Techno-News Blog

October 31, 2013

How Digital Learning Is Becoming The Fourth Literacy

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By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Reading.  Writing.  Math.  Those are the big ones, right? Up until recently, a lot of people would have probably said that was correct. But since it is 2013 and so much of our lives happen online, digital literacy is being added to the list. Not that this should come as any sort of surprise to most of us, since most teachers spend vast amounts of time in classrooms surrounded by technology. Technology that both teachers and students need to be literate in. The handy infographic below (see URL) takes a look at digital learning as the ‘fourth literacy’, which I found interesting.

http://www.edudemic.com/digital-learning-literacy/

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Reinventing higher education – MOOCs, SPOCs and hubs

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 by Paul Rigg, University World News

Jean-Claude Burgelman, head of unit in the European Commission’s directorate-general for research and innovation, kicked off a panel discussion on “The Production of Learning Experiences: Hubs, technologies and new players” with provocative questions about the future of research. “Which professor would you hire if you had to choose between one who had published two articles in Nature and another who ran a blog that was read by the top 500 people in their field?” he asked. “And what if you had to decide between an applicant with a good degree or one who had qualified via MOOCs at Harvard and Oxford University?”

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2013102415264928

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Curious wants to turn teachers into the web’s next wave of entrepreneurs

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by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOm

When Curious launched this spring, its focus was offering lifelong learners a marketplace of bite-sized lessons on everything from beer brewing and salsa dancing to calculus and coding. Now, it’s upping its attention on the other side of the learning equation: teachers. For the past few months, in an effort to ensure quality classes, the site has recruited its teachers and given them in-house support to create their classes. On Friday, the company said it had opened up its service so that teachers anywhere can create classes of their own. “We think there are thousands of things to teach and ways to teach and you’ll never be able to build all the content yourself,” said CEO and founder Justin Kitch. “This is all in the name of helping teachers become entrepreneurs.”

http://gigaom.com/2013/10/25/lifelong-learning-startup-curious-wants-to-turn-teachers-into-the-webs-next-wave-of-entrepreneurs/

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October 30, 2013

Gov. Parnell announces digital learning initiative

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by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Gov. Sean Parnell on Thursday announced a digital learning initiative aimed at ensuring students have access to the best teachers available. In an address to the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Fairbanks, Parnell said every child deserves access to a high-quality education and kids in rural areas cannot be shortchanged. He said rural teachers do a good job but cannot be expected to provide expert instruction in every subject to every child in every grade level they teach, such as those in small schools who teach grades 1-12.

http://juneauempire.com/state/2013-10-25/gov-parnell-announces-digital-learning-initiative

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The Global Search For Education: Got Tech?

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by C.M. Rubin, Huffington Post

In the future, will students still attend “schools” or will they be called “blended learning schools” that combine brick-and-mortar buildings with online learning? Five years ago, Clayton M. Christensen along with co-authors, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, applied Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation to one of the most important matters of our time — Education. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (McGraw-Hill: 1st edition, May, 2008; 2nd edition, August, 2010) explored how technology might better serve future students. The benefits of blended online and brick and mortar learning, such as individualization, universal access and equity, and productivity, sound powerfully tempting to policy makers looking for solutions to the failings of standardized education.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-m-rubin/got-tech_b_4159856.html

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US education secretary visits suburban school

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BY SOPHIA TAREEN, Associated Press

A suburban Chicago high school — and its unique science lab with cutting-edge microscopes — got a nod from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who said during a visit Thursday that students in public high schools nationwide should have similar opportunities. Wheeling High School officially unveiled the roughly $615,000 nanotechnology lab to coincide with Duncan’s visit. The seven microscopes, which nanotechnology industry experts say would be the envy of a university or major company, are worth $400,000 alone. “This is pretty amazing to see,” Duncan said after touring the classroom with rows of the computer-like devices. “The world of opportunity that is going to available for these students going forward is pretty extraordinary… We want to see a lot more students have these kinds of chances. ”

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/10/24/3708837/us-education-secretary-visits.html

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October 29, 2013

Twitter Experiments With a Private Feed

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by Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Two experiments being run by the company suggest it is dabbling with the idea of offering people private and personalized feeds alongside the public one. The experiments may provide a preview of how Twitter will further expand a service that started out simple but is now becoming more complex (see “Facebook and Twitter Are Converging”). Opting in to the experiments involves following two special Twitter accounts, which then send personalized messages using the service’s direct message function. The first of these experiments, @magicrecs, was launched in June. Its followers receive direct messages containing recommendations for other Twitter accounts and tweets that may be of interest. The account’s profile says that it will also recommend “content,” although I’ve not seen any reports of that happening yet. A second experimental account with a similar design appeared earlier this month. Called @eventparrot, it sends its followers personalized updates on breaking news via direct messages.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520636/twitter-experiments-with-a-private-feed/

