Educational Technology

Posted by Reality

The swift pace of change in the business and corporate world means that organisations should challenge themselves to think strategically in order to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. This is where continuous learning fits in. Knowledge today is somewhat transient; it changes and evolves with time. Continuous learning seeks to address this challenge by encouraging students to consistently update their skill set. This is also vital for career growth and is seen as a tool to empower employees who may see new opportunities opened to them. There are two perspectives on continuous learning – that of the employee and that of the employer. Continuous learning is used by employees to improve their current, or future, employment prospects and by employers as a way of improving their organisational performance. In many respects, it’s an objective that serves a dual purpose.

http://www.reality.co.za/articles/continuous-learning-the-way-of-the-future/

by Debbie Morrison, Online Learning Insights

Is there value in studying Socrates? Some suggest we should ditch the study of Humanities altogether, others are supportive, some just plain indifferent and scholars like Stanley Fish suggest that the study of humanities has no intrinsic value at all…. As the announcements of new online learning ventures multiply, though exciting, I am concerned that the possibility of the fading emphasis of studying such works as Plato’s Cave, Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, and on and on we could go. What I am referring to is the study of humanities. I’m all for much needed reform – an accessible and relevant model for Higher Ed is needed, and I’ve written about promising initiatives recently. However, there appears to be an abundance of mathematics, and science topics within the open learning resources and open online universities, and it’s more than a little scant on the arts, history, literary studies and languages.

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/why-socrates-and-online-education-should-be-friends/

By Randy Wyrick, Vail Daily

In the middle of Teacher Appreciation Week, the school board Wednesday upheld a decision to lay off Nancy Bujnowski. The foreign-language teacher has spent her entire 21-year career at Eagle Valley High School. She’s four years from retirement. She and the district’s other two foreign-language teachers are all being replaced by a computer program, Aventa, for which students must pay at least $150 per semester, the district said. The board’s unanimous vote followed almost two dozen people — students and adults, alike — asking the school board to save Bujnowski and the other foreign language teachers, citing the importance of foreign language learning in an increasingly global economy. They pointed out that foreign-language classes are where students learn English-language grammar and syntax.

http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20120514/NEWS/120519908/1078&ParentProfile=1055

by the South Wales Evening Post

For those of us who were schooled before the turn of the century it will seem like something out of science fiction, but for pupils at one Swansea school it’s the future here today. Youngsters in Cila Primary School, Upper Killay, are at the forefront of education after discarding paper and pencils for state-of-the-art iPads. The handheld computer devices allow them to connect to the Internet and the classroom’s large high-tech white board, as well as downloading applications that more or less cater for every area of the curriculum.

The school’s IT coordinator, Katy Gregory, said: “Technology is ever changing and at Cila Primary School our aim is to ensure that our pupils have access to the growing multimedia world around them, enabling a successful transition into further education and the working world.”

http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/Tablets-learning-pupils-hands/story-16062218-detail/story.html

By Kyle Martin, Augusta Chronicle

Nancy Hunter once presided over a law library that took up half of the ninth floor of the Municipal Building and boasted thousands of volumes. Nancy Hunter has been clerk of the law library for 19 years. “It’s evolved into something different,” she said. Today, she directs attorneys to five computers and about 300 sets of bound volumes. The departure from three musty rooms adorned with portraits of judges to a box with beige carpet and harsh fluorescent lights has been tough. Hunter gave away some of the books to local attorneys before the move last year, but close to 70,000 volumes were shredded. There simply was no room and, in this digital age, no one who would buy them.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/crime-courts/2012-05-12/law-library-adapts-technology-after-move-new-building?v=1336874243

by the Marietta Times

By the time the 23 seniors in Waterford High School teacher Deana Dye’s sixth-period calculus class graduate, they will have three college math courses under their belts. “It’s been tough, but you know it’s going to be helpful, so that’s why we did it,” said Waterford senior Shane Kern. The year-long calculus class covers a trio of courses offered at Washington State Community College, where the students will also receive credit for their work. As the number of high school students taking courses at Washington State continues to increase, the amount of such “dual enrollment” classes offered on area high school campuses is set to double in the coming year.

http://www.newsandsentinel.com/page/content.detail/id/560978/Number-of–dual-enrollment–classes-double.html?nav=5061

by GREGORY FERENSTEIN, Techcrunch

Lectures are often the least educational aspect of college; I know, I’ve taught college seniors and witnessed how little students learn during their four years in higher education. So, while it’s noble that MIT and Harvard are opening their otherwise exclusive lecture content to the public with EdX, hanging a webcam inside of a classroom is a not a “revolution in education”. A revolution in education would be replacing lectures with the Khan Academy and dedicating class time to hands-on learning, which is exactly what Stanford’s medical school proposed last week. Stanford realizes that great education comes from being surrounded by inspiring peers, being coached by world-class thinkers, and spending time solving actual problems.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/move-over-harvard-and-mit-stanford-has-the-real-revolution-in-education/

By Tanya Roscorla, Converge

Brian Kibby, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education as as universities seek to make textbooks more affordable for students, they’re increasingly interested in digital content and adaptive learning. He says: “I was at a mid-tier state school about 6 or 8 weeks ago speaking to the school of business. And this is a school where it’s a good school, but it is not the University of Illinois, and it was not an affluent private school. So this is a school with largely working parents in a reasonably good business school. So at that school, 70 percent of the students in the business school had an e-reading device of some kind outside of a personal computer. At that point, were the vast majority of students using e-content of some kind? No. But — I think I may be in the minority here — I believe in less than 36 months, the idea of having a print product will be far from the norm on most college campuses across the country.”

http://www.convergemag.com/curriculum/QA-McGraw-Hill-Higher-Education.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Converge

More smartