education technology

Reflections on “The 3 instructional shifts that will redefine the college professor” [Craig]

On 08/05/2015, in 21st century, active learning, adjunct faculty, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, colleges, community colleges, Daniel S. Christian, education technology, educational games / serious games, elearning, faculty/staff, flipping -- inverted learning, higher education, ideas, instructional design, IT in HE, learning ecosystem, mobile learning, mobile technologies, new business models, new media literacies, online learning, online media, organizational change, platforms, programming, simulations, teaching & learning, trends, universities, usability, user experience (UX), user interface design, using teams, by Daniel Christian

The 3 instructional shifts that will redefine the college professor — from edsurge.com by Ryan Craig

Excerpts:

As faculty at colleges and universities are all too aware, it’s hard to do two jobs at the same time. Since the advent of the modern research university over a century ago, faculty have effectively held down two jobs: conducting (and publishing) research and teaching students.

Arguments for the dual-role professor seem logical. Knowledge production should make one a better instructor. Students should benefit from teachers producing the latest knowledge. But there’s precious little data to support that adding the research job to the instruction job improves student outcomes.

The downside is that both jobs require significant expertise and commitment to do well.
…
There is an emerging consensus as to what works best for onground instruction. It’s called the Dynamic Classroom, and it looks like this:

Flip classroom so “transfer of information” occurs ahead of class
Incorporate technology in the classroom (handheld clickers or smartphone apps) to quickly ascertain whether students have understood key concepts
Integrate active learning techniques to improve understanding of key concepts, including peer learning, group problem solving, project-based learning and experiential learning via studios and workshops
Include “perspective transformation” exercises wherein students change their frames of reference by critically reflecting on their assumptions

From DSC:
First of all, I second the idea of splitting up the responsibilities of researching and teaching. Both roles are full-time jobs and require different skillsets. With students paying ever higher tuition bills, students deserve to take their courses from professors who know how to teach (not an easy job by the way!).

But the unbundling doesn’t — and shouldn’t — stop with the splitting up of the teaching and research roles.

Let’s look at another of the instructional shifts that Ryan considers — and that is the move towards the use of smartphones and apps:

In this environment, we can imagine one app for Economics 101 and another for Psychology 110. They are also the ideal platform for simulations and gamified learning and can tailor the user experience further by incorporating real-world inputs (e.g., location of the student) into the material. But, like the dynamic classroom, apps require an unparalleled level of development and instructional expertise—a full-time job for faculty who will be teaching online.

I think there’s some serious potential with this approach, especially given the trend towards more mobile computing and the affordances that come with using mobile technologies.

However, when we start delivering teaching and learning experiences that involve the digital/virtual realm like this, we’re instantly catapulted into a world that requires additional skills. As such, I highly doubt that the majority of faculty members have the time, interests, passions, or the abilities/gifts to code such apps. They would have to simultaneously be (or become) a programmer/developer, an instructional designer, a graphic designer, a copyright expert, an expert in accessibility, instantly knowledgeable in user interface and user experience design, as well as continue to serve as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) — and I could list other roles as well. That is why we need TEAMS of specialists. If the trends towards moving more of our teaching and learning experiences online and/or into such digital realms continue, then our current models simply won’t cut it anymore, at least in the majority of cases.

I appreciate Ryan’s article and second the main idea of splitting up the teaching and researching responsibilities. But again, when we’re talking developing apps, we had better be talking employing the use of teams — or the students will likely not be better off.

—–

A related quote from “In Sign of the Times for Teaching, More Colleges Set Up Video-Recording Studios” — from The Chronicle

At some colleges, media teams sit down with professors ahead of time and lay out long-term strategies to determine how video may enhance the learning experience of students in their courses.
…

The media team offers instructors a number of planning worksheets to encourage them to think more about the purpose of videos in their courses.

—–

What might our learning ecosystems look like by 2025? [Christian]

On 07/31/2015, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, active learning, adult learning, analytics, Apple, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Augmented Reality (AR), blended learning, business side of he, career development, changing business models, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, competency-based learning/education, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, cost of getting a degree, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, digital learning, digital storytelling, disruption, distance education, education, education technology, elearning, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, expectations, experimentation, formal learning, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, Google, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, ideas, informal learning, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, K-12 related, learner profiles, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, liberal arts, lifelong learning, marketplaces, mobile learning, more voice more choice more control, online learning, online media, online tutoring, pace of change, participation, personalized/customized learning, platforms, professional development, reinvent, second screen apps, social learning / networks, staying relevant, streams of content, student-related, surviving, technologies for your home, technology (general), telepresence, television, training / L&D, transmedia, trends, TVs, universities, user experience (UX), using teams, videoconferencing, virtual field trips, virtual K-12 schools, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, virtual tutoring, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, workplace, by Daniel Christian

This posting can also be seen out at evoLLLution.com (where LLL stands for lifelong learning):

From DSC:
What might our learning ecosystems look like by 2025?

