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Teacher Collaboration: When Belief Systems Collide
Image credit: iStockphoto Last month I reflected on team development and how we can work more effectively together in schools. It's impossible to explore these ideas without considering conflict -- an inevitable part of working together.
Learnable Programming
Here's a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming? Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types.
Following hot on the heels of Stanford's announcement that it would be taking on iTunes U with its own free course software, Google has just released a new "Course Builder" tool. Following a trial course in July that saw 155,000 registered students (with 20,000 completing it), the search giant has bundled the technologies used into an open source package available to anyone here . The tool includes all of the formalities you would expect from a full educational course, including a registration process and schedule alongside certificates and the standard content repository that you would expect. Unlike services like iTunes U, the result is much more holistic -- this feels less like a way for a casual user to "play along" with the real course taking place at a university and more like a dedicated service in itself.
Google Course Builder will catalogue and deliver the world's educational content
This sentence is a learning object. , the “father of learning objects,” first came up with the idea for them while watching his son play with LEGOs. The basic notion is that we can create units of learning so fundamentally simple and reusable that they can be applied in different ways to different objectives and lessons, no matter the context. Hodgins’s dream was of “a world where all ‘content’ exists at just the right and lowest possible size.” Like a single sentence. Like a single question on an exam.
Udacity and Online Pedagogy: Players, Learners, Objects | Online Learning | HYBRID PEDAGOGY
A Better Way to Teach?
Any physics professor who thinks that lecturing to first-year students is the best way to teach them about electromagnetic waves can stop reading this item. For everybody else, however, listen up: A new study shows that students learn much better through an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor. The research, appearing online today in Science , was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman. First at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at an eponymous science education initiative at UBC, Wieman has devoted the past decade to improving undergraduate science instruction, using methods that draw upon the latest research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and learning theory.
Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school. “I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.” Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.
Come the Revolution
Guide to Open Learning
ABSTRACT: This document is an introduction to Open Learning. It examines briefly what "Open" means and the different facets of the open movement and what "Learning" means and how it is different for every person. Attention is brought to the issue of the digital divide and ways to reduce or eliminate barriers to education.
Hi Simulacron3 - Great Stuff here. Would you consider joining the team Free Education. I like your pearls on the future of learning, Khan Academy Information and especially the path you have started that includes the virtual classroom and social media in education...and well...I have a bit of wandering to do on your pearls as I see a lot of other paths that are of interest by your pearl titles. Ah, I need more time in the day! Next thing I have to do is figure out how to invite you to team up to FreeEducation, I'm a newbie to pearltrees. Sincerely, Peggy by May 14
Chomsky: How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey | Education
April 4, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.
The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy
An Explainer Post There's an article in this month's Wired Magazine about Khan Academy. The headline speaks volumes -- " How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education " -- as do the responses I've seen to the article. As usual, there's plenty of praise for Sal Khan and his one-man-educational-video-making machine.The federal school turnaround program is mostly failing in Washington state, even though teachers and administrators are trying their best to make a difference for kids, according to a report issued Thursday by education researchers at the University of Washington. The federal government is spending more than $3 billion nationwide to help districts turn around their worst-performing schools. Washington school districts are failing to make aggressive reforms with their more than $50 million share of the money, researchers from UW's Center on Reinventing Public Education say. Teachers are working very hard but their efforts are mostly wasted because the districts don't have a good plan, said Sarah Yatsko, a UW research analyst and lead author of the study.
Local News | Report: School turnaround mostly failing in Wash.
LEARNING x FREEDOM x THE WEB Learning gets more agile, more active, more participatory, more like the web. The web strengthens its public mission and its place in human history. Everyone gets to invent his or her own end to the story.
Learning, Freedom and the Web
by FREDERICK BENNETT Chapter 1: A Prophecy Fulfilled Chapter 2: A True Solution Notes James Bryant Conant was a scholar whose talents extended over a wide range of activities. He was a scientist, writer, and concerned citizen. Harvard University selected him to be its president, and he filled that position for twenty years.
Bennett
Here at Maclean's, we appreciate the written word. And we appreciate you, the reader. We are always looking for ways to create a better user experience for you and wanted to try out a new functionality that provides you with a reading experience in which the words and fonts take centre stage.
In conversation: Alison Gopnik - The Interview
Seattle University | Seattle U teacher honored for innovation
Originally published November 17, 2011 at 12:03 AM | Page modified November 17, 2011 at 11:18 AM Fourteen years ago, Vicky Minderhout did something very radical for a university professor: She set aside her biochemistry-lecture notes, moved away from the lectern and began teaching from the center of the classroom. She wanted to coach her students at Seattle University to think about how biochemistry works, to puzzle their way through the structures of proteins and work out the functions of carbohydrates. She wanted them to discover answers for themselves. "I view it as a coaching role," Minderhout said. "We're really trying to coach thinking."Critical & Creative Education