What Glass does offer, Vanden Heuvel said, is a shift in perspective, particularly because teachers can use it as a tool to engage students faster and more easily than before. After returning from Geneva, Vanden Heuvel launched a YouTube channel devoted to his experiments with science–and Glass–called STEMBite. To date, in more than two dozen videos, he’s guided viewers through the physics of ball spin on the tennis court to the polarization of light through (appropriately enough) a pair of glasses.
“What I’m excited by making these videos is not only that they’re filmed with Google Glass, but they’re high engagement videos, so they’re meant to be really short and to get kids to think about how math and science is all around,” he said. “I suppose I could have done that before, but it’s just so easy now.”
Per Hanna Brown:
“I’ve had videos in my classroom before–that’s not a novel thing–but I’ve never been able to take a video from my eye perspective,” said Hannah Brown, another early Glass adopter who works as a high school art teacher at Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an all-online statewide charter school in Ohio.
From DSC: Virtual field trips, mobile learning, videoconferencing, web-based collaboration, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and other topics come to my mind when I see this.
I see a Watson-type-of-tool as being a key ingredient for future MOOCs and the best chance for MOOCs to morph into something very powerful indeed— offloading the majority of the workload to computers/software/intelligent tutoring/learning agents, while at the same time allowing students to connect with each other and/or to Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) as appropriate.
The price of education could hopefully come way down — depending upon the costs involved with licensing Watson or a similar set of technologies — as IBM could spread out their costs to multiple institutions/organizations. This vision represents another important step towards the “Walmart of Education” that continues to develop before our eyes.
Taking this even one step further, I see this system being available to us on our mobile devices as well as in our living rooms — as the telephone, the television, and the computer continue to converge. Blended learning on steroids.
What would make this really powerful would be to provide:
The ability to create narratives/stories around content
To feed streams of content into Watson for students to tap into
Methods of mining data and using that to tweak algorithms, etc. to improve the tools/learning opportunities
Such an architecture could be applied towards lifelong learning opportunities — addressing what we now know as K-12, higher education, and corporate training/development.
The Amazon By Marcos Antonio de Lima Filho | Master in Design | Federal University of Pernambuco – Brazil
This is a free book which is available in iBooks 3.0+ on the iPad and/or using iTunes on your computer. Marcos designed this book to take advantage of all the interaction enabled by iPads.
156 images, 14 infographics, 18 galleries, 11 maps and 8 videos join with the text, which here is not the primary. Why? Because the nature is much too rich to be described only by words. The Amazon seeks to take advantage of all the technology advancements enabled by the tablet.
Great work Marcos! Nice interactivity, use of digital audio and video, graphics, and more. Check it out!
Thanks to digital media, the Internet and new advances in understanding how students learn, educators are beginning to appreciate the importance of breaking out of the classroom and into the wider world. There’s a growing understanding that learning should not just be preparation for life, but is actually “life itself.”
Is School Enough? documents vivid examples of where new modes of learning and engagement are taking hold and flourishing. Featuring nationally recognized educators and researchers, Stephen Brown’s powerful stories show that when students have the opportunity to explore real interests and problems, they step up and perform at the highest level.This new approach reaches motivated students as well as kids that educators call “the bright and bored,” helping these learners tune in rather than drop out.
Is School Enough? introduces parents, educators, and everyone passionate about learning to:
• Students in Maine who work with veterinary experts and digital apps to prepare a new home for a retired circus elephant.
• Young people worldwide who use the online Harry Potter Alliance to launch meaningful social justice initiatives.
• A curious and creative teen who crafts her own educational experience based on her passion for natural healing and yoga.
• A young man in Oakland who produces state-of-the-art music videos to engage his community—and himself.
Through the voices of these inspired students and America’s foremost education thought leaders, Is School Enough? provides insight into an essential new understanding of what education can be in the 21st century. Is School Enough? is the second in a series of programs about kids, digital media and education. The first program,Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Centuryexplores students claiming digital media as a means of connecting, communicating, creating, and learning, while interpreting its importance and providing a window into 21st-century education.
Both Apple and Amazon were designing e-book readers by copying the 2,500-year-old idea of books as self-contained collections of words, completely missing how readers share and discuss content online today. While most e-readers allow you to share passages or links to the book you are reading, and sites like Goodreads let you share what you’ve read, their implementations treat the book and the discussions around them as separate collections. Worse, these apps force users to venture into the distracting world of the open Internet when they want to share, making it hard to stay focused on reading.
This didn’t sit well with Berggren, so he came up with an ingenious solution: Make each and every book its own self-contained social network.
