Bill Gates’ $100 million database to track students Text smaller Text bigger By Michael F. Haverluck Over the past 18 months, a massive $100 million public-school database spearheaded by the $36.4 billion-strong Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been in the making that freely shares student information with private companies. The system has been in operation for several months and already contains millions of K-12 students’ personal identification ‒ ranging from name, address, Social Security number, attendance, test scores, homework completion, career goals, learning disabilities, and even hobbies and attitudes about school. Claiming that the national database will enhance education, the main funder of the project, the Gates Foundation, entered the joint venture with the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from a number of states. School officials and private companies doing business with districts might have plenty to be happy about with this information-sharing system, but ParentalRights.org President Michael P.
Why Open Educational Resources? - Article - SURFspace SURFspace vraagt jouw toestemming om cookies te gebruiken In afwachting van de verwachte wijziging van de Telecomwet hanteert SURFspace deze cookiemelding om aan de wet te voldoen. Zodra de Telecomwet gewijzigd is zal SURFspace de cookiemelding aanpassen. Over cookies Een cookie is een bestandje met informatie die op jouw computer wordt geplaatst en welke bij een volgend bezoek weer wordt gelezen. Zo kan de site je bij een volgend bezoek herkennen en onthouden wat jouw voorkeuren zijn. Veelgestelde vragen over de cookiewet SURFspace gebruikt cookies voor: het onthouden van instellingen en voorkeuren. het tonen van inhoud van externe partijen zoals video’s, presentaties en audiobestanden. Zonder jouw toestemming kun je deze site niet gebruiken.
The Trouble With Online College First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed. Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the record is not encouraging. The research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges.
Finding OERs Search engines A number of search engines exist to search Open Educational Resources. These include: DiscoverEd - "Discover the Universe of Open Educational Resources"Jorum - "free learning and teaching resources, created and contributed by teaching staff from UK Further and Higher Education Institutions"OCWFinder - "search, recommend, collaborate, remix"OER Commons - "Find Free-to-Use Teaching and Learning Content from around the World. Organize K-12 Lessons, College Courses, and more." Dandelion Image CC BY-NC-SA monteregina Here’s why schools are wary of edtech: Coursesmart crashes before student exams By Erin Griffith On April 25, 2013 Earlier this month, edtech company CourseSmart was awash in press for its new, albeit somewhat controversial, learning tools. Using digital textbooks, CourseSmart shows teachers and professors exactly how much time each student has spent with an assignment. Naturally this ignited concerns about privacy and the message it sends to students. But this week, the company experienced a software company’s worst nightmare: It crashed. What’s worse is that CourseSmart isn’t a lean startup iterating its way to success. @coursesmart This is more than an inconvenience, we have exams. Wrong day for coursesmart to crash on me. @coursesmart I have a final exam tomorrow at 9 am with two chapters left to read. Ever feel like spending a crap load of money on something that will fail when you need it most? coursesmart is really not working right now…..the day i have a test…really? The Facebook comments were not much better.
How Open Access and Para-Academic Publishers Are Disrupting Academic Publishing Digital disruption has happened in almost every publishing sector except one: academic publishing. The reasons why academic publishers have resisted changes as other sectors have gone digital is complex, and many have tried to change aspects of academic publishing with few results. For example, In 2011, GigaOm author Mathew Ingram explained that one of the reasons why academic publishing is so resistant to change is because universities “pay large sums to subscribe to those journals, they often feel compelled to justify those costs by requiring that all research be published through them” (“So When Does Academic Publishing Get Disrupted?”). Some of these journal subscriptions cost upwards of $20,000 a year through traditional academic publishers, according to a recent report from the University of Illinois. Here in 2013, not much has changed in traditional academic publishing, but there are changes happening on the edges of academic publishing. Library Book Image via Shutterstock.
