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‘Our Technology Is Our Ideology’: George Siemens on the Future of Digital Learning

‘Our Technology Is Our Ideology’: George Siemens on the Future of Digital Learning
What does it mean to be human in a digital age? Some people researching education technology might not spend their days wondering how their work fits into this existential question—but George Siemens isn’t "some people." “Maybe my mama hugged me extra when I was a baby.” That’s his explanation for how he thinks about the role of education in the 21st century. A researcher, theorist, educator, Siemens is the digital learning guy. Siemens’ work is on the cutting edge of what’s possible in digital learning, but he doesn’t want to discuss the latest fads in education technology. “Our technology is our ideology,” Siemens says. Rise of the robots Siemens has both an academic and an industry perspective on digital learning. Siemens also serves on the advisory board of learning analytics company Civitas Learning and is a mentor to startups in Intel’s Education Accelerator. The kind of knowledge that humans need to function in society looks different than it did during the Industrial Revolution. Related:  Instructional Design

Online Classes Get a Missing Piece: Teamwork Most online courses are a solitary experience for learners. Students lack the ability to strike up an impromptu conversation about last week’s homework or compare notes with whoever’s sitting next to them in class. The absence of social interaction could be one reason behind high dropout rates in online classes. Instead their interactions are relegated to stale chat forums, where questions go unanswered or where few students regularly visit. Students enrolled in online classes at community colleges drop out of class at a higher rate than peers in face-to-face environments, according to the Community College Research Center. Several California community colleges are hopeful that adding a way for learners to interact with each other in online classes will help them complete their coursework. MOOCs get social Carolyn Rosé, an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has been exploring ways to add social engagement to MOOCs since 2013.

How Twitter Users Can Generate Better Ideas References (7) 1. W. Isaacson, “Steve Jobs” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011): 431. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. i. Show All References So You Want to Be an Instructional Designer? Good listener. People person. Lifelong learner. Sound like you? No, we’re not trying to arrange a first date. Colleges, K-12 schools and companies increasingly turn to instructional designers to help them improve the quality of teaching in in-person, online or blended-learning environments. Once-lonely techies who helped faculty figure out Blackboard and dwelled in university IT departments, IDs now are growing in number and gaining celebrity status at their institutions. Jobs in the industry take many shapes, but instructional designers act broadly as shamans who guide educators and institutions through the world of digital learning. You’re a good listener IDs often start the design process by talking to faculty and subject matter experts about the courses they teach. You enjoy working with diverse teams Instructional design work is unique to any given organization, but odds are it involves collaborating with people who have vastly different roles and personalities.

Twitter users forming tribes with own language, tweet analysis shows | News Twitter users grouped into tribes, annotated with words typically used by each group. Graphic: John Bryden, Sebastian Funk and Vincent Jansen Twitter users are forming 'tribes', each with their own language, according to a scientific analysis of millions of tweets. The research on Twitter word usage throws up a pattern of behaviour that seems to contradict the commonly held belief that users simply want to share everything with everyone. In fact, the findings point to a more precise use of social media where users frequently include keywords in their tweets so that they engage more effectively with other members of their community or tribe. The largest group found in the analysis was made up of African Americans using the words 'Nigga', 'poppin' and 'chillin'. Interestingly, just as people have varying regional accents, we also found that communities would misspell words in different ways. Given enough data, Bryden said that this can be done "with up to 80% accuracy". Download the data

NWeLearn: Creativity in Instructional Design | Brainstorm in Progress These are only my notes and impressions. Non-tangential ramblings are my own. Contents may settle in shipping: Creativity in Instructional Design Shannon Riggs, Director of Ecampus Course Development and Training at Oregon State University Instructional designers wear many hats in online education. She was reticent to get involved in online education but found that ALL of the online students had to be engaged because the courses were designed that way. The eCampus as 50 online programs, 3k students have earned a degree since 2002, 19k students from 50 states and 19 countries. 1k+ online courses. They are growing at 15% a year and they are proud that they have not let the quality slip – it has improved. “ECampus Essentials”: This requires the collaboration of an instructional designer. The question for the tables was “what role do instructional designers play on campus?” Instructional designers are artists.

