar research for the past five years.
“When we asked them to try a new problem that they’d never seen before, 50 percent of the subgoal people did it correctly, and less than 10 percent of the people who didn’t get subgoals did that correctly,” he said.
Tips for choosing and using educational videos in your classroom — from edtechreview.in by Prasanna Bharti
Excerpt:
No matter if you are an expert of technology or novice, there are a lot of ways by which you can use technology easily in teaching to make lecture more interesting and engaging, one of the best way is to use educational videos. However, you need to be thoughtful before choosing and using them.
Items on Meerkat* and Periscope*
Hashtag automatically uploads users’ Meerkat* posts to YouTube — from springwise.com
Meerkat users can now add #Katch to their Twitter posts and the service will automatically record their livestreams and post them on YouTube.
Excerpt:
One of the major successes of this month’s SXSW festival was Meerkat — a live streaming app which enables users to create and broadcast video footage in the moment. Videos are shared with the world, live, via the user’s own Twitter account, before disappearing forever into the ether of internet-past. That was until hacker Tarikh Korula launched #Katch, a simple hashtag which enables Meerkat users to auto upload their livestreams to YouTube, immortalizing them forever.
Want to save Meerkat* videos to YouTube? Katch’s hashtag wants to help — from mashable.com by Adario Strange
Twitter launches its own live video streaming app, Periscope — from talkingnewmedia.com by D.B. Hebbard
Periscope, which streams live video to your Twitter feed, launches a couple weeks after competitor Meerkat entered the App Store
* Meerkat and Periscope are tools to Tweet live video
Sharing TV Clips Socially (and Legally) with Whipclip — from adweek.com by Adam Flomenbaum
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Whipclip – an app that lets viewers splice and share (legally) TV clips – has launched today, and has secured partnerships with major broadcast networks, including Comedy Central, ABC, CBS, FOX, VH1, A&E and Lifetime, Bloomberg, OWN and truTV. In December, we wrote about the company raising $20 million to launch the service.
…
“The days of awkwardly holding your phone up to the TV to record and share your favorite moments may be coming to an end. Whipclip enables users to find and create their favorite TV and music clips and share them intimately with their closest friends or broadly across their entire social network,” said Richard Rosenblatt, co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Whipclip. “Not only benefitting the users but also providing the content owners with a viral user driven method to find new audiences.”
* From DSC:
What if we were talking about lectures on the TV…
what new affordances might there be?
Wipster and Adobe Voice — from markdubois.info by Mark DuBois
Excerpt:
I have been experimenting with the Wipster application for a few weeks. Essentially, this is a site where you post a video for others to review and approve. They can add comments in the video (as it plays). Although the service is not free, I am finding this to be very helpful for work I am doing with our student chapter of Web Professionals as well as within various courses I teach. What I find most beneficial is the use of Adobe Voice to generate short videos on a topic and then seek feedback via Wipster.
Also, though this isn’t just about video, I’m going to include it here anyway:
Sharing our inspiration from the Learning Technologies conference with links to all our liveblogs — from joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com
Excerpt:
Sibrenne and myself arrived last Friday at Rotterdam airport with a head full of inspiration from the Learning Technologies conference and fresh air from our walk along the Thames. In this blogpost we compile some reflections and provide links to all our liveblogs, so that you may choose which ones to read. Something which struck us when we reflected on all different sessions.
…
If you’d like to read our liveblogs, choose one or several of the 13 liveblogs below:
Addendum on 3/29/15:
Inside Higher Ed’s 2015 Survey of Chief Academic Officers — from facultyecommons.org by Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman
Excerpt:
A majority of provosts are concerned about declining faculty civility in American higher education. And a large majority of provosts believe that civility is a legitimate criterion in hiring and evaluating faculty members. Generally, the provosts are confident that faculty members show civility in their treatment of students, but have mixed views on whether professors show civility in dealings with colleagues and doubt how much civility is shown to administrators.
These results are clear from Inside Higher Ed‘s 2015 Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers. And after a year of intense debate over civility, the survey shows that provosts are not aligned with faculty leaders on the issue.
