I think we can make it easier for students to navigate the web

there’s only a fine line between “WordPress in Higher Education” and “WordPress in the Enterprise”.

market for

institutions that are preparing tomorrow’s leaders

Montreal: Melding of Old and New

Contact azwaldo at gmail dot com for more information.

E-texts could record how much time is spent in textbook study. All such data could be accessed by the LMS or various other applications for use in analytics for faculty and students.”

Would the spaces where novel ideas can emerge unbound by efficiency or productivity be eliminated, the consequence would be no less than the simultaneous destruction of all non-actual possible worlds

What is now useless can open up whole new worlds tomorrow. And even if it never does, it is beautiful, in that it has the markings of the play of possibility that is life and mind.

education vertical

I could have easily chosen a different prepositional phrase. "Convivial Tools in an Age of Big Data.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of DRM.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Venture-Funded Education Technology Startups.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Doxxing and Trolls."

education technology has become about control, surveillance, and data extraction

create their own interactive learning tools

our education system is controlling, exploitative, imperialist

(Let me stress “gender” there. I can’t but notice that this list, much like the list of those on the education speaking circuit today, is full of men.) 

There is still much more emphasis in hyperbolic education discourse on pushing content rather than enabling connections between people

efforts to expand worldwide

a handful in a few major world languages

ironically while continuing to employ adjunct faculty

afford a university education

xploratory grants for developing new pathways.

One-size-fits-all education rarely fits anyone well

The military’s contributions to education technology are often overlooked

For-profits typically take those funds and spend way more on advertising and profit distribution than on teaching.

The phrase “diploma mills” came into popular usage during the era.

A similar conclusion was reached by the medical (pdf) and legal professions of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

This model might make sense if our goal was to produce cars, clothing, and some other commodity more efficiently. But a university education doesn’t fit into this paradigm. It isn’t just a commodity.

The idea is that higher education is like any other industry.

“In five to 10 years, most students will buy their postsecondary education differently from the way they buy it now,”

Colleges using data analytics have to make sure their students have “open futures” — that their programs create educational opportunities, not the other way around.

those who are learners will have more opportunities for growth and success than those who are learned.

improving teaching, not amplifying learning.

They looked to education for the promises their parents had so often mouthed, and they reaffirmed a faith that schooling ought to make a difference in the job a man or woman could expect.?

disheartened that open education is still mainly focused on MOOCs and OERs, rather than on the broader concept of open textbooks, open research, and open data.

pay for certification if they wish to validate that learning externally

districts are pouring money into computers and software programs—money that’s badly needed for, say, hiring teachers

despite the fact that it’s remarkably expensive

we shouldn’t confuse personalized learning with personal learning

children’s learning

digitally personalized.

spend oodles of money

the largest consumer of college graduates

there is widespread agreement among college officials and policymakers that the current accreditation system is broken

Funding for humanities labs

our faculty are evaluated on not just research, teaching and service but also collaboration

Many, but not all, told me that they had integrated technology into their lessons to “personalize learning.”

“Students chose how they were going to display how they were going to master those standards through projects,”

giving our kids agency

And now we’re besties again.

If we don’t force kids to come to school in order to change their ‘mindsets’, why ARE they here? 

Second, this is a false dichotomy right out of the gate.

failure to find revenue and support from unconventional sources

We do not support casting from Android or iOS at this time.

We need to enable and facilitate alternative development models if our vision of universal OER adoption is to become a reality.

While the open educationfieldtends to focus onthe development and scalability ofeducational resources and practices, networked learningtends to emphasizethe pedagogical experience of learning communities and interpersonal connections, and connected learning promotes instructional designs for holistic, participatorylearning.

who are the gatekeepers in deciding what that looks like.

it can mean that students see themselves as actively building their learning

does “open” actually transform the way in which we do “school,” the way in which we teach and learn?

Free? Open access? Open enrollment? Open data? Openly-licensed materials, as in open educational resources or open source software? Open for discussion? Open for debate? Open to competition? Open for business? Open-ended intellectual exploration?

Look for existing networks for collaboration that could be adapted to fit the strategy if formal networks are desired.

ANCHOR INSTITUTIONS

OER must have the right metadata

SUPPORTING ROBUST TECHNICAL and INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

the Foundation will provide enhanced support for grantee collaboration.

the technical basis for OER

robust and flexible infrastructure.

Moreover, ZTC degrees ensure that the benefits of open materials follow students from enrollment to graduation, allowing for a pathway of personalized courses that guide students toward completing their degrees.