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A Successful Moon Shot for Laser Communications

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by Dave Talbot, Technology Review

There was no “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you” moment. But a pioneering space-based optical communications test has been a big success. And that means optical systems stand a higher chance not only dominating future space data transmissions (with radio systems serving as a backup) but of enabling new satellite networks that would boost the capacity of the terrestrial Internet. A planned test of the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration (see “NASA Moonshot Will Test Laser Communications”) aboard a probe in lunar orbit is working just as planned, delivering download speeds six times faster than the fastest radio system used for moon communications, Don Boroson, the researcher at MIT’s Lincoln Lab who led the project, says, “We have successfully hit all our marks—all the downlink rates up to 622 Mbps [and] our two uplink rates up to 20 Mbps.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520676/a-successful-moon-shot-for-laser-communications/

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The Decline of Wikipedia

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By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/

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October 28, 2013

For Disruption, MOOCs Beat Open-Access Journals, Scholar Says

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by Megan O’Neil, Chronicle of Higher Ed

MOOCs are more disruptive to higher education than open-access megajournals are, in part because of structural protections in the scholarly-publishing world and because some policy makers are pushing massive open online courses as a means to increase productivity, a professor argues in a new article on open-access alternatives in higher education.  The privatization of the delivery of educational services via MOOC platforms and other models is seen by some politicians as a solution to “the perceived higher-education crisis of cost, access, completion, and productivity,” writes Richard Wellen, an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at York University, in Toronto, and the author of the article. It is titled “Open Access, Megajournals, and MOOCs: On the Political Economy of Academic Unbundling.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/for-disruption-moocs-beat-open-access-journals-scholar-argues/47673

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3D printing to dominate STEM education within 3 years

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by 3ders

A new report from the NMC Horizon Project has identified 12 emerging technologies that will have a significant impact on STEM+ education over the next one to five years. The Technology Outlook for STEM+ Education 2013-2018 recognizes learning analytics, mobile learning, online learning, and virtual and remote laboratories as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the near-term horizon of one year or less. 3D printing, games and gamification, immersive learning environments, and wearable technology are seen in the mid-term horizon of two to three years. Finally, flexible displays, the Internet of Things, machine learning, and virtual assistants emerged in the far-term horizon of four to five years.

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20131022-3d-printing-to-dominate-stem-education-within-3-years.html

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Can we scale ‘the learning that matters most’?

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by Tony Bates, Online Learning and Distance Ed Resources

This important question has been raised in the HEQCO report by Tom Carey and David Trick. It is this issue I wish to address here, since scaling up the delivery of content, and learner-content interaction, through online learning is relatively easy, although both depend on good course design for effective learning. What is more challenging is whether we can also scale the kind of ‘learning that matters most’, namely helping students when they struggle with new concepts or ideas, helping students to gain deep understanding of a topic or subject, helping students to evaluate a range of different ideas or practices, providing students with professional formation or development, understanding the limits of knowledge, and above all enabling students to find, evaluate and apply knowledge appropriately in new or ill-defined contexts.

http://www.tonybates.ca/2013/10/22/improving-productivity-in-online-learning-can-we-scale-the-learning-that-matters-most/

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October 27, 2013

Why Are Girls Not Pursuing Computer Science Degrees?

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By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

We know that there is what is called a ‘gender divide’ (or gender gap) in STEM. In short, there are more men than women in STEM careers. More young men pursue STEM fields in college than young women. So why don’t more girls pursue technology careers, become scientists, or become computer scientists? Girls get the same education in K-12 that boys do. So do they simply dislike computer science? Are they not good enough at it to pursue it as a career? The handy infographic at the URL below takes a look at some statistics from a few different sources to show that it is mainly girls’ perceptions that prevent them from pursuing careers in computer science.

http://www.edudemic.com/girls-computer-science-degrees/

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6 Reasons To Try Mobile Devices In The Classroom

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By Alice Martin, Edudemic

Looking at the recent advancement in computer and technology, the education system seems more organized and systemic than ever. Considering this aspect, one can easily predict a more technology-based classroom environment that will benefit both the teachers and students in future. Tablets and Smartphones have reinforced this ideology further by introducing new ideas and concepts in the traditional ways of schooling. Now students can learn in a more flexible and self-paced environment without any hurdles with resources – time, people, space and money. This has resulted in an efficient and faster way to learn and grow within a particular field of study. Here I will inform you about some important benefits that you can avail using Tablets, Smartphones and other mobile devices in the classroom.

http://www.edudemic.com/mobile-devices-in-the-classroom/

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Two types of online learning

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by Thomas Arnett, Christensen Institute

The emergence of online learning is transforming education by allowing us to personalize learning in ways that were impossible in the past. Because these technologies—and the new classroom models that best leverage them—are still evolving, it’s unclear what our educational system will look like in the future. New technologies entering the education ecosystem are often grouped under the common label of “online learning.” I have found it helpful, however, to categorize online-learning technologies into two distinct groups—instructional technologies and virtual interaction technologies—when contemplating the potential interfaces between teachers, technology, and physical space.

http://www.christenseninstitute.org/two-types-of-online-learning/

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October 26, 2013

Understanding E-Textbooks – it’s not Elementary!

