Mezzanine-from-Oblong-May2013

 

.

Mezzanine2-from-Oblong-May2013

.

.

From the Oblong.com website:

Mezzanine™ is a collaborative conference room solution that introduces multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device collaboration. This is next-generation communication: share any content from any device with anyone, anywhere.

Mezzanine transforms creative teamwork, executive meetings, and sales presentations into real-time, collaborative work sessions. Mezzanine expands on existing telepresence technology by providing what we call InfoPresence™—the incorporation of multiple users, multiple devices, and multiple streams of information in the collaboration environment. The future of conference room collaboration is here.

A Mezzanine workspace lets any person on a network bring their own device and share content and applications with any colleague, anywhere in the world, interactively. Mezzanine is a collaborative conference room solution combining presentation design and delivery, application sharing, whiteboard capture, and video conferencing, all within a framework of multi-participant control.

.

Also see:

  • Oblong Technovates with LA High School
    .
  • Oblong at OME
    Oblong Industries recently participated at OME, a summit hosted by UC San Francisco.  The two-day summit focused on charting the future of precision medicine—an emerging field combining big data with clinical research and patient care to deliver insights and advances in treatment that is more targeted and enables improved patient outcomes.

 

Excerpt from Beyond school choice — from Michael Horn

With the rapid growth in online and mobile learning, students everywhere at all levels are increasingly having educational choices—regardless of where they live and even regardless of the policies that regulate schools.

What’s so exciting about this movement beyond school choice is the customization that it allows students to have. Given that each student has different learning needs at different times and different passions and interests, there is likely no school, no matter how great, that can single-handedly cater to all of these needs just by using its own resources contained within the four walls of its classrooms.

With the choices available, students increasingly don’t need to make the tradeoff between attending a large school with lots of choices but perhaps lots of anonymity or a small school with limited choices but a deeply developed personal support structure.

 

Excerpt from Cooperating in the open — from Harold Jarche

I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via Google Plus or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.

 

 

From DSC:
Perhaps helping folks build their own learning ecosystems — based upon one’s gifts/abilities/passions — should be an objective for teachers, professors, instructional designers, trainers, and consultants alike. No matter whether we’re talking K-12, higher ed, or corporate training, these ever-changing networks/tools/strategies will help keep us marketable and able to contribute in a variety of areas to society.

 

 

 

Addendum on 2/5/13:

.

JayCross-LearningEcosystem2013

 

Tagged with:  

10 predictions for blended learning in 2013 — from thejournal.com by Michael Horn and Heather Staker

Excerpt:

In the year ahead we will see more public schools adopt blended learning, meaning online learning in physical schools. Blended learning is no longer entirely new or untried, and school leaders are hungry for a way to do more with less. Below are 10 predictions for blended learning in 2013.

Tagged with:  

Online Learning: A Manifesto — from hybridpedagogy.com by Jesse Stommel

What we need is to ignore the hype and misrepresentations (on both sides of the debate) and gather together more people willing to carefully reflect on how, where, and why we learn online. There is no productive place in this conversation for exclusivity or anti-intellectualism. Those of us talking about digital pedagogy and digital humanities need to be engaging thoughtfully in discussions about online learning and open education. Those of us in higher ed. need to be engaging thoughtfully with K-12 teachers and administrators. And it’s especially important that we open our discussions of the future of education to students, who should both participate in and help to build their own learning spaces. Pedagogy needs to be at the center of all these discussions.

I have no interest in debating the whether of online learning. That bird has most assuredly flown. What I’d like to do here is outline a pedagogy of online learning — not best practices, but points of departure to encourage a diversity of pedagogies.

 

 

Also see:

.

classrooms of the future

 

.

.

Addendum on 11/14/12:

.

The Teaching and Learning Spaces Working Group (TLSWG) endeavors to enhance teaching and learning at McGill by creating a vision for teaching and learning space development that is aligned with University strategic directions. Its mandate is to…

The first principle of blended learning — from innosightinstitute.org by Heather Clayton Staker

Excerpt:

As I talk to people who want to blend online learning into students’ curriculum, the most frequent question I get is what online content is best? I respect that question, and others that sound really good too, like what does a student-centric classroom look like? Or what should be the teacher’s role?

