MOOC Monitor: European Union unveils its own MOOC Consortium…OpenUpEd — from wiredacademic.com

Excerpt:

As we reported a year ago, the European Union wants to get in to the MOOC game and is doing so now with a dozen partners at colleges throughout Europe in its new OpenUpEd MOOC platform. Partners in 11 different countries (France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, UK, Russia, Turkey and Israel) joined forces to launch the first pan-European MOOCs initiative with the European Commission backing it. This is a great development for MOOCs globally.

The EU is busy at work, creating transferability and standardization at universities throughout the 27 member countries as part of the Bologna Process. It’s a smart move for the EU to include universities in Turkey and Israel in this consortium as it shows a broader reach to bring European neighbors, friends and NATO members to the table.

Citrix Paris headquarters by Areq Sq

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Digization, sole growth engine for Europe’s creative industries? — from inaglobal.fr/en/… by Nicolas Vaquier
[NEWS] According to a recently published study entitled The Digital Future of Creative U.K., digitization is the sole growth engine for Europe’s creative industries.
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Excerpt from Conclusion:

Finally, the study delivers conclusions for the whole of the creative industries and forecasts for their future. It notes that with the fragmentation of media consumption, advertising money is now divided between a number of players. While total advertising revenues have climbed, individual companies can no longer expect profits to be as high as they were in the past. Online advertising is still a challenge, and the monetization of already existing content will not be enough to meet it. The Digital Future of Creative U.K. furthermore highlights the complementarity of digital and analog, refuting the idea of one technology’s cannibalization of the other, using the example of catch-up television.

The study announces the transformation of the value creation chain. The horizontal integration of production, distribution and marketing intermediaries that prevailed in the traditional system will be dissolved by more profitable digital alternatives, diminishing the importance of these intermediaries. The study predicts that the concept of “chain” will furthermore be replaced by that of a “network” of relations, with consumption and participation at its heart. The rise in the number of players and the lowering of entry barriers will thus allow for greater quantity as well as relevance of content on offer.

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Dynamic cityscapes painted with extreme energy — posted on mymodernmet.com by Katie Hosmer; art by Van Tame

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Visualizing the future urban world — from fastcoexist.com by Ariel Schwartz
A new app called Urban World beautifully projects how cities around the world are going to explode in growth and economic power by 2025.

 

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UrbanWorld-March2013

Innovation alert: World’s first 3D printed canal house in Amsterdam — from freshome.com

 

3D printed canal hou Innovation Alert: Worlds First 3D Printed Canal House in Amsterdam

 

 

…and, as usual, technology itself can be used for good or bad…here’s the far less appealing side of the coin (at least to me):

 

3D-Printed-Weapons-March2013

 

— from gigaom.com by Derrick Harris

Summary:
A group of European researchers has created a cloud platform designed to serve as a central processing and data-access brains for robots located throughout the world.

From DSC:
Readers of this blog know that one of the areas that I am pulse checking is robotics and trying to ascertain the impact that robotics is having (and has had) on employment. Such research prompts me to ask:
  • Do these trends affect what we should be teaching our youth?
  • Do these trends affect how we should be preparing our youth?
Also see:
  • Summary:
    IBM’s always on the look out for new challenges for Watson to tackle. Two dozen teams of USC students recently had 48 hours to create their own business plans for the technology.!
NOTE:
  • I do NOT mean to “lift up” technology here — such technologies are merely tools; though sometimes folks in this space (esp. from America) tend to overestimate how far they’ve come and underestimate what God has created/designed.

imgZine-Feb2013

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From DSC:
Hmmmm…I wonder how this might apply to education? Will we move more towards personal brands vs. institutional brands?

Classrooms of the Future

Excerpt:

This image gallery from Fielding Nair International, a group of architects working in education, shows lots of images from new and innovative schools around the world.

 

imgur-learningspaces-2012

 
Addendum on 2/13/13, also see:

 

Vitra School Brotorp Rosan Bosch Architects

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Vitra School Brotorp Rosan Bosch Architects

Grad student turns heads in Norwegian schools with technology-charged pedagogy — from beditionmagazine.com by DC Brandon; with thanks to brian k (@iEducator) for posting this on Twitter

Excerpt:

Salerno says using video games in the classroom is a sure-fire way to get students excited about learning. She used the example of a social studies unit that students are taught in Norwegian schools. In one particular unit, they usually read a textbook chapter about famous explorers. In the game-based version of the unit, textbooks may be used but are not relied upon.

So how does she incorporate video games into a social studies lesson?

She uses a Microsoft product called Kodu, although she says there are many other software products that could be used, like Minecraft and Little Big Planet.

She breaks the unit down like this (from the perspective of a student):

  1. Choose an explorer to profile
  2. Research the explorer’s history online and in textbooks
  3. Create game map (games require planning to be successfully built)
  4. Create game details and missions, mark out important plot points
  5. Build world
  6. Build in characters and plot in the form of missions
  7. Demo game to classmates on “gameday”

 

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AmandaRipley-AskTheKids2012

 

Description:

Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who writes about human behavior and public policy. For Time Magazine and the Atlantic, she has chronicled the stories of American kids and teachers alongside groundbreaking new research into education reform. “Kids have strong opinions about school. We forget as adults how much time they sit there contemplating their situation.”

 

From DSC:
I post this now, because I just saw this via a post that Patrick Larkin made over the weekend —
Amanda Ripley’s intriguing talk on education reform that contains the following excerpt (bolding/emphasis DSC):

The video concludes with the following takeaways from these conversations:
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  • In the top performing countries in the world school is harder.
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  • No country is like the US with its obsession of playing sports.
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  • Kids (in schools in these other countries) believe there’s something in it for them.
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  • Kids believe that what they are doing in school impacts their futures.

 

The New Explorers Guide to Dutch Digital Culture — from creativeapplications.net

 

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 LWF World Summit – The Barbican – June 17th-21st, 2013

 

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Other resources/links

This is Learning Without Frontiers
Learning Without Frontiers (LWF) is a global platform that facilitates the ongoing dialogue about the future of learning. LWF attracts an engaged and open-minded audience who are forward thinking, curious and receptive to new ideas and perspectives about education, teaching and learning.  They are an international audience of thought leaders, policy makers, innovators, entrepreneurs and leading practitioners from across the education, digital media and technology sectors.  They are education leaders, intellectuals, social and political theorists, artists, designers, futurists, architects, publishers, broadcasters, technologists, parents, teachers and learners.  They come to ask the big questions, discuss the big challenges and seek to answer them by innovation, enterprise and an enduring optimism. http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com

 


 

Architectural watercolors by Maja Wronska — from thisiscolossal.com
Examples:

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Architectural Watercolors by Maja Wro?ska watercolor painting architecture

 

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Architectural Watercolors by Maja Wro?ska watercolor painting architecture

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From DSC:
What caught my eye here was the use of scenarios and using those scenarios to help define/create/plan for our future.

 

 

© 2024 | Daniel Christian