Open materials can empower faculty with the aca-demic freedom to tailor their courses to their students’ needs and even engage students in meaningful learning experiences through adaptation and improvement of the open content itself.10

reserve part of its portfolio to con-tinue funding the infrastructure necessary to support the field

Therefore, we refreshed our OER strategy to focus on our goal of using grants to help OER reach mainstream adoption.

high-quality academic materials

I hired a bunch of undergrad students and recent alums, and paid them out of my own pocket to assist me.

and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

and refreshed OER strategy.

The infrastructure

Develop innovative OER models

the frustration faculty members sometimes feel when searching for open content to include in their courses.

thinking more broadly about what ‘open’ means and how open connects to a variety of different areas

Scaling Up OER

«On entend pourtant peu parler de la pédagogie postsecondaire, même s'il y a des initiatives qui naissent à gauche et à droite. Certains innovent, mais ça reste dans leur collège ou leur département universitaire»

New Hampshire System Plans Open Education Push

However, you may be required to pay fees to use certain features or content made available through the Site and Services.

Teachers and professors regularly ask students to write papers. Semester after semester, year after year, “papers” are styled as the highest form of writing.

we are blinding ourselves to the world as it is. And then we’re punishing students for our blindness.

Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist

but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”

If the limitations are acknowledged and accounted for, there is no reason why open education should not offer genuine opportunities for promoting equity of access to higher education

addressed the way we treat student writing as the waste product of assessment.

“Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.” The ruling made clear that because this nation was founded on a racial caste system, black children would never become equals as long as they were separated from white children.

recently cautioned against commercialization and urged colleges to take more control.

Sakai development is actually accelerating.

For many teachers, access to timely data that helps tailor instruction in meaningful ways is still a challenge, a Gates Foundation report revealed last year.

timely

Am I asking too many questions?

Artificial Intelligence will eventually revolutionize this practice.

educators and students alike have found themselves more and more flummoxed by a system that values assessment over engagement, learning management over discovery, content over community, outcomes over epiphanies

talking about open pedagogy as the “second power of open.”

talking about open pedagogy as the “second power of open.”

many more people understand cost than understand pedagogy

that OER can provide benefits to some schools, but that commercial resources will continue to have value because of the tech-based enhancements, in analytics and adaptive learning and other areas, that they offer beyond academic content.

“curriculets,” the company’s eponymous term for embedded quizzes, videos and other multimedia elements designed to offer students a richer reading experience and to give teachers data into how their pupils were progressing.

articles and take quizzes,

Competency-based learning

identifying who or what body in the community has power to make the change;

To me, this is what OER for the web should start to reflect.

Among students with high ACT scores, those in the laptop-friendly sections performed significantly worse than their counterparts in the no-technology sections. In contrast, there wasn’t much of a difference between students with low ACT scores — those who were allowed to use laptops did just as well as those who couldn’t. (The same pattern held true when researchers looked at students with high and low GPAs.) These results are a bit strange. We might have expected the smartest students to have used their laptops prudently. Instead, they became technology’s biggest victims. Perhaps hubris played a role. The smarter students may have overestimated their ability to multitask. Or the top students might have had the most to gain by paying attention in class.

The West Point study has lessons even for those whose baccalaureate days are far behind them. This is yet more evidence that multitasking doesn’t work. Beware of people who take laptops into meetings — even “just to take notes.” They’re probably not listening to you.

My experimentation with open pedagogy – and my attempts to guide students’ learning with/in and across open platforms – was a social endeavor that invited reciprocal networking.

A NEW FEDERALISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION AFFORDABILITY

College Affordability Diagnosis

smart publishers will focus on how their solutions can support and optimize student learning and achievements. They will see themselves as participants in the student outcomes business as well as in the publishing business.

marketing directly to students, teachers, and parents, bypassing traditional institutional sales channels.

Students, parents, and teachers are also increasing their role in purchasing decisions. They can choose from more options than in the past,

CIOs who are weighing in on the choice of learning platforms and software

urchasing often involves department heads, CIOs, and provosts, since the choices made can affect the entire school.

To succeed, they will need to fundamentally rethink their value propositions to take full advantage of the digital medium and consider the entire educational experience.

customization tools to “build your own textbook” from a variety of preexisting and newly created content

texts embedded in the online course

practical tools that supplement core instruction

education (Pearson, Cengage, McGraw-Hill)

Blogs tend towards conversational and quotative reuse, which is great for some subject areas, but not so great for others. Wiki feeds forward into a consensus process that provides a high level of remix and reuse, but at the expense of personal control and the preservation of divergent goals. Wikity takes lessons from federated wiki, combining the individual control of blogging with the permissionless improvement of wiki.

If, at the dawn of the web, I was to take a list of things the web would bring about and show them to a researcher, they might disagree on the level of interest people would have in things (what’s with the cat pictures, spaceman?) but there’d be little there to surprise them except for one item: the most used reference work in the world will be collaboratively maintained by a group of anonymous and pseudonymous volunteers as part of a self-organizing network.

