collaboration

Some solid resources re: Google Chromebooks & Google in the classroom

On 07/10/2014, in cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, education technology, Google, K-12 related, tools, vendors, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

New: Google Launched Google Educator Groups (Great Learning Platform for Teachers) | June 11, 2014 — from educatorstechnology.com

Excerpt:

Google Educator Groups (GEGs) is a new project launched by Google [on June 10, 2014]. This project aims at bringing the benefits of technology to schools, classrooms and communities across the world through the collaborative work of a community of passionate educators. GEGs is a place where educators, principals, school administrators, professors, teachers, students, and anyone else interested in using Google Products to help people learn , get to meet and collaborate with each other .

Google Art Project
Massive online global collection makes art accesible to all

The Chromebook vs. iPad Debate | Technology in Music Education — from techinmusiced.wordpress.com by Christopher Russell

OPINION: Why We Are Misunderstanding the Chromebook-iPad Debate — from edsurge.com by Tim Holt

A variety of postings at edudemic.com re: Chromebooks

A variety of postings at GettingSmart.com re: Chromebooks

A variety of postings at KQED.org (Mind/Shift) re: Chromebooks

Chromebooks & Chromeboxes for education — from google.com

New Excellent Google Drive Guide for Teachers and Students — from educatorstechnology.com | June 16, 2014

Excerpt:

I don’t want you to miss this wonderful resource on how to be a Google Drive master. This is basically a Google Doc that features a plethora of video tutorials and activities related to each tool in Google Drive. The main objectives of this guide is to help teachers and students leverage the power of Google Drive tool in education. It provides them with video tutorials covering each of the Drive applications ( Google Doc, Presentation, Drawing, and Google Forms ) and with each of these videos is an attached activity that should be completed to show mastery of the topic under discussion. I have spent sometime going through these tutorials and activities and I found them really helpful. All thanks go back to Vicki Davis through whom I learned about this resource ( by the way Vicki has recently published a new book entitled ” Reinventing Writing: The 9 Tools That Are Changing Writing, Teaching, and Learning Forever“

Here is a round-up of all the video tutorials included in this guide, you can also check the entire guide from this link.

From DSC:
Personally, I would also recommend to anyone out there considering a rollout of Chromebooks to set up some Google Alerts. You could use such words/phrases as “Google Apps For Education,” “GAFE,” “Chromebooks,” “rollouts,” plus any other keywords that you are interested in.

Addendums:

A Response to Joshua Kim’s ‘3 Reasons Why Chromebook Beats iPad in 1:1 Programs’ — from edsurge.com by Tim Holt
http://www.scoop.it/t/chromebook-for-education
The RSS feed for the Chrome Show

A new, very sharp, incredibly well-designed collaborative workspace in Grand Rapids, MI (USA)

On 06/30/2014, in 21st century, career development, collaboration, entrepreneurship, learning spaces, library / librarians, Michigan, web-based collaboration, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Excerpt from custerworklab.com:

The floor plan includes 10,000 square feet of co-working space.

13 private offices
Two mobile offices
One executive office
One team room that can accommodate up to four people
Seven meeting spaces with seating for four to 35 people

All the meeting spaces include display and switching technology with video conferencing available in three of the rooms. Other features include a work lounge, cafe and a variety of other workstations. Plus more social accessibility, ergonomic furniture and the best technology available.

From DSC:
I recently toured this space and I can tell you that you can quickly get a sense of how much thought and effort went into the design of that collaborative workspace.

Check out the photo gallery and 360 degree tour to see what I mean.

I think you will agree that each and every thing that you see in that space is approached from a sense of design and functionality. Everything is there for a reason. The technology. The furniture. The esthetics and accessories. Everything. It’s very well done. If you get a chance to use it or tour it, I would highly recommend it. Custer’s Worklab lays out so many things that are helpful in a collaborative learning/workspace.

Also see:

8 Perks of Coworking Spaces for Savvy Entrepreneurs — from grasshopper.com by Allison Canty

10 disruptive cloud innovations for schools [Samuel]

On 06/24/2014, in cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, education technology, higher education, innovation, IT in HE, tools, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

Excerpt:

Here are 10 companies that are making waves in the education sector with products in the cloud that impact both the frontend and backend of institutions.

