From DSC:
The first article/item I want to comment on is:
A Potential Market for Courseware Developers — from Brandon-Hall.com by Richard Nantel
First of all, thanks Richard for tackling this subject and for putting a posting out there regarding it. For years, I’ve wondered what the best way(s) is(are) to pursue the creation of professionally-done, interactive, personalized/customized, multimedia-based, engaging content. It is expensive to create well-done materials and/or the learning engines behind these materials. Also, as at the faith-based college where I work, some colleges would want a very specific kind of content or take a different slant on presenting the content. So the content would have to be modified — which would have an associated cost to it.
Some options that I’ve thought of:
- Outsource the content creation to a team of specialists — at educationally-focused publishing companies out there
- Outsource the content creation to a team of specialists — at other solution providers focused on education
- Develop the content in-house with a team of specialists
- Don’t create content at all, but rather steer people to the streams of content that are already flowing out there. Some content may be changing so fast that it may not be worth the expense to create it.
- Have students create the content — that’s what school becomes. Learning enough to create/teach the content to others. (This would require a great deal of cross-disciplinary collaboration and cooperation amongst faculty members.)
As a relevant aside, I have held that if an organization could raise the capital and the teams to develop this type of engaging, professionally-done content — and scale the solution — they could become the Forthcoming Walmart of Education. The attractive piece of this for families/students out there would be that this type of education will come at a 50%+ discount.
The second article/item that caused some additional reflection here was the article at The Chronicle of Higher Education by Marc Parry entitled, “Think You’ll Make Big Bucks in Online Ed? Not So Fast, Experts Say”
What if the United States could reallocate even the cost of 1-2 high-end planes in the United States Air Force? Our nation could create stunning, engaging content that could reach millions of people on any given subject — as online learning has the potential to be highly scalable (though I realize that much of this depends upon how much involvement an organization wants to integrate into the delivery/teaching of this content in terms of their instructors’/professors’ time).
Anyway, Marc highlights some important points — that creating content, marketing that content, etc. can be expensive.
But I have it that if you don’t get into this online learning game, you won’t be relevant in the years to come. People want convenience and students’ expectations will continue to rise — wanting to learn on their own pace, per their own schedule, from any place and on any device; finally, they will want to have more opportunities to participate/collaborate/control their own learning experiences. (And this doesn’t even touch upon whether it will become even more difficult to get through “the gate” — that is, getting the student’s attention in order to make it into their short-term memory, in hopes of then moving the lesson/information into long-term memory.)
From DSC:
Interesting if this same concept could be applied towards developing a personalized digital textbook that a student could build over time…and be assessed up what they came up with. Also the student could take the personalized textbook with them. Cool.
Also see:
4/1/11 addendums:
EdWeek’s 2011 Technology Counts — from The Future of Education by Jesse Moyer
Also see the report at:
From DSC:
In my mind, this area of intelligent systems and agents is one of the most important areas to watch in the years ahead. Such efforts should help us develop sophisticated systems that can help deliver personalized, customized education at the K-12 and higher ed levels…and perhaps will be relevant in the L&D space as well.
The innovations that come from this area may make hybrid-based — as well as 100% online-based learning — incredibly powerful!
If someone can develop such systems and make them available at far cheaper prices than exist today, a quality “Walmart of Education” will truly have been built.
Per the Call for Papers section, the topics for this conference include, but are not limited to:
Area 1 – Intelligent Systems
– Algorithms – Artificial Intelligence – Automation Systems and Control – Bioinformatics – Computational Intelligence – Expert Systems – Fuzzy Technologies and Systems – Game and Decision Theories – Intelligent Control Systems – Intelligent Internet Systems – Intelligent Software Systems – Intelligent Systems – Machine Learning – Neural Networks – Neurocomputers – Optimization – Parallel Computation – Pattern Recognition – Robotics and Autonomous Robots – Signal Processing – Systems Modelling – Web Mining
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Area 2 – Agents
– Adaptive Agent Systems – Agent Applications – Agent Communication – Agent Development – Agent middleware – Agent Models and Architectures – Agent Ontologies – Agent Oriented Systems and Engineering – Agent Programming, Languages and Environments – Agent Systems – Agent Technologies – Agent Theories – Agent Trends – Agents Analysis and Design – Agents and Learning – Agents and Ubiquitous Computing – Agents in Networks – Agents Protocols and Standards – Artificial Systems – Computational Complexity – eCommerce and Agents – Embodied Agents – Mobile Agents – Multi-Agent Systems – Negotiation Strategies – Performance Issues – Security, Privacy and Trust – Semantic Grids – Simulation – Web Agents |
Customized Schooling — from edweek.org by Rick Hess
Excerpt:
So, if you’re ready to get your geek on, have I got a treat for you. Harvard Education Press has just published Customized Schooling: Beyond Whole-School Reform. The book, edited by Bruno Manno and [Rick Hess], is an attempt to pull together a bunch of sharp thinking on how we get past just trying to “fix” schools–or to merely give families a choice between school A and school B–and how we start to think about using new tools, technologies, and talent to transform the quality of teaching and learning.
School turnarounds are a swell idea, and will occasionally work. And I’m broadly in favor of choice-based reform as a useful way to open up systems to new providers and permit schools to sharpen their focus. But these measures retain and even enshrine the assumptions of the 19th century schoolhouse, and those assumptions seem an unlikely answer to the challenges of the 21st century. (For my full riff on this score, go peruse last fall’s The Same Thing Over and Over.)