From DSC: When people urge us to do things differently due to the technologies at our disposal, this is a great example of that. It rethinks what can be done now vs. how it has been done in the past. I like the increased opportunities this type of big-thinking, innovative solution offers for increased participation, collaboration, and discussion.
Questions that come to my mind:
How might this affect what’s possible with digital storytelling? With transmedia?
Could each MOOC/course/stream of content be its own social network?
“The app itself is free, so the company makes money by selling anonymized data it collects about its users’ consumption habits to publishers.” Will we see more of this type of business model?
The etextbook in 2018 will be dramatically different than the etextbook of today. It will be coupled to an app that will provide you with Content as a Service (CaaS). CaaS will include many of the following features (and more that have yet to be imagined):
Multimedia
Simulations
Educational Games
Animations
Pre- and post-tests
Formative and Summative Quizzes
Adaptive testing
Networked Social Learning
Study groups
Analytic Datasets
Virtual and Flipped classes
Communities of Learning and Practice
Virtual classes.
The innovative digital US Open environment provides fans, players, broadcasters and media with access to a range of Big Data insights streaming from the courts, including stats, facts, videos, live scoring, and historical and real-time analysis of tennis data served to tablets, smartphones, PCs and other devices.
Also see:
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From DSC: Questions I wonder about:
How might this sort of thing help us in education? What if, instead of a tennis match, it was a debate on X vs. Y…? .
Could we use it in educational gaming apps? .
If so, what sorts of apps that lean on social learning could we create? .
How could professional development/conferences use this type of immersive second screen experience? What sorts of opportunities for participation would open up? .
Could we develop things like this that help us learn things IN REAL TIME from the streams of content flowing by? (Do learning agents employ this sort of thing?)
Their idea was to sell doctors’ offices prepackaged video segments containing tips on diet, exercise and other lifestyle tweaks patients could make to improve their health. A TV screen in the reception area would broadcast this programming, modeled after segments on shows such as Today, while patients waited for appointments.
To test the idea, Agarwal, Shah and classmate Derek Moeller bought TVs and DVD players, culled content from the internet and distributed the equipment and “shows” to 50 doctors in five states.
From DSC: I would like to propose some additional — and/or different — questions for next year’s survey:
Original question:
Can online courses achieve learning outcomes that are equivalent to inperson courses?
Another potential question:
How will face-to-face courses compete with what’s being achieved via online/digitally-based courses and mechanisms? (One potential answer, go hybrid.)
Original questions:
What do professors and administrators see as the most important indicators of quality in online education? How does the quality of online courses compare with the quality of inperson courses?
Another question:
If we turned the level of scrutiny (which is good and appropriate, BTW) that’s being applied to online courses to our face-to-face (F2F) courses, how would our F2F courses look/perform? How would they compare in terms of quality, achieving learning outcomes, and in terms of long-term ROI?
Original question:
What do faculty and technology officers make of MOOCs (massive open online courses), and how do they perceive media coverage of the phenomenon?
Another potential question (to students, ed tech staff, admins, faculty members):
What might MOOCs morph into and how might those innovations affect the higher education landscape?
Other questions:
Should we be looking to faculty members to initiate change? Or somewhere else?
(Faculty members’ plates are full, they may or may not believe in the value/benefits of technology, they may or may not be gifted in using technology, and many faculty members don’t have the incentive systems necessary to move forward with online learning or even enhance their F2F courses with more hybrid-based learning approaches.) .
Will it take a team-based approach to be competitive in the future? .
(Addressed to faculty members teaching F2F courses) Do you know each student’s name in your F2F course and what each of them are majoring in? How often do you talk to them? Do you keep track of who you’ve talked to and when? Do you know what goals each of your students are pursuing? How often can/do they contact you?Do you find it more difficult to engage your students in the year 2013 as opposed to 2000? Do you hold the power to change things at your institution? If so, what have you done with that power? .
Are curriculums keeping up with what’s needed or are institutions of higher education falling behind? Are we being responsive enough, realizing that the rate/trajectory of change is now exponential, not linear?
Transmedia stories and games explained — from splash.abc.net.au by Dr. Christy Dena; with thanks to The Digital Rocking Chair for Scooping this onto Transmedia: Storytelling for the Digital Age Opportunity abounds in the area of ‘transmedia projects’, or stories and games that span more than one medium or artform. Dr Christy Dena explains this evolving area of education. This is Part 1 in her blog series.
Excerpt:
One of the areas I work in is ‘transmedia’ or ‘cross-media’ writing and design. I work in the area as a practitioner, and also as an educator for industry professionals and undergraduate students. Transmedia or cross-media fundamentally refers to projects that span more than one medium; for example, a book and computer. I work in creating transmedia stories and games, and so also teach students about making their own. Over my two articles for ABC Splash, I share some of the approaches I use when giving students the opportunity to make their own transmedia stories and games.