But I am convinced that the infinitely most important question to ask first is what will motivate students to love this? My observation is that once a student’s heart is in it, the learning happens naturally, elegantly, and quickly. Imagine a classroom filled with students who want to be there, are focused, engaged, even clamoring to learn. But getting students into that righteous flow*, where they learn something because they genuinely love learning it—that’s where 90 percent of the battle is won or lost.

From DSC:
I think Heather & Co. are onto something here. One of the most important bottom lines and gifts that we can give our young people is a love for learning. 

I ask myself, if  and when students graduate from high school, what are their views on learning? Do they love it?  Are they looking forward to continuing a journey of lifelong learning? Are they prepared for being employed on a constant basis in a world of constant change?

How much more could lifelong learning be served if students developed a love of learning. Then, like Heather mentioned, “…once a student’s heart is in it, the learning happens naturally, elegantly, and quickly.”

Borrowing from a sports-related analogy…it’s like in tennis; don’t worry about the score. Play the point, mentally be in the point/moment and enjoy what you’re doing. Then the score will take care of itself. But if you are so focused on the score, you probably won’t enjoy what you’re doing and the score, most likely, will not take care of itself.

 

The Future of Education - Learning Powered by Techonology -- Karen Cator -- May 2012

.

Featured presenters:

  • Karen Cator, Dir. Office of Education Technology, U.S. Department of Education
  • Dr. Barrett Mosbacker, Superintendent, Briarwood Christian School

Excerpts re: trends:

  • Mobility — 24/7 access
  • Social interactions for learning
  • Digital content
  • Big data

 

 

Classifying K-12 Blended Learning -- by Staker and Horn - May 2012

 

Excerpt from the introduction

The growth of online learning in the K–12 sector is occurring both remotely through virtual schools and on campuses through blended learning. In emerging fields, definitions are important because they create a shared language that enables people to talk about the new phenomena. The following blended-learning taxonomy and definitions expand upon and refine our previous work in helping to create a shared language for the K–12 blended learning sector.

In our report titled, “The rise of K–12 blended learning,” we observed that there were six main blended-learning models emerging in the sector from the perspective of the student. This paper introduces a number of changes to that taxonomy based on feedback from the field and the need to update the research to keep pace with new innovations that are occurring in blended learning. Most importantly, the paper eliminates two of the six blended-learning models—Faceto-Face Driver and Online Lab—because they appear to duplicate other models and make the categorization scheme too rigid to accommodate the diversity of blended-learning models in practice. By moving from six to four overarching models, we have created more breathing room in the definitions. We hope these new models will better describe the majority of programs so that nearly all blended-learning programs will fit comfortably within one of the four. Appendix A explains the differences between the new four-model taxonomy and the old six-model taxonomy in greater detail.

Flick content from your phone to your TV with a single swipe [Video] — from PSFK by Emma Hutchings

Excerpt:

Panasonic have recently added the Media Flick function to the Viera Remote Android app, which allows content to be shared between a smartphone and a TV with just the swipe of a finger.

From DSC:
  • What if students could quickly do this in class — without interrupting the flow of the class —  and transfer a paper they wrote, or a song they composed, or a website they found, etc., up to the main “screen” to “play” it for the rest of the class?
    .
  • What if faculty could just as quickly send files/items to students’ devices?
    .
  • And/or, what if such gestures quickly sent such files up to a cloud-based repository for that course, accessible 24x7x365?

 

Right now, Apple and other vendors need to work out the wireless network (and related) issues to make this a more feasible idea for an entire campus to implement this. 

But, it would sure be nice!  🙂

 

 

 

 

From DSC:
Arguably, Sal Kahn has become the most famous, influential educator on the planet today — his videos are watched millions of times a day now.  The question — which Eric Schmidt answers in the piece — I couldn’t help but ask was, “Why didn’t this type of innovation come from someone who was working in education at the time of their innovation?”

My thanks to Dr. Kate Byerwalter and her colleagues for passing along this resource.
The tags/associated categories for this posting point out the relevant areas covered.

