Social Media in Education: Pros and Cons. About ETR Community EdTechReview (ETR) is a community of and for everyone involved in education technology to connect and collaborate both online and offline to discover, learn, utilize and share about the best ways technology can improve learning, teaching, and leading in the 21st century. EdTechReview spreads awareness on education technology and its role in 21st century education through best research and practices of using technology in education, and by facilitating events, training, professional development, and consultation in its adoption and implementation.
Apps. Clay Christensen takes closer look at how online learning will disrupt K-12 education. When you first hear disruptive economics guru Clayton Christensen’s prediction that by 2019 half of all K-12 classes will be taught online, it’s easy to wonder if brick-and-mortar schools as we know them are on their way out. But a new study released Thursday from his think tank, the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, depicts a future of education, particularly at the elementary school level, that isn’t nearly as stark as that. The paper, which refines theories on blended learning Christensen and his colleagues have laid out in the book “Disrupting Class” and other studies, introduces the idea of hybrid innovation.
While Christensen’s famous theory of innovation mostly focuses on disruptive and sustaining innovations, the new paper offers the concept of the hybrid. Often, the researchers argue, sectors experiencing disruption go through an extended phase in which old and new technology exist side by side, providing “the best of both worlds.”
Don't Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Lifelong Learning. By Maria Popova “When you step away from the prepackaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.” “The present education system is the trampling of the herd,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I started Brain Pickings in large part out of frustration and disappointment with my trampling experience of our culturally fetishized “Ivy League education.” I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it should work.
People who forgo school build their own infrastructures. I learned how to teach myself.
That's Great!: Why Not MOOseums? I have been interested in museums for a long time, with a special concern for museum effectiveness in offering open, informal or free-choice learning for the visitor. I've recently written about this (Barr 2013: online at "There are plenty of fascinating things about museums. And one of the most intriguing is that during the 20th century anyway, museums have been one of the few places where adults (and children) could experience informal or free-choice learning. During that century, the educational mandate rose to become one of the primary goals of most museums. " But that museum focus has been almost entirely onsite. "In spite of the speed with which museums embraced the world wide web, few of them seem to have become equally enthusiastic about the prospect of expanding their on-site educational activities into the online environment.
The new MOOC experience should function as an "extension of the visitor experience for museums. The Professors Behind the MOOC Hype - Technology. Dave Chidley for The Chronicle Paul Gries, of the U. of Toronto, has taught MOOCs on computer science. By Steve Kolowich What is it like to teach 10,000 or more students at once, and does it really work? The largest-ever survey of professors who have taught MOOCs, or massive open online courses, shows that the process is time-consuming, but, according to the instructors, often successful. The survey, conducted by The Chronicle, attempted to reach every professor who has taught a MOOC. Hype around these new free online courses has grown louder and louder since a few professors at Stanford University drew hundreds of thousands of students to online computer-science courses in 2011. Princeton University's Robert Sedgewick is one of them.
Like many professors at top-ranked institutions, Mr. His online course drew 80,000 students when it opened last summer, but Sedgewick was not daunted. It paid off. Therefore the positive response may come as a surprise to some observers. Why They MOOC Mr. Nathan Heller: Is College Moving Online? Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of the distant past. At seventy, he has owlish eyes, a flared Hungarian nose, and a tendency to gesture broadly with the flat palms of his hands. He wears the crisp white shirts and dark blazers that have replaced tweed as the raiment of the academic caste. His hair, also white, often looks manhandled by the Boston wind. Where some scholars are gnomic in style, Nagy piles his sentences high with thin-sliced exposition. (“There are about ten passages—and by passages I simply mean a selected text, and these passages are meant for close reading, and sometimes I’ll be referring to these passages as texts, or focus passages, but you’ll know I mean the same thing—and each one of these requires close reading!”)
Nagy has published no best-sellers. He is not a regular face on TV. The Internet was the natural next step. News Archives. Open online courses – an avalanche that might just get stopped. These days there are plenty of prophets preaching hi-tech and digital solutions to the problems of expanding access to knowledge and higher education. Barely a week goes by without some new hymn to education technology, open-source software or open-access publishing. In the US, the growing chorus for online education through massive open online courses, or moocs, has been deafening. But in Britain, it has barely registered. Last December, the commercial launch of the Open University's mooc platform, FutureLearn, attracted the participation of a dozen universities and the support of David Willetts, but little response from Britain's beleaguered academics. No wonder that last month Sir Michael Barber, the chief education adviser of Pearson, the world's largest profit-making education provider, proclaimed that universities were powerless to stop the online avalanche.
Historically, the University of California has often proved a weathervane for global trends in higher education.