In the future, learning “channels” will offer more choice, more control. They will be far more sophisticated than what we have today.

That said, what the most important aspects of online course design end up being 10 years from now depends upon what types of “channels” I think there will be and what might be offered via those channels. By channels, I mean forms, methods, and avenues of learning that a person could pursue and use. In 2015, some example channels might be:

Attending a community college, a college or a university to obtain a degree
Obtaining informal learning during an internship
Using social media such as Twitter or LinkedIn
Reading blogs, books, periodicals, etc.

In 2025, there will likely be new and powerful channels for learning that will be enabled by innovative forms of communications along with new software, hardware, technologies, and other advancements. For examples, one could easily imagine:

That the trajectory of deep learning and artificial intelligence will continue, opening up new methods of how we might learn in the future
That augmented and virtual reality will allow for mobile learning to the Nth degree
That the trend of Competency Based Education (CBE) and microcredentials may be catapulted into the mainstream via the use of big data-related affordances

Due to time and space limitations, I’ll focus here on the more formal learning channels that will likely be available online in 2025. In that environment, I think we’ll continue to see different needs and demands – thus we’ll still need a menu of options. However, the learning menu of 2025 will be more personalized, powerful, responsive, sophisticated, flexible, granular, modularized, and mobile.

Highly responsive, career-focused track

One part of the menu of options will focus on addressing the demand for more career-focused information and learning that is available online (24×7). Even in 2015, with the U.S. government saying that 40% of today’s workers now have ‘contingent’ jobs and others saying that percentage will continue climbing to 50% or more, people will be forced to learn quickly in order to stay marketable. Also, the 1/2 lives of information may not last very long, especially if we continue on our current trajectory of exponential change (vs. linear change).

However, keeping up with that pace of change is currently proving to be out of reach for most institutions of higher education, especially given the current state of accreditation and governance structures throughout higher education as well as how our current teaching and learning environment is set up (i.e., the use of credit hours, 4 year degrees, etc.). By 2025, accreditation will have been forced to change to allow for alternative forms of learning and for methods of obtaining credentials. Organizations that offer channels with a more vocational bent to them will need to be extremely responsive, as they attempt to offer up-to-date, highly-relevant information that will immediately help people be more employable and marketable. Being nimble will be the name of the game in this arena. Streams of content will be especially important here. There may not be enough time to merit creating formal, sophisticated courses on many career-focused topics.

With streams of content, the key value provided by institutions will be to curate the most relevant, effective, reliable, up-to-date content…so one doesn’t have to drink from the Internet’s firehose of information. Such streams of content will also offer constant potential, game-changing scenarios and will provide a pulse check on a variety of trends that could affect an industry. Social-based learning will be key here, as learners contribute to each other’s learning. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) will need to be knowledgeable facilitators of learning; but given the pace of change, true experts will be rare indeed.

Microcredentials, nanodegrees, competency-based education, and learning from one’s living room will be standard channels in 2025. Each person may have a web-based learner profile by then and the use of big data will keep that profile up-to-date regarding what any given individual has been learning about and what skills they have mastered.

For example, even currently in 2015, a company called StackUp creates their StackUp Report to add to one’s resume or grades, asserting that their services can give “employers and schools new metrics to evaluate your passion, interests, and intellectual curiosity.” Stackup captures, categorizes, and scores everything you read and study online. So they can track your engagement on a given website, for example, and then score the time spent doing so. This type of information can then provide insights into the time you spend learning.

Project teams and employers could create digital playlists that prospective employees or contractors will have to advance through; and such teams and employers will be watching to see how the learners perform in proving their competencies.

However, not all learning will be in the fast lane and many people won’t want all of their learning to be constantly in the high gears. In fact, the same learner could be pursuing avenues in multiple tracks, traveling through their learning-related journeys at multiple speeds.