Other key findings:
Madcap and Metaio team up for augmented reality documentation — from blog.metaio.com by
Excerpt:
Documentation is a huge industry and with humanity’s continuing pursuit of technology, it’s not slowing down. Instead, documentation methods are growing and diversifying into mediums beyond the traditional paper manual.
…
Madcap’s newest update, Madcap Flare 11, has taken documentation even further. By leveraging Metaio’s Augmented Reality technology, Flare is now able to export documentation with Augmented Reality content. In a world of increasingly complex and abstract concepts, Augmented Reality provides much needed simplicity, with intuitive 3D models, live video, and dynamic linking between static printed content and digital information.
A video of Audi’s Augmented Reality Manual, back from August 2013:
From DSC:
Also…what affordances might this present for educators, instructional designers, and the like?
More info about iBeacon technology — from DavidLeeKing.com
Excerpt:
Ex-Apple designer rethinks the Bible for a mobile world — from fastcodesign.com by Ainsley O’Connell
Kory Westerhold and his cofounder, Yahoo design director Aaron Martin, give Co.Design an exclusive look at their beautiful new Bible app.
Excerpt:
Fast-forward to 2015, and Westerhold, now a product designer at Twitter, has teamed up with Aaron Martin, a design director at Yahoo and childhood friend. Today, after months of sketching and development, they released NeuBible, an elegant and radically simplified mobile app for the Bible.
Their goal, Westerhold says, was to “get rid of everything between you and scripture.”
Also see:
Published on Mar 15, 2015
Description (emphasis DSC):
Design has become a game changer in Silicon Valley. Last year, John Maeda joined KPCB as the firm’s first Design Partner, joining from his role as the President of the Rhode Island School of Design. Now, in his inaugural #DesignInTech Report, Maeda highlights the rising importance of design in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Drawing on extensive research and his own conversations with hundreds of designers, Maeda examines the intersection of design and technology. The report covers trends ranging from the record amounts of funding flowing into design-led startups to M&A activity with major tech corporations. Beyond designers and technologists, the report will appeal to a broad audience. For all of us who use a computer or mobile device, great design is changing how we live and work. This report helps explain why.
Nine creative firms have been atypically acquired by companies known for tech like Facebook, Flextronics, Googe, and GlobalLogin; also Accenture and Capital One.
Tech companies, and investors, are increasingly seeing the value of designers who know how to work with and within the constraints of the tech industry.
Design in VC is not about pretty — it’s about relevance.
Below are some resources, ideas, questions, and more regarding the topic of learning spaces:
Per Jeanne Narum (Principal, Learning Spaces Collaboratory and Founding Director, Project Kaleidoscope), we’ve been asking the following key questions for several years now:
The Learning Spaces Collaboratory
NOTE:
Be sure to see The LSC Guide: Planning for Assessing 21st Century Spaces for 21st Century Learners
Derek Bruff’s Learning Spaces gallery
Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics – a meta-analysis of 225 studies
Abstract
To test the hypothesis that lecturing maximizes learning and course performance, we metaanalyzed 225 studies that reported data on examination scores or failure rates when comparing student performance in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses under traditional lecturing versus active learning. The effect sizes indicate that on average, student performance on examinations and concept inventories increased by 0.47 SDs under active learning (n = 158 studies), and that the odds ratio for failing was 1.95 under traditional lecturing (n = 67 studies). These results indicate that average examination scores improved by about 6% in active learning sections, and that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning. Heterogeneity analyses indicated that both results hold across the STEM disciplines, that active learning increases scores on concept inventories more than on course examinations, and that active learning appears effective across all class sizes—although the greatest effects are in small (n ? 50) classes. Trim and fill analyses and fail-safe n calculations suggest that the results are not due to publication bias. The results also appear robust to variation in the methodological rigor of the included studies, based on the quality of controls over student quality and instructor identity. This is the largest and most comprehensive metaanalysis of undergraduate STEM education published to date. The results raise questions about the continued use of traditional lecturing as a control in research studies, and support active learning as the preferred, empirically validated teaching practice in regular classrooms.
