Mind Map of the Digital Age — from fastcompany.com by Richard Watson
A new map showing how the digital era is changing our minds and in particular about how new digital objects and environments are re-wiring our brains. Best viewed by people aged 35+ with full-time jobs and teenage kids.
McGraw-Hill Education buys software maker Tegrity — WSJ
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Why McGraw-Hill Bought a Lecture-Capture Company — from The Chronicle by Jeff Young
[Yesterday] McGraw-Hill Education announced that it has bought a lecture-capture company called Tegrity Inc, putting the textbook publisher squarely in the education-software business. Officials say they made the move because of the importance of “user-generated content” as textbooks go digital.
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Addendums:
10-5-10– from Google announces TV deals with HBO, NBA, others
“One of our goals with Google TV is to finally open up the living room and enable new innovation from content creators, programmers, developers and advertisers,” Ambarish Kenghe, developer product manager for Google TV, said in the post.
How the Gates Foundation will spend its education-technology dollars — from The Chronicle by Marc Parry
From DSC:
Mentioned in that article is the following site that I thought further addresses the need to come up with different kinds of assessments/assignments:
We use Lynda.com and the feedback has been excellent. Back in 1997, I took a 1-day seminar from Lynda Weinman out at SFSU’s Multimedia Studies Program. I learned more from her in a few hours then I have in many courses. She knows how to make things very understandable…and she’s a great teacher. If she doesn’t know the topic, she selects people who know how to explain that topic in easy-to-understand terms.
So when I saw this item — Connect@NMC: Panel Discussion Led By Laurie Burruss of Lynda.com – Implementing Lynda.com Campus-Wide — I felt that I should pass it along.
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Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education — from Ted Talks <– from DSC: This is well worth your time!
My thanks to Dr. Kate Byerwalter at Grand Rapids Community College for this item
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity…
Education as a platform — from radar.oreilly.com by Marie Bjerede
A data-driven architecture could disrupt the school system and improve it the more students use it.
Any and every education reform design is going to fail for two reasons. The first is that the problem is not one that is solvable by “design” in the traditional engineering sense — the education system, including all its human elements, is too complex for that. The second is that the system as currently built contains feedback loops that damp out change.
At the Gov 2.0 Summit, Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,Thomas Kalil, referred to the challenge of educational software that improves the more students use it.
What would it mean to talk about a whole school system that improves the more students use it? I’ve heard the Department of Education’s Steve Midgely refer to school as a service and education as a platform — why not apply this kind of systems thinking to the Gordian knot of our education system, using the Internet as a lens and a platform model?
The September 2010 issue of Academic Commons is now online.
“Charting the New Knowledge Terrain“ is our third collaborative issue with the National Institute for Technology in the Liberal Arts. Here you’ll find profiles of innovative projects taking place on NITLE-member campuses, written by the people who are making them happen.
In this issue, you’ll learn about:
* A collaborative website project produced by a professor, college students, and a community partner that helps parents make sense of school choice options in their area
* Creating simple animations with Google Earth to help students visualize landscapes as they existed thousands of years ago
* Creative problem-based projects in map-making that engage students in thinking about how to represent their own collective experiences with study abroad programs.Our next collaborative issue with NITLE will be published in spring 2011. The theme will be ‘Digital Humanities and the Undergraduate.’ For the most up-to-date information on NITLE’s Community Contribution Award program, please visit the NITLE website.
Enjoy!
The Editors at Academic Commons
Kno breaks new ground with the world’s first single screen tablet textbook
Kno continues the pace of innovation in integrated learning with a smaller version of the Kno
TechCrunch Disrupt Conference — San Francisco, CA – September 27, 2010 –Kno, Inc., the groundbreaking tablet textbook and dynamic learning platform, today announced its further commitment to the education market with a single screen version of its tablet textbook. The single screen version extends the breakthroughs and functionality of the dual screen version announced in June.
“Kno fundamentally improves the way students learn,” said Osman Rashid, the CEO and Co-Founder of Kno, Inc. “We are driven to innovate in a category that has been static for too long. Even though the Kno pays for itself in 13 months, the smaller up front investment of the single screen version will allow more students to use our learning platform.”
Kno, short for knowledge, is a transformative learning platform that blends a touch-screen tablet, digital textbooks, course materials, note-taking, web access, educational applications, digital media, sharing and more into a powerful and engaging educational experience that is not available on any other tablet or eReader today.
