Techno-News Blog

By Nancy Revie, Guelph Mercury

In our advanced technology age, we have to go to school to learn how to go to school, all without leaving home. I know, it’s mind boggling. One thing is for certain in today’s world — not only is a field of study a part of education, but so is the delivery. Lifelong learners like me are blessed to be part of this amazing realm. No more hickory sticks; no more pencils; no more books; no more teacher’s dirty looks and if you have to go the bathroom, don’t raise your hand — just hit the pause button, if you can find it!

http://www.guelphmercury.com/living-story/4266280-learning-how-to-learn-with-technology/

BY LARS THORVALDSEN, Miami Herald

The American Association of University Professors says ownership of online courses, including MOOCs, is a pressing issue. Among the concerns are that institutions will change online courses created by professors and that professors will sign away their intellectual property rights to the courses they create. Doing so may have long-term consequences, as a professor might not be able to use a course after leaving his or her institution, the organization said.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/12/3812743/massive-online-courses-pose-possibilities.html

by Virtual College (UK)

A combination of face-to-face instruction and online training, otherwise known as blended learning, is the most effective form of education. This is according to Alex Williams, a course leader at Buckinghamshire New University who has pointed out the benefits of using online resources to aid classroom study. He argued in a post for Digital Arts Online that face-to-face time with a lecturer should be spent taking part in workshops and receiving personal feedback, while the internet is great for catching up on missed lectures and doing homework. “The beauty of an online lecture is if you don’t get it the first time, you just watch it again. In fact, you keep watching it until you do get it,” Mr Williams said.

http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/Blended-learning-the-most-effective-kind-newsitems-801670751.aspx

By Alexander Baron, Digital Journal

If programmes of this nature are mainly US-oriented, they won’t be for long; on-line learning is not only here to stay, it is a global phenomenon, even for those who are not interested in learning either formally or less formally through a MOOC. At one time in order to do serious research you needed access to a major archive like the British Library, the Library Of Congress or at the very least a major university library. Now all that is on your desktop and more. Back in the 1990s, the British Library was adding around 5 shelf miles of material every year. Today, one website – the Internet Archive – is currently boasting 368,000,000,000 pages. Even allowing for duplication, this is staggering. Combine this with the ad hoc University of YouTube, and all the other archives on your desktop – and there is now no excuse for ignorance. If only!

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/363699

by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The early signs are promising. After only seven months, the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA, serves as the central link in an expanding network of cultural institutions that want to make their holdings more visible to the public. It has attracted financial support from foundations and government agencies, among them the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and, mostly recently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And it’s begun to attract not only users in search of far-flung information but also developers who want to build new tools and applications on its open-source platform. But its small staff also has a lot of work to do before the digital library fully realizes the vision that brought it to life.

http://chronicle.com/article/Digital-Library-of-America/143489/

By Ian Chant, Library Journal

Since the term was coined five years ago, massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have been a subject of much debate in educational circles. In their brief life span, the courses, in which up to many thousands of students can participate, have demonstrated the promise of new technology to democratize education by some and been declared failed experiments by others. MOOC professors, though, say that it’s too early to judge how MOOCs perform, and that after just a few years, even those in the know are still figuring out what MOOCs really are and what shape—or shapes—they’ll take in the future. Whatever MOOCs look like going forward, though, libraries—in the academic and public sphere alike—will play a key role in helping to determine their design and success. In just the few months since we looked in LJ at the MOOC environment (“Massive Open Opportunity,” LJ 5/1/13), the quickly moving field has evolved significantly.

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/12/digital-content/opening-up/

by Peter High, Forbes

PH: What do you see the impact of Udacity here in America on higher education as well as what sort of evolution do you see happening in the field?

ST: Two things, really. First is access and second is the quality of the experience. It’s really hard for people in the world to partake in higher education. They are excluded because they don’t get admitted. There is a financial barrier, and there is also a demographic barrier for entry for people in mid-career. It is important to stay up to-date in your skills and that skill set changes rapidly over time. We must be able to stay employed and when you need to find your next job, or advance in your career, this really requires more of a life-long learning perspective. So there is an access problem that Udacity addresses to give higher education to people of all ages and at all points in their life.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2013/12/09/udacity-ceo-sebastian-thrun-on-the-future-of-education/

by Anant Agarwal, Huffington Post

A specific example of unbundling content might be what my colleague from the University of California, Berkeley, Armando Fox, has called “SPOCs”: Small Private Online Course (like MOOC, another awkward acronym). With SPOCs, universities can license courses offered through edX or another MOOC provider and incorporate some of the online course material into their own on-campus course. This is just like using another scholar’s textbook; the only difference is that the content is delivered not through typeset ink on paper, but via a dynamic bit-mapped display. No one could have predicted the explosion of interest in MOOCs that has occurred in the past year. Nor can we predict where MOOC technology and research will lead us. But we can examine these innovations and collaborate on how best to use them to transform and re-imagine higher education. Success will lie in experimenting with these new concepts, along with many more we can now only begin to imagine.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anant-agarwal/unbundled-reimagining-higher-education_b_4414048.html

By Fred O’Connor, Computer World

Tyler Kresch isn’t turning to graduate school to help him change his job from tech sales to running a startup; instead he’s taking massive open online courses (MOOCs) to learn the IT skills necessary for that career move. Employers are receptive to hiring IT job candidates with MOOC educations, but education alone won’t result in a job offer. Projects that show how candidates who have used their tech skills are key.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9244648/IT_job_seekers_look_to_the_MOOC

By MARK ELLERS, Athens Banner-Herald

In restaurants the raucous protests of hungry toddlers are muted. On long car rides, threats to turn the car around forgotten. Capturing the attention of so many of these tykes, while providing their moms and dads respites, are mobile applications, more commonly referred to as an apps. Apps for GPS-guided directions and online banking are helpful tools to get through the day. In recent years, though, more parents are turning over their tablets and smart phones to entertain and educate their children.

http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2013-12-08/mobile-apps-useful-learning-tools-within-limits

By AMNA H. HASHMI, Harvard Crimson

In its first explicit attempt to attract high school students, edX will collaborate with College Board and Davidson College professors to create online mini-courses in calculus, physics, and macroeconomics based on difficult topics in the Advanced Placement curriculum. Davidson professors will analyze data from College Board to create the courses. EdX, the virtual learning platform founded over a year ago by Harvard and MIT, will provide the technological tools to make these courses available to high school students, who constitute five to ten percent of its learners. “The College Board has a huge amount of data on AP scores, so Davidson scholars looked at the data and said where [students are] having the most difficulty on exams,” said edX President Anant Agarwal.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/9/edX-supplement-high-school/

by Jorge Camil Starr, Huffington Post

Despite significant progress and the implementation of widespread reforms in Latin America to improve the access, quality and management of its educational systems, countries in the region are ranked among the lowest performing in the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results. When regions of the world are compared in terms of long run economic growth, Latin America ranks at the bottom along with Sub-Saharan Africa. Stanford University Senior Fellow Eric Hanushek argues that slow economic growth is directly related to the poor quality of education plaguing school systems and suggests that the long-term growth prospects would improve significantly if this were to change.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jorge-camil-starr/the-tech-trends-most-likely-to-transform-how-latin-american-learn_b_4408923.html

by Karen and Kathy, Blooms Digital Web Tools

This site is created by two dedicated teachers who have identified apps and tools that can be applied at the various levels of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Many resources are collected at this site.

https://sites.google.com/site/bloomsdigitalwebtool/home

by Best Colleges Online

$400 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on universities.  The $400 billion represents: more than the annual revenues of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter combined. Every educational institution wants a piece of that pie. Meantime, more than 10 million people are estimated to have enrolled in at least one MOOC. Check out this infographic for some relevant factoids.

http://www.bestcollegesonline.org/moocs/

by Vinton Cerf, Project-Syndicate

Once students are online, there is no limit to what they can do with the vast amount of information available to them or how they will collaborate with and learn from one another. Imagine students in Malaysia working with students around the world on a weather project. They could conduct virtual experiments, work simultaneously to update data in a spreadsheet or document, and create a shared final presentation. Where desktop or laptop computers are not widely available, students might use smartphones or tablets to augment their learning. For example, they could turn to sophisticated mobile biology apps that let them interact with a 3D version of a cell, or polling apps that they could use to conduct a psychology experiment.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/vint-cerf-goes-inside-the-online-revolution-in-education