Building Community with FLEXspace: The Flexible Learning Environments eXchange — from educause.com by Lisa Stephens
Key Takeaways
Seven Principles for Classroom Design: The Learning Space Rating System — from educause.com by Malcolm Brown
Key Takeaways
Gordana Latinovic’s Learning Spaces on Pinterest
Kelley Tanner’s Learning Spaces on Pinterest
Greg Swanson’s Learning Spaces on Pinterest
Bill Duncan’s Learning Spaces on Pinterest
The SCALE-UP Project
The primary goal of the Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) Project is to establish a highly collaborative, hands-on, computer-rich, interactive learning environment for large-enrollment courses.
What does ‘learning’ have to learn from Netflix? — from donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com by Donald Clark
Excerpts:
Of course, young people are watching way less TV these days, TV is dying, and when they do watch stuff, it’s streamed, at a time that suits them. Education has to learn from this. I’m not saying that we need to replace all of our existing structures but moving towards understanding what the technology can deliver and what learners want (they shape each other) is worth investigation. Hence some reflections on Netflix.
Areas discussed:
From DSC:
I just wanted to add a few thoughts here:
Also, some other graphics come to my mind:
Excerpt:
AUSTIN, TX – Virtual reality is featured prominently at South By Southwest Sports this year, from using it to better train athletes with Oculus Rift to how it could transform the fan experience watching basketball, football and hockey at home.
…
The NHL had its first successful test of a 360-degree virtual reality experience at its Stadium Series game between the San Jose Sharks and Los Angeles Kings last month, mounting cameras around the glass that filmed HD images in the round.
Excerpt:
When basketball lovers aren’t able to trek to stadiums near and far to follow their favorite teams, it’s possible that watching games on a bar’s widescreen TV from behind bowls of wings is the next best thing. This may no longer be true, however, as a wave of court-side, 3D virtual game experiences is becoming available to superfans with Oculus gear.
Earlier this month, NextVR showed off its new enhanced spectator experiences at the 2015 NBA All-Star Technology Summit with virtual reality (VR) footage of an October 2014 Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers match-up in Rio de Janeiro. The NBA also already announced plans to record VR sessions of the NBA All-Star Game, the Foot Locker Three-Point Contest, and the Sprite Slam Dunk event and practice.
From DSC:
In the future, will you be able to “pull up a seat” at any lecture — throughout the globe — that you want to?
Alternatively, another experiment might relate to second screening lectures — i.e., listening to the lecture on the main/large screen — in your home or office — and employing social-based learning/networking going on via a mobile device.
Consider this article:
TV-friendly social network Twitter is testing a new Social TV service on iPhones which provides users with content and interaction about only one TV show at a time.
The aim is to give users significantly better engagement with their favourite shows than they presently experience when they follow a live broadcast via a Twitter hashtag.
This radical innovation in Social TV design effectively curates just relevant content (screening out irrelevant tweets that use a show’s hashtag) and presents it in an easy-to-use interface.
If successful, the TV Timeline feature will better position Twitter as it competes with Facebook to partner with the television industry and tap advertising revenue related to TV programming.
Private Giveaway — from insidehighered.com –by Ry Rivard
Private college in Iowa gives itself to the University of Iowa rather than be forced out of business
Excerpt:
Leaders at the AIB College of Business in Iowa took a look at the future of their small private college and decided to shut down and donate the campus to the University of Iowa.
AIB’s decision, made back in January, is similar in some respects to one made a few weeks later by leaders at Sweet Briar College, a 700-student women’s college in rural Virginia, that announced it plans to close this year.
At AIB, officials figured they would close down before they were forced out of business.
Corinthian Colleges Closing — from huffingtonpost.com
Addendum 5/1/15 re: Corinthian Colleges:
California Attorney General Kamala Harris | Eric Risberg / Via AP Photo
See Bryan Alexander’s list of Queen Sacrifices including Elmhurst College makes a queen sacrifice (3/1/15)
Sweet Briar will close — from insidehighered.com by Scott Jaschik
Excerpt:
Sweet Briar College announced today that it is shutting down at the end of this academic year.
Small colleges close or merge from time to time, more frequently since the economic downturn started in 2008. But the move is unusual in that Sweet Briar still has a $94 million endowment, regional accreditation and some well-respected programs. But college officials said that the trend lines were too unfavorable, and that efforts to consider different strategies didn’t yield any viable options. So the college decided to close now, with some sense of order, rather than dragging out the process for several more years, as it could have done.