The more traditional liberal arts track

To address these varied learning preferences, another part of the menu will focus on channels that don’t need to change as frequently. The focus here won’t be on quickly-moving streams of content, but the course designers in this track can take a bit more time to offer far more sophisticated options and activities that people will enjoy going through.

Along these lines, some areas of the liberal arts* will fit in nicely here.

*Speaking of the liberal arts, a brief but important tangent needs to be addressed, for strategic purposes. While the following statement will likely be highly controversial, I’m going to say it anyway. Online learning could be the very thing that saves the liberal arts.

Why do I say this? Because as the price of higher education continues to increase, the dynamics and expectations of learners continue to change. As the prices continue to increase, so do peoples’ expectations and perspectives. So it may turn out that people are willing to pay a dollar range that ends up being a fraction of today’s prices. But such greatly reduced prices won’t likely be available in face-to-face environments, as offering these types of learning environment is expensive. However, such discounted prices can and could be offered via online-based environments. So, much to the chagrin of many in academia, online learning could be the very thing that provides the type of learning, growth, and some of the experiences that liberal arts programs have been about for centuries. Online learning can offer a lifelong supply of the liberal arts.

But I digress…
By 2025, a Subject Matter Expert (SME) will be able to offer excellent, engaging courses chocked full of the use of:

Engaging story/narrative
Powerful collaboration and communication tools
Sophisticated tracking and reporting
Personalized learning, tech-enabled scaffolding, and digital learning playlists
Game elements or even, in some cases, multiplayer games
Highly interactive digital videos with built-in learning activities
Transmedia-based outlets and channels
Mobile-based learning using AR, VR, real-world assignments, objects, and events
…and more.

However, such courses won’t be able to be created by one person. Their sophistication will require a team of specialists – and likely a list of vendors, algorithms, and/or open source-based tools – to design and deliver this type of learning track.

Final reflections

The marketplaces involving education-related content and technologies will likely look different. There could be marketplaces for algorithms as well as for very granular learning modules. In fact, it could be that modularization will be huge by 2025, allowing digital learning playlists to be built by an SME, a Provost, and/or a Dean (in addition to the aforementioned employer or project team). Any assistance that may be required by a learner will be provided either via technology (likely via an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled resource) and/or via a SME.

We will likely either have moved away from using Learning Management Systems (LMSs) or those LMSs will allow for access to far larger, integrated learning ecosystems.

Functionality wise, collaboration tools will still be important, but they might be mind-blowing to us living in 2015. For example, holographic-based communications could easily be commonplace by 2025. Where tools like IBM’s Watson, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Deepmind, and Apple’s Siri end up in our future learning ecosystems is hard to tell, but will likely be there. New forms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) will likely be mainstream by 2025.

While the exact menu of learning options is unclear, what is clear is that change is here today and will likely be here tomorrow. Those willing to experiment, to adapt, and to change have a far greater likelihood of surviving and thriving in our future learning ecosystems.

Exclusive: Education company Blackboard seeks $3 billion sale – sources [reuters.com]

On 07/29/2015, in CMS/LMS, education technology, vendors, by Daniel Christian

Exclusive: Education company Blackboard seeks $3 billion sale – sources — from reuters.com

Excerpt:

Blackboard Inc, a U.S. software company that provides learning tools for high school and university classrooms, is exploring a sale that it hopes could value it at as much as $3 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.

Blackboard’s majority owner, private equity firm Providence Equity Partners LLC, has hired Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) and Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) to run an auction for the company, the people said this week.

Some great applications of AR: “How Blippar Education supports special needs students to improve learning”

On 07/28/2015, in accessibility / UDL, assistive technologies, Augmented Reality (AR), Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education technology, emerging technologies, history, ideas, machine-to-machine communications, neurodivergent/special needs, science, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, by Daniel Christian

How Blippar Education supports special needs students to improve learning — from blippar.com

Excerpts:

Firstly, high school teacher Katrine Pinkpank’s class made individual, blippable posters for their Earth Day projects in April. When passers-by blipped these posters – all of which were hung in beautiful frames in the hallways – they were taken to a video of the students doing their Earth Day presentation in front of the class. One student in the class is legally blind, so the braille on his poster was used to trigger the blipp. These hallway boards have become living, breathing, 3D tributes to the work of our students.

In Room 407, students used Blippar in many different ways. Wendy Thompson, an early adopter of the technology, used it for a Women’s History Month project where students created an app-smash between Blippar and Trading Cards. The students created trading cards about famous women in history – such as Ella Fitzgerald, Frida Kahlo, and Mary Shelley – then used Blippar to add photo galleries, hyperlinks, and videos so people passing the bulletin board could scan the cards and view pop-up content about these remarkable women.