Why Teaching Digital Citizenship Doesn’t Work « Looking Up Spend time with children and you learn that lists of rules don’t work well. Kids are too smart and love to find loopholes. No matter how long you spend crafting a list that covers all scenarios a 5-year-old will bite someone and point out that you didn’t say he couldn’t. A better approach is positive general principles. Attentive Listening- Pay close attention to what others are saying. These agreements cover most situations, describe behavior in positive terms and support the development of critical thinking skills. This approach works better than long lists of rules, and so I’m confused by the common approach to encouraging good Digital Citizenship. Digital Citizenship is often promoted by listing the many things students cannot or should not do. Students may not Such lists are too narrow, quickly become outdated and don’t allow students to think critically. More importantly the whole concept of digital citizenship is backwards. Like this: Like Loading... Related April 13, 2015 June 2, 2013
Learnadoodledastic: Making a case for creating Open Educational Resources for use in Higher Education To set the scene we'll start with a useful and pragmatic definition of Open Educational Resources from Stephen Downes (although he does not support the idea of an 'official' definition) – Read more here "Open educational resources are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone." Background Inspiration for this post was attendance at the one day MEDEV workshop From curiosity to confidence: sharing what it takes to ‘go open’ with learning and teaching resources. Sangeetha Rajoo and Caesar Wek (Both, Queen Mary University London) demonstrated the good work that they have done creating open educational resources and outlined their approaches and the issues that they have come across. Suzanne Hardy (MEDEV) rounded off the session in the afternoon with many practical tips and advice on tools to use that will aid the development of OERs. Further Reading
Why Professors at San Jose State Won't Use a Harvard Professor's MOOC - Technology By Steve Kolowich Professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University are refusing to teach a philosophy course developed by edX, saying they do not want to enable what they see as a push to "replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities." The San Jose State professors also called out Michael Sandel, the Harvard government professor who developed the course for edX, suggesting that professors who develop MOOCs are complicit in how public universities might use them. In an open letter this week addressed to Mr. Sandel, the philosophy professors decried a dean's request that the department integrate a MOOC version of "Justice," the Harvard professor's famous survey course, into the curriculum at San Jose State. San Jose State's Experiment Under Mohammad H. Students in that section passed at a much higher rate than those in the traditional sections. Peter J. "I think he will answer it in good faith," said Mr.
Imaginary Digital Skills Course – #h817open- Week 2-Activity 8 | Reflections on Learning image credit: Alice Mini-Series TV Show (2009) #h817open -Week 2- Activity 8 Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. Using these OER repositories to find OERS: MERLOTJorumAriadneMITOpenLearnRice Connexions The Journey of Building an Imaginary OER courseI did find a few OERs that looked promising for this imaginary course. I did find a course or two on MIT OCW that helped me find links to resources I could use. I did see many good resources that I could possibly use for other courses, but would I be able to find them again when I needed them? However, I did find a link to Rubrics to be used as an OER Evaluation tools that looked really exciting, but had nothing to do with teaching this imaginary course. Resources: Like this:
Are iPads and Other Classroom Gadgets Really Helping Kids Learn? For the last six years, the buzz about educational technology has grown deafening. Schools across the nation are scrambling to figure out just how a new generation of technology—software and devices both in the marketplace and still to be developed—might better educate kids. The experiments are far-reaching. Currently, there are roughly 275,000 K-12 students from 31 states who are taking classes online. Other schools, including a rapidly expanding chain of charter schools that serve low-income children, are employing what they call a “blended learning” model. At another chain of charter high schools, kids sit in what resembles a call center, receive videotaped lectures and interactive lessons on a monitor, and get pulled into smaller, teacher-led groups to get a particular lesson refreshed or reinforced. The purpose of at least some of this new technology is to make education—a sprawling, complicated enterprise—more streamlined, targeted and efficient. “Is it a bubble?”
Examining Open Education This past week, I had the chance to delve deeper into the idea of open education and open education resources (OER) thanks to both #ETMOOC and the #MediaLabCourse. Before this week, I hadn’t spent much time considering the differences between “open” and “free” and the power they can bring to people around the world when they are combined together. Free is valuable for the accessibility it provides but open, I discovered, means much more than just making something accessible or available to the public. It also means providing transparency and the blueprint for how and even why something was created. This unique insight into how something was made (e.g., a website, a software program), allows users to make the transition from consumers to creators much more easily. Of course, one of the benefits of the open learning movement and the open education community, is that you don’t have to walk through that door alone. Like this: Like Loading... Related Experimenting with Open Collaboration
Much Ado About MOOCs The debates are just beginning to boil. Last week, Georgia Tech plunged into the ether by announcing it will award a Master's degree in Computer Science to students who go through its program with Udacity. Faculty around the U.S. are raising plenty of questions about what such programs will mean for them, their institutions and their students: From the philosophy department at San Jose State University to Harvard professor, Michael Sandel, whose course, JusticeX, is offered via edX: "There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves, nor do we have a shortage of faculty capable of teaching an equivalent course." Dip a toe in the blogosphere and you will find plenty of thoughtful debate: "At the moment, the classism of the MOOCs is most clear in the central unexamined assumption--that the “best” teachers are at the “best” universities. "A first myth is that university brand is a surrogate for teaching quality. This is hardly a comprehensive survey of the debate.