Paul G. Rice, board chair, said in an interview that he realized some would ask, “Why don’t you keep going until the lights go out?”
But he said that doing so would be wrong. “We have moral and legal obligations to our students and faculties and to our staff and to our alumnae. If you take up this decision too late, you won’t be able to meet those obligations,” he said. “People will carve up what’s left — it will not be orderly, nor fair.”
Closing with grace — from insidehighered.com by Alice Brown
The closing of Sweet Briar College will, I expect, have little impact on other small, private, rural colleges with small endowments. Most will keep their heads in the sand, live on in a state of denial and continue to produce strategic plans that say little more than “Hope.”
Addendum on 3/17/15:
Trustees are set to vote on Tuesday morning to merge Temple with Piedmont International University of Winston-Salem, N.C. Students who are not graduating this semester would have the option to continue their education there. Bryan College in Dayton, Tn., and Shorter College at Rome, Ga., would be other options.
…
The merger with Piedmont will officially take place on April 30, pending the approval of the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools which is the accrediting body for both universities.
Addendum on 3/19/15:
Addendum on 3/20/15:
Addendums on 4/6/15:
Part 3: Google Search will be your next brain — from medium.com by Steven Levy
Inside Google’s massive effort in Deep Learning, which could make already-smart search into scary-smart search
Excerpt:
But about ten years ago, in Hinton’s lab at the University of Toronto, he and some other researchers made a breakthrough that suddenly made neural nets the hottest thing in AI. Not only Google but other companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and IBM began frantically pursuing the relatively minuscule number of computer scientists versed in the black art of organizing several layers of artificial neurons so that the entire system could be trained, or even train itself, to divine coherence from random inputs, much in a way that a newborn learns to organize the data pouring into his or her virgin senses. With this newly effective process, dubbed Deep Learning, some of the long-standing logjams of computation (like being able to see, hear, and be unbeatable at Breakout) would finally be untangled. The age of intelligent computers systems?—?long awaited and long feared?—?would suddenly be breathing down our necks. And Google search would work a whole lot better.
This breakthrough will be crucial in Google Search’s next big step: understanding the real world to make a huge leap in accurately giving users the answers to their questions as well as spontaneously surfacing information to satisfy their needs. To keep search vital, Google must get even smarter.
This is very much in character for the Internet giant. From its earliest days, the company’s founders have been explicit that Google is an artificial intelligence company. It uses its AI not just in search?—?though its search engine is positively drenched with artificial intelligence techniques?—?but in its advertising systems, its self-driving cars, and its plans to put nanoparticles in the human bloodstream for early disease detection.
…
Indeed, as of now, all Google’s deep learning work has yet to make a big mark on Google search or other products. But that’s about to change.
Also see the other parts in this series:
Part 1: The never ending search
Excerpt:
Google’s flagship product has been part of our lives for so long that we take it for granted. But Google doesn’t. Part One of a study of Search’s quiet transformation.
Part 2: How Google knows what you want to know
Eight times a day Google asks test subjects about their information needs. Their replies can be sobering.
Excerpt:
Google search really isn’t threatened by competition from other search engines. But the people on the search team constantly worry that they may be falling short in satisfying the needs of their users. To address that problem, of course, Google needs to know what those needs are. One way to do this is by examining the logs to see what queries are unsatisfied. But there are lots of things people want to know that they aren’t asking Google about.
How does Google know what those needs are?
It asks them.
Every year since 2011 Google has run an annual study to learn what people really, really want to know, whether it’s something Google provides or not. It’s called Daily Information Needs, but the psychologists at Google involved with the project just call it DIN.
Part 4: The Deep Mind of Demis Hassabis — from medium.com by Steven Levy
Google’s prize AI prodigy tells all. In the race to recruit the best AI talent, Google scored a coup by getting the team led by a former video game guru and chess prodigy
Excerpt:
From the day in 2011 that Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind—with funding by the likes of Elon Musk—the UK-based artificial intelligence startup became the most coveted target of major tech companies. In June 2014, Hassabis and his co-founders, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, agreed to Google’s purchase offer of $400 million. Late last year, Hassabis sat down with Backchannel to discuss why his team went with Google—and why DeepMind is uniquely poised to push the frontiers of AI. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Addendum on 3/16/15:
