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Scriptocentrism and the Freedom to Think

By now I had become quite hooked on experimenting with the system, and lots of questions along the line of “I wonder what would happen if?…” sprang to mind.

Now, if you don’t know susanvlaws or kdhicks2…

sandbox

see you in the margins!

somewhere between close reading and distributed commentary

“appropriation” of a context

more democratic pathway

Unlike the commenting feature of a blog

latent capacity for agency

To be playful is to appropriate a context that is not created or intended for play

if you really want a playful learning experience.

Open data

Open Learning

Seldom does a promised innovation disrupt entrenched power relations or challenge institutional privilege.

watch an online tutorial so as to actually use some unintuitive software

invitations to adopt a much-hyped LMS

The challenges and opportunities confronting higher education pedagogy will not be adequately addressed by platforms designed to provide answers.

#profchat confirmed my bias towards learning technologies that cultivate curiosity.

If annotation is a trans-media practice

Tool is to task as repertoires of tools are to learning

formal and less formal learning arrangements

distributed publics

divergent insight, know-how, and wondering:

too readily position expertise

#profchat participants began parsing with nuance certain taken-for-granted relations

How might open annotation amplify marginalized voices?

genuine curiosities

Twitter chats – which too readily prompt a collective preaching to the choir

from various institutions and with varied backgrounds

healthy critics of open and digital pedagogy

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

rather nascent experiences

This is a program of lessons that gives kids the freedom of action to take their own Sonic Pi project in any direction they want to, moving away from the sort of lesson where everybody works on the same piece of software, and giving students the agency to develop their work in an individual way, while almost accidentally becoming familiar with an important set of fundamentals.

got them thinking about what a computer really is, wherein lies the power of the Pi.

gender neutrality, creativity, imagination and tinker time are the basis for learning

Educators

insert reflective pause to acknowledge the power of weak tie networks here

Martin Weller at the OER Hub

BCcampus as a whole is a research project in the eyes of our parent institution SFU

Job functionOther,Marketing

Dominique Cardon is calling on businesses to disclose the purpose of their algorithms.

it’s more the harmful threat of algorithms that we should be worried about.

You don’t have to do everything yourself!

There is no single correct way to implement personalized learning

currently being translated into French by Contact North

To date Teaching in a Digital Age has been downloaded 13,679 times since its publication in April this year and is also available in print

An innovator in this space is SMART, which created the world's first interactive whiteboard in 1991

Teachers work hard.

Smart technology will impact education

In 2014, U.S. based education technology (EdTech) companies raised $1.2 billion in funding across 357 venture rounds.

you'll see the "download annotated" option.

For a community that has always worried about the block chain being taken over by an oppressive government, it is a rich irony.

a crisis that reflects deep philosophical differences in how people view the world

“One of the great things about Bitcoin is its lack of democracy”

Bitcoin is not intended to be an investment and has always been advertised pretty accurately: as an experimental currency which you shouldn’t buy more of than you can afford to lose

don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose

the financial crisis convinced him that national currencies were vulnerable to politics and bad decision-making

We are in the midst of fundamentally redefining the relationship between governments and citizens in the face of technological upheavals in human communications.

We analyzed the relationship between students’ level of online engagement, and traditional learning metrics, to understand the effectiveness of discussion forums in the context of flipped classrooms.

Brenda has shifted her approach from providing turnkey solutions to the teachers that come to her for help. Instead she focuses on accompanying them on their journey, and wants to know what research they have done prior to coming to see her.

Today, she encourages the women she works with to NEVER say they know nothing about technology.

When Brenda starts working with a teacher for the first time, she begins by sharing much more about herself with others than she would have done back in 2008 when she began as an Education Advisor. She finds that it helps to forge a stronger connection.  She remembers hearing someone say that we are constantly asking our students to take risks and share information about themselves with the class and with the teacher, so as teachers we should model this and do the same with our students. This person convinced Brenda that it strengthens bonds, makes us more engaged with each other and makes the teaching and learning much more meaningful and fun.

Don’t just talk about technology. Get to know the person in front of you. It’s not just about the technology, it’s also about what other things are going on. I feel like I missed out on a lot of opportunities, having learned this later in my career.

However, a Fitbit device Risley was wearing told a different story, the affidavit shows.

Creating simulations, however, requires expert-level skills in interaction design, graphics, database functionality, and programming - not to mention instructional design, content expertise, and imagination.

inevitably, to academics working as part of a team

By teaching kids how to make beer reliably, we can teach them how to design gas turbines.

Apprendre à programmer permet aux enfants un nouveau rapport aux technologies: de consommateur interactif de manuels scolaires numérisés à la capacité de créer des ressources éducatives numériques et même des mini-jeux.

Coding is a really valuable skill to have and this an amazing entry point for that.”

the notion that those who spend their life glued to their Dr Dre Beats headphones ‘aren’t interested in music’ as they don’t read notation or have an interest in the cello. 

“I think younger people don’t see technology as a separate thing,” she says. “We call it new media and new technology, but are they really ‘new’ any more? It is just another tool, like paper, ink or wood. You can use it to be enormously creative and do wonderful things.”

A firm believer that arts and science teaching should cross over, Drury saw Sonic Pi as a great example of how that could work in the classroom. 

teaching tool

people loading their own music up to SoundCloud

own music projects, exchanging tunes and coding in the online community that has sprung up around it. 

Some may engage and others may not, but those who do will be at a definite advantage in a world where more moments and objects within our lives will depend upon programming and be enhanced by it too. 

Satisfaction guaranteed.

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1m | gzip > ~/Desktop/pi.gz

massive advances in Open Educational Resources

animations are great for demonstrating difficult concepts and organizing information

It was not so very long ago that people thought that semiconductors were part-time orchestra leaders and microchips were very, very small snack foods. --Geraldine A. Ferraro

reconciling STEM and Arts: a laptop orchestra seamlessly encompasses Arts and Sciences. This allows us to utilize such an ensemble in a number of educational scenarios.

If you are interested in this conversation, join us Friday, January 8 at Noon Eastern.

I am a total intellectual.

We are developing a lifesize, scalable, modular LEGO construction set.

bringing the principles of the internet to our physical lives.

social benefits it might bring in terms of user autonomy and community-building

routing protocols are currently unable to scale over a few hundred nodes

the internet has become essential to our everyday life

So, this is an interesting article to read about oneself!.  :-)

listen very loudly

Resolve the tensions with Moodle HQ (one way or another)

(Fascinatingly enough, citing the article that footnotes this development requires use of the Internet Archive, a non-profit institution dedicated to “preserving the internet.”)

one wonders about the relationships between scholarship, technology, and the academic institution that engendered that turn from printing materials to printing ideas.

Set Semantics¶ This tool is used to set semantics in EPUB files. Semantics are simply, links in the OPF file that identify certain locations in the book as having special meaning. You can use them to identify the foreword, dedication, cover, table of contents, etc. Simply choose the type of semantic information you want to specify and then select the location in the book the link should point to. This tool can be accessed via Tools->Set semantics.

“Windows 10 Mobile could arrive January 12” It may not. You just never know.

Think of the educational potential.

The *.iba file is completely transparent and accessible.

Readium plug-in for Chrome

There’s no better way to honor Jobs’ legacy than that.

Apple should also better explain what a multi-touch format book is, from within the iBooks Store.  These books are special, with unique interactivity and multimedia, and people would download more of them if Apple did a few more simple things to call attention to them within the place of purchase.

multi-touch format books

If Apple makes it possible for content creators to set up shop on the iBooks Store, and feel at home there, many will.

the iBooks Store can be thought of as a feature of iBooks Author

Deliver a more customizable iBooks Store experience. 

paradoxically drive more people to purchase Apple hardware.

deconstructed and re-created

Deliver functionality allowing “backward-compatible” EPUB conversion of existing multi-touch format books. 

published similarly through iTunes Connect into the App Store rather than the iBooks Store

export books as apps

a consistent high-end user experience for multi-touch format books created by iBooks Author

as the software that defines digital content creation for the next decade.

unlike Adobe DPS, Inkling, or some other would-be competitors…it’s free.

was such a zealot that he single-handedly forced the shutdown of a would-be iBooks Author competitor.

Quebec remains a world leader in education, thanks to its pedagogical approach and technological advances.

Your exported Hype document should be 1024 width × 648 height or smaller.

working with forms somewhere in your HTML widget

Audio in general is not reliable,

see your book underneath the widget, though this would be nice

In 'Scroll view' mode, your widget might not display unless you have the widget set as 'anchored'.

Why aren’t there terms and conditions for students to understand who has access to their data?

notion that your identity comes from within you and not from someone else

sovereign source identity

Users publish coursework, build portfolios or tinker with personal projects, for example.

(Not surprisingly, none of the bills provide for funding to help schools come up to speed.)

then you can’t test them

with any precision

trying to conduct physics research before somebody has invented calculus

a widely adopted language that describes the details of why instructors think a particular aspect of their lecture or their discussion prompt or their experiment assignment is effective

we don’t have a vocabulary to talk about these teaching strategies

focus groups where students self-report the effectiveness of the materials are common, particularly among textbook publishers

It has no way for it to inspect the video and deduce that a particular presentation strategy is being used.

Would the machine be able to infer that these videos belong in a common category in terms of the reason for their effectiveness?

your system is able to flag at least a critical mass of videos taught in the Mueller method as having a bigger educational impact on the students the average educational video by some measure you have identified

big data infinite improbability drive

sufficiently rich information

who owns the data

need all student educational interactions to be on the platform

It sounds really cool.

Knewton, for example, claims that their system can track students across courses and semesters and test hypotheses about them over time.

big data enthusiasts

Silicon Valley is not going to make us magically smarter about teaching.

It’s educators who come up with hypotheses and test them using a large data set.

when you just change one video for a class that is otherwise the same for many students

control the variables

variables that mostly aren’t in our computer systems

The good news is that, while there are many variables, they are finite in number, mostly known and measurable, and mostly have a quantifiable and reasonably regular impact on the cancer outcome (if you understand all the interactions sufficiently well).

come up with inferences

learned from experience

Some were done this way on purpose but based on intuitions by classroom teachers.

hadoop thingamabob back end

those ultra-hip MOOC platforms

expecting that new and more effective pedagogies will rise out of the data because, you know, science or something, is more of a hope (or a fantasy) than a plan to improve education.

a good example of the kind of insight that big data is completely blind to

All content, including the metadata links created in the authoring platform, is exportable into an XML manifest.

Support for Creative Commons

I will investigate the details on this, including the relevant contractual clauses, when I get the chance.

taking a swipe at Knewton

As long as the content in SmartBooks is locked down, then it is possible to run machine learning algorithms against the clicks of millions of students using that content. To the degree that the platform is opened up for custom, newly created books, the controlled experiment goes away and the possibility of big data analysis goes with it.

they are making a bet against the software as a replacement for the teacher and against big data

you can tag questions with difficulty level and Bloom’s Taxonomy level

content (or “learning resources”)

You probably wouldn’t expect a textbook to impart deep and nuanced understanding of…well…anything

With SmartBooks, students can see the important content highlighted

The first product that McGraw Hill built with Area9 technology, LearnSmart, is just that. It’s a good drill and kill tool.

a set of algorithms designed to optimize the commitment of knowledge to long-term memory

numbers have to be interpreted by those who do the daily work of classroom teaching

despite having promised not to track students, Google is abusing its position of power as a provider of some educational services to profit off of students’ data when they use other Google services—services that Google has arbitrarily decided don’t deserve any protection.

Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome, had abused its position as trusted upstream to insert lines of source code that bypassed this audit-then-build process, and which downloaded and installed a black box of unverifiable executable code directly onto computers, essentially rendering them compromised.

The challenge, of course, is how to balance concerns of the Hawthorne effect with privacy.

Regular readers know that I am a big fan of the standard-in-development.

I’m sorry, but this sort of quasi-mystical garbage debases the very notion of education and harms Knewton’s brand in the process.

If Knewton were doing more of this, I wouldn’t be as critical.

nearly $8 billion prekindergarten through 12th-grade education technology software market

What is needed is an edit / design network – similar to the thousands who edit the pages of Wikipedia on a voluntary basis

Schiller has a personal interest in seeing the Mac App Store succeed.

Lego approach

purchasable à la carte

Personalized course materials made possible by real data

Using “time spent” as the measure of how much a student has learned is absurd.

Universities may eventually come to look like a bit like airlines

Even the course itself is an arbitrary unit size.

it is difficult to argue that people can’t form strong social and emotional connections online

the unit size of higher ed will begin to change from a traditional four-year on-campus bundled experience to more of a course-based experience

credit acceptance policies become more flexible

evaluate efficacy

Soon, data will make learning outcomes for these courses highly transparent

Universities are creating courses like this

Teaching two or three sections per semester would leave ample time for prep and office hours. Add in materials and tech fees around $100 and we could offer these courses for $900 per student per course, excluding marketing costs and considering only the cost of product delivery. These courses would be academically equivalent (incredible professor, great materials, office hours2) to any “regular” university course, but delivered online at around 20% of the all-in cost of buying such a course bundled with food, lodging, athletic facilities, Jacuzzis, and rock walls at an elite university.

no research

we could attract some of the very best professors in the world