Ten Myths About Technology. Some of the best moments are low-tech Sometimes my view on technology seems paradoxical and messy. Sometimes it feels like cognitive dissonance. I hang with Luddites and Technophiles. I join #chats and write blogs and yet I frequently criticize technology. So, this list might seem conflicting. Or nuanced. The following are ten myths I have found myself believing over the years: Myth #1: Technology Dehumanizes This is an oversimplification of Luddites. Myth #2: Technology is Neutral Technology is never neutral. Myth #3: Technology Makes Us Relevant On some level, this is true. Myth #4: We Can Use It Wisely We need to think about the pros and cons of the tools. Myth #5: Technology Saves Time Technology cannot save time.
Myth #6: Technology Is Just a Tool Seeing technology as merely a tool is a dangerous mindset. Myth #7: Technology Happens in a Vacuum People rarely say this. Myth #8: Technology Equals Innovation Technology can lead to new developments. Educational Technology and Mobile Learning. The 22 Milestones Of Education Technology. How Teachers Can Best Use Education Technology 8.67K Views 0 Likes Edtech isn't the final solution for education's problems. It's a powerful addition to classrooms though, so it's time to ask: what is the point of education technology?
The Current State Of Technology In K-12 8.12K Views 0 Likes What is the next device most students will soon purchase? How Online Education Has Changed In 10 Years. LabSpace - The Open University. Stephen Downes: The Role of the Educator. How often do we read about the importance of teachers in education? It must be every day, it seems. We are told about "strong empirical evidence that teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student achievement" again and again. The problem with the educational system, it is argued, is that teachers need to be held accountable. We are told we must fire incompetent teachers. Not just in the United States, but in the UK and elsewhere, the concern is that bad teachers must go. Even here on The Huffington Post, the emphasis is on defining teacher accountability rather than understanding what teachers in the 21st century are supposed to do.
The problem with focusing on the role of the teacher, from my perspective, is that it misses the point. Let me tell you how I know this. Each of these has contributed in one way or another to an overall approach not only to learning online but to learning generally. It's an approach that emphasizes open learning and learner autonomy.
The Evidence on Online Education. WASHINGTON -- Online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning, according to a new meta-analysis released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education. The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took "blended" courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.
The Education Department examined all kinds of instruction, and found that the number of valid analyses of elementary and secondary education was too small to have much confidence in the results. Using technology to give students "control of their interactions" has a positive effect on student learning, however. John R. Why School? TED ebook author rethinks education when information is everywhere. The Internet has delivered an explosion of learning opportunities for today’s students, creating an abundance of information, knowledge, and teachers as well as a starkly different landscape from the one in which our ideas about school were born. Traditional educators, classrooms, and brick-and-mortar schools are no longer necessary to access information. Instead, things like blogs and wikis, as well as remote collaborations and an emphasis on critical thinking skills are the coins of the realm in this new kingdom.
Yet the national dialogue on education reform focuses on using technology to update the traditional education model, failing to reassess the fundamental model on which it is built. In Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere, educator, parent and blogger Will Richardson challenges traditional thinking about education— questioning whether it still holds value in its current form. How can schools adjust to this new age?
Or students? The openness-creativity cycle in education | Weller. Clinton: Moocs may be key to a more efficient US system | News. Former president says online courses could drive down costs The way higher education is delivered in the US needs to undergo a “dramatic change”, which could be driven by the accreditation of massive open online courses, according to the nation’s former president Bill Clinton. At public colleges and universities, the cost of tuition has been rising above the rate of inflation for more than a decade, and although the federal government has increased its funding for students in a bid to reduce levels of student debt, this has been negated by a drop in average family incomes. “A lot of people will have student debt that goes beyond the federal student loan programme. I think the only sustainable answer is to find a less expensive delivery system,” Mr Clinton told Times Higher Education. “[Reducing college costs] has become more urgent because so many public schools have lost a lot of their public aid because of the budget problems in various states.” chris.parr@tsleducation.com Click to rate.
I’m having a blogsistential crisis! I am a blogger. And I am an academic. But am I an academic blogger? Lynne Murphy‘s blog began life as a ‘limbering up exercise’ before she wrote work for peer-review. A somewhat accidental academic blogger, she notes that her online presence has become part of her professional profile… even if it occassionally serves as a distraction. Lynne also questions whether she is working for the University when she blogs, but doubts a future model of higher education that involves timetabling blog time for academics.
I’m not sure that I would have agreed to write a post for the LSE Impact blog if I had known that it would send me into the depths of a blogsistential crisis. But here I am: I am a blogger. I am a successful blogger, even. And I am an academic. Before I address or sidestep these questions, let me introduce myself. The blog is a success – I’m not going to be particularly modest about that because I do get a kick out of it. I love both of those kinds of blogs -but mine is neither. What I blog is educational, though. I am an academic. So. A Great Guide on Teaching Students about Digital Footprint.