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by Resource Link

The advantages of e-textbooks seem logical:

  • 24/7 and remote access
  • enhanced mobility and reduction in physical size
  • inbuilt features such as search, dictionary
  • enhancement of learning experience via inbuilt multimedia and interactivity
  • improved accessibility for students with sight impairment

However, teachers and teacher librarians report challenges including

  • the need for digital infrastructure including strong WiFi networks
  • the cost of providing/maintaining devices required to deliver digital content
  • the time-consuming nature and complexity of management
  • the inability to provide textbook hire or resale of texts

http://resourcelinkbce.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/understanding-e-textbooks-its-not-elementary/

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New Survey: College Faculty Increasingly Use Social Media for Teaching and in Professional, Personal lives

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By Faculty Focus, Magna

A new report from the Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson finds that college faculty members have become sophisticated consumers of social media, matching different sites to their varying personal, professional, and teaching needs — yet obstacles to wider adoption still remain. The annual survey of nearly 8,000 teaching faculty — from all disciplines in higher education and selected to be representative of the overall range of faculty teaching in U.S. higher education — examined both the personal and professional impacts of social media.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/edtech-news-and-trends/new-survey-college-faculty-increasingly-use-social-media-for-teaching-and-in-professional-personal-lives/

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15 Learning Tools You Never Knew Existed

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by Educators Technology

The world of educational technology is moving in such an allure that it becomes hard for us to keep up with it. Everyday, there are new learning apps emerging hither and tither, new educational trends are being conceptualized and the educational field gets richer and richer. Online College has compiled this interesting list of some new learning trends you might have probably never heard of. I am sharing it with you below, have a look and let us know what you think of this list.

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/10/the-world-of-educational-is-moving-in.html

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October 25, 2013

Do Your Students Know How To Search?

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By Holly Clark, Edudemic

There is a new digital divide on the horizon. It is not based around who has devices and who does not, but instead the new digital divide will be based around students who know how to effectively find and curate information and those who do not.  Helene Blowers has come up with seven ideas about the new digital divide – four of them, the ones I felt related to searching, are listed below. In an age of information abundance learning to effectively search is one of the most important skills most teachers are NOT teaching. They assume students know how to conduct a search, and set them free on the internet to find information. They assume that students have the skills to critically think their way through the searching and the web. Sadly, this is not the case and everyday we are losing the information literacy battle because we often forget to teach these crucial searching skills in our schools.

http://www.edudemic.com/student-search-skills/

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8 Questions Answered By Popular Social Networks

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By Paolo Leva, Edudemic

The number of popular social networks may seem overwhelming. We can share links, ideas, comments, jokes, pictures and everything else, and new social media options seem to pop-up everyday. This may discourage learners, teachers, instructional designers and eLearning professionals from using the fantastic benefits of a social presence on the internet. Social media may overlap – and they often do in some ways – but they are not equivalent. Each offers its own unique set of attributes. Some of them focus on identity, some on topics, some on sharing feelings. And within each group there are many important and crucial nuances to keep them apart.

http://www.edudemic.com/8-questions-answered-by-popular-social-networks/

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The Differences Between Digital Natives And Digital Immigrants

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By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Basically, all of our young digital natives are being taught by “digital immigrants”, or, folks who didn’t grow up with the internet. Pretty obvious, but think of it this way: Let’s say you go to school and have to take English classes (and English is your native language). Your teacher’s native language is not English (and let’s say hypothetically their English is not great), and even though he/she may be very knowledgeable about literature and much of the other stuff to go along with it, there’s a language barrier getting in the way. In some cases (and obviously not all), this is what we’re doing to our students. We are….older.  Many teachers who are not ‘fluent’ in technology choose a pretty logical route – don’t teach with technology you’re not fluent with.  But teaching only with a bit of technology that you feel super comfortable with is like teaching a foreign language class when you have a more limited vocabulary than the students.  The handy infographic below came from a quick Google Search of “digital natives vs. digital immigrants”.
http://www.edudemic.com/digital-natives-digital-immigrants/

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