Disrupting the learning dynamic with technology — from Cisco

So how can technology disrupt the academic learning dynamic as effectively as it has disrupted the process for becoming more adept with social engagements? A new PBS documentary, Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century, explores this subject in depth. View an excerpt from the documentary…

.

Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education — March 2011

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

.

Sal Kahn at TED -- March 2011

.

From DSC:
Before rushing to a quick take/judgment on this, hear him out. Turning over more control to the students during the relaying of the information makes sense to me. They can pause, rewind, fast forward, etc.  They can re-listen to the lecture again and again, without affecting the flow of a typical face-to-face classroom. Then they come into class and can get help on their homework, instantly and when they need the assistance.

Also see:



 

The Connected Life at Home — from Cisco

The connected life at home -- from Cisco

.

.

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:

Tagged with:  

Evidence of learning online: Assessment beyond the paper — from CampusTechnology.com by Judith Boettcher
…learning designer Judith Boettcher examines online assessment strategies beyond the traditional end-of-term paper.

Excerpts:

Professional Work Products

  • Written and audio communications of all types, such as press announcements, white papers, briefs, summaries, memos, project management documentation
  • Creating and planning news events, such as announcements, interviews, or regular updates of interests, such as podcasts
  • Setting up personal or group blogs within different contexts of leadership, business, etc.
  • Setting up wikis for team projects, areas for monitoring developments
  • Many more listed…

Interviews
The interview medium is a very flexible communication tool and can be used by both faculty and students for demonstrating understanding and eliciting the state of concept development. Here are some possible strategies that can require research, critical thinking, and writing.

  • Learners identify an expert or a person of interest to them in a particular field germane to the course and then prepare the interview questions, do the interview, and then post the results
  • Learners identify and interview the author of a textbook or article closely related to the course, possibly updating information critical to the course
  • Many more listed…

Audio, Video, and Visual Projects
What about other media such as audio and video projects? Today’s learners live surrounded by audio and video and the tools that make it possible for everyone to create and produce audio and video products. Here are some of the possibilities with audio and video spaces.

  • Podcasting resources now are very common so learners are familiar enough with the format to embrace creating audio and video podcasts of their own
  • Video shorts and ad hoc documentaries engage learners and draw in their friends and families
  • Creating and posting short reports via VoiceThread is another “writing space” to consider as are Flickr, YouTube, and Slideshare

Blogs
Blogs are a very underutilized writing space. Blogs share many characteristics with journals and thus can capture snapshots of what learners are thinking, and when; plus they often can also capture the sources of some of their thinking. Blogs help learners understand the growth cycle of learning new concepts and how and why they think the way they do. Here are some ideas on how blogs, both personal and class, might be used.

  • Personal commentary and self-reflection
  • Capturing thought processes and generating new ideas
  • Assist learners in finding their “voice”
  • Many more…

Wikis

  • Collaborating on group and team projects of all kinds
  • Capturing and developing ideas for solving critical problems and case studies and simulations
  • Developing “featured” Bronze star Wikipedia articles on specific topics in particular disciplines

Google’s Gadfly — from InsideHigherEd.com

“Uncomfortably familial.” That is how Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, describes the relationship between higher education and Google — a company that has, in a little more than a decade, evolved from pet project of Stanford doctoral students to chief usher of the information age.

But as is often the case with cousins, the genetic differences between higher education and Google are more striking than their similarities. Beneath the interdependence and shared hereditary traits, tensions creep. And like an awkward Thanksgiving dinner, Vaidhyanathan’s new book, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press), provokes these tensions to the surface.

The Virginia professor, who is not afraid to confess his affection for the ease and usefulness of Google, nevertheless distrusts the company’s basic motivations as it vies for our intellectual inheritance. “Google has fostered a more seamless, democratized, global, cosmopolitan information ecosystem,” he writes. “Yet it has simultaneously contributed to the steady commercialization of higher education and the erosion of standards of information quality.”

Embedplus.com — resource and quote below from Shola ‘Tay’ Omojokun, Co-founder, EmbedPlus.com

EmbedPlus can allow users to seamlessly and freely upgrade the videos they embed with attractive features that the standard YouTube player does not currently offer.  It was recently mentioned to me that supported features like annotations and scene editing would be useful for teachers wanting to mark up lecture, demo, and videos posted on wikis, blogs, etc.  Slow motion and zoom can have some useful applications for art, nature, and science videos.

.

EmbedPlus helps teachers focus students on relevant parts of existing videos and allows them to add extended material.
EmbedPlus as an educational tool for videos

.

From DSC:
With the increase of digital video, digital storytelling, lecture capture, and other related educational technologies, this tool may be helpful to you. Thanks Tay for the resource.

Addendum on 2-18-11 — also see:

Report shows U.S. schools can’t meet technology demands of teachers, students— from The Journal by Scott Aronowitz

Few people will be surprised to learn of research that shows K-12 institutions throughout the United States have become heavily dependent on technology, and that this dependency continues to increase with each passing year. What may surprise even the most jaded among us, however, is that, given that many view this a “good” dependency with a wealth of immediate and long-term benefits for teachers, students, and staff, we’re doing an inadequate job of feeding the habit.

