From Daniel Christian: Fasten your seatbelts! An accelerated ride through some ed-tech landscapes.


From DSC:
Immediately below is a presentation that I did for the Title II Conference at Calvin College back on August 11, 2011
It is aimed at K-12 audiences.


 

Daniel S. Christian presentation -- Fasten your seatbelts! An accelerated ride through some ed-tech landscapes (for a K-12 audience)

 


From DSC:
Immediately below is a presentation that I did today for the Calvin College Fall 2011 Conference.
It is aimed at higher education audiences.


 

 Daniel S. Christian presentation -- Fasten your seatbelts! An accelerated ride through some ed-tech landscapes (for a higher ed audience)

 


Note from DSC:

There is a great deal of overlap here, as many of the same technologies are (or will be) hitting the K-12 and higher ed spaces at the same time. However, there are some differences in the two presentations and what I stressed depended upon my audience.

Pending time, I may put some audio to accompany these presentations so that folks can hear a bit more about what I was trying to relay within these two presentations.


Tagged with:  

Social media and its impact on how we learn in the workplace — from C4PLT by Jane Hart


 

From DSC:
One reflection that jumped out at me from Jane’s excellent presentation…and that I believe is a universal truth:

If an organization doesn’t respond to changing conditions, needs, desires, preferences, best interests, and/or the requirements of its customers, that organization will diminish in usefulness and will most likely (albeit eventually) go out of business.

I know I’m not introducing a new thought here and the above statement seems very self-evident, but do we heed this advice in corporate L&D? Corporate IT? IT within higher education? In higher education as an industry?

 


The high cost of low graduation rates — from air.org by Mark Schneider and Lu (Michelle) Yin
How much does dropping out of college really cost?

 

The Third Teacher -- the ways design can transform teaching and learning

 

Also see:

 

Addendum:

  • Guidelines from Bretford.com
    Guidelines for the design of effective learning spaces should support teaching and learning opportunities. The following factors should be considered when providing learning spaces…

 

Presentations from MoodleMoot - July 2011

Calvin College Students' Summer Day 2011

See what a summer day in West Michigan can offer.
Los Campesinos’ “You! Me! Dancing!” used with permission of Turnstile Music.

 

haworth-c77-avg.jpg

 

 

Excerpt:

Overview

  • Min Height: 22″
  • Max Height: 48″
  • Max Load: 250 lbs
  • Electric (also available Incremental Leg, Hand Crank, Torsion Paddle, Standard Actuator)

Design

The Haworth Planes Height-Adjustable Table has a simple, utilitarian design with a customizable desktop. The significant advantage to this height-adjustable table design from the Haworth Design Studio is that the crossbeam has been moved up directly underneath the table top, which improves its accessibility and range of motion with no reduction of stability at full height extension. The trade-off for this stability seems to be weight—even the smaller version of this sturdy desk (23″ x 58″) is heavy enough to need two people to move it. However, the table has a very wide sit-to-stand range (22″ – 48″), and the raised crossbeam and two-leg design with low-profile feet improve accessibility for wheelchairs and users of different sizes and needs to the point where it exceeds ANSI/HFES 100-2007 requirements. Plus it has a motor and gear set that can handle a load up to 250 lbs, so it’s going to need some weight behind it.

 

MIT launches Center for Mobile Learning with support from Google — from readwriteweb.com by Jon Mitchell

Excerpt:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced the creation of a new Center for Mobile Learning. The center will be housed at the MIT Media Lab. Google supported the creation of the center with a grant from Google University Relations. The center’s first project will be the adoption and further development of App Inventor for Android, a do-it-yourself tool for building apps for Google’s Android mobile OS with no programming skills required.

From the announcement

The Center, housed at the Media Lab, will focus on the design and study of new mobile technologies and applications, enabling people to learn anywhere anytime with anyone. Research projects will explore location-aware learning applications, mobile sensing and data collection, augmented reality gaming, and other educational uses of mobile technologies.

Best practices help dispel the myths of online faculty hiring practices — from Faculty Focus by Mary Bart

Excerpt:

Some of the myths include:

  • Faculty who only teach online courses are typically hired “differently” than faculty who teaching face-to-face.
  • Academic departments are reluctant to use geographically-dispersed faculty to teach online courses.
  • Little to no effort is made to integrate faculty who teach only online courses into a department’s faculty community.
  • Faculty who teach only online courses are not subject to the same kind of teaching evaluation as those who teach face-to-face courses.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) at a glance -- video

My thanks to Mrs. Krista Spahr, Calvin College, for this resource and the quote below:

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is meant to minimize barriers and to maximize learning.

 

Reflections from DSC:
Though I still have much to learn about Universal Design for Learning (UDL), my initial thought is that I really like this approach, as it moves us away from the one-size-fits-all approach and towards a teaching and learning environment that offers more choice, more selection, and more opportunities for customization and personalization. Plus, as companies such as Apple and Microsoft have seen, functionality that started out trying to address accessibility-related needs ended up helping everyone!

Along these lines, I created this graphic years ago — with the idea that students would have a choice on which media they might prefer to use to absorb the information:

 

Again, the idea being that we could provide the same content in 3-5 different ways and let the students select what works best for them. Plus, in the example above, we could even see how other students are describing/making meaning of something.

But it goes further than this as I’m understanding UDL. For example, the methods for achieving a learning outcome can be greatly varied, as the assignments for a particular outcome might be reaching via watching a video clip, or reading a book, or doing a project, or writing a story, or creating music, or ___(fill in the blank) ____.

Also see:

 

cast.org


Guidelines for UDL

‘Narrate, curate, share’: How blogging can catalyze learning — from campustechhnology.com by W. Gardner Campbell

Excerpt:

What is blogging? Is it like an online journal? If so, how is a public journal of academic value? Should I give my students prompts? Will they think this is merely busy work? Should their blogs be about work done in specific classes, work done in several classes, work done outside of class, or all of the above?

For-profit college group sued as U.S. lays out wide fraud — from the New York Times by Tamar Lewin

Excerpt:

The Department of Justice and four states on Monday filed a multibillion-dollar fraud suit against the Education Management Corporation, the nation’s second-largest for-profit college company, charging that it was not eligible for the $11 billion in state and federal financial aid it had received from July 2003 through June 2011.

Create Khan Academy style video tutorials with ScreenChomp — from the digital inspiration blog by Amit Agarwal

Some of the products that Amit mentioned in the posting include:

 

 

*  Also see
Drawing on the iPad: 12 touchscreen styluses reviewed
— from Macworld.com

 

Update / addendum on 4-17-2012 from posting w/ same date:

Sal uses a PC with:

Camtasia Recorder ($200)
SmoothDraw3(Free)
Wacom Bamboo Tablet ($80)

Prior to that, he used:

ScreenVideoRecorder($20)
Microsoft Paint (Free)

Mac users: In lieu of SmoothDraw, Autodesk Sketchbook Express works (free with a Wacom)

 

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