2,271 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2015
    1. Open education is a means, a way of doing something; it isn’t something. That something is for individuals to arrive at however they want to get there–that’s the point of making it all “open.” I hope they share that awesomeness when they arrive at it, but they don’t have to.

      Process not product.

  2. Nov 2015
    1. The real problem with textbooks, though, is that focusing on them is focusing on content. When learning, and open education, should focus more on process (a conversation on this from a year ago across my blog, Jim Groom’s, Mike Caulfield’s and David Wiley’s).
    2. “why textbooks?”
    1. Nanodegree Program Summary Machine learning represents a key evolution in the fields of computer science, data analysis, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. It has quickly become industry's preferred way to make sense of the staggering volume of data our modern world produces. Machine learning engineers build programs that dynamically perform the analyses that data scientists used to perform manually. These programs can “learn” based on millions of experiences, all rigorously and numerically defined.
    1. Google is merely interested sharing the code. As Dean says, this will help the company improve this code. But at the same time, says Monga, it will also help improve machine learning as a whole, breeding all sorts of new ideas. And, well, these too will find their way back into Google. “Any advances in machine learning,” he says, “will be advances for us as well.”
    1. All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors’ noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa.”
    1. This article included an estimate from the system that further backs up the $530 – $640 figures. [Hanley’s] rough estimate: As of a few years ago, learners at the 23-campus, 460,200-student university system were spending $300 million a year on course materials — about $651 per student per school year.

      This graph is the kicker. It is NOT about textbook costs, it's about how much students can afford to spend. The amount hasn't changed, or has gone down, since '02!

    1. Open Education We believe that educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.

      DOE office of ed tech

    1. “Instead of having one prescribed way to do things that comes from a textbook, kids can do things where they’re truly interested,” says Lori Secrist. “When they’re truly interested, they’re engaged. And when they’re engaged, they learn.”
    1. Center  Priorities

      priorities

    2. Most  centers  (81%)  report  up  through  the  Provost  or  Academic  Affairs  Office.    The  remainder  report  to  the  CIO  (6%),  the  library  (2%)  or  “other”  units  such  as  a  special  learning  or  innovation
    3. Technology  is  often  not  the  leading  focus  of  most  of  these  efforts,  but  rather  viewed  as  a  tool  to  potentially  help  achieve  desired  outcomes.    UT-­‐Austin,  for  example,  has  created  an  Associate  Vice  Provost  for  Learning  Sciences  position  that  oversees  a  Learning  Sciences  group  that  includes  faculty  developers,  digital  content  developers,  technologists,  and  a  unified  learning  analytics  infrastructure.    Duke’s  center,  which  is  the  only  one  among  the  17  that  reports  up  through  the  library,  works  very  hard  to  take  faculty  who  come  in  wanting  to  test  a  new  technology  and  get  them  thinking,  instead,  about  transforming  their  course.    This  is  also  true  for  Carnegie  Mellon’s  Eberly  Center,  which  grounds  any  technical  solutions  in  the  desired  learning  outcomes
    1. In the past few years, many colleges have expanded the scale and scope of centers that support teaching and learning with technology, as part of an effort to build a new “innovation infrastructure” for instruction.

      Innovation infrastructure

    2. In other words, supporting teaching with technology is becoming less about offering training sessions for professors about how to use clickers and course-management systems, and more about coordinating bigger-impact projects like redesigning large introductory courses or leading the creation of a new online-degree program.

      Agreed, but ed tech support is still a basic need of faculty. Though things are changing (at least philosophically), there are sound digital pedagogical approaches that rely on knowledgeable and innovative instructional technologists and designers.

  3. Oct 2015
    1. The Coming of OERRelated to the enthusiasm for digital instructional resources,four-fifths (81percent) of the survey participants agreethat “Open Source textbooks/Open Education Resource(OER) content “will be an important source for instructional resources in five yea
    1. This chapter suggests two ways to make the grading of writing easier,fairer, and more helpful for students: using minimal grades or fewerlevels of quality, and using criteria that spell out the features of goodwriting that we are looking for in the assignment.Grading Student Writing: MakingIt Simpler, Fairer, Clearer

    1. At William & Mary, one way Swem Library is leading the way is by bringing open educational resources (OER) to the campus.  
    1. So let’s take #fedwiki. I love Mike Caulfield. I love that he invited me to join the first #fedwikihappening which I truly enjoyed and learned SO MUCH from.
    2. The #dlrn15 Discourse #Resonated #NotResonated
    1. And we see that develop into the web as we know it today. A web of “hey this is cool” one-hop links. A web where where links are used to create a conversational trail (a sort of “read this if you want to understand what I am riffing on” link) instead of associations of ideas.

      Serial stream.

    2. And it’s about getting back to the idea that our Personal Learning Network isn’t just our twitter followers, but is an effort to connect work together not just people. And maybe to understand the process of connecting and building and extending the work of others is as human and engaging as the conversational Stream.

      Personal Learning Network - not just about people

    3. Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.
    4. Now when people talk about Bush’s article, they are usually talking about the portion that starts around section six, which seems so prescient, so predictive of the web to come.

      Ha. That's exactly what I focused in on!

    5. To understand a statement you must go back to things before, you must find out what it was replying to, you must know the person who wrote it and their speech context. To understand your statement I must reconstruct your entire stream.

      With little confidence you will find all the parts to fully reconstruct in a manner reflective of the intention in the past, let alone the current perspective.

    6. It’s not that you are passive in the Stream. You can be active. But your actions in there — your blog posts, @ mentions, forum comments — exist in a context that is collapsed down to a simple timeline of events that together form a narrative.

      And so much of that narrative can be missed, or difficult to reconstruct, once it is down stream.

    7. Over time these things you write up start to form a deep network that helps you think.
    1. Section 6. The root of our problem with selection is the inadequacy of the indexing systems. Records are sorted alphabetically or numerically, this classification being inadequate to the human mind, which is associative by nature. Selection by association may be mechanized, improving (not the speed and flexibility) but the permanence and clarity of the stored informations.

      Root of the problem...

    1. The second level of Open Access is Gold Open Access, which requires the author to pay the publishing platform a fee to have their work placed somewhere it can be accessed for free. These fees can range in the hundreds to thousands of dollars.

      Not necessarily true. This is a misconception. "About 70 percent of OA journals charge no APCs at all. We’ve known this for a decade but it’s still widely overlooked by people who should know better." -Suber http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/09/opinion/not-dead-yet/an-interview-with-peter-suber-on-open-access-not-dead-yet/#_

    2. Faculty Senate wants work published through Open Access

    1. 67. In the Loop Year: 2009 Director: Armando Iannucci If clever verbal humor were easy, we’d have more comedies like In the Loop. But it’s not, and this one stands in a class of its own. It’s the most quotable film of the decade—by miles—and the cynical potty mouths on screen are so articulate and creative that, after the avalanche of witticisms, you’re left with the lingering sense that you’ve seen not just a funny movie but also a wicked political satire of the highest order, the kind where the absurdity speaks for itself.—Robert Davis
    1. From knowing to learning An immediate outcome of this transition is that we no longer ask, “Do students know this?” Instead, we can ask, “How do students learn this?” Giving students learning activities as an assessment has the benefit of assessing a meaningful aspect of their learning, that is, their ability to make sense of new challenges. This paradigm is often termed preparation for future learning assessment, or PFL.
    1. My favorite feature though is the control over privacy. I have always kept my class streams private. Before Known I used Google+, but now I can have a public stream that empowers students to make decisions over their privacy.Students not only control what they share but where they share it. I subscribe to Known’s Convoy feature

      Can students' continue to use Known after the course is over and morph it into their own blog? What if they have other classes that use Known too? Does the student use the same space? Copy over content to their main Known account?

    2. Dear Universities everywhere, building a portfolio and a presence are not the same thing

      university portfolios vs. personal domains?

    3. Known offers great hosting packages for students

      So does ReclaimHosting.com. Students can install and run WP, Known, Mahara, etc.

    4. Many of my students have chosen Known as their blogging platform.

      Would anyone care to share examples of students' Known blogs?

    5. First I review the benefits of learning in the open to build a web presence.

      What is your favorite phrase to describe what this process is (e.t. digital identity, open learning, digital literacy, etc.)?

    6. Greg's P&T portfolio

  4. Sep 2015
    1. And believe me, my temperament is very good, very calm. But we will be respected outside of this country. We are not respected now.

      Frightening. Image Description

    1. If you have a Centre for Teaching and Learning or a Learning Technology unit, they should have such specialists. It would also be sensible to make sure that an instructional designer also attends your first meeting, as their skills are somewhat different, although related.
    1. However, the dynamic of post-secondary institutions is such that this direction could and probably will change dramatically. In the future, we will need instructors who have the skills to decide when and how to use online learning as part of their jobs, and not see online learning as a specialty of someone else.
    1. Some college presidents have pointed to interdisciplinarity to justify the elimination of separate disciplinary departments or programs. What do you make of these moves?
    1. For one thing, inspired since childhood by Carl Sagan’s vivid explanations of the cosmos, he had dreamed of leaving academe to become a public educator.

      Interesting choice of words... leaving Iowa State University/academe to become a "public" educator.

    1. The more interesting challenge for an open learning architecture is how to scale agile and distinct environments across and among many courses — or even better, across several institutions and across the web itself. This moves us back toward a network of networks, a foundational principle of the Internet.

      Perhaps a "flipped MOOC" might work?

    2. But as David Kernohan remarks, sometimes innovation can be "the art of circumventing large monolithic systems to actually get some stuff done."

      Amen!

    3. Five Arguments against the Learning Management System
    1. Indeed, it was often unclear from the level of engagement which participants were physically present at DPL and which were watching from afar. The present-absent-present dance was fascinating to observe.

      As a "virtual attendee" or "lurker" or "scoper," it was difficult to follow and frustrating at times, but super helpful and fun too, especially as resources (images, links, quotes) were shared out. Communicating the context of those resources is still a pretty tricky thing to do well.

    1. Bennett Merriman, young entrepreneur and director of a workforce management company, told a recent higher education conference that connectivity in our work place is important. He recommended that students should spend time developing their networks throughout their studies.
    2. They should focus on learning through experience and the cycle of failure inherent in creative endeavours. Rather than defining measurable learning outcomes, curricula should support aspirational outcomes that ignite lifelong learning and encourage inquiry beyond the classroom.
    3. Universities must also get comfortable with the idea of providing an education focused on the whole person rather than only acquiring discipline-specific knowledge and skills. This has been accomplished at Stanford University where students undertake “missions not majors”.
    1. …move away from measuring academic success according to rigid marking criteria. They should focus on learning through experience and the cycle of failure inherent in creative endeavours.
    2. do we focus on creating students who are ‘job ready’ for today, or who are ‘entrepreneurially spirited’ for the world which is likely to be on their doorstep within the next twenty years?
  5. Aug 2015
    1. "What really is our role as professors?" he asks. "Is our role to simply give out information and people will use it as they wish? Or is our role to honestly and truly help guide people to be who they are and how they will live their life?"
    1. 77 cents of every dollar spent on textbooks go to publishers. Of those 77 cents, the publishing company makes about 18 cents in pure profit, while spending 15 cents on marketing, and roughly 32 percent to cover costs (paper, printing, employee salaries, etc). At the same time, the author - the person who dedicated hundreds of hours of research to write the book – only gets about 12 cents on the dollar on average.
    1. Secondly,instructionaldesigners,duetothedevelopingcomplexityoftoolsandavailabilityofopeneducationresources,playaneducationalroleofdirectingeducatorstotoolsandresources.Thesetwofoundationalchanges,whilepresentedhereasaconceptualdiscussionandinneedofadditionalexperimentationandevaluation,mayserveasleversforbroaderchangeswithintheacademy
    1. We’ll have an even more humane, ethical, productive, and effective version of the courseware when we come out of the pilot in Spring term.

      Yikes. Sounds a little scary.

    1. Of course, “efficiency” is the language of business. We – and I use that plural first person pronoun quite loosely here – want education to be faster, cheaper, and less wasteful. As such, we want the system to be measurable, more managed, and in turn, increasingly mechanized. We want education to run more like a business; we want education to run more like a machine.

      I just can't buy the progression of thought here. What exactly is rolled up in "education?" The teachers? The classrooms? The administration? The architecture and underlying support systems? The curriculum? If the "business" side of education, then perhaps so. Greater efficiency seems like a smart move. When I think of the vast majority of courses I have taken or helped create, they are moving away from Henry Ford factory classroom models. Further from manufacturing educated human objects. Further from homogeneity and toward more individualized and likely more inefficient, experiences.

    1. Is the choice to use words like “electronic” or “digital” to designate our work and pedagogy simply a reflection of a moment of transition, soon to be abandoned as such methods become universal, or is it still important to call attention to the use of technology as we push it towards new frontiers?

      An artifact of transition?

    2. can anyone really teach without digital means at this stage of web integration?
    1. Professional networking is also compartmentalized as a form of distasteful “self-promotion”, another (ironic) taboo in academic circles.

      I don't know about saying it is distasteful self-promotion. I know it can be. But I don't seem to run into much of that. Do you in your network(s)?

    1. The macroscopic side of this communications argument is that social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent. New ideas will spread slowly, scientific endeavors will be handicapped, and subgroups separated by race, ethnicity, geography, or other characteristics will have difficulty reaching a modus vivendi.

      Strength in diversity, diverse contributions and contributors.

    2. Acquaintances, as compared to close friends, are more prone to move in different circles than oneself. Those to whom one is closest are likely to have the greatest overlap in contact with those one already knows, so that the information to which they are privy is likely to be much the same as that which one already has

      Love this. Weak ties foster diversity of people and thought in one's network.