 

Khan Academy: The future of education?

Also see:

  • Khan Academy: The future of education?
    (CBS News) Sal Khan is a math, science, and history teacher to millions of students, yet none have ever seen his face. Khan is the voice and brains behind Khan Academy, a free online tutoring site that may have gotten your kid out of an algebra bind with its educational how-to videos. Now Khan Academy is going global. Backed by Google, Gates, and other Internet powerhouses, Sal Khan wants to change education worldwide, and his approach is already being tested in some American schools. Sanjay Gupta reports.

From DSC:
A relevant graphic comes to mind with what Sal is trying to achieve with analytics:

i.e. Highly-effective diagnostic tools for the educators and trainers out there!

 

 

The Promise and Potential of Personalized Digital Learning -- from Tom Vander Ark on November 4, 2011

Also see:


.

A comprehensive look at the promise and potential of online learning
In our digital age, students have dramatically new learning needs and must be prepared for the idea economy of the future. In Getting Smart, well-known global education expert Tom Vander Ark examines the facets of educational innovation in the United States and abroad. Vander Ark makes a convincing case for a blend of online and onsite learning, shares inspiring stories of schools and programs that effectively offer “personal digital learning” opportunities, and discusses what we need to do to remake our schools into “smart schools.”

— Examines the innovation-driven world, discusses how to combine online and onsite learning, and reviews “smart tools” for learning
— Investigates the lives of learning professionals, outlines the new employment bargain, examines online universities and “smart schools”
— Makes the case for smart capital, advocates for policies that create better learning, studies smart cultures

Addendum on 11/29/11:

Building Learning Communities 2011 Keynote: Dr. Eric Mazur — from November Learning

Excerpt:

Today, we are officially relaunching our opening keynote from BLC11 with Dr. Eric Mazur. Dr. Mazur is the Area Dean of Applied Physics and Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

In his keynote, Dr. Mazur shares his vast research on teaching and learning. Students in Dr. Mazur’s class are moving far away from the traditional stand and deliver lectures given in many k-12 and university classrooms around the world, and they are gaining a much deeper understanding of the material being taught in the process.

As you watch this video, we invite you to take some time and respond to one or more of the following questions…

 

From DSC:
What I understood the key points to be:

  • Teaching and learning should not be about information transfer alone; that is, it’s not about simply having students “parrot back” the information.  That doesn’t lead to true learning and long-term retention.
  • The more a teacher is an expert in his/her content, the more difficulty this teacher has in understanding how a first time learner in this subject struggles
  • Rather we need to guide and use peer instruction/social learning/collaboration amongst students to construct learning and then be able to apply/transfer that learning to a different context
  • Lecturing is not an effective way to create a long term retention of information
  • Peer instruction/human interaction creates effective learning
  • “The plural of anecdotes is not data.”
  • Eric is seeking data and feedback to sharpen his theories of how to optimize learning
  • Technology serves pedagogy — technology should afford a new mode of learning
  • Towards that end, Eric and team working on “Peer instruction 2.0”
  • How do I design good questions?  Optimize the discussions? Manage time? Insure learning is taking place?
  • Eric is working with several other colleagues to create a system for building and using data analytics to give useful information to instructor about who’s “getting it” and who isn’t; about how we learn
  • Peer instruction not without issues — how people group themselves and who students choose to collaborate with can be problematical
  • Why not have the system do the pairing/grouping?
  • System uses algorithms, facial recognition, posture analysis; cameras, microphones
  • Surveys also used
  • The system is attempting to help Eric and his team learn about learning
  • The system being used at Harvard and by invitation only

Eric ended with a summary of the 2 key messages:

  1. Education is not about lecturing
  2. We can move way beyond the current technologies and use new methods and technologies to actively manage learning as it happens

 

From DSC:
After listening to this lecture, the graphic below captures a bit of what he’s getting at and reflects some of my thinking on this subject as well.  That is, we need diagnostic tools — along the lines of those a mechanic might use on our cars to ascertain where the problems/issues are:
 


 

© 2024 | Daniel Christian