40 Useful Tips For Anyone Taking A MOOC As these resources have grown in number and the list of institutions providing them has become ever more prestigious, free online courses are gaining legitimacy with employers as a method of learning valuable job skills. While there’s still a long way to go in terms of acceptance, more and more employers are recognizing the value of cheap, effective educational programs that can keep employees up-to-date and engaged in their field without spending a dime. Whether you’re looking to online education for personal reasons or to get ahead in your career, use these tips to help you get more out of open courses and use what you learn to market yourself, improve your performance, and stand out on the job. Treat them like real classes .
Evernote as Portfolio | The story of using Evernote as a portfolio in my k-12 school Our #EdcMooc paths to Information and knowledge | Eleni's First Steps The last three weeks have been extremely rich and creative although I haven’t come back to the blog to record my thoughts. One of the things that keeps coming back in my mind are the words of George Roberts few months ago when I started the first UK-based MOOC “First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education“. During the orientation, George encouraged us to dive into the #fslt12 curriculum (the hashtag of the aforementioned MOOC) and make it ours. At that time, his words didn’t make a lot of sense but my enthusiasm was enough to “dive” into the resources, engage with participants and spend a considerable amount of time on further exploration. George’s words make perfect sense to me while engaging with #edcmooc as a student and while trying to encourage, as an educator, my students to internalize their course content and experience it as a whole. This experience is going to help me immensely in a PhD program…so many research questions swirling through my head! What do you do?
state-of-the-art classroom: New state-of-the-art physics class at Bishop Moore Catholic High has students buzzing October 9, 2011|By Leslie Postal, Orlando Sentinel The students in Rob McCall's honors physics class pay scant attention to their teacher as they chat, scribble and even mark up windows with crayon. McCall doesn't mind. His students are tackling problems on projectile motion, calculating, for example, the maximum height of a golf ball in flight in a way meant to give them a deeper understanding of the subject. Working in small groups, the teenagers look occasionally to McCall for advice or direction but not, ideally, for answers. They work in Bishop Moore Catholic High's new "studio" classroom, figuring their equations on velocity and vertical displacement on white "smart boards," "writable windows" and giant touch-screen computer monitors. The room is a showcase for state-of-the-art technology, but also for the belief that students learn best if teachers ask questions, present problems, prod them to think and then get out of the way and let them work. "You want them hands-on.
H-: Wrestling with Transhumanism Transhumanism for me is like a relationship with an obsessive and very neurotic lover. Knowing it is deeply flawed, I have tried several times to break off my engagement, but each time it manages to creep in through the back door of my mind. In How We Became Posthuman,1 I identified an undergirding assumption that makes possible such predictions as Hans Moravec’s transhumanist fantasy that we will soon be able to upload our consciousness into computers and leave our bodies behind. I argued that this scenario depends on a decontextualized and disembodied construction of information. There are, of course, many versions of transhumanism, and they do not all depend on the assumption I critiqued. How can we extract the valuable questions transhumanism confronts without accepting all the implications of transhumanist claims? As a literary scholar, I consider the locus classicus for re-framing transhumanist questions to be science fiction and speculative fiction, jointly signified by SF.
Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. Also see:
EDC MOOC EDCMOOC: Utopias and Dystopias Film Festival I signed up some time ago to do the Coursera online course E-Learning and Digital Cultures (#edcmooc). I am going to blog some of my thoughts on the course over the next five weeks, starting with week one’s film festival about Utopias and Dystopias. Bendito Machine III Bendito Machine III shows quite a dystopian vision. Ecological Implications New technologies make older technologies obsolete leading to more throw away artifacts and creating landfill with all the flow on effects that carries with it. Social Implications Individuals are putting their obsession with technology ahead of relationships, allowing technology to set cultural expectations and agendas. I adore this tweet from Edel Horan: Bendito Machine reminiscent of public fervor over new Apple products! I feel the pressure to be an early adopter of technology but there are financial and time investments relating to new technology. Inbox Inbox looks at the limitations and advantages of online communications. Thursday Agency New Media
Transhumanist Declaration Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.We believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions.We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle. Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.Research effort needs to be invested into understanding these prospects.
Week 1: Discussion on Utopias and Dystopias Venture Lab What constitutes learning in the 21st century? Should reading, watching, memorizing facts, and then taking exams be the only way to learn? Or could technology (used effectively) make learning more interactive, collaborative, and constructive? Could learning be more engaging and fun? We construct, access, visualize, and share information and knowledge in very different ways than we did decades ago. Schedule The course runs from Oct 15 - Dec 20, 2012.Workload 4 hours a week.Technical Requirements You need a computer that allows you to watch the video lectures, and the ability to upload your assignments which will be digital artifacts such as powerpoint or video presentations.Statement of Accomplishment Subject to satisfactory performance and course completion, you will receive a statement of accomplishment signed by the instructor. « Less