The eLearning Guild: A community of practice for eLearning designers, developers, and managers Fractaltastic Evolution | PLOS Biologue Hello there! If you enjoy the content on PLOS Biologue, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. One of the iconic metaphors of evolution is that of the ‘tree of life’ – it is the image we all have for how species relate to each other in evolutionary time. In a perspective article last year, David Penny (one of our editorial board) points out that this is originally a biblical phrase and not, as is sometimes assumed, one that was coined by Darwin. He also argues that Darwin’s use of this phrase has often been misinterpreted. Darwin used the phrase only once and then to denote competition between species (and groups of species) rather than relationships per se. It has been three weeks since its publication and the article has been downloaded more than 14,000 times and, within only five days of the launch, the website hosting the platform was viewed more than 100,000 times. It is, as the authors acknowledge, not perfect but that’s not the point.
Agile learning: How ‘making do’ can evolve into ‘making good’ | ALT Online Newsletter By David Jennings Behaviour changes in a colder climate. We are forced to become more resourceful, to find new ways to do things. Older patterns do not always reassert themselves automatically when things get warmer again. Bucking the trend, open resources and tools are continuing to grow even in colder climes, and already we are seeing some cash-strapped pioneers using these to hack together their own education outside institutional boundaries. With that premise, those coming ten years will be a period rife with creative and destructive potential. Over the last year, I have interviewed a sample of people who I thought might give me some useful pointers: from a home educator to a university professor; and from a social software entrepreneur to a photographer who is committed to helping people learn yet refuses to see this as teaching. Changes bred of necessity and opportunity Is self-organised learning just for people with degrees? The high-water mark of structured formal education
National Hands-on Science Institute Khan Academy The Saylor Foundation: Connecting the Dots Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is. "Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down," says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland. But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it's a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it. When Eric Mazur began teaching physics at Harvard, he started out teaching the same way he had been taught. "I sort of projected my own experience, my own vision of learning and teaching — which is what my instructors had done to me. He loved to lecture. "For a long while, I thought I was doing a really, really good job," he says. But then in 1990, he came across articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes had a suspicion students were just memorizing the formulas and never really getting the concepts. The two balls reached the ground at the same time.
12 Visualizations That Will Change the Way You View Scale in Your World Scale is a simple concept. From a very early age, children know about big and small, heavy and light, more and less. Extreme scales, however, are another story. Try to imagine, for example, the size of the universe… or $1 trillion made up entirely of dollar bills. Below are 12 visualizations that try to show things at extreme scales. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Infographic originally published on Mashable.com. 10. xkcd’s creator, Randall Munroe seems to enjoy visualizations of scale. 11. 12. Humans all fit within a small range of sizes, weights, and lifespans, and the quantities we deal with typically fit in small ranges as well. Drew Skau is a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC, with an undergraduate degree in Architecture.
7 compelling arguments for peer learning Learning lurches between extremes: the formal v informal, didactic v discover , self-paced v social, teaching v learning. But is there a bridge between these extremes, something that cleverly combines teaching and learning? Over the years, starting with Judith Harris’s brilliant (and shocking) work on peer pressure, then Eric Mazur’s work at Harvard but also through several presentations at a recent JISC E-assessment conference, I’ve been smitten by peer learning. The idea is to encourage learners to learn from each other. 1. The bible for ‘peer’ pressure, and why parents and teachers should know about this stuff, is Judith Harris’s wonderful The Nurture Assumption, the work for which she received the George Miller Medal in psychology. 2. Given the massification of education, here’s an interesting argument. 3. Unsurprisingly, to teach is to learn, as peer learning involves high-order, deep-processing activity. 4. You can easily see how peer learning produces diversity of judgement. 5.
AASL Announces 2011 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning « INFOdocket From ALA: At the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2011 Annual Conference in New Orleans, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced the 2011 Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning. In its third year, the list of websites honors the top 25 Internet sites for enhancing learning and curriculum development for school librarians and their teacher collaborators. Here’s the 2011 List (Annotations by AASL) Media Sharing Tagxedo Dazzle your project with these word clouds. Kerpoof Explore, create, and design at Kerpoof. Aviary Create logos, web templates, screen captures, edit your photos and more at Aviary. Nota Connect, collaborate, and co-create in real time! Digital Storytelling PicLits If a picture is worth a thousand words, then let this site provide the picture to inspire your words. Zooburst Add a new dimension to storytelling, reports, and presentations with ZooBurst’s digital 3-D tool. Myths and Legends A site for those who enjoy stories and storytelling. Spicy Nodes
Action Science Explorer (Formerly iOpener Workbench) Latest News January 2012. Our paper on Action Science Explorer was accepted by JASIST, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. See the Publications section below for more details. December 2011. July 2010. Description The goal of the iOpener project is to generate readily-consumable surveys of different scientific domains and topics, targeted to different audiences and levels. Action Science Explorer is partially an integration of two powerful existing tools the SocialAction network analysis tool and the JabRef reference manager. JabRef supplies all the features one would expect from a reference manager, including searching using simple regular expressions, automatic and manual grouping of papers, DOI and URL links, PDF full text with annotations, abstracts, user generated reviews and text annotations, and many ways of exporting. These tools are linked together to form multiple coordinated views of the data. Data & Summarization Video Demonstration