Connexions - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities. Guardian Teacher Network | guardian.co.uk. ...And Another Thing (about Predictive Analytics) Judging by some of the reactions I have been getting to my Data Change Everything blogpost last night, I would say I've touched a bit of a nerve. Good. People get ready, there a change a comin'. Just a few more random, ancillary analytical thoughts: Predictive analytics are not just used in for-profit universities. While institutions like the University of Phoenix and APUS are investing in analytics tools to help them improve services and customize the experience of learning online, forward thinking publicly funded institutions including Rio Salado College and the Colorado Community College System are doing the same kinds of things.
Predictive analytics are also not just used with online learning (and, by the way, online learning is not the same thing as for profit education.) Some researchers respond quite negatively to predictive analytics in education. Any guesses?? <drumroll>....Dating sites. Pretty good completion rate, if you ask me. That is all. Learning is the new work. Assessing Informal Learning. For March the LCBQ is: How do you assess whether your informal learning, social learning, continuous learning, performance support initiatives have the desired impact or achieve the desired results?
My response to the question – I think we should assess informal learning but I don't think I want to asses informal learning using the same set of parameters often used for formal learning. Need to assessTo me, the objective of all learning (including formal and informal) is to achieve the 'desired' change in behaviour and performance. Therefore, I want to continue to assess performance to see if the ‘desired results’ have been achieved. And since informal learning contributes a great deal to our performance, therefore, it is important to think about how to assess informal learning.
Difference between formal and informal learning We are constantly learning - either by ourselves or because others want us to learn. Conclusion I agree that we should assess our efforts towards informal learning. The Five Myths of Informal Learning. There are misunderstandings about this critical approach. Informal learning is emerging as one of the most powerful disciplines in our industry. The tools and methodologies that have been developed over the past several years are changing the learning landscape in amazing ways. But there are a number of misunderstandings about this critical approach.
I’d like to share some myths I’ve encountered when trying to intentionally implement a successful informal learning strategy. 1. 2. 3.
The Purpose of Education | Simbeck-Hampson Consultancy. I set out to discover the purpose of ‘education’ after hearing about the purposed campaign. After reviewing some quotes from influential scholars and some definitions on the web, a four-sided picture of education’s purpose came to mind. I began with the Wikipedia definition of education. Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual.
In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another. ~ Wikipedia The words ‘act’ and ‘experience’ jumped out at me as those formative effects that can happen everywhere and any time throughout our lives. But then ‘deliberately transmits’ worried me. This brought me to the first ‘purpose of education’ ; to negotiate a balance of push and pull between learners and their sources.
Sometimes learners need permission to pull from their own set of sources. What’s the New Narrative in the Education Revolution? The control piece is really big because, if it’s acknowledged, it really leaves teachers and educators with this empty hole. “Well, if we’re not doing that, then what are we doing?” That’s where the conversation needs to be. And that’s not where a lot of people want to go. It’s a hard conversation to have.
It’s very difficult for people to see themselves in a decidedly different role in the classroom. But the interesting thing is that all of them will acknowledge that it’s happening. I don’t think there's anyone fighting really hard for the idea that schools should be the places where we’re the ones who should mete out content, or that because content online is unfiltered and unedited, you can’t trust it. And the parent part interests me too. I don’t think parents really have a clue, in general. [Parents say]: "There are places that are experimenting on that stuff, but don’t experiment on my kid. Q. Absolutely. Q. It is a pretty high mountain to climb, but I think it’s going to happen. The Learning Society’s Global Ambitions.
Culture Flickr: woodleywonderworks By Sara Bernard If we want our education system to adapt to the 21st century, we need to re-imagine the entire thing — not just build more of the same. So claim the thought leaders behind The Learning Society, a concept launched as part of Cisco Systems’ Global Education initiative at the 2010 Learning and Technology World Forum in London last year. Their big idea is this: Education can no longer be isolated from the rest of society.
Learning is no longer confined to the hours of the school day, the walls of the school building, or even the duration of our time “in school.” It’s everywhere, all the time, involves everyone from all walks of life, and requires constant tinkering and improvement. The Learning Society project, led by Richard Halkett, Cisco’s director of Strategy & Research for Global Education, is, so far, just a white paper and a video. Key recommendations include: Related. Ten Surprising Truths about Video Games and Learning.
How Bill Gates' Favorite Teacher Wants to Disrupt Education. Sal Khan" /> In 2008, Sal Khan had a bright future making millions as a hedge fund manager. He gave it up to produce low-budget math films on YouTube for free. Fortunately, hidden among his millions of loyal students, were the wealthiest of educational philanthropists, Bill Gates and the Google Foundation. Now, with a whole lot of cash and even more street cred, Khan aims to demote the institution of "school" to just one of many educational options. Beginnings Khan Academy, the YouTube open-course series, began as verbal contract with a 7th-grade girl.
His younger cousin, Nadia, was struggling in math class and had agreed to sit in on remote tutoring sessions. Since YouTube encouraged universal access, Khan thought “Why not? “Random people started watching it, and I started getting good feedback,” Khan tells Fast Company. The Success Factor and Company Growth To his amazement, the videos were far more popular than his dedicated tutoring sessions. The Motivation Changes to the System. Conversations | All Conversations. HippoCampus: Online Content In and Out of Class. Teaching Strategies HippoCampus Teaching the Civil War Through a series of slideshow presentations, HippoCampus covers a wide range of subject areas, from the Civil War to biopsychology. By Sara Bernard For students seeking study guides and educators needing specific content, here’s another robust online resource: HippoCampus, a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), provides multimedia homework and study help to high school and community college students and instructors free of charge.
As part of MITE’s National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), HippoCampus content focuses on general education topics like algebra and biology and is largely donated by universities and other educational institutions. It was a surprise to us … but probably more than 80 percent of HippoCampus use is happening in classrooms. “Teachers work hard; they don’t have a lot of time,” says Gary Lopez, executive director and co-founder of both the Monterey Institute and HippoCampus. Q. How Learning Environments Are Changing. Cost cutting is a big motivating factor for traditional schools offering online programs. A Michigan-based study found that Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida spend 20 to 30 percent less per pupil on full-time student online enrollment as they do on traditional classroom enrollment, and administrators in Florida admitted that a huge impetus for creating e-learning labs was to bypass a class-size reduction law.
Universities are also leveraging online classes for practical benefits -- as a way to compensate for over-filled classes and a way to save costs. The number of online-only universities hit record highs in 2010, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all college students taking at least one course online. Online classes offer a number of benefits: personalized, flexible learning approaches, access to courses that are over-capacity, and collaboration with other institutions, for starters. [Sara Bernard contributed to this report.] 2) Theme-Based. 3) Deconstructed. Spurred by ideas like Dr. Khan Academy and BitTorrent partner to deliver P2P educational video.
Learn technology. Infotention. Train thinking & creativity. QR codes in education. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education. E-JUMP 2.0 — e-Jump 2.0. Www.ieml.org/IMG/pdf/IEML-Dictionary.pdf. Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data. Photo by Dan Nguyen/ProPublica Our Dollars for Docs news application lets readers search pharmaceutical company payments to doctors. We’ve written a series of how-to guides explaining how we collected the data. Most of the techniques are within the ability of the moderately experienced programmer. The most difficult-to-scrape site was actually a previous Adobe Flash incarnation of Eli Lilly’s disclosure site. Lilly has since released their data in PDF format. These recipes may be most helpful to journalists who are trying to learn programming and already know the basics. If you are a complete novice and have no short-term plan to learn how to code, it may still be worth your time to find out about what it takes to gather data by scraping web sites -- so you know what you’re asking for if you end up hiring someone to do the technical work for you.
The tools With the exception of Adobe Acrobat Pro, all of the tools we discuss in these guides are free and open-source. A Guide to the Guides. Jumper 2.0. ApexKB (formerly Jumper 2.0), is an open source web application script for collaborative search and knowledge management powered by a shared enterprise bookmarking engine that is a fork of KnowledgebasePublisher.[1] It was publicly announced on 29 September 2008.[2] A stable version of Jumper (version 2.0.1.1) was publicly released under the GNU General Public License and made available on Sourceforge on 26 March 2009 as a free software download.[3] Jumper is Enterprise 2.0 software that empowers users to compile and share collaborative bookmarks by crowdsourcing their knowledge, experience and insights using knowledge tags. Features[edit] Jumper 2.0 is enterprise web-infrastructure for tagging and linking information resources.[5] Jumper 2.0 lets you search and share high-value content, media, or data across remote locations using knowledge tags to capture knowledge about the information in distributed storage.
It collects these tags in a tag profile. Advantages[edit] History[edit] How To Prepare Yourself For Online Education | Help & Teach Our Children. How To Prepare Yourself For Online Education Online education refers to any learning process that is partially or completely done using computer technology for the delivery or support. The concept of online education is not new. Psychology Professor Sidney Pressey developed a teaching machine using mechanics in the 1920s. Many computer-based training (CBT) applications have been developed in the 1980s to exploit the evolution of the personal computer. However, the growth of the Internet has fueled the growth in volume and scope of what is now known as online education. Unfortunately, online education does not guarantee an improvement in quality compared to traditional methods, and may even be detrimental to the learning experience.
The question here is how accredited online universities can provide you the best online degrees. Now that you have a short list of options you can start looking for colleges online that are related to the course of study. Related posts: Google Launches Global Online Science Fair [Video] For years, employees at Google have suggested a project near and dear to their nerd hearts: a Google-led science fair. "It's come up over and over and over again," says Cristin Frodella, a senior product marketing manager in education at Google. After all, many a Googler has fond childhood memories of explaining the genius of his or her biology experiment to passersby in a school gym. (Frodella and her best friend trained hamsters to ask for food by ringing a bell.) Today those Googlers and budding scientists worldwide should be ecstatic.
The company launched Google Science Fair, the first global online science competition. It's open to full-time students ages 13 to 18, who are encouraged to use the panoply of Google products to record and share their work. This is a far cry from your typical local science fair. Google's partners include National Geographic, CERN, Scientific American, and Lego. "We want kids to make a difference in the world," says Frodella. Kollock.mov (video/quicktime Object) Connectivism.
Editor’s Note: This is a milestone article that deserves careful study. Connectivism should not be con fused with constructivism. George Siemens advances a theory of learning that is consistent with the needs of the twenty first century. His theory takes into account trends in learning, the use of technology and networks, and the diminishing half-life of knowledge. It combines relevant elements of many learning theories, social structures, and technology to create a powerful theoretical construct for learning in the digital age. George Siemens Introduction Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments. Learners as little as forty years ago would complete the required schooling and enter a career that would often last a lifetime.
“One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. Some significant trends in learning: Background An Alternative Theory Connectivism. Shelly Terrell: Global Netweaver, Curator, PLN Builder. When I started using social media in the classroom, I looked for and began to learn from more experienced educators. First, I read and then tried to comment usefully on their blog posts and tweets. When I began to understand who knew what in the world of social media in education, I narrowed my focus to the most knowledgeable and adventurous among them.
I paid attention to the people the savviest social media educators paid attention to. I added and subtracted voices from my attention network, listened and followed, then commented and opened conversations. When I found something I thought would interest the friends and strangers I was learning from, I passed along my own learning through my blogs and Twitterstream.
I asked questions, asked for help, and eventually started providing answers and assistance to those who seemed to know less than I. The teachers I had been learning from had a name for what I was doing -- "growing a personal learning network. " The Global Conversation. Granny Woman Ozark Herbs. Paul LaViolette. Stigmergic systems - summary of theory.