At the FETC 2011 show in Orlando, FL, PBS and research firm Grunwald Associates released a national research report on digital media usage among educators entitled “Deepening Commitment: Teachers Increasingly Rely on Media and Technology.” The report is based on a survey conducted in August 2010 of 1,401 preK-12 teachers from various regions and demographics throughout the United States. Its primary conclusions are:

  • Teachers are, owing to both interest and circumstance, increasing their use and knowledge of technology in the classroom; and
  • U.S. schools provide an insufficient capacity of computing devices and technology infrastructure to support teachers’ Internet-based instruction needs.

The following airs Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT:

Digital Media -- to be on PBS 2-13-11

Digital Media – New Learners Of The 21st Century  Digital Media: Chapter 1

Chapter 1 features experts in the field of digital media and its use in education.
Chapter one of Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century criss-crosses the nation to highlight real-life examples of how digital media is exploding in educational environments.

Originally seen at startl.org

Semantic technologies and learning — from Steve Wheeler

Excerpt:

The January special issue of Interactive Learning Environments is out right now. Our guest editors have done a great job drawing together 5 excellent papers under the banner of ‘Semantic Technologies for Multimedia Enhanced Learning Environments’ and for Learning with ‘e’s readers, here is the editorial in full, with excellent summaries of all the papers by our special issue editors Marco Bertini, Vladan Devedzic, Dragan Gasevic and Carlo Torniai…

This special issue solicited papers focused on the use of semantic technologies in multimedia-enhanced learning environments. In this call, we were especially interested in publishing research reports and lessons learned in the following research tasks:

  • Ontologies and semantic annotations for multimedia learning objects.
  • Collaborative tagging and folksonomies for multimedia learning objects.
  • Semantic social networking in multimedia-based learning environments.
  • Semantic technologies for enabling pedagogical theories in multimedia-enhanced learning environments.
  • Semantic-enhanced learning designs in multimedia-enhanced learning.
  • Semantic technologies for personalization and adaptation of multimedia-enhanced learning.
  • Semantic-rich service-oriented architectures for multimedia learning environments.
  • Semantic multimedia content for (collaborative) mobile learning.

An overview of HTML5 — from Integrated Learning Services

Also see:

As of Feb 1, 2011 -- the world's largest multitouch display

.

Again..can you imagine the power of this in a smart classroom setting?

.

See also:

From DSC:

I’ll wager that in the future, this is the type of “wall” that will be in many classrooms. Students will be able to hold up their devices to send their files to it…then interact with the various programs/files on the displays. Such a “wall” will read/process QR codes as well.


London: Videos from the Learning Without Frontiers Festival now online

Learning Without Frontiers is a global platform for disruptive thinkers and practitioners from the education, digital media, technology and entertainment sectors who come together to explore how new disruptive technologies can drive radical efficiencies and improvements in learning whilst providing equality of access.

If you were unable to attend the recent LWF Festival of Learning & Technology in London we’re pleased to let you know that videos from the conference are now online for your personal or group viewing pleasure.  There are a number of ways to view these videos so just choose the one you prefer.

To view, comment & join the discussions you can visit the video pages on the LWF site here

Amongst the alternatives, they are available on the following platforms:

iTunes (download to your PC, iPad or iPhone)*

YouTube

Blip.TV

And for users of Apple TV simply search for the Learning Without Frontiers channel under podcasts.

*You can also search for Learning Without Frontiers in the iTunes store – they are FREE!

Who needs textbooks? — from Newsweek.com
How Washington State is redesigning textbooks for the digital age.

Who needs textbooks? How Washington State is redesigning textbooks for the digital age.

Jessie Sellers, a student at Tacoma Community College in Washington state, was puzzled when he logged onto his school’s website last December to figure out which book he needed for his upcoming English class. Whereas for all his previous courses, the 24-year-old education major could simply click on a link to view the name of the required textbook, this time there were no books listed at all. It was no mistake: thanks to an ambitious pilot program aimed at reducing the cost of textbooks at public colleges, Sellers and hundreds of other students across the state won’t have to buy textbooks for more than three dozen courses offered this winter.

Washington’s Open Course Library is the largest state-funded effort in the nation to make core college course materials available on the Web for $30 or less per class. Financed with $750,000 from the state of Washington and a matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the goal isn’t just to reduce student costs, says program architect Cable Green. It’s also to create engaging, interactive learning materials that will help improve course completion rates. By the time the project is completed in 2012, digitized textbook equivalents for some 81 high-enrollment classes will be available online for the more than 400,000 students enrolled in Washington’s network of community and technical colleges. Even better, the materials can be shared across the globe, largely for free, because they will be published in an open format that avoids the most onerous licensing restrictions. To keep costs at a minimum, the teachers developing the materials are relying primarily on either existing material in the public domain or embarking on the painstaking task of developing materials from scratch.

Simple tools for digital classroom — from November Learning by guest blogger Geoff Gevalt
The hardest thing for teachers to do is make the transition from paper and pencils to online media: Not enough computers, not enough knowledge, not enough time and a whole new way of doing things. We work with hundreds of teachers in the same situation and we offer this advice:

  • Take small steps.
  • Find a couple of tech-savvy kids in each of your classes to help.
  • Explore the digital world on your own.
  • Seek out people in the school or in professional development spheres to mentor you.
  • Don’t be afraid to fail.
  • Don’t be afraid if you don’t have all the answers – your kids will help.

Teacher Knowledge — Exploring, a few links…

© 2024 | Daniel Christian