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Contents
Introduction
Bruno V. Manno and Frederick M. Hess
1 Creating Responsive Supply in Public Education
Kim Smith and Julie Petersen
2 Reframing the Choice Agenda for Education Reform
Chester E. Finn Jr. and Eric Osberg
3 The Rise of Global Schooling
Chris Whittle
4 Multiple Pathways to Graduation
Tamara Battaglino and JoEllen Lynch
5 The Evolution of Parental School Choice
Thomas Stewart and Patrick J. Wolf
6 Education Tools in an Incomplete Market
Douglas Lynch and Michael Gottfried
7 A Typology of Demand Responders in K–12 Education
Joe Williams
8 Price Competition and Course-Level Choice in K–12 Education
Burck Smith
9 The Data Challenge
Jon Fullerton
10 Will Policy Let Demand Drive Change?
Curtis Johnson and Ted Kolderie
Conclusion
Frederick M. Hess and Olivia Meeks
Schools use digital tools to customize education — from Education Week by Michelle R. Davis
“In regular, face-to-face classrooms, it’s very difficult to create an individual experience for each student unless you can make the learning independent but also interactive,” says Jeff Snyder, a former classroom social studies teacher who is now an assistant principal with the Jefferson County, Ky., public schools’ eSchool, an online school with more than 6,000 students. “Technology allows students to go in their own direction, which is really difficult to do in a classroom with 30 different kids
If viewing these graphics via the Learning Ecosystems website/blog:
You may need to right-click and download the graphics to see them in their entirety.
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If viewing these graphics via the Learning Ecosystems website/blog:
You may need to right-click and download the graphics to see them in their entirety.
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If viewing these graphics via the Learning Ecosystems website/blog:
You may need to right-click and download the graphics to see them in their entirety.
Can new technologies help us solve the never-ending problem of employee turnover? –– from Bloomfire.com
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Formal knowledge bases, outside of a few carefully constructed FAQ’s do not exist here. We lean towards activity streams, keyword subscriptions, and other features that crawl the entirety of our collaborative platforms and deliver information in a personalized way. I am not intimating at all that we have perfected the concept of personalization. However, we are mindful of it with every technology we deploy. In the end it’s a mixed bag success wise. There are always going to be more consumers than publishers, but if we can can create even one derivative work that spurs further innovation then the collective efforts of the Collaboration Services team are bought and paid for. I think our strength is understanding what could provide value, or more specifically advantage, its implementation, and promoting its adoption; more so than a singular focus on the relative benefits of a particular technology.
Big ideas from TED 2011: Letting students drive their education
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The implications of Khan’s work are nothing short of a total reevaluation of education. In a world in which the only constant is the increase in the pace of change, we simply can’t afford to give our kids anything less than an education system that actually gives them what they need to be successful.
Models for the Future of Learning — from KnowledgeWorks by Katherine Prince, Jesse Moyer, Lisa Scheerer, and Jamie Feltner
January 2011
This report was prepared for, and with the support of, Yellow Springs School District as part of a series of engagements related to its Class of 2020 initiative.
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From DSC:
How will these types of technologies affect what we can do with K-12 education/higher education/workplace training and development? I’d say they will open up a world of new applications and opportunities for those who are ready to innovate; and these types of technologies will move the “Forthcoming Walmart of Education” along.
Above item from:
From DSC:
The first portions of Kelly Tenkely’s solid blog posting — 17 ways to meet individual learning needs in the math classroom — stirred up some thoughts from a training-related session I was in earlier today. Kelly writes:
Differentiating instruction can be challenging. Student’s educational strengths and weaknesses can be widely varied, making it a difficult task to meet each student’s needs in any given lesson. Math is one such subject area where student skill levels can be very different.
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For most students, math takes a lot of practice. Unfortunately, the students who need the most practice are the most reluctant to do so because they haven’t been successful in the past. Many of these students have convinced themselves, through negative self-talk, that “I’m just not good at math.” What is a teacher to do with such a mix of skill and comfort levels in the math classroom?
Though there could be several lines of thought that I could pursue here — such as the good and bad sides of self-efficacy, personalized/customized learning, 1:1 initiatives, other — my thought process was most influenced from a training session I had attended earlier today. That session featured a video from Marcus Buckingham’s short-film series entitled Trombone Player Wanted.
Marcus asserts that there are several myths that many of us grow up with (such as our personalities change as we grow; we grow most in the areas of our weaknesses; our teams don’t need us to show up with our strengths, instead they need us to do ____). Marcus asserts that we should identify and develop our strengths (and manage around our weaknesses) — as we seek to create Win/Win situations. This perspective is consistent with my economics training that states that everyone benefits when each one of us does what we do best.
This made me reflect on the massive, systemic pressure most of our current educational environments/policies/curriculums put on students to get everyone to be at the same place. It seems like our systems stress conformity — in the goal of “level-setting” everyone.
This made me wonder:
I realize that there are basic skills that are very helpful for all adults — balancing a checkbook, being able to read and write, and many other skills. However, the question I started pondering today was…”At what point should we call it quits on a subject area — say that’s good enough — and then allow the students to pursue their individual strengths (rather than try to hammer out performance increases in an area they will rarely use)?”
Examples: