Exploring curation as a core competency in digital and media literacy education — from the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (jime.open.ac.uk); with thanks to Robin Good for the Scoop

Paul Mihailidis
Department of Marketing Communication, Emerson College, United States

James N Cohen
School of Communication, Hofstra University, United States

Abstract:

In today’s hypermedia landscape, youth and young adults are increasingly using social media platforms, online aggregators and mobile applications for daily information use. Communication educators, armed with a host of free, easy-to-use online tools, have the ability to create dynamic approaches to teaching and learning about information and communication flow online. In this paper we explore the concept of curation as a student- and creation-driven pedagogical tool to enhance digital and media literacy education. We present a theoretical justification for curation and present six key ways that curation can be used to teach about critical thinking, analysis and expression online. We utilize a case study of the digital curation platform Storify to explore how curation works in the classroom, and present a framework that integrates curation pedagogy into core media literacy education learning outcomes.

From DSC:
Yesterday, I had posted an item re: interactive video. As I looked at the credits for the piece out at the Wall Street Journal, it made me reflect upon this thought:

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UseOfTeams-DChristian-July2013

 

This will be true whether we’re talking about K-12, higher ed, and/or the corporate training/L&D world.

 

In the future, the whole world will be a classroom — from fastcoexist.com by Marina Gorbis

 

TheFutureOfEducation-Gorbis-6-28-13

. TheFutureOfEducation3-Gorbis-6-28-13.

From DSC:
What Marina is asserting is what I’m seeing as well. That is, we are between two massive but different means of obtaining an education/learning (throughout our lifetimes I might add).  What she’s saying is also captured in the following graphic:

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streams-of-content-blue-overlay

 

Also see:

 

Helping MOOC students navigate open educational resources — from ecampusnews.com by Jake New

Excerpt:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has partnered with Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc., to begin addressing the problem with a new platform they call Guided Learning Pathways. The project’s team is currently exploring ways to introduce the platform into the MOOC systems of edX.

Announced June 17 at the Sixth Conference of MIT’s Learning International Networks Consortium but in the works since 2010, the platform allows students to access and organize free, high quality learning materials from all over the internet based on the student’s interest and level of understanding.

4 ways higher ed has changed, post recession — from the Associated Press (via ABC News in this case) by Justin Pope, AP Education Writer

Excerpt:

More urgent. More crowded. More expensive. Also, more flexible and accessible to millions.

That, in a nutshell, is how higher education has changed around the world in the wake of the global financial crisis that struck five years ago, and the Great Recession that followed.

Here’s how it happened…

Then globalization and the Internet changed everything. Customers suddenly had real choices, access to instant reliable information and the ability to communicate with each other. Power in the marketplace shifted from seller to buyer. Customers started insisting on ‘better, cheaper, quicker and smaller,’ along with ‘more convenient, reliable and personalized.’ Continuous, even transformational, innovation have become requirements for survival.”

Steve Denning, “The Management Revolution That’s Already Happening,”
Forbes Magazine, May 30, 2013.

 

 

ChangeIsOptionalDanielChristian-evolllutionDotcom-June2013

 

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PDF of article here

 

 

From DSC:

  • What if you want to allow some remote students to come on into your face-to-face classroom?
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  • What if you want to allow those remote students to be seen and communicated with at eye level?
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  • What if you want Remote Student A to join Group 1, and Remote Student B to join Group 2?
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Well…how about using one of these devices  in order to do so!


 

New video collaboration robot: TelePresence gets moving — from cisco.com by Dave Evans

Excerpt:

That is why Cisco’s new joint effort with iRobot—demonstrated publicly this week for the first time—is so exciting: We’ve created a mobile Cisco TelePresence unit that brings collaboration to you—or, conversely, brings you to wherever you need to collaborate. Called iRobot Ava 500, this high-definition video collaboration robot combines Cisco TelePresence with iRobot’s mobility and self-navigation capabilities, enabling freedom of movement and spontaneous interactions with people thousands of miles away.

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irobot-june-10-2013
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iRobot Ava™ 500 Video Collaboration Robot — published on Jun 10, 2013
iRobot and Cisco have teamed to bring the Ava 500 video collaboration robot to market. The robot blends iRobot’s autonomous navigation with Cisco’s TelePresence to enable people working off-site to participate in meetings and presentations where movement and location spontaneity are important. The new robot is also designed to enable mobile visual access to manufacturing facilities, laboratories, customer experience centers and other remote facilities.

 

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Double Robotics Double

http://www.doublerobotics.com/img/use-office.jpg

 

 

MantaroBot™ TeleMe

 

 

 

From Attack of the Telepresence Robots! — from BYTE  by Rick Lehrbaum

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Kubi

http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2013-Jan/robotic-telepresence/kubi.jpg

 

 

MantaroBot “TeleMe” VGo Communications “VGo” Anybots “QB” Suitable Technologies “Beam”

 

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RP-7i ROBOT

RP-7i Remote Presence Robot

 

Also see:

 

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.

Mad Professors — from inthesetimes.com by Rebecca Burns
The adjuncts are at the barricades.

Excerpt:

That so many advanced degree-holders are toiling in poverty conditions flies in the face of the assumption that higher education is a path to prosperity. But low wages and precarity represent the new norm for what some adjuncts have termed “academia’s version of apartheid.”

Hired on a contract basis, adjuncts (who may include contingent full-time faculty) are paid by the course—the average rate is $2,900, according to crowd-sourced figures from the website the Adjunct Project. Most contingent faculty are also excluded from access to health insurance or other benefits, and are guaranteed neither a full teaching load nor a steady contract.

Tagged with:  

Extending the boundaries of learning: A challenge for IT in Higher Education: A Q&A with Lev Gonick — from CampusTechnology.com by Mary Grush

Excerpts:

“In just one generation there has been the most radical transformation of access to learning ever in human history,” Lev Gonick points out.

But among the major developments that we can look back on at this point is a significant challenge to the traditional postsecondary education model–an entrenched model that has almost always been exclusively faculty centric. We, as the leaders of IT initiatives in higher education, have given rise to a conversation on our college campuses about the meaning of student centered learning and active learning. We are a significant part of that reframing–this is enormously important as we think about IT’s continuing role.

But we are now on the threshold of a very different set of institutional configurations and new learning experience opportunities, and ultimately we will see a reconfiguration of the meaning of learning as enabled by the IT world.

 

Hacking the Academy: A book crowdsourced in one week — from MPublishing/University of Michigan Press

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On May 21, 2010, we posted these intentionally provocative questions online:

Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?

We asked for contributions to a collectively produced volume that would explore how the academy might be beneficially reformed using digital media and technology. The process of creating the edited volume itself would be a commentary on the way things are normally done in scholarly communication, with submissions coming in through multiple channels, including blogs, Twitter, and email, and in multiple formats—everything from a paragraph to a long essay to multimedia. We also encouraged interactivity—the possibility that contributors could speak directly to each other, rather than creating the inert, isolated chapters that normally populate edited volumes. We then sent out notices via our social networks, which quickly and extensively disseminated the call for submissions. Finally, we gave contributors a mere seven days, the better to focus their attention and energy.

Preface | Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt

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Excerpt from “About the Book

MPublishing, the publishing division of the University of Michigan Library, is pleased to announce the open-access version of Hacking the Academy, The
Edited Volume
. The volume is forthcoming in print under the University of Michigan Press digitalculturebooks imprint.

This volume was assembled and edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt from the best of over 300 submissions received during a spirited week when the two editors actively solicited ideas for how the academy could be beneficially reformed using digital media and technology. For more on the unusual way this book was put together, please start with Cohen and Scheinfeldt’s preface.

 

 

Northern Arizona wins regional accreditor’s approval for personalized learning program– from nextgenlearning.org by Nancy Millichap

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

It’s all systems go, at last: Northern Arizona University, one of the ten institutions presently developing breakthrough degree programs with NGLC support, recently got the green light to start enrolling students in their Personalized Learning program. The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (HLC), NAU’s regional accreditor, approved their application to offer a competency-based degree program that moves away from the credit hour standard to use an approach referred to as “direct assessment” instead. In this approach, students receive credit related not to their presence in a real or virtual classroom for a specified period of time but instead to their successful completion of assessments that show they have mastered clearly defined competencies or are able to perform specific, predetermined tasks. HLC has created a pilot group of four institutions now approved to offer a competency-based degree program: NAU, the University of Wisconsin Colleges (a system of two-year campuses), the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Capella University.

The New ‘New Normal’ — by Kevin Kiley

Excerpt:

Mandatory tuition and fees at the University of California system have about doubled since 2007, but this year, if the state’s governor has his way, they will stay flat.

And the University of California is far from alone. Purdue University is freezing tuition for the first time since 1976. Iowa’s three universities will also probably hold tuition prices constant for the first time in more than 30 years.

 

From DSC:
Institutions of higher education seem to have been priding themselves on smaller tuition increases these last few years — while I’ve been disappointed that they rose at all!  In fact it should have gone in the other direction — i.e. price decreases.  Time will tell whether it’s too little too late; but tuition freezes may not prevent the alternatives from taking over now.

 

 

 

How to get a job — by Thomas L. Friedman

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Underneath the huge drop in demand that drove unemployment up to 9 percent during the recession, there’s been an important shift in the education-to-work model in America. Anyone who’s been looking for a job knows what I mean. It is best summed up by the mantra from the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner that the world doesn’t care anymore what you know; all it cares “is what you can do with what you know.” And since jobs are evolving so quickly, with so many new tools, a bachelor’s degree is no longer considered an adequate proxy by employers for your ability to do a particular job — and, therefore, be hired. So, more employers are designing their own tests to measure applicants’ skills. And they increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?

People get rejected for jobs for two main reasons, said Sharef. One, “you’re not showing the employer how you will help them add value,” and, two, “you don’t know what you want, and it comes through because you have not learned the skills that are needed.” The most successful job candidates, she added, are “inventors and solution-finders,” who are relentlessly “entrepreneurial” because they understand that many employers today don’t care about your résumé, degree or how you got your knowledge, but only what you can do and what you can continuously reinvent yourself to do.

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From DSC:

So how about it? Are the students coming out of K-12 and higher ed prepared for this changing workplace? If not, how can we better prepare them? It seems to me we should require that each student create their own business — and help them build it before they graduate.  It doesn’t matter if that business makes any money at all.  What matters is the learning/experiences that the students would gain.

Also, to folks in the corporate world, help us get students to the places you need them to be — and stop expecting the”purple unicorns” to show up at your doorstep.  Adjust your expectations and aim for a higher purpose than pleasing the shareholder/Wall Street.

© 2024 | Daniel Christian