Self-directed learning for all? [modernlearners.com, Sylvia Martinez]

On 06/24/2014, in collaboration, heutagogy, K-12 related, pedagogy, psychology, relationships, teachers, teaching & learning, youth, by Daniel Christian

Self-Directed Learning for All? — from modernlearners.com
What do we mean by “self-directed learning,” and who gets to pursue it? All students? Or only some? Do we select certain students for these opportunities based on what counts as “good behavior,” for example?

How do we make sure that self-directed learning opportunities benefit all students? How do we balance students’ need for support with their need for freedom?

Author and speaker Sylvia Martinez writes in What a Girl Wants about the ways in which gender plays a role in education and explores how we can help support girls in self-directed learning opportunities.

An excerpt/quote from Sylvia’s article:

The teacher’s role is to help students move past what they know school usually asks of them and take a chance on something that they really want to do.

…

Some people assume that self-directed learning means solitary learning. This is far from the truth. Mardziah Hayati Abdullah of the US Department of Education writes that self-directed learning is both collaborative and social, where the learner collaborates with both teachers and peers. Students must learn how to navigate new ways of getting and sharing information with others, both in real life and online. Creating opportunities for self-directed learning means more collaboration and communication, not less, an area in which girls excel.

International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning (iJAC) — latest issue now available

On 06/12/2014, in collaboration, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, higher education, professional development, telecommunications, workplace, by Daniel Christian

International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning (iJAC) — latest issue now available

Excerpts:

Papers

Integrating Corporate Competence with Real Cases into Higher Education Curriculum
Hong Wu
.
Collaborative Learning in the Workplace: Practical Issues and Concerns
Hyunkyung Lee, Curtis J. Bonk

Case Study

GEDIFO: A Cross-Organizational Approach to Learning in Communities of Practice
Christina Merl, Ulrich Schönbauer

Short Papers

The Usage of Telecommunication Technologies in the Integration of Universities and Business
Rustem Lukmanovich Sakhapov, Svetlana Germanovna Absalyamova
.
Knowing Customers Better: An Experimentation of Twit Marketing in the e-Commerce Industry
Hamad Al Turki, Ayham Fayyoumi

Reinventing libraries for ‘hanging out, messing around and geeking out’ — from CNN.com by Emanuella Grinberg

Excerpt:

The staff takes special pride in its mentor-led activities, offered in partnerships with various community organizations: a spoken word workshop, a video game program and a makerspace, or workshop, where teens create birdcages, duct tape wallets and other art projects.

It might be a library, but for 18-year-old Alexis Woodward, the atmosphere is more like a “family reunion,” she said.

“It’s always packed until it closes. Everybody goes to the library after school,” said Woodward, who began participating in the spoken word program when she was 14.

Internet Trends 2014 — Mary Meeker [KPCB]

On 05/29/2014, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, Amazon, analytics, Apple, Asia, business, Canada, change, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, communications, convergence, corporate / business world, dangers of the status quo, data related items, disruption, emerging technologies, Europe, global / globalization, Google, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, innovation, interactivity, internet, marketing/social marketing, marketplaces, mobile technologies, more voice more choice more control, pace of change, platforms, social media, society, strategy, streams of content, technologies for your home, technology (general), telecommunications, television, trends, TVs, UK, United States, user experience (UX), vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

Example slides:

The collaborative consumption & the sharing economy — what are the implications for teaching & learning?

On 05/22/2014, in business, business side of he, change, changing business models, collaboration, communities of practice, Daniel S. Christian, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
First…a few items that stimulated some reflection:

Weekly Round-up: Collcons Must-Reads 23 May
We scour the internet to find the most interesting news on the collaborative consumption front. Here are our picks for the week:

Weekly Round Up: COLLCONS Must Reads – 9 MAY — from collaborativeconsumption.com
We scour the internet to find the most interesting news on the collaborative consumption front. Here are our picks for the week:

The Sharing Economy — from bbc.co.uk
Video duration: 30 minutes | First broadcast: Thursday 08 May 2014

Description:

Home swaps, driving your neighbour’s car, private car parking in your drive, even renting your neighbour’s clothes. They are all part of a new style of collaborative enterprise in which nearly everyone can join and (maybe) make money: the ‘shared economy’.

It’s breaking cover, growing fast and could be important. Perhaps the best known example is Airbnb but many more companies have sprung up allowing people to share their things and even their time. And now companies are trying to make money out of what makes all this sharing possible: trust.

But existing regulations and laws are set up for traditional businesses such as hotels and car hire companies, and that is causing problems. Peter Day investigates the opportunities and snags of the sharing economy and asks if it could become a big democratic movement.