Secondly, the class made the school newsletter blippable.
…
Using Blippar and Tellagami, the students created talking digital avatar videos that illustrated their post-secondary and transition goals.

From DSC:
Though this posting focuses on the use of Blippar, an augmented reality app, I also think beacons (such as from Estimote), machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, and apps like locly could be used to relay information from students, teachers, and faculty members who could record and provide presentations concerning their work — with pieces of their work being located out in the hallways or actually anywhere on a campus. When someone approaches a piece in the hallway, a pre-loaded application on that person’s mobile device — such as locly — would be activated to display a “card”/link to the video describing that piece. The author, creator, designer doesn’t need to be physically present in order to tell people about their work.

Also see:

4 Great Augmented Reality Apps for teaching Science
Excerpts:

Elements 4D
ZooKazam
NASA’s Spacecraft 3D
Anatomy 4D

“Choose your reality: Virtual, Augmented or Mixed” [A basic primer in 3 future-looking technologies by Eric Johnson]

On 07/27/2015, in attention, Augmented Reality (AR), corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, digital storytelling, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, K-12 related, Mixed Reality (MR), user experience (UX), user interface design, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, by Daniel Christian

Choose Your Reality: Virtual, Augmented or Mixed — from recode.net by Eric Johnson; with thanks to Woontack Woo for his posting on this

Excerpts:

[For VR] The key buzzword here is presence, shorthand for technology and content that can trick the brain into believing it is somewhere it’s not.

The key term for AR is utility…AR takes your view of the real world and adds digital information and/or data on top of it.

The key term for mixed reality, or MR, is flexibility…It tries to combine the best aspects of both VR and AR…In theory, mixed reality lets the user see the real world (like AR) while also seeing believable, virtual objects (like VR). And then it anchors those virtual objects to a point in real space, making it possible to treat them as “real,” at least from the perspective of the person who can see the MR experience.

So, to borrow an example from Microsoft’s presentation at the gaming trade show E3, you might be looking at an ordinary table, but see an interactive virtual world from the video game Minecraft sitting on top of it. As you walk around, the virtual landscape holds its position, and when you lean in close, it gets closer in the way a real object would.

See this example.

Matching pedagogies with technologies — this is the type of interface that could help!

On 07/24/2015, in accessibility / UDL, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education technology, emerging technologies, ideas, interface design, neurodivergent/special needs, parents/guardians, personalized/customized learning, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, youth, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
The folks who worked on the Understood.org site have done a great job! Besides the wonderful resources therein, I really appreciated the user experience one is able to get by using their site. Check out the interface and functionality you can experience there (and which I’ve highlighted below).

We need a similar interface for matching up pedagogies with technologies.

DSC-NeedThisInterface4SelectingTechs4Pedagogies--July2015-flat

Also, there are some excellent accessibility features:

From DSC:
When you read the article below, you’ll see why I’m proposing the aforementioned interface/service/database — a service that would be similar to Wikipedia in terms of allowing many people to contribute to it.

Why ed tech is not transforming how teachers teach — from edweek.org by Benjamin Herold
Student-centered, technology-driven instruction remains elusive for most

Excerpt:

Public schools now provide at least one computer for every five students. They spend more than $3 billion per year on digital content. And nearly three-fourths of high school students now say they regularly use a smartphone or tablet in the classroom.

But a mountain of evidence indicates that teachers have been painfully slow to transform the ways they teach, despite that massive influx of new technology into their classrooms. The student-centered, hands-on, personalized instruction envisioned by ed-tech proponents remains the exception to the rule.

From DSC:
Swivl allows faculty members, teachers, trainers, and other Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to make recordings where the recording device swivels to follow the SME (who is holding/wearing a remote). Recordings can be automatically sent to the cloud for further processing/distribution.

My request to you is:
Can you extend the Swivl app to not only provide recordings, but to provide rough draft transcripts of those recordings as well?

This could be very helpful for accessibility reasons, but also to provide students/learners with a type of media that they prefer (video, audio, and/or text).

A note to Double Robotics — can you work towards implementing M2M communications?