Barefoot In the head A Physics of Education? The behaviour of children in Self-Organised Learning Environments everywhere Is reminiscent of self-organising systems. A self-organising system (SOS) consists of a set of entities that obtains an emerging global system behaviour via local interactions without centralised control (Elmenreich,W. and de Meer,H.(2008). Self-organising systems fall under the general area of Chaos Theory in Physics. It is interesting to apply the definition of Chaos to education in general: ‘A system whose long term behaviour is unpredictable, tiny changes in the accuracy of the starting value rapidly diverge to anywhere in its possible state space. The sentence above perhaps sums up, in the language of Physics, what we understand as education and assessment. In a SOLE, children seem to maximise the information content of what they are researching. These subjects are in their infancy.

NWeLearn: Limitless Education: Is Open Source an Option? | Brainstorm in Progress Bell tower at Oregon State University. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Limitless Education: Is Open Source an Option? Tamara Mitchell, Assistant Director Career Success Center at Oregon State University / Arkansas State University Mountain Home / Western Oregon UniversityBrian Daigle, Center for Academic Innovation at Western Oregon UniversityAlexis Terell, Undergraduate Pathway Associate Program Manager at Oregon State UniversityCraig Geffre, Division of International Programs at Oregon State UniversityJennifer Kepka, Linn-Benton Community College Open Source tools are reducing barriers and encouraging innovation among higher education faculty, staff, and administrators. Some of the tools looked at: I think we should have started with a definition of Open Source.

Education Technology 101: From Assessments to Zombies | EdSurge Guides Why shouldn't the smartest people in the world want to go into education? One reason that comes to mind: maybe they just don't know much about how education--and for that matter, how quickly education technology has been evolving. And yep, we'd like to help. Here's a collection of stories and resources to help you begin to map the landscape of education technology. In some ways, there's nothing new about using technology in the school room. At one point, pencils seemed a tad bit revolutionary. Still it's hardly all buttercups and roses: both education broadly as well as edtech have big, hairy problems that trigger passionate debates. And as always, please share your rants, raves and reminders with us here.

Google Goes Back to School with Updates to Classroom and Expeditions It’s that time of the year—the time when companies start making back-to-school updates and announcements. First up: Google, in the form of updates to Classroom, Expeditions, and the overall Google for Education offerings, all announced on Google’s blog. Google Classroom: Email Summaries and Annotations Google Classroom, the company’s learning management system, is now getting a new feature. Teachers will now be able to share summaries of student work, classroom announcements and the like with parents (shown above), either by sending daily or weekly summaries via email or over the Google Classroom app, show below. But that’s not all for Classroom’s mobile app. And one big update specifically geared towards teachers: now, teachers can organize the class stream by adding topics to posts so that teachers and/or students can filter the stream for specific topics. Expeditions: New Virtual Adventures Google Apps for Education: Improvements to Cast and Forms

Bean Bags in the LMS – OFFICE OF DIGITAL LEARNING Recently, I spoke with an English teacher at the University of Dayton who despaired over the cold, sterile environment the LMS creates for students and teachers alike. She asked why should she not be able to create a comfortable space for dialogue in her course? “I want my LMS to have bean bags in it, so that students can have a comfortable place to talk, to study, to engage.” The LMS doesn’t come with bean bags, unfortunately. And while Canvas, Middlebury’s new learning management solution, provides a level of ease in both design and function, it isn’t necessarily cozy. Education and learning are tied in our imaginations to the aesthetic. The most compassionate instructional designers will say they love students, and they will talk about designing for student-centeredness. One of the primary influences on instructional design (and online learning as a consequence) is educational psychology. In his chapter “The Technology of Teaching“, B. Tools are not neutral, but neither are we.

7 Game Changer EdTech Tools to Personalize Your Classroom By Stephanie Shaw I was immersed in the “digital conversion” almost 10 years ago and it was extremely overwhelming for me. I suddenly taught fourth grade to 30 students who all had a laptop. I felt like I had 72 subscriptions and passwords, but I wasn’t sure where to start. I needed technology to make my life easier, not more difficult! Even after many years, it is still easy to feel engulfed by the ever changing technology tools. Educreations: Simply put, this tool allows you to make a video and share it with a link. Personalized Learning Tip: I have a video for almost all of the skills I teach. Edpuzzle/Playposit: Similarly to Educreations, both of these sites allow the teacher to assign a video for their class to watch. Personalized Learning Tip: I use these tools to personalize learning in several ways. Kahoot/Quizizz: Both of these sites are amazing interactive games that add a competitive edge to your lesson. Google Forms: This is quickly becoming one of my favorite tools.

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