From DSC:
After seeing those items, I began to wonder…

Given the tough economic times many of us find ourselves in, will the sharing economy continue to pick up steam?
If so, what are the implications for teaching and learning? How might such an environment impact what occurs within K-20? For example, will the concept of learning hubs take off (especially at the higher ed level)?
Will such an environment lend itself to encouraging more communities of practice?

Hmmm….

Also see:

Addendum — related…?

Turning a MOOC into a network of schools collaborating — from pbs.org

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Students at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Utah are currently engaged in a collaborative online class, Social Media Journalism, which combines the convenience of a MOOC with the engagement of a medium-sized lecture — and the completion rate is more than 95 percent. The engagement scales, too: students at both schools, 1,300 miles apart, are taking the class together, interacting with each other, viewing the same lesson modules and building a news aggregation service on various social media platforms. The difference is they get a personal instructor and smaller groups of familiar classmates. Our next step is to add more campuses and make this a new kind of MOOC — a network of schools working together with the same material but with individual instructors.

…

“It wasn’t about lectures or tests; it was about actually putting our work out there on social media and letting audience feedback be our guide. It was one of the few classes I’ve taken where I felt like my work was actually applicable toward real-life situations, instead of just being about a grade.”

…

Even if they don’t become social media editors, many have said they gained from having the knowledge of how to run an organization’s social channels.

Also see:

Where the Internet of Things could take society by 2025 — from centerdigitaled.com by Tanya Roscorla

Excerpt:

The Pew Research Center Internet Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center released the report on Wednesday, May 14, as part of an ongoing future of the Internet series inspired by the Web’s 25th anniversary. Eighty-three percent of these experts, which included education leaders, agreed that the Internet of Things would have “widespread and beneficial effects on the everyday lives of the public by 2025.” The remaining 17 percent said it would not, and both camps elaborated on their answers in paragraph form.

Their explanations fall under six major points:

The Internet of Things and wearable computing will take major steps forward in the next 11 years.
Increased data from connected things will cause privacy concerns to come to the forefront and encourage the growth of profiling and targeting people, which will greatly inflame conflicts in various arenas.
Despite advancement in information interfaces, most people won’t be connecting their brains to the network.
Complicated, unintended consequences will arise.
A digital divide could deepen and disenfranchise people who don’t choose to connect to the network.
Relationships will change depending on people’s response to the Internet of Things.

From DSC:
As with most technologies, there will be positives and negatives about the Internet of Things. To me, the technologies are tools — neutral, not value-laden — and it’s how we use them that adds moral, political, legal, ethical, or social perspectives/elements to them. With that said, I’m quite sure that the IoT will have unintended consequences (#4 above). Also, item #5 — “A digital divide could deepen and disenfranchise people who don’t choose to connect to the network” — is especially troublesome to me, along with the topic of privacy concerns as mentioned in #2.

MIT Technology Review’s “10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2014”

On 05/14/2014, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Augmented Reality (AR), biology, collaboration, data related items, emerging technologies, engineering, mobile technologies, research, robotics, technology (general), by Daniel Christian

10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2014 — from MIT Technology Review

Also see:

MIT Lists its 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2014 – Part 1 — from WFS.org

From DSC:
Last spring, I saw the following graphic from Sparks & Honey’s presentation entitled, “8 Exponential Trends That Will Shape Humanity“:

If today’s changes are truly exponential — and I agree with Sparks & Honey that they are, especially as they relate to technological changes — how soon will it be before each of us is interacting with a robot?

This is not an idle idea or question, nor is it a joke. It will be here sooner than most of us think! The science fiction of the past is here (at least in part). Some recent items I’ve run across come to my mind, such as:

Hitachi’s EMIEW Robot Learns to Navigate Around the Office — from spectrum.ieee.org by Jason Falconer

Photo: Hitachi

Excerpt:

Now EMIEW 2 still relies on maps of its surroundings, but its navigation software has a new feature: It uses designated zones that make the robot change its speed and direction.

iRpobot Ava 500

Excerpt:

Ava 500 enables this new dimension in telepresence with:

autonomous navigation and mobility – remote users simply specify a destination and the robot automatically navigates to the desired location without any human intervention.
standards-based videoconferencing – built-in Cisco Telepresence® solutions deliver enterprise-class security and reliability.
an easy-to-use client application – an iPad mini™ tablet enables remote users to schedule and control the robot.
scheduling and management -seamlessly handled through an iRobot managed cloud service.