On 07/22/2015, in 21st century, accessibility / UDL, Daniel S. Christian, education technology, ideas, machine-to-machine communications, neurodivergent/special needs, robotics, student-related, technologies for your home, telecommunications, telepresence, usability, user experience (UX), vendors, videoconferencing, virtual field trips, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
A note to Double Robotics — can you work towards implementing M2M communications?

That is, when our Telepresence Robot from Double Robotics approaches a door, we need for sensors on the door and on the robot to initiate communications with each other in order for the door to open (and to close after __ seconds). If a security clearance code is necessary, the remote student or the robot needs to be able to transmit the code.

When the robot approaches an elevator, we need for sensors near the elevator and on the robot to initiate communications with each other in order for the elevator to be summoned and then for the elevator’s doors to open. We then need for the remote student/robot to be able to tell the elevator which floor it wants to go to and to close the elevator door (if if hasn’t already done so).

Such scenarios imply that we need:

Industry standards for such communications
Standards that include security clearances (i.e., “OK, I’ll let you into this floor of this public building.” or “No, I can’t open up this door without you sending me a security clearance code.”)
Secure means of communications

A major request/upgrade might also include:

The ability for the Double App on the iPad to make recordings, have an auto send option to send those recordings to the cloud, and then provide transcripts for those recordings. This could be very helpful for accessibility reasons, but also to provide students/learners with a type of media that they prefer (video, audio, and/or text).

Opinion: Apple and IBM have big data plans for education [Evans]

On 07/16/2015, in analytics, Apple, data related items, education technology, IBM, mobile learning, mobile technologies, student-related, by Daniel Christian

Opinion: Apple and IBM have big data plans for education— from computerworld.com by Jonny Evans
Apple and IBM are developing solutions that underpin a future of personalized mobile learning that lasts a lifetime.

Excerpt:

Apple and IBM have been developing the “Student Achievement App” for several months and this is due to enter real world tests this year. The partners recently began approaching US school districts to trial the new technologies. For example, in June a large delegation of Apple and IBM folk met with the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees.

They discussed a proposed partnership between IBM, Apple and CISD to develop these solutions, which are described as “content analytics for student learning”, according to the meeting minutes.

From DSC:
One paragraph reads:

It’s no surprise Apple wants to do what it can to improve the education industry. Co-founder Steve Jobs was famously frustrated with the way the sector works in the US. Speaking to Fortune, Denise Young Smith, Apple’s vice president of human resources said Apple CEO Tim Cook is also committed to and involved in the company’s educational technology programs. “Education and learning is our legacy but Tim goes above and beyond,” she says.

Though I’m a huge fan of Apple, I’d have to disagree here. I’m much more skeptical/dubious as to whether Apple’s leadership is as committed to education as they once were; and if they still are, it hasn’t been showing much these last few years. Instead, they’ve let Google make major inroads on this turf; to the point that I would even say that Google is blowing Apple out of the water in this space.

So from my edtech-based perspective, Apple has dropped the ball on education in recent years — instead, leadership focused far more on the iPhone, music, and other consumer-oriented goods and services. From a business standpoint, I get it. They’re the largest company in the world (by market cap) and their strategies are clearly working for them.

That said, I am encouraged when I see items like the one mentioned above and I hope that such education-related projects/endeavors — and the budgets and resources allocated to them — play a larger role at Apple in the future.

Beyond Active Learning: Transformation of the Learning Space — from educause.edu by Mark S. Valenti

Excerpt:

The past decade has seen exciting developments in learning space design. All across the United States and around the world, across seemingly every discipline, there is interest in creating new, active, project-based learning spaces. Technology-rich and student-centric, the new learning spaces are often flexible in size and arrangement and are a significant departure from the lecture hall of yesterday. These developments are not the result of any one factor but are occurring as the result of changes in student demographics, technology advances, and economic pressures on higher education and as the result of increasing demands from employers. The nature of work today is inherently team-based and collaborative, often virtual, and geographically distant. Companies are seeking creative, collaborative employees who have an exploratory mindset. Employers seek graduates who can be more immediately productive in today’s fast-paced economy. Colleges and universities around the country are responding by creating flexible, multimodal, and authentic learning experiences. It’s a complex ecosystem of education—and it’s evolving right before our eyes. What an amazing time to be in education and to be a part of the transformation of the learning space!

…

The next generation of learning spaces will take all the characteristics of an active learning environment—flexibility, collaboration, team-based, project-based—and add the capability of creating and making. Project teams will be both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and will likely need access to a broad array of technologies. High-speed networks, video-based collaboration, high-resolution visualization, and 3-D printing are but a few of the digital tools that will find their way into the learning space.

