Welcome to the Frontpage Horizon Report > 2013 Higher Education Edition Login or Create New Account Member Spotlights RIT Launches Nation’s First Minor in Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture Partner News HP LIFE e-Learning Raffle: Win an Amazon Gift Card! iTUNES U Ideas that Matter and More High Quality, Free EdTech Content Sparking innovation, learning and creativity. > Publications > NMC on iTunes U > Creative Commons NMC Horizon Report > 2013 Higher Education Edition The NMC Horizon Report > 2013 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE Program. The tenth edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education. Tags: 2013 135638 reads Sparking innovation, learning and creativity. Identifying the impact of emerging technologies. News Events Members Projects Connections Publications Horizon About
Academic Evolution: Scholar or Public Intellectual? After listening to Henry Jenkins and a few others speaking about public intellectualism lately, I have felt a sense of civic duty coming over me, something that links participating in democracy with the participatory media of Web 2.0. How obvious, how appropriate, that we share our best thinking with the world at large; how simple it is to do this, now, through blogs and online media. Here's the problem: I'm a scholar. When a scholar does choose to address the public, as when a colleague of mine once chose to write a column for the local newspaper, that scholar is considered not to be doing his or her job. The disciplines within academia train professors to withdraw from public life and to aim their most thoughtful attention to narrowly specialized audiences. This is how a scholar is doomed to a life of private intellectual inquiry and expression. I don't want to be a private intellectual. I'd rather be a public intellectual.
Social Collaboration… The Collaboration Pyramid by oscarberg, on Flickr The Collaboration Pyramid offers a great visual to dive deeper into the nature of authentic collaboration and optimized production. In traditional team-based collaborative models we experience the “form, storm, norm and perform” process, and it has proved to be very useful in the context of team effectiveness, but perhaps leaves a bit of a void in the area of personal responsibility, or individual motivation to make a meaningful contribution to the team. The Collaboration Pyramid displays a broader platform to support a different context for collaboration that may eventually lead to more authentic and meaningful personal investment in the team process. I think social collaboration as framed in the diagram is closely related to the concept of morphic resonance. morphic resonance [ˈmɔːfɪk] n This act of becoming visible and participating as a receiver creates possibility in teaching and learning.
The (Coming) Social Media Revolution in the Academy - Daniels and Feagin - Fast Capitalism 8.2 Jessie Daniels and Joe R. Feagin A revolution in academia is coming. New social media and other web technologies are transforming the way we, as academics, do our job. Scholarship: Knowledge Production and Use in a Networked Society Scholars now completing PhD’s have likely never known a world without the Internet and social media. Ultimately, this technological transformation is going to have major implications on expert knowledge. Online Research in the Academy Now, academics do so much research online that it is difficult to remember a time when this wasn’t the case. Most information once available only in hard copy is now accessible for academics working away from their campus or college library. Academic Blogging and Microblogging Academics are increasingly bloggers. My initial blog entries were a form of pre-writing for my book chapters. Virtual Conferences and Backchannels and Curating the Ideal Academic Department Open Peer-Review & Crowd-Sourced Edited Volumes Conclusion
Are you ready to MOOC? A conversation with George Siemens In this episode of the Learning Revolution podcast I talk with George Siemens, one of the leading thinkers on how technology is impacting learning and education. One of the areas the areas that George has become known for, along with his collaborator Stephen Downes, is massive open online courses, or MOOCs. You may have noticed that MOOCs have become quite trendy lately. I actually conducted this interview (like all of the other initial interviews on the podcast) several months ago as I was writing Leading the Learning Revolution. In any case, in this interview I talk with George about the massive online course phenomenon – including what kind of business models might emerge for them. Click play, and enjoy. Listen to the Podcast Podcast: Play in new window | Download | iTunes Show Notes 00:44 – MOOCs are all the rage these days. 01:49 – Get the show notes at 06:41 – Uncertainty and ambiguity now defines a growing number of fields.
At Educause, a discussion about OER DENVER — MOOCs are on the tip of everyone’s tongue here at the annual Educause meeting, presumably because of their scale and the technologies their recent champions have built to support that scale. But in his opening keynote, Clay Shirky, an author and assistant professor at New York University, said the most provocative aspect of MOOCs is not their massiveness; it is their openness. Or, in some cases, their lack thereof. Shirky’s framing of MOOCs as a phenomenon of the open educational resources (OER) movement -- rather than of the online education or instructional technology movements -- comes shortly after Coursera struck a content licensing deal with Antioch University that drew a line on the extent to which the company would allow outsiders to use its resources without paying to do so. The missing piece is a caveat in Coursera’s terms of service that prohibits the use of Coursera’s MOOCs for anything but informal education. So are MOOCs, and the content packaged therein, OER?
