.
Also see:
Online marketplace helps professors outsource their lab research — from The Chronicle by Alex Campbell
Excerpt:
Jill Wykosky, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, needed to make some antibodies, but she couldn’t do it all herself.
To help find a lab partner, she tried a new Web site called Science Exchange, posting an ad there saying she needed someone to make peptides to be used as “antigen for monoclonal antibody production.” Within a couple of days, she had bids from seven or eight companies.
Also see:
Currix.com: The Place to Buy and Sell Digital Content for Innovative Education — from Currix.com; originally saw this at Audrey Watters blog
Excerpt from Audrey’s article:
Currix is launching its beta today, aiming to become a destination for teachers to discover just these sorts of resources. It’s also a marketplace for this content: teachers will be able to monetize the lessons, activities, logos and more that they upload there. The prices range from free to a few dollars for activities to up to several hundred dollars for entire courses.
Also see:
From DSC:
This reminds me of a graphic I periodically post:
Separate and unequal — from InsideHigherEd.com by Dan Berrett
NEW YORK — Higher education’s own hiring practices are undermining one of its chief selling points: that a college education fosters upward mobility, several speakers said here Tuesday at a conference on academic labor.
In particular, it is the condition of adjunct faculty members, which was the subject of several sessions of the annual meeting of the National Center for Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, that casts the harshest light on the gap between academe’s aspirations and its actual conduct.
“In order to maintain faith with higher education, you have to be able to confront the idea that a high proportion of the most educated portion of the population is having trouble making ends meet,” said Alan Trevithick, founding member of the New Faculty Majority and an adjunct who teaches sociology at Fordham University and Westchester Community College, during a session entitled “Contingent Faculty: Issues at the Table.”
…
“The non-tenure-track faculty make the tenure-track research positions possible,” said Robert Samuels, a lecturer in the writing programs at the University of California at Los Angeles and president of the University Council, American Federation of Teachers. The adjunct faculty serve this enabling purpose in two ways, said Samuels: they assume much — and in many cases, the majority — of the teaching load, thus freeing up time for full-time faculty to do research; and their lesser salaries for teaching highly enrolled undergraduate courses also result in net revenues that essentially subsidize other, more costly work at the university.
From DSC:
It will be interesting to see how the developing online-based exchanges/marketplaces affect the professional adjunct faculty member — who may already be teaching at a variety of institutions at the same time. My guess would be that they will be well positioned to move into this developing new landscape — if this landscape continues to develop in that manner.
Daniel Christian:
A Vision of Our Future Learning Ecosystems
In the near future, as the computer, the television, the telephone (and more) continues to converge, we will most likely enjoy even more powerful capabilities to conveniently create and share our content as well as participate in a global learning ecosystem — whether that be from within our homes and/or from within our schools, colleges, universities and businesses throughout the world.
We will be teachers and students at the same time — even within the same hour — with online-based learning exchanges taking place all over the virtual and physical world. Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) — in the form of online-based tutors, instructors, teachers, and professors — will be available on demand. Even more powerful/accurate/helpful learning engines will be involved behind the scenes in delivering up personalized, customized learning — available 24x7x365. Cloud-based learner profiles may enter the equation as well.
The chances for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship that are coming will be mind-blowing! What employers will be looking for — and where they can look for it — may change as well.
What we know today as the “television” will most likely play a significant role in this learning ecosystem of the future. But it won’t be like the TV we’ve come to know. It will be much more interactive and will be aware of who is using it — and what that person is interested in learning about. Technologies/applications like Apple’s AirPlay will become more standard, allowing a person to move from device to device without missing a beat. Transmedia storytellers will thrive in this environment!
Much of the professionally done content will be created by teams of specialists, including the publishers of educational content, and the in-house teams of specialists within colleges, universities, and corporations around the globe. Perhaps consortiums of colleges/universities will each contribute some of the content — more readily accepting previous coursework that was delivered via their consortium’s membership.
An additional thought regarding higher education and K-12 and their Smart Classrooms/Spaces:
For input devices…
The “chalkboards” of the future may be transparent, or they may be on top of a drawing board-sized table or they may be tablet-based. But whatever form they take and whatever is displayed upon them, the ability to annotate will be there; with the resulting graphics saved and instantly distributed. (Eventually, we may get to voice-controlled Smart Classrooms, but we have a ways to go in that area…)
Below are some of the graphics that capture a bit of what I’m seeing in my mind…and in our futures.
Alternatively available as a PowerPoint Presentation (audio forthcoming in a future version)
— from Daniel S. Christian | April 2011
Addendum on 4-14-11:
Swedish Online Store Features Live, Interactive Salespeople [VIDEO] — from Mashable.com
Excerpt:
Swedish telecom company 3 Sweden has bridged the gap between Internet commerce and brick and mortar with 3LiveShop. The new site features employees interacting with customers, live, over videoscreens. As the video above shows, the Chatroulette-like site was made possible with custom-built touchscreens that look like they’re right out of The Minority Report. Using the screens, the online salespeople are able to bring up images of phones the company sells and field questions about them.
Questions/reflections from DSC:
If this does turn out to be the case:
.
‘Social teaching’ company bets buy-in from Capella Education — from The Chronicle by Josh Fischman
The basic idea behind Sophia is to identify the best teachers for any concept, put their instruction for that concept online, and students all over the world can use these “learning packets” free of charge. For example, a professor who has a really great lesson on how to factor polynomials can package that lesson—complete with video and any other materials—on Sophia, and search engines like Google will let students find it and use it.
From DSC:
Will the Forthcoming Walmart of Education turn out to be that we teach each other, free of charge? Online marketplaces and exchanges continue to appear; the game-changing environment — filled with disruption and change — continues to develop.
But know this, teaching is tough. It’s not easy, and it’s not an exact science; it’s also an art.
Our minds — and the ways in which we learn — are unbelievably complex. After decades of trying, scholars still do not agree on how we learn. There are numerous learning theories out there (still) and though we’ve come a long way, there are no silver bullets of the teaching and learning world.
So if you decide to be a teacher, you better get ready to spend some serious time honing your craft…otherwise, your ratings on these types of sites will plummet and few will see your modules/contributions. conversely, if you are an effective teacher, your ratings will reflect that and your contributions will be seen/linked to quite frequently — from people all over the world.
Also see:
Apple U / Cisco U / Google U / Microsoft U — from Inside Higher Ed by Joshua Kim
10 Ideas and Reasons for an Apple, Cisco, Google and Microsoft University…
From DSC:
I always appreciate Joshua Kim’s innovative, creative, outside-the-box thinking.
Who wants a self-paced, free, world class education? — from OpenSesame.com
From DSC:
I work within higher education…so why am I posting this? For several reasons:
Google to build education software marketplace — from The Huffington Post
which links to:
Google pushes education software through app store — from BusinessWeek.com
Building a bottom up online education marketplace with TinyPay.Me — from Kirsten Winkler
Quoting Kirsten:
Now, I could imagine two use cases for online education. One would be a marketplace for lesson material, lesson plans, tests, exercises etc. hence a more teacher targeting approach. As there are already some websites out there where teachers can sell their material to other teachers I am pretty sure that there is a growing market for that. You could either build something based upon age groups as verticals or subject matters, there are a lot of possible combinations.
The second opportunity I see is a marketplace for live online lessons. As you can sell virtual goods via TinyPay.Me teachers could offer individual lessons or lesson packages just like on the marketplaces and platforms we all know. The interesting part here would be that the marketplace itself would not interfere with the actual teaching part. Student and teacher would sort out where, when and how to meet on their own.