Figure 1. The T-Shaped Professional

Credit: Developed by IBM (Jim Spohrer, IBM Labs) and Michigan State University and
modified on March 16, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

CMU’s active learning classrooms improve STEM students’ learning — from cmich.edu; with thanks to Krista Spahr for this item
Environments support collaborative conversation, development of real-world skills

Excerpt:

The active learning difference
Through state-of-the-art technology, students spend their class time in active learning classrooms collaborating on assignments and solving problems rather than listening to lectures. Faculty become coaches and guides instigating thoughtful discussions and debates. Often, students watch faculty members’ online lectures before each class session begins.

Studies have shown that active learning classrooms and their settings allow students to learn up to three times more and retain greater knowledge, strengthen student-faculty relationships and improve student performance. Active learning also is proven to increase the likelihood that students in STEM disciplines will continue in those programs and removes the gap between the success of male and female students.

…

The flipped classroom can be associated with more collaborative, experiential, constructivist learning. “Faculty become coaches and guides instigating thoughtful discussions and debates. Often, students watch faculty members’ online lectures before each class session begins.”

6 Secrets of Active Learning Classroom Design — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser
While the basic elements of active learning classrooms are well known, no one-size-fits-all template exists. Here’s how to achieve the custom fit your school needs.

Excerpt:

4 Questions to Guide Classroom Design
By next year, the University of Oklahoma will have nearly a dozen active learning spaces, up from one in 2012. Every single classroom looks different from the others, and that’s by design. Chris Kobza, manager of IT learning spaces, and Erin Wolfe, director of strategic initiatives, have honed their process down to four simple questions:

What’s the vision?
What’s the focus?
How flexible?
What’s the budget?

The process starts when they sit down with the person or people who want to redo a room to find out what they envision — is it maximum technology or maximum flexibility? “It’s a real casual conversation but you can learn enough about what their expectations for the space are, what the expectations for their faculty are, what they hope the students get out of the space,” said Kobza.

Reasons and Research – Why Schools Need Collaborative Learning Spaces — from emergingedtech.com by Kelly Walsh
There are Many Reasons Why Flexible, Active Learning Classrooms Should be Widely Adopted

Excerpt:

The power of Active Learning: “Many of today’s learners favor active, participatory, experiential learning—the learning style they exhibit in their personal lives. But their behavior may not match their self-expressed learning preferences when sitting in a large lecture hall with chairs bolted to the floor.”

Kelly references the
Learning Spaces compilation out at Educause:

From DSC:
Don’t like the phrase “active learning?” I’m compiling a list of other words/phrases/thoughts that one can use:

Collaborating on assignments and solving problems
Collaborative learning
Actively engaged learning
Peer instruction
Thinking out loud with one another
Constructionist / constructivist learning
Developing real-world skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, negotiating, and teamwork
Students have the opportunity to work in groups, solve complex problems and be creative
Emphasis on small-group activities
Immersed in discussion
Flexible in size and arrangement
Experiences and opportunities to better understand the material
Students are extremely engaged in what they are doing, and their thinking is being refined.
Creating and making; creativity
Effective interactions of small groups of people within communal spaces
Putting the focus on students doing the work of learning
Increased motivation via more hands-on opportunities
Sharing / exchanging ideas
Participatory

‘The shift is changing the way teachers plan, present lessons and share information. Students no longer need to all do the same thing to learn about a topic. This change is enhancing the quality of work teachers are receiving back from students, and is creating an environment where students are involved in the creation (versus consumption) of content that aids their learning. “A major change comes in the direct instruction piece. As teachers, we’re moving from simply giving information and offering a passive learning experience, to serving as a facilitator and guiding student inquiries. This method is allowing them to be active participants in their own education,” said Alder Creek Middle School teacher Vicki Decker. (Source)

Addendum on 7/17/15:

Designing Active Learning Classrooms — from dbctle.erau.edu; with thanks to Tim Holt out at holtthink.tumblr.com for the original posting that led me to this resource
Excerpt:
Active Learning Classrooms (also known as Active Learning Spaces or Learning Studios) are classrooms or other physical spaces designed with active learning in mind. In particular they are student-centered rather than instructor-centered. Students often sit in groups instead of rows to support collaborative learning, and some classrooms even have movable tables or desks. Students also sometimes have their own computers or tablets, and there may be multiple displays around the classroom, since students are not facing in one direction. Researchers have found that active learning classrooms have positive influences on student learning and engagement. Below are videos, examples, research studies, and assessment instruments related to active learning spaces.