By Sasha Zients, Duke Chronicle

Even as online courses move forward at Duke, some faculty members still have misgivings. At the Arts and Sciences Council’s last meeting of 2013, Chair Thomas Robisheaux, Fred W. Schaffer professor of history, opened up the floor to members to express their views on the University’s venture into online education.  Though some professors—including those already teaching online classes—see the benefits, others feel pressured to incorporate online elements. Faculty concurred, however, on the idea that online education needed to be better defined. “We need to know what we’re talking about—what these things look like and how they are framed in order to have these kinds of discussions,” said Cary Moskovitz, director of writing in the disciplines for the Thompson Writing Program.

http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2013/12/06/online-edu-still-garnering-mixed-responses-arts-and-sciences-council

by Harvard Magazine

Reporting to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at length for the first time since he was appointed vice provost for advances in learning last September, Peter K. Bol highlighted shifts in the landscape for the much-publicized massive open online courses (MOOCs). At the December 3 faculty meeting, Bol noted that:

• People who register for free MOOCs, like those offered on edX, differ from conventional students, and are not using them like conventional courses.
• Students enrolled in higher-education institutions seem disinclined to take advantage of not-for-credit MOOCs.
• Faculty members are increasingly interested in using edX technology to produce “modules”—short units covering a single subject, background information, a problem set, or elements of a larger course—rather than entire courses, which entail an enormous investment of their time and energy.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/12/harvard-mit-online-education-views-changing

By PATRICIA KITCHEN, Newsday

There’s help online for professionals on Long Island who are looking for tools to boost their career prospects. An increasingly popular batch of free or low-cost on-demand Web platforms, some with mobile apps for learning on the go, are helping people develop skills to stay relevant and employable, learn the ins and outs of setting up a blog or a business, or find ways to manage time and energy more effectively. These resources — with names like creativeLIVE, Skillshare, Udemy and Coursera — offer training in anything from Twitter basics to Rock Poster Design to Statistical Molecular Thermal Dynamics, right along with essential computer-age skills such as how to use the ubiquitous spreadsheet program Excel.

http://www.newsday.com/classifieds/jobs/online-educational-tools-help-boost-career-prospects-1.6556410

By KATELYN GAGNON, Concordia Monitor

It’s impossible for me to get through my day without using some form of technology, whether it is school-based or purely for entertainment purposes. I wake up to the alarm on my phone, open my computer to read the news and check my email to see if my professors have sent out anything pertaining to class that day. Almost all of the work submitted to my professors is online, meaning that having a laptop is an essential part of my life as a college student. It’s what I use for homework, research, shopping and job hunting. The only thing I don’t use my computer for is taking notes in class. Having the internet at my fingertips during lecture proves to be very distracting. There’s a lot of technology my generation takes for granted, but one thing I know I’ll never take for granted is my Kindle e-reader. Not only do I have access to my favorite books at the touch of a button, but I’m able to purchase several of my textbooks at less than half the cost of buying the actual book. What more can a college student ask?

http://www.concordmonitor.com/home/9504031-95/my-turn-online-all-the-time

BY BRIAN SHUSTER, Wired

Virtual worlds promise to deliver the best aspects of both real-world classrooms and online distance learning into a single platform. With tools that provide avatars that represent the educators and the students, voice and video capabilities, powerpoint and other collaborative whiteboard technologies and group and private messaging chat, educators are finding that the newest generation of virtual worlds can simplify the lecture and presentation process, allow students to ask/answers questions to their teacher or each other (without interrupting the lecture), socialize and learn in a very streamlined manner. All of this is done with the convenience and cost efficiency of distance learning.

http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/12/virtual-reality-and-learning-the-newest-landscape-for-higher-education/

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Interactive whiteboards are a great classroom tool. Many teachers use them to project and capture images – basically as a high tech, connected chalkboard. While definitely useful in these ways, the handy infographic below describes using your interactive white board that way as letting it go ‘underused’. So how do you ensure that this great piece of classroom technology isn’t underused? The graphic below outlines eight different ways to ‘exploit the pedagogical potential’ of this tool. Whether a whiteboard is a new tool to you or you’re looking to use yours in different ways, keep reading to find some new ideas!

http://www.edudemic.com/power-of-interactive-whiteboard/