The Best of the Web 2010 -- by Richard Byrne

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From DSC:
Great finds here…but the number of apps here made me feel like I was drowning in all of these possibilities/tools, with tidal waves of innovation sweeping over me.


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Augmented reality and mobile learning — from interactyx.com by Jeff Roth

Let me pose this scenario:

Every day, you walk down the same street. You walk past the buildings, see the crowds and yawn.  But on this day, you decide to use your smartphone and look down on the screen. At that moment, you see animation, tweets from people in the area, and you can respond. Interactivity meets reality. Social meets real time visibility.  Engagement, enlightenment and excitement in an instance.

You wonder to yourself, can this work in the e-learning world?  Specifically, m-learning? Can an app for the smartphone superimpose learning in a location or locations?  Would it be possible to create a 3D environment in a real environment with people interacting? If yes, what would it be called?

Augmented Reality and it is happening as we speak…

The world changed, colleges missed it — from edreformer.com by Tom Vander Ark

A bunch of colleges are going out of business, only they don’t know it. They pretend that trimming costs and jacking tuition is a solution.  They haven’t come to terms with a world where anyone can learn anything almost anywhere for free or cheap. Art Levine, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, sees three major change forces: new competition, a convergence of knowledge producers, and changing demographics.

To Art’s list of three big change forces, add shrinking government support, the press for more accountability, and emerging technology…the next few decades will be marked by a lumpy move to competency-based learninginstant information and the ability to learn anything anywhere.

The shift to personal digital learning is on.  Some colleges get that.  Others will seek bailouts until they go out of business.  Working adults are getting smart on their own terms.

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From DSC:
Time will tell if Tom’s assertions are too harsh here, but personally, I think he’s right.

I have it that:

  • There is a bubble in higher ed
  • There also exists a perfect storm that’s been forming for years within higher ed and the waves are cresting
    .The perfect storm in higher ed -- by Daniel S. Christian

  • Institutions of higher education need to check themselves before they become the next Blockbuster
    .Do not underestimate the disruptive impact of technology -- June 2009

  • We must not discount the disruptive powers of technology nor the trends taking place today (for a list of some of these trends, see the work of Gary Marx, as well as Yankelovish’s (2005) Ferment and Change: Higher Education in 2015)
  • Innovation is not an option for those who want to survive and thrive in the future.

Specifically, I have it that we should be experimenting with:

  • Significantly lowering the price of getting an education (by 50%+)
  • Providing greater access (worldwide)
  • Offering content in as many different ways as we can afford to produce
  • Seeking to provide interactive, multimedia-based content that is created by teams of specialists — for anytime, anywhere, on any-device type of learning (24x7x365)at any pace!
  • “Breaking down the walls” of the physical classroom
  • Pooling resources and creating consortiums
  • Reflecting on what it will mean if online-based exchanges are setup to help folks develop competencies
  • Working to change our cultures to be more willing to innovate and change
  • Thinking about how to become more nimble as organizations
  • Turning more control over to individual learner and having them create the content
  • Creating and implementing more cross-disciplinary assignments

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Homework Rescue offers online resource — from savagepacer.com by Keighla Schmidt

There’s Google chat, Facebook chat, AOL instant messaging, Yahoo! messenger and the list goes on when it comes to instant help at your fingertips. Add teenagers into the mix and consider the combo peanut butter and jelly.

And when it’s time to do homework at the Braun house in Savage, mom Sandy has no problem with her Prior Lake High School children Jake, a freshman, and Leigh, a sophomore, going online and chatting.

As long as they’re logged onto Homework Rescue, a free, online live one-on-one instant messaging tutor offered through the library and can be accessed remotely.

Homework Rescue is available at www.scott.lib.mn.us under the online references collection daily from 1-11 p.m. for free by using a library identification number. About 100 metro area libraries are part of the Metropolitan Library Services Agency (MELSA), which financially supports the program.

From DSC:
I was reading a white paper from Tegrity today (see below graphics). It mentioned that the next frontier for lecture capture technologies is focused on developing more personalized learning experiences.

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—  A brief aside from DSC:
Reminds me of some of the functionality found in Livescribe’s echo smartpen.

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The ability to integrate lecture capture platforms with Learning Management Systems (LMS’s) can help to automate the authentication and authorization needed to ensure learners get to review what they are allowed to review. Integration hooks provided by lecture capture and LMS vendors are viable as methods of ensuring a baseline approach to secure access. Yet most lecture capture systems do not know who the viewer is (as the LMS does the authentication and authorization); they only know that the stream is permitted to play and that students of the course are watching.