A somewhat related addendum:

50 alternatives to lecturing — from teachthought.com

New tools, emerging technologies, HCI, & resources to check out

On 07/13/2015, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Augmented Reality (AR), chemistry, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, CMS/LMS, computer science, digital learning, digital video, education technology, educational games / serious games, Microsoft, user experience (UX), user interface design, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, wearables, by Daniel Christian

Augmented Reality Chemistry Experiments with Elements 4D — from whiteboardblog.co.uk

Excerpt:

Elements 4D is a neat Augmented Reality chemistry app for iOS and Android devices which provides a fun way to look at various different chemical reactions.

The app uses blocks that are inscribed with the symbols of 36 elements from the periodic table. The site will eventually sell ready-made cubes, but you can download paper templates for free here.

When viewed through the app, these blocks instantly transform a simple, inanimate object into dynamic, dimensional, 4D representations of each element.

Also see:

elements4d’s website

Toss your manual overboard—augmented reality aims at big industry — from arstechnica.com by Lee Hutchinson
Papers, diagrams, and checklists would be replaced with intuitive visual tools.

Excerpt:

GE is focusing efforts on constructing an extensible “field maintenance manual” intended to be used for industrial equipment. The use case being tested in the labs is with oil and gas; researchers in GE’s Research Center in Brazil are building software that they hope will replace the need to deal with bulky printed maintenance manuals—manuals which have to be kept up to date and which lack any kind of interactivity.

New Microsoft Tool Takes the Pulse of Higher Education
Bing Pulse in the Classroom, a new student response system designed for higher education, launched this week.

Excerpt:

A new student response tool designed by a team at Microsoft will soon be giving teachers instant feedback on how their lessons are going.

Bing Pulse in the Classroom, a free online tool designed to make higher education lectures more dynamic, was released Thursday. The technology lets teachers ask students questions to get a real-time “pulse” of the lesson to ensure a teacher isn’t getting too far ahead of the class.
…
A feature not included in Pulse in the Classroom’s first iteration was live video streaming. Nesho says this capability will soon be added, and it could be a game changer for higher education classes that incorporate distance learning. Using a live video stream along with the Pulse feature set, the platform comes closer to an all-inclusive classroom experience.

Microsoft pioneers new ‘machine teaching’ technology to bring machine learning to the masses — from winbeta.org by Joseph Finney

Excerpt:

Tech companies are constantly building and testing technology which could cause the next paradigm shift in how the world communicates, creates, and consumes. Many big names including Google, IBM and Microsoft are investing in machine intelligence and machine learning. Now Microsoft believes they have created the next generation of machine learning which they call machine teaching. While the name ‘machine teaching’ does not instantly communicate the purpose or intent of the new tech the underlying concept is simple.

Essentially, like Henry Ford brought the automobile to the masses, Microsoft wants to bring machine learning to everyone. Many companies are focused on making their machine learning algorithms more accurate, but Patrice Simard believes more advances can be driven by bringing machine learning to the masses.

Also relevant here/see:
What Every Manager Should Know About Machine Learning — from hbr.org by Mike Yeomans
A primer on machine learning — from loop.ai
A tour of Machine Learning Algorithms #BigData #MachineLearning — from mo-data.com
In this post we take a tour of the most popular machine learning algorithms.

Microsoft launches site for teachers taking Minecraft into the classroom — from theguardian.com
Minecraft in Education portal aims to get educators sharing tips on how Mojang’s popular game can be used to teach children

The Scoop on Periscope: Broadcast Live Video to the World — from learninginhand.com by Tony Vincent
[Tony includes a nice infographic in this posting.]

First Look: Jaunt’s VR Camera Codenamed NEO — from by Jonathan Nafarrete

Excerpt:

Jaunt has announced the launch of a new professional grade VR camera series codenamed “NEO” that will enable the next generation of filmmakers to produce the highest quality VR experiences.

Industrial Design by LUNAR.

Leap Motion’s Augmented-Reality Computing Looks Stupid Cool — from wired.com

Excerpt:

This demo, in which a standard desktop computer is reimagined as a three-dimensional workstation of the future, offers a glimpse of what that might look like.

