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Educational Models

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The Blockchain Revolution and Higher Education. The blockchain provides a rich, secure, and transparent platform on which to create a global network for higher learning. This Internet of value can help to reinvent higher education in a way the Internet of information alone could not. What will be the most important technology to change higher education? In our view, it’s not big data, the social web, MOOCs, virtual reality, or even artificial intelligence. We see these as components of something new, all enabled and transformed by an emerging technology called the blockchain. OK, it’s not the most sonorous word ever, sounding more like a college football strategy than a transformative technology. The opportunities for innovators in higher education fall into four categories: The blockchain may help us change the relationships among colleges and universities and, in turn, their relationship to society.

Let us explain. What Is the Blockchain Revolution? Overall, they do a pretty good job — but there are limitations. Why should you care? Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds of young people whom I have spoken with on campuses or who have written to me over the last few years. Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. I should say that this subject is very personal for me. Like so many kids today, I went off to college like a sleepwalker. A young woman from another school wrote me this about her boyfriend at Yale: Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories.

The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think. U.S. America Needs to Get Over its Reverence for the Bachelor's Degree - The Atlantic. Two years ago, my nephew was set to graduate from Maryland’s Towson University with a degree in political science. After six long years, both he and his parents were ready to breathe a sigh of relief—he had made it to the finish line. He had never been excited about school, and his parents had worried about his lack of enthusiasm, wishing he could be engaged in something that ignited his curiosity and provided him more of a motivation to focus, something more hands-on and practical.

But they also knew that without a bachelor’s degree, my nephew’s ability to move into a rewarding career, earn a middle-class salary, and enjoy some economic security would be very limited. And they worried that if he didn’t complete that degree before he turned 25, he likely never would (a reasonable concern, given national statistics on college completion). They knew their son well. Another nephew of mine, Jeffrey, faced a similar dilemma, but took a different route. It doesn’t have to be this way. Here's the best case that software is about to disrupt education. Reviewing Jeff Selingo's 'There Is Life After College' America’s students and parents have good reason to fear life after college. Though Bachelor’s degrees are now needed more than ever, over the last 15 years the average wage for someone holding one has declined by 10 percent, and the net worth of those under 35 has gone down by nearly 70 percent since the early 1980s.

Employers are using the Bachelor’s degree as a screening device, but neither students nor those hiring them think the degree proves that the person who earned it is ready for the world of work. Worries about the preparation of college grads for the world of work have been around for a long time. A century ago, business groups and labor unions came together to support a stratified system of high-school education that trained some students for specific tasks, while giving others a broad education that would allow them to continue their studies in college. Selingo makes a happy presentation of the virtues of community colleges and two-year degrees. Letter Grades Deserve an 'F' - Jessica Lahey.

Letter grades are a tradition in our educational system, and we accept them as fair and objective measures of academic success. However, if the purpose of academic grading is to communicate accurate and specific information about learning, letter, or points-based grades, are a woefully blunt and inadequate instrument. Worse, points-based grading undermines learning and creativity, rewards cheating, damages students' peer relationships and trust in their teachers, encourages students to avoid challenging work, and teaches students to value grades over knowledge. Letter grades communicate precious little about the process of learning a given subject. When a child earns a ‘B’ in Algebra I, what does that ‘B’ represent? That ‘B’ may represent hundreds of points-based assignments, arranged and calculated in categories of varying weights and relative significance depending on the a teacher’s training or habit.

As a teacher, I struggled with the fuzzy logic of grading every term.

Primary Education

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves. How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Business. He started by telling them that there were kids in other parts of the world who could memorize pi to hundreds of decimal points.