Also see:

Chinese city aims to have 80% of production done by Robots by 2020 — from robohub.org
Robohub Digest March 2014 — — from robohub.org
With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time — from the New York Times by Jesse McKinley

Transmedia & interactive reading list #10 — including Racontr’s Guide to Interactive Storytelling [Hoguet]

On 04/04/2014, in A/V -- audio/visual, animation, Augmented Reality (AR), collaboration, creativity, digital learning, digital storytelling, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, immersion, innovation, interactivity, interface design, story, storytelling, transmedia, user experience (UX), Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, by Daniel Christian

Transmedia & interactive reading list #10 — from benhoguet.com

Excerpt of slides from one of the items Ben mentions:

“Making your office space work” [Groner] & “The office goes live” [Harvey]

On 03/21/2014, in 21st century, A/V -- audio/visual, business, collaboration, corporate / business world, generational differences, videoconferencing, web-based collaboration, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Making your office space work — from sparksheet.com by Danny Groner
What happens when you move your startup into the Empire State Building? You learn what a difference a well-designed space can make, reports Shutterstock’s Danny Groner.

Photo by Bilyana Dimitrova.

Photo by Bilyana Dimitrova.

Photo by Bilyana Dimitrova.

The office goes live — from avnetwork.com by Steve Harvey

Excerpt:

The corporate workplace is undergoing a transformation, due in large part to a combination of influences such as cost, collaboration, convergence, and the cloud. What will the future office look like, and what part will AV integrators play in its evolution?

“The workplace is not evolving, it’s being revolutionized,” according to Julian Phillips, executive vice president of Whitlock. “More businesses are moving towards ‘European style’ open plan office environments to make better use of space and create a more collaborative working environment. This drives a need for more informal meeting spaces.

“Research has shown that the average meeting is now with less than four people in the office, although more may join virtually, therefore we are seeing a demand for fewer medium-sized conference rooms for eight to 12 people, but many more ‘huddle’ spaces for four to six people.”

…

Worklogik’s Todd McCandless points out that in the next decade baby boomers
will consist of less than 25 percent of the workforce. Gen Ys will represent over 50 percent,
and collaboration is the key to their work ethic.

3 incredible resources re: collaborative workspaces!

On 03/15/2014, in collaboration, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, smart classrooms, web-based collaboration, workplace, by Daniel Christian

I want to send a shout out to Mr. Dean Gunnink [Assistant Director, Design, for Calvin College’s Physical Plant Department] from whom these resources are from.

21 inspirational collaborative workspaces — from myturnstone.com by Stephen Searer

22Squared

Creative & modern office designs around the world — from hongkiat.com by

Google (Zurich, Switzerland)

Creative collaborative spaces — from cherrylawncircle.wordpress.com

hivehaus in San Diego

How do your learning spaces measure up? — from campustechnology.com by David Raths

Excerpt:

Now, however, two separate yet complementary initiatives under development promise to fill that void: 1) FLEXspace, an interactive online database with images and videos of learning spaces, provides a searchable collection of best practices in active learning design, and 2) the Learning Space Rating System (LSRS) seeks to provide a set of measurable criteria to assess how well classroom design supports and enables active learning activities.

Also see:

Excerpt:

The Flexible Learning Environments eXchange – FLEXspace – is a robust, open access repository populated with examples of learning spaces. It contains high resolution images and related information that describes detailed attributes of these spaces from institutions across the globe.

The incentive for participation is to showcase innovative design solutions open to peer review ranking and comments. As more contributions are received, the repository will emerge into a very useful planning resource for education and supporting entities at multiple levels.

Somewhat related/also see:

Emerson College campus by Morphosis places curvy classrooms within a hollow frame — from dezeen.com

Learning Ecosystems

A new, very sharp, incredibly well-designed collaborative workspace in Grand Rapids, MI (USA)

10 disruptive cloud innovations for schools [Samuel]

International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning (iJAC) — latest issue now available

The collaborative consumption & the sharing economy — what are the implications for teaching & learning?

The Internet of Things will thrive by 2025 [Pew Research; Anderson & Rainie]

Transmedia & interactive reading list #10 — including Racontr’s Guide to Interactive Storytelling [Hoguet]

“Making your office space work” [Groner] & “The office goes live” [Harvey]

3 incredible resources re: collaborative workspaces!

How do your learning spaces measure up? [Raths]

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