“From day one, we designed the Kno with flexibility in mind,” said Babur Habib, CTO and Co-Founder of Kno, Inc. “We developed the product to have multiple configurations and meet different student needs. The single screen maintains the elegance of our fluid, intuitive interface while capturing the richness and ‘page fidelity’ of the original textbook.”
The company plans to ship both the single and two-screen tablet textbooks to consumers by the end of 2010. Pricing and pre-order announcements will be made in the coming months.
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Edyounet, the FIRST EVER TeleClassroom network in India, can stream World-class Educational Courses to various TeleClassrooms in any remote area on real time basis.
Surprising facts about online education — from DegreeScout.com [via dontwasteyourtime.co.uk]
Online education is quickly becoming a prominent and important piece of the education pie in the United States. The explosive growth of this segment of education, even during a recession, is nothing short of spectacular. It is becoming clear that there is a fundamental shift in how Americans are being educated after high school. The flexibility, lower cost, and variety of choice are just some of the reasons that online education is growing at its current pace. The following infographic will give you a better idea of the scope, impact, and future of online education. Enjoy!
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The Khan Academy now on iTunesU [via openculture.com]
The Khan Academy, which already has a robust presence on YouTube and the web, now opens up shop on iTunesU. This gives students yet another way to access 1800+ video tutorials that teach the ins-and-outs of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, finance, physics, economics and more. The lectures, all taped and presented by Sal Khan, a Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager, are watched some 70,000 times per day. And, with this new distribution channel, the numbers only promise to move higher. For more on The Khan Academy, see this August CNN piece. To download iTunes, click …
Khan Academy content available for download [via M. Guhlin]
At the start of the year, a Math teacher specialist pulled me aside and asked me, “How come all these awesome videos are blocked?” As we tried to access the different videos, I finally pulled up the web site–The Khan Academy–and noticed that the majority of the content was located at …
Teacher Development: Starter Kit for Teaching Online — from Edutopia.org by Grace Rubenstein
Expert advice on shifting from brick and mortar to bytes and bits.
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Bellevue College launches program to teach educators about online learning — — [via Ray Schroeder] by the Bellevue Reporter
Bellevue College is launching a new “eLearning for Educators” professional development program for K-12 and college teachers who wish to bring the benefits of online learning to their students. “eLearning” is a broad term that includes all forms of teaching and learning that are supported or enhanced by digital technology. The new program at the college teaches educators how to integrate new instructional technology into their courses, whether they teach in a traditional “in-class” venue, a fully online setting or in a hybrid format that blends the two …
Students Are Motivated to Take Online Courses — [via Ray Schroeder] by edreformer.com via e-learning news blog
Susan Patrick, President of iNACOL writes into the Chicago Tribune to voice her support for online learning initiatives in Chicago Public Schools. She finishes off her letter with a valid point, that students actually are motivated to take online courses, because they like it, and because online better influences their learning. What’s more, students want to learn online: a national study showed 40 percent of middle and high school students want to take online courses. Despite what critics say, there is no evidence that children in online or hybrid classes are any less socially adjusted than those children who attend brick-and-mortar, traditional …
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Watch out for the digital trees — from odysseyware.com
For the first time ever, iNACOL (International Association for K-12 Online Learning) teamed up with the SREB (Southern Regional Education Board) to honor an “outstanding online teacher for exceptional contributions to online K-12 education as the nation’s K-12 Online Teacher of the Year.”
Teresa Dove, a Virginia math teacher, was chosen from more than 50 nominations of online educators in public schools and state virtual schools nationwide.
Dove said after receiving the award that teaching online allows her to spend much more time working individually with students than she did previously in a traditional classroom. Spending only a moment with students in a traditional classroom is “not enough, and our kids deserve better,” she said.
What struck me most about this award, was the advice Dove offered to online teachers as reported in an article from eClassroom News. When asked about her success, she didn’t talk about technology or the way to deliver information in an online format. She didn’t talk about how to create lessons that “translate” in the digital format.
She offered five lessons – practices – that make her effective. All of them were about relationships.
From DSC:
Perspectives from an English professor at Duke University, who has also studied biology and neuroscience, and who has been working for years on a variety of items surrounding this topic.