Bring Your Own Device - Questions to Consider Guest post by - Pamela Livingston | Cross posted at 1:1 Schools The buzz in 1-to-1 right now is about BYOD - Bring Your Own Device - and it's not a fad and it's not going away. There's a convergence of factors causing it including: Hardware is diverse and at price points that are more affordableSchools are hyper budget consciousThe "cloud" (previously called The Internet, the Web and the Information Superhighway) is ideal for core apps which are free or inexpensive with such as Google (although be sure to use GAFE), and ZohoParents are realizing that a digital device is necessary for learningSchools want to be sure students possess 21st Century skills But BYOD upsets apple carts right and left. But then there are the students. In order for BYOD to work well there must be a strong partnership between administration, Board members, teachers, technology, students, and parents. Have you visited a BYOD school or district? Related posts: 1:1 questions to consider
What will the new Google search mean for teachers? | Teacher Network | Guardian Professional As plans for Google's Knowledge Graph and new search emerge, Ben Morse explores the impact these developments will have on education and people working in schools In an observer interview this weekend, Tim Adams met with Google search bigwig Amit Singhal. During the recap of Google's potted history, and it's ambition for the new Knowledge Graph, a question occurred to me, that should be bothering a lot of us - what does this mean for teachers? Currently, Google search works reflexively - which is to say, it learns from you as you learn from it. But let's follow this line of thought through logically - if internet searching becomes more nuanced - if it can anticipate, associate and extrapolate meaning so that no matter how ham fisted the original question, an answer is derived with little effort, what does this mean for teaching? I don't think it will. It's not all bad news though. Knowledge is worthless without the tools with which to interpret it.
MOOCs – The revolution has begun, says Moody’s A new report by Moody’s Investors Service suggests that while MOOCs’ exploitation of expanded collaborative networks and technological innovation will benefit higher education in the United States as a whole, their long-term effect on the for-profit sector and smaller not-for-profit institutions could be damaging. MOOCs – massive open online courses – have garnered considerable attention since Stanford University’s artificial intelligence course in the autumn 2011 semester attracted nearly 160,000 students. While the course’s completion rate was low (15.6%), the scale of the response excited many in the higher education community – from institutions to venture capital companies. Indeed, the report notes that MOOCs represent a “pivotal development” in the evolution of higher education and have the potential to revolutionise the way a centuries-old industry has operated. Online education’s makeover Elite institutions For-profit institutions Implications But, what does all this mean?
Pedagogy and Space: Empirical Research on New Learning Environments (EDUCAUSE Quarterly Key Takeaways In the new technology-enhanced learning spaces at the University of Minnesota, students outperformed final grade expectations relative to their ACT scores. When instructors adapted their pedagogical approach to the new space by intentionally incorporating more active, student-centered teaching techniques, student learning improved. Students and faculty had positive perceptions of the new learning environments but also had to adjust to the unusual classrooms. In a previous EDUCAUSE Quarterly article,1 we reported the results of quasi-experimental research on the University of Minnesota's new, technology-enhanced learning spaces called Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs). That investigation found — after controlling for potentially confounding factors such as instructor, instructional methods, assessments, and student demographics — that teaching in an ALC contributed significantly to student learning outcomes. Two specific research questions guided this phase of our research:
Twitter in the Classroom There are so many GREAT educators on Twitter and it’s great to connect, learn, and grow from them. One day my class and I tweeted about Greece with someone IN Greece. Now that I have completely embraced Skype in my classroom, I’m realizing even more that global learning adds a whole new wonderful layer to an ordinary day in the classroom. I started thinking, could a Twitter account help us connect to other classrooms, keep our conversations going, learning about weather, cultures, differences, and similarities around the world? I could use my own Twitter account. Since I’ve started it, I’ve been following other classrooms and even started a list of Classrooms that Tweet. Uses for Twitter in the Classroom: 1.) 140 a day Learning Log: Ask a student to tweet “What did we learn today?” 2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) 6.) 7.) Tips: 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) I’m really just starting this journey with my class and I can’t wait to see where it takes us.
Digital literacies: What are they and why should we care? Digital literacies: What are they and why should we care? Submitted by nickyhockly on 21 February, 2013 - 15:12 In most UK schools new media literacy skills now supplement the more traditional 3 Rs (reading, writing and 'rithmatic). In Australia schools teach 'digital literacy skills', and in the USA there is a growing awareness of the importance of 'new media literacies'. In Spain and Norway there is talk of 'digital competences' being a necessary part of the curriculum. What are digital literacies? An umbrella term for the media literacy skills and digital competences which appear in national curricula, digital literacies refer to our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal. Why digital literacies in the language classroom? What has this got to do with language teaching, you may be asking yourself. Digital literacies So, what exactly is digital literacy? Focus on language: print and texting literacies Focus on information: search and information literacies
Blackboard Coursesites as MOOC-platform In 2011 Blackboard launched Coursesites. This platform is free for teachers to create course and offer them to students. The CourseSites platform is based on the full Blackboard Learn platform including Collaborate and Mobile Learn. They are running the newest version (SP10), so it is also a good way to get to know the new version. From the beginning Blackboard showed in this platform their commitment to support standards and to be more open. This year they also started to promote the platform for MOOCs. If you are not familiar with Blackboard Learn, this video gives a good overview of the newest features in 9.1.SP10: