January 2012
1 post
November 2011
1 post
Why Facebook's Seamless Sharing is Wrong →
Facebook recently instituted a new program that makes it easy for 3rd party websites and services to automatically post links about your activity elsewhere back into Facebook and the newsfeeds of your friends. It’s called Seamless Sharing (a.k.a. frictionless sharing) and there’s a big backlash growing about it, reminiscent of the best-known time Facebook tried to do something like...
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
2 posts
1 tag
idea for reforming education
I believe that the single most important idea for reform in K-12 education concerns a change in goal. The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy. —Steve Denning
August 2011
4 posts
google profile
Schools of the Future May Not Be Actual Buildings...
From David Porter: “The notion that every person learns, retains, applies in the same way at the same rate, no longer holds water. Extending the use of costly school buildings for the community into evenings, weekends and holidays barely scratches the surface. The fundamental question is: does the next decade automatically need new schools? Do students need to be physically present...
Broadcasting G+ hangouts in YouTube/live
From the Blog Herald “Google+ is now allowing users of their ten personHangouts video chat program to watch live streaming videos together using popular video streaming service YouTube which is also owned by Google Inc.
Five steps
Start a Hangouts session in Google+ and invite your contacts to join you.
In a separate browser tab, go to YouTube.com/Live and select a live stream
Copy the...
July 2011
7 posts
New tools, new content in old settings, old...
Derek Wenmoth pulls together some threads of the debate on digital devices in schools, and states:
“… For the real value of things like tablet computers to be realised, we need to plan for and strategically bring about a transformation at a system level. To fail to do so will simply see new tools, providing new content, by newly inspired teachers in old settings, following old ways of...
Shoot, edit and share videos on the iPhone
From GigaOm, a review of Vibop
“Social video sharing is fast becoming a hot market, with multiple applications arriving to make it easier for users to shoot and share videos with their friends on networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The latest to enter the fray is Vibop, an app from editing software maker NewBlue that combines social sharing with drop-dead-easy video editing on the...
Infographics as a Creative Assessment
Infographics combine visuals and text to make information easier to understand or present information in a new way. Kathy Shrock has built a site to support her ISTE session this year - it’s a resource site that provides “links, ideas, tips, and much more for supporting the use of infographics as an assessment option in the classroom.”
She provides a page full of links to...
Textbooks will be all digital for all South Korean...
From TheNextWeb, Asia:
“By 2015, students will be carrying digital textbooks in lieu of paperback books in all schools in South Korea, according to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.
Taking advantage of cloud technology, the ministry said that it will invest KRW 2.2 trillion (US $2 billion) to convert textbooks to digital with links to various multimedia content, establish...
June 2011
4 posts
Literacy skills of young adult New Zealanders
A newly released report from MoE, Literacy skills of young adult New Zealanders explores how the literacy of young adults (aged 16-24) in New Zealand varies according to a wide range of factors (technology, language, ethnicity, TV habits…)
Technology: For people aged 16-24, literacy scores increased as number of hours of home computer use increased. Computer use for playing games or online...
Reading revolutions: Online digital text and...
From a research paper by Barry Gull in latest volume from First Monday:
The way the brain is adapting to meet the new medium of electronic text is only beginning to become understood. Despite the fact that skimming and jumping around from place to place within text is not limited to online reading, this type of reading appears to be the most common type of reading online.
Indeed, in recent years...
Our maximum number of friends
Alasdair Wilkins writing in io9.com:
Our maximum number of friends is actually determined by the size of our brains. Dunbar’s number says 150 friends is about the human limit, and that’s been true throughout history. Can human evolution withstand the insanity of social networking?….
Dunbar examined human social groupings throughout history, and he kept coming back to that 150...
May 2011
7 posts
IMAGINATION: Creating the Future of Education and...