This sets the stage for the next transformation of lecture capture solutions – into platforms that can understand not just who their users are, but also what those users need to do and how their experience can be personalized and enhanced.

The coming shift will bring creation of custom learning environments that cater to the individual student by offering personal context-sensitivity, the ability to draw on the knowledge of peers and instructors, and the ability to better manage and monitor each individual learner’s behaviors and customize their experience to their individual needs. Among the major effects of this shift:

  • Democratization of the content creation process as learners themselves contribute to or otherwise use lecture capture tools to learn from or teach others
  • Faster learning by enabling learners to access information more quickly through bookmarks – and placing efficiencies within the platform to streamline teaching and learning
  • Changing impact on educators, who can rely on lecture capture feedback loops based on features like bookmarking to enable them to adjust content and teaching styles to suit learner needs
  • Use of presence and the fact that a system can know a learner to automate and make more efficient the act of finding peers or instructors for further learning interactions
  • Greater ability to deliver content and offer customized features via mobile devices

This white paper focuses on the evolution of lecture capture as a tool for creating a coherent environment for learner-centered instruction, showing the possibilities for improved efficiencies and better learning outcomes.

From DSC:
The integration of a lecture capture system w/ an LMS got me to thinking…what if each person in the world had a constantly-updated, adaptive, web-based learner profile that detailed their current age, current and past places of residence, language(s), hobbies, interests, courses taken, major(s), minor(s), last grade completed, which RSS feeds they subscribe to, which sources of educational content they prefer, etc. Given permission by the student, a vendor’s tool could then query the database and look for particular fields…plugging that  content into their own application for greater context and engagement.

So if a 3rd grader in India loved horses, the math problems could utilize that information to make the problems more engaging to that person.

Hmmm…along these lines, I think I’ll set up some Google alerts to include:

  • Multi-agent systems
  • Adaptive learning systems
  • Artificial intelligence education
  • Distributed e-learning systems
  • Semantic web education
  • Learning agents
  • Intelligent tutoring
  • Online tutoring

The next few years should be veeeerrrryyy interesting. Fasten your seatbelts!

Software turns every camera phone into a spectrometer

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Creating a culture of innovation — from Gallup Management Journal by Jason Krieger
In the “new normal,” fostering innovation will be a driver of organic growth. Organizations must have these six key steps in place.

Also see:

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Reinventing management for a networked world — one of topics/presentations at Educause 2010

From DSC:
The following summary of this presentation is a powerful message that I’m looking forward to hearing (emphasis mine):

Over the past decade, the Internet has had a profound impact on just about every organization around the world. It has enabled dramatic efficiency gains in core processes and has radically changed service delivery in industries as diverse as education, financial services, publishing, and entertainment.

However, the greatest impact of the Internet is likely to come over the next decade as it starts to reshape the traditional management processes and structures that are used to run large-scale institutions. The management practices found in most organizations today trace their roots back to the Industrial Age or to medieval religious orders. While this model was well suited to a world requiring conformance and discipline, it is woefully inadequate and even toxic in today’s world of accelerating change.

To thrive in the years ahead, every organization must become as nimble as change itself—a challenge that will require a fundamental rewiring of our tradition-bound management principles and practices.

Unlike most organizations, the web is a cauldron of innovation; it is extraordinarily malleable and highly adaptable. In these respects, it already exhibits exactly those qualities that will be most critical to organizational success in the years to come.

That’s why the management model of every organization will need to be rebuilt on the fundamental values of the web: freedom, openness, transparency, collaboration, flexibility, and meritocracy. In this provocative and practical presentation, Gary Hamel will lay out a blueprint for “Management 2.0” and outline the steps you can take to help your organization to become as adaptable as the times demand.

While looking at the video for Sonos Controller for the iPad, I wondered…what if we could replace the selection below — i.e. the word music with the words “educational providers” — and then control which room received which signal/content?

Wow…talk about a home dedicated to learning!   🙂

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http://www.google.com/tv/

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Also see:

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http://discover.sonystyle.com/internettv/

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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.

10-6-10 — Logitech set-top box for Google TV to cost $299

University, IBM to open unique high school in NYC — By The Associated Press

The City University of New York and IBM will open a unique school that merges high school with two years of college, allowing students to earn an associate’s degree, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday in announcing a series of ambitious educational initiatives.

Those students will be “first in line for a job at IBM,” Bloomberg said in his announcement, made on MSNBC.

The city also will move to a rating system this year designed to ensure teacher tenure is linked to classroom performance. Only teachers rated “effective” or “highly effective” will be awarded lifetime job…

© 2024 | Daniel Christian