They could write symphonies and build robots and airplanes. Most people wouldn't think that the students at José Urbina López could do those kinds of things. Kids just across the border in Brownsville, Texas, had laptops, high-speed Internet, and tutoring, while in Matamoros the students had intermittent electricity, few computers, limited Internet, and sometimes not enough to eat. "But you do have one thing that makes you the equal of any kid in the world," Juárez Correa said. "Potential. " He looked around the room. Paloma was silent, waiting to be told what to do. "So," Juárez Correa said, "what do you want to learn? " In 1999, Sugata Mitra was chief scientist at a company in New Delhi that trains software developers. Over the years, Mitra got more ambitious. Over the next 75 days, the children worked out how to use the computer and began to learn. The Future of Learning, Networked Society - Ericsson.

Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education. Are Universities Going the Way of Record Labels? - Martin Smith. If you spent the 1990s plucking songs from a stack of cassettes to make the perfect mixtape, you probably welcomed innovations of the next decade that served your favorite albums up as individual songs, often for free. The internet’s power to unbundle content sparked a rapid transformation of the music industry, which today generates just over half of the $14 billion it did in 2000—and it’s doing the same thing to higher education.

The unbundling of albums in favor of individual songs was one of the biggest causes of the music industry’s decline. It cannibalized the revenue of record labels as 99-cent songs gained popularity over $20 albums. It also changed the way music labels had to operate in order to maintain profitability. Pressure from labels then had downstream effects on content creators, specifically artists. Being a recording artist these days is a hard gig and an increasing number are going independent. For consumers, unbundling music is a mixed blessing. MOOCs Aren’t Revolutionizing College, but They’re Not a Failure. A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these “massive open online courses” stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher education.

Their interactive technology promised to deliver top-tier teaching from institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, not just to a few hundred students in a lecture hall on ivy-draped campuses, but free via the Internet to thousands or even millions around the world. At long last, there appeared to be a solution to the problem of “scaling up” higher education: if it were delivered more efficiently, the relentless cost increases might finally be rolled back. Some wondered whether MOOCs would merely transform the existing system or blow it up entirely. Computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of the MOOC provider Udacity, predicted that in 50 years, 10 institutions would be responsible for delivering higher education.

Then came the backlash. Valuable snippets Justifying tuition Teaching teachers. Colleges Cutting Lectures, and Costs. MANCHESTER, Mich. —Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors. Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. Kippnick’s classroom is a small study she’s set up in her home in rural Michigan, where she can stare out at apple trees and the occasional passing deer. For the most part, colleges and universities have changed very little since the University of Bologna gave the first college lectures in 1088.

But a new model is upending the traditional college experience, and has the potential to change the way universities—both new and old—think about learning. New Report Reimagines Learning in a Networked Society. A research report released today by the Connected Learning Research Network tackles the big issues in education and fundamentally reimagines what learning looks like in the 21st century. The Connected Learning Research Network – a group of nine interdisciplinary thinkers (including our own Katie Salen) – is focused on understanding the opportunities and challenges that arise for learning in today’s changing media ecology, and developing a new model of connected learning: learning that is socially-connected, interest-driven, and geared towards educational opportunity for all.

In response to these trends, the document offers a new framework to expand the reach of meaningful and sustained learning. Connected learning, the report argues, embodies the values of equity, participation, and social belonging by integrating the divergent spheres of peer culture, interests, and academic content. The Challenge of Open Education | Pantò | Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society. The Challenge of Open Education Eleonora Pantò, Anna Comas-Quinn Abstract Digital culture and the remix culture it has generated have changed the way in which knowledge and learning are constructed.‬

The last decade since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched the Open Courseware initiative (OCW) in 2002 has seen a significant increase in the number of initiatives related to Open Educational Resources (OER) and open education in general. New institutions, with different objectives and business models, are emerging rapidly outside traditional universities: start-ups that offer free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), consortia of universities from four continents that share teaching materials and infrastructure, and universities where classes are taught by the students themselves.‬ This paper seeks to provide a historical overview of developments in the world of open education and a look at the key challenges that it faces.

The student authored syllabus. Author: Suz Burroughs In either formal learning, informal learning or models which transition between the two, there are many opportunities for learners to co-create the syllabus and/or outline their own course of action. The sage on the stage of formal instruction must become at the most a guide on the side who acts as a coach appearing only when needed rather than as a lecturer who determines the content that the learners need to master.