The project came out of a hackathon at Leap Motion, whose nifty gesture-recognizing sensor acts as a sort of finger-scale Kinect for desktop software. Using a prototype Leap sensor, a developer-kit Oculus Rift, a team of engineers built an augmented-reality work environment in which regular desktop applications jump out of the computer and into 3-D space. It’s a new computing interface hovering in front of a traditional personal computer sitting on a wood table—three generations of the “desktop,” one on top of another.

Apps That Rise to the Top: Tested and Approved By Teachers — from kqed.org by Katrina Schwartz

EdTech 2015: What’s Coming Down the Innovation Pipeline — from medium.com by Daniel Rezac
Brace Yourselves for a New Wave of Classroom Integration

Office 365 Open Source plugins for Moodle: getting better all the time — from msopentech.com

Excerpt:

[On June 26th, 2015] we shared the news that the upcoming Cypress release of Open edX, the most popular open source MOOC (massive open online course), will include new features for tighter integration with Office 365. Those features are the result of our open source collaboration with members of the Open edX community.

In addition to the new work we’re doing with Open edX, we continue to work with Remote-Learner (a leading Moodle partner) to make improvements and additions to the open source Office 365 plugins for Moodle. Moodle is the most popular open source learning management system (LMS), and the Office 365 plugins were released in January of this year. In this post, we’d like to share a few details about the great work Remote-Learner is doing to evolve the plugins.

New math app turns 2-D problems into 3-D solutions for Nova Scotia students — from trurodaily.com by Zane Woodford, Metro Halifax

Excerpt:

HALIFAX – A new augmented reality application for iPhones, iPads and Android devices brings math problems off the page for Nova Scotia students – illustrating angles, curves and the dreaded Pythagorean theorem in three dimensions.

© Metro Halifax/Jeff Harper
Grade 9 student Nathaniel Jarmash uses an augmented reality app
to work on his math problems at Sir Robert Borden Junior High School.

The NMC Horizon Report > 2015 K-12 Edition is now out.

Description:

What is on the five-year horizon for K-12 schools worldwide? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and transforming teaching and learning steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 56 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report > 2015 K-12 Edition, in partnership with the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). The NMC also gratefully acknowledges ISTE as a dissemination partner. The three key sections of this report — key trends, significant challenges, and important developments in educational technology — constitute a reference and straightforward technology planning guide for educators, school leaders, administrators, policymakers, and technologists. It is our hope that this research will help to inform the choices that institutions are making about technology to improve, support, or extend teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in K-12 education across the globe. View the wiki where the work was produced.

> Download the NMC Horizon Report > 2015 K-12 Edition (PDF)
> Download the report preview (PDF)
> Download the interim results (PDF)

Augmented Reality – hype, or the future? [mybroadband.co.za]

On 06/29/2015, in 21st century, Augmented Reality (AR), corporate / business world, digital learning, education technology, emerging technologies, marketing/social marketing, technologies for your home, wearables, by Daniel Christian

Augmented Reality – hype, or the future? — from mybroadband.co.za by EE Publishers
The concept of Augmented Reality has existed for many years now – and commentators have remained rigidly sceptical about whether it will truly materialise in our everyday lives.

Excerpts:

Essentially, AR describes the way in which a device (such as a smartphone camera, wearables like Google Glasses, or a videogame motion sensor) uses an application to “see” the real world around us, and overlay augmented features onto that view.

These augmented features are aimed at adding value to the user’s experience of their physical environment.
…
We predict there will be three primary areas in which we will initially engage with AR:

The way we consume information: Imagine going to a library or museum and being able to have a “conversation” with key people throughout history, or instantly transform the world around to you resemble a bygone era.

The fields of product development, marketing and customer engagement: Overlaying new digital services into retail environments opens up a host of new possibilities for organisations to tailor products to their consumers.

Back office/operational functions within the organisation: Companies are already finding ways to use AR in their supply chain, logistics and warehousing environments. Find out, for example, if a particular unit is missing from a shelf.

From DSC:
I wonder how Machine-to-Machine communications, beacons, GPS, and more will come into play here…? The end result, I think is a connection between the physical world and the digital world:

DanielChristian-Combining-Digital-Physical-Worlds-Oct2014

Learning Ecosystems

Reflections on “The 3 instructional shifts that will redefine the college professor” [Craig]

Exclusive: Education company Blackboard seeks $3 billion sale – sources [reuters.com]

Augmented Reality – hype, or the future? [mybroadband.co.za]

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