Here’s the basic idea — slow & measured reform is often a web of unfortunate compromises, but its protection of the status quo generally preserves business regulation, at least at some level. Because this is unacceptable to business interests, business needs to create a crisis or scale up an existing crisis. It needs to make the status quo malfunction to the point where there is supposedly “nothing left to lose”. With the system reduced, supposedly, to rubble, economic interests can move in to “solve” the problem — if the public will only place its faith in them, and abandon their old public institutions and outdated business regulations.

In other words, the solution isn’t to turn away from public funding for higher education. Rather, taxpayers should take some of the money they’ve been inefficiently sending to the for-profit sector, and channel it toward America’s underfunded public higher education system. There, the emphasis should be on emulating some of the flexibility of the for-profit sector while offering the quality of non-profit schools. That should boost graduation rates and employment prospects, and result in taxpayers getting stiffed a lot less in the future.

Asking What Students Spend on Textbooks Is the Wrong Question

Convinced that big undergraduate lectures are ineffectual, Wieman long ago ditched those big performances in favor of getting students to problem-solve. He gets them actively engaged with course material, working in smaller groups. The techniques have become known as an evidence-based, "active learning" style of teaching.

The University of New Hampshire Open Educational Resources Ambassador Pilot

Those with the highest degree of functional literacy aren’t necessarily those with the highest social status.

The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory

Love in pedagogical work is an orientation. It’s a commitment to the personhood of learners, to their intersectionality, to their deep emotional backgrounds, to the authenticity of their lives. It is a decision to commit first to the community of learners and second to the material we’ve come to teach.

not to provide citizens with jobs. That's the role of the economy.

The product of education should be effective citizenship that is enacted out in the open

After the 2007-2008 financial crisis in the United States, a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets are seeing education — and educational technology – as growth areas. Resistance by students, parents and educators to high-stakes standardized testing and the Common Core State Standards confronted them with a temporary setback, but now they are poised to make an end run around the Opt Out movement by concentrating on “personalized learning” which requires a huge investment in computerization of classrooms as well as software. Along with this remaking of schooling, the powers that be plan a data-based reinvention of teacher education that will require the closing, or reinvention of colleges of teacher education. If these plans go through, a majority of the nation’s teachers and teacher educators could lose their jobs in the next 10 years, replaced by people who will largely be temp workers making little more than minimum wage. This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky thinking. It is happening in higher education with the switch to adjunct labor. I fear it is about to sweep through our public schools with the force of a juggernaut.

Open data

Open Learning

open – that is, to make public, transparent, and participatory

open annotation.

True personalized learning calls for a "rethinking and redesign" of schools, which could require them to overhaul classroom structures and schedules, curricula, and the instructional approaches of teachers, Mr. Calkins of EDUCAUSE argued. For instance, in an effective personalized learning model, teachers' roles are more like those of coaches or facilitators than "content providers," he said.

"Technology can help provide students with more choices on how they're going to learn a lesson," Ms. Patrick said. "[It] empowers teachers in personalizing learning" and "empowers students through their own exercise of choice."

It reminds me of the New Math of the 1960s, which fashioned mathematics in a dramatically more abstract, more analytic way than before. And if Johnny Can’t Add with the new math, maybe Jenny Won’t Code with an overly abstract presentation of computing. Papert points us in the opposite direction

One striking comment follows a couple of pages later, where the phrase “computer-aided instruction” evokes in Papert the unappealing idea that “the computer is being used to program the child” — his vision, of course, is that the child must program the computer.

In 1980, Seymour Papert published the book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas” [2]. Papert was co-director, under Marvin Minsky, of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1967 to 1981. Previously, he had worked with Jean Piaget in Geneva. Piaget was a developmental psychologist best known for pioneering the learning theory known as constructivism: simply put, that learners construct new knowledge (in their minds) from the interaction of their experiences with previous knowledge. Papert, in turn, developed the theory of constructionism, adding the notion that learning is enhanced when the learner is engaged in “constructing a meaningful product.”

Credentalism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity. Over the past 40 years, professions that never required a college degree began demanding it. "The United States has become the most rigidly credentialised society in the world," write James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield in their 2005 book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. "A BA is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four."

Inquiry Learning Vs. Standardized Content: Can They Coexist?

What do we know about sharing?

Framing our Open EdTech project

We don’t know if content will be interoperable – that is, usable beyond the Amazon (Kindle) ecosystem – or if there’ll be integration with other software systems.

With more than 18 million downloads to date, Minecraft is the best-selling computer game of all time; the game’s free-form structure has made it popular with kids and adults alike. But little by little, teachers, parents, and students have discovered that the game can be used for educational purposes, too.