Opening the door to transmedia projects— from splash.abc.net.au by Dr. Christy Dena In her second article on transmedia projects, Dr Christy Dena shares the guidelines she’s created to open the door to this form of education in schools.
Excerpt:
It is important that students are given at least two media locations to work with, such as a website and poster. I always include a live event of some kind as well.
From DSC: The massive convergence of the telephone, the television, and the computer continues. How that media gets to us is also changing (i.e. the cord cutting continues).
What types of innovative learning experiences can be crafted as “TV” becomes more interactive, participatory, and engaging? What happens if technologies like WebRTC make their way into our browsers and we can videoconference with each other without having to download anything?
What doors open for for us when Google, Apple, or an Amazon.com delivers your “shows” vs. NBC/ABC/CBS/etc.?
The items below cause me to reflect on those questions…
Here’s a fun combination to ponder: The world’s most powerful media company and America’s most popular sport.
That could happen if Google buys the rights to the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, the all-you-can-eat subscription-TV service currently owned by DirecTV.
Netflix inks exclusive deal for first-run Weinstein films— from cnet.comThe Internet’s biggest on-demand video service will stream movies from the indie film studio before any other pay-TV providers starting in 2016, the same year it kicks off a similar Disney deal.
Turn education into a lifelong experience — from clomedia.com by Caroline Mol and Nick Van Dam MOOCs ensure development remains relevant. The future of work depends on people’s ability to build intellectual capital.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Most of the discussions about MOOCs focus on the experience and potential impact on higher education, which we will not discuss here. Rather, we will talk about their impact on the 21st century workforce and corporations. It is very exciting that, according to edX, more than 50 percent of enrollments in such courses are professionals from all over the world.
Looking at market dynamics, increasing globalization, rapid advancements in technology and the continuously changing business environment, it becomes increasingly important that people up their game and continue to invest in their development to stay relevant in the workforce.
…
In addition to employing people with the right skills, corporations are looking more and more for specialized expertise in the so-called human cloud — the virtual, on-demand workforce. Success for a 21st century workforce is leaders’ ability to predict which competencies will be valued in the future and to accelerate mastery of those competencies.
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From DSC: While I might take some different viewpoints on a couple of things in the article, the importance of reinventing oneself — i.e. staying relevant — is key; and what MOOCs morph into might be a key ingredient for the corporate world.
The new learning dashboard is your personal homepage on Khan Academy. The dashboard gives you an easy way to find the best next things for you to do. It has a bunch of really cool things designed to help you learn math, and soon other subjects, really well on your own or with a coach.
From DSC: This is the type of innovation that makes online/blended learning even more powerful/useful.
The New York Times has now opened a channel at the website If This, Then That (IFTTT). For journalism hackers and tinkering readers, this is fine news.
IFTTT is elegantly useful and usefully elegant. For a variety of sites and services (Evernote! Instagram! Dropbox!), IFTTT combines “triggers” and “actions,” so that when one thing happens on one service, something else happens on another.You can say,if I take a picture on Instagram, then automatically save it to Dropbox.
From DSC: How might this concept be used in conjunction with digital playlists/learning? If I finished the XYZ module over here at U of X, then start ABC over here at ___.
Apple gears up for the video discovery wars — from fastcolabs.com by Michael Grothaus Think Apple’s Matcha.tv acquisition was about its programming guide service? You’re probably wrong. There’s a new war brewing in online video: helping users find the stuff they want.
From DSC: Instead of discovering videos only, how about discovering items along the lines of what you are trying to learn more about? i.e. Matcha.tv meets Google Alerts meets IBM’s Watson.
The Coming Big Data Education Revolution — from by Doug Guthrie Big data, not MOOCS, will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve outcomes for individual students
Excerpt (emphasis):
Don’t get me wrong, online learning will fundamentally transform higher education, bridging distances and creating access in ways that have not been possible before. But, in this arena, MOOCs are not a transformative innovation that will forever remake academia. That honor belongs to a more disruptive and far-reaching innovation – “big data.” A catchall phrase that refers to the vast numbers of data sets that are collected daily, big data promises to revolutionize online learning and, in doing so, higher education.
Big data in the online learning space will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve learning outcomes for individual students. By designing a curriculum that collects data at every step of the student learning process, universities can address student needs with customized modules, assignments, feedback and learning trees in the curriculum that will promote better and richer learning.
![The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV](http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian-July-2012.jpg)