IMAGINATION: Creating the Future of Education and Work, is a site that doesn’t just present theories and ideas, but actionable solutions that can be immediately and easily implemented. The website presents hyperlinks to hundreds of articles written from many perspectives and includes mixed media and moderated comments in each section.
This information was designed to be shared, discussed and...
Freedom of Connection, Freedom of Expression
UNESCO has launched its new publication, Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet.
The publication explores “the complex situation of freedom of expression on the Internet and provides a new perspective on the social and political dynamics behind the threats to expression. It develops a conceptual framework of ‘ecology of...
1 tag
"cloudlearn" research project to source, collate,...
Stephen Heppell and the rest of the team at cloudlearn have kicked off a novel research project: it starts from the premise that “the culture of blindly ‘locking and blocking’ in the classroom is no longer acceptable:
it does not prepare young people for the real world
it is liable to be dangerous (you wouldn’t try to enhance water safety by keeping children away from...
"How I Use a MacBook Pro" video
A 9-minute video from Doug Belshaw showing how he has his MacBook Pro set up – including apps and web services. Included are Spaces, which creates separate desktops you can use to navigate to different types of tasks, cloud app for sharing files licorize, which “is a minimalistic and fast bookmark manager that you can feed with your bookmarks, todos, ideas,” the Rockmelt browser, and...
How the internet is revolutionising education
“As connection speeds increase and the ubiquity of the Internet pervades, digital content reigns. And in this era, free education has never been so accessible.”
TheNextWeb article describes a number of trends, movements and innovations that indicate new directions for open education, including the Khan Academy, Open Culture, Scitable and Skillshare: ”a community marketplace...
A literature review is a controlling,...
George Seimens writes about “The Problem with Literature Reviews” in Elearnspace.
“Literature reviews ensure that new ideas follow an existing stream of thought and work. Much like Kuhn’s “normal science” progresses through small iterative changes within the larger bounded structure (paradigm) of previous thinkers, literature reviews ensures that most authors will not...
April 2011
9 posts
How to Avoid Idea Plateaus
Scott Belsky breaks down how this trap works and how to avoid falling into it (video)…
The project plateau is littered with the carcases of dead ideas that have never happened. What do we do? We just generate a new idea. We do it again and again and again. What we continue to do is we escape this project plateau with a new idea, and instantaneously we return to this high of excitement,...
This is what you look like right now →
Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning
Are schools designed to help people learn? Are colleges and universities really institutions of higher education? Do students actually learn any science in science classes? Can skateboarding give us a better model for teaching and learning?
Watch this video from Dr Tae to find out. Two years old, but worth a look.
Social Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise
Harold Jarche in this web version of a recent article argues that “our relationship with knowledge is changing as our work becomes more intangible and complex.”
“Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is...
How Self-Control Works
“A recent study … at Duke demonstrates very convincingly the role that self control plays not only in better cognitive and social outcomes in adolescence, but also in many other factors and into adulthood. In this study, the researchers followed 1,000 children for 30 years, examining the effect of early self-control on health, wealth and public safety.
“Controlling for...
NZ sneaks in Internet disconnection copyright law...
Cory Doctorow writes about our copyright infringement law:
“When it comes into effect, it means that the livelihoods, civic engagement, education, social mobility, political engagement, and other online activities will be subject to suspension without trial or evidence for anyone accused of copyright infringement.
“Using the tragedy in Christchurch as a means to advance the corporate...
Agile eLearning
Agile eLearning - 27 Great Articles, including The Agile Elearning Design Manual - Of Project Spaces & Project Managers;
“On Agile teams, each morning the team meets for 15 minutes for a standup, describing what they did the previous day, what they’re doing today and their blockers. This discussion happens in front of the card wall, so that issues can be pointed out in correlation...
“If we holistically cover the entire learning ecosystem, including the edges...”
– Close to the edge: the radicalization of training, Gary Wise, Living in Learning, 8 March 2011
March 2011
8 posts
Born to learn
Born to learn is a “fun, thought-provoking series of animations that illustrate ground-breaking new discoveries about how humans learn”. They say the videos ”sum up over 20 years’ of rigorous and complex research in a way that’s accessible and easy to understand”.
The first is online and has potential for classroom use.
Digital Textbooks Reaching the Tipping Point in...
Extract from summary of an Xplana report:
“Over the next 5 years, digital textbook sales in the United States will surpass 25% of combined new textbook sales for the Higher Education and Career Education markets. Moreover, we expect digital to be the dominant form factor in Higher Education textbooks inside of 7 years….
Within the general publishing, education, and technology...
The ‘Net Generation’ and the Myth of Research
An article by Jim Shimabukuro in Educational Technology and Change:
He summarises the issue in this way… ”The argument goes something like this: If the ‘Net Generation’ is truly different, then colleges would have to change instructional practices to accommodate the new learning style. It’s this need to change that represents a danger for Bullen… if Bullen and...
How to understand and position enteprise 2.0 in...
from Bertrand Duperrin’s Notepad
“Enterprise 2.0 is a set of tools and practices aiming at increasing the scope of the human and informational capital that’s accessible and usable in order to execute everyday’s processes and workflows and deliver the expected work in the assigned time limit. It’s not build outside or in replacement for workflows and business processes but around...
Rethinking Education; Michael Wesch
Digital anthropologist Michael Wesch has produced thought provoking videos using Creative Common licensed materials about the web, education and online communities. In ‘Rethinking Education’ Wesch compiles sound bites of thought leaders (Tim O’Reilly, Yochai Benkler, Brewster Kahle, Ray Kurzweil, etc.) in describing how technology is altering the broader educational landscape.
view...
FYI: TMI: Toward a holistic social theory of...
Quote from article in First Monday: Volume 16, Number 3 - 7 March 2011 “FYI: TMI: Toward a holistic social theory of information overload”
“In today’s overloaded work environment, multitasking during meetings via the use of smart phones and laptops has increased in prevalence. Individuals who perceive themselves as suffering from overload tend to “e–multitask” more frequently...
Social Media Maturity in Digital Communication:...
From 7 DAYS AND MORE : Notes on Emerging Technologies and Applications for Newmedia, innovative Enterprises and Business Excellence. Full size graphic available here »
Detail of “walking stage”
February 2011
2 posts
“Researchers find that a hybrid process in which people are given time to...”
– How Group Dynamics May Be Killing Innovation - Knowledge@Wharton (via csessums)
Five Tips for Smarter Social Networking
John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, blogging for the Harvard Business review, offer “some brief, and often contrarian, advice that comes from our decades of experience studying networks and the way people act within them:” Aimed at business, but can be adapted for education…
1. Express more vulnerability.
2. Mix professional and personal lives.
3. Provoke.
4. Promote...
January 2011
4 posts
The Secret History of Social Networking
From the BBC radio 4 podcasts: a three part series on the history of podcasting…
“In this three-part series the BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan Jones traces the hidden story of social networking, from the early days of computing and the 60s counterculture through to the businesses worth billions today. From their roots in utopian experiments in California, online...
The Best Ways to Tweak Your Search When Google...
From Lifehacker:
“As much as Google (and other search engines) may try, they don’t speak English or any other human language. If you ask a search engine a specific question, it’s probably not going to yield the best results. Fortunately, there are some tricks you can learn to form a really good Google query and end up with more relevant results..
Use the AROUND() Operator
...
Using the Mac App Store (video)
In episode number 500 of MacMost Now, Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at the Mac App Store.
After updating to Mac OS X 10.6.6 you can browse, purchase and download Macintosh software using the Mac App Store, which fundamentally changes the way Mac users get software.
A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the...
A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change
by DOUGLAS THOMAS and JOHN SEELY BROWN
AVAILABLE January 15, 2011 at Amazon.com
The 21st century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown take up the challenge of understanding how the forces of change can not only be managed, but how they inspire and...