In the following inspirational but certainly not prescriptive examples, we will focus on co-learning methods drawn from a Social Constructivist perspective, which fits nicely here. We offer a few examples below to show a range of learner centered approaches. They all are based on co-learners hosting each other for one of a number of digestible topics in the larger subject area or domain that the group formed in order to explore. This can take place across a number of media and timelines. 3 example designs to structure the learning Weekly topics structure. UnCollege | Hacking Your Education. Saying No to College. Fast Company's Guide To The Generation Flux College Degree. The cost of college tuition has risen faster than nearly any other good or service in America for more than three decades. A bachelor’s degree at New York University, the most expensive university in the country, will now set you back $244,000. The average student loan borrower pays much less but still walks away almost $27,000 in debt for an undergraduate degree.

Student loan debt has outpaced credit card debt in this country, and the percentage of people who default on their loans after just three years just rose to 13%. These eye-popping prices have inspired a raging debate over whether college is really worth the money anymore. Some prominent voices in the entrepreneurship world, such as PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, say no. Economists and social scientists scoff, arguing the average return on an education remains robust; in today's economy, you need at least a technical degree or certificate to qualify for anything better than a fast food or warehouse job. P2PU. How we test ideas about learning. Current projects Use the drop down list above to see all current projects. Here are a few examples: The Citizen Science project makes scientific ideas and practice accessible to everyone.The Open Masters creates a template for anyone to pursue their own semi-formal study.The Mechanical MOOC automates a massive course experience. What’s a project?

Projects take many forms- such as organizing face to face meetings around an existing course, building a community of ambassadors, conducting research experiments, running experimental courses, or building technology and tools- but all projects: Create something new- a tool, content, experience, model, etc.Test a hypothesis or question, or demonstrate a new way of doing things.Openly share what they are creating and learning.

Projects are not afraid to fail, but they don’t whimper. P2PU projects are an important part of what we do, and they are rooted in our values of openness, community, and peer learning. Company's skills tests offer glimpse of alternative credentialing. The big enchilada of potential disruptions to higher education is if employers go outside of the academy to size up job seekers. While that prospect remains fanciful, for now, new approaches to skills assessment show what the future could look like. Take Smarterer, a Boston-based start-up that offers 800 free online tests for people to prove their chops in areas ranging from C++ programming to speaking English for business or understanding Gothic architecture.

And not all the assessments are about getting a job -- there are quizzes on punk rock history and how to use Twitter. Smarterer's tests are crowdsourced, Wikipedia-style, and users can get a meaningful score by answering fewer than 20 questions, company officials said. That means they can tout a skill on their Smarterer profile after spending as little as one minute taking a test. Jennifer Fremont-Smith, Smarterer’s CEO, describes the company as a “third-party, super powerful assessment and credentialing tool.” 1. 1. Skill Tests - Smarterer. Hacker Ethics and Higher Learning. Nmr-21-nelson.pdf (application/pdf Object) Noam Chomsky - The Purpose of Education | Learning Without Frontiers on Blip. Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21st Century and Beyond. Education For Whom and For What?

Brillinger Thesis IGS PDF.pdf (application/pdf Object) Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill. Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism, Democracy and the University as a Public Sphere. Philanthropy Daily® » Anti-intellectualism and higher education. A Brief History of Anti-Intellectualism in American Media. Why College Professors Are Afraid to Teach Millennials. Riesman model of Education and Culture. Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains. Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms. American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn't Exist. The Skills Gap: America's Young Workers Are Lagging Behind. 10 talks from inspiring teachers. The Flipped Classroom: Turning the Traditional Classroom on its Head. Inquiry-based Learning: Explanation. Reading, Writing, and Self-Esteem — Emerging Ideas. The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Four Secrets To Lift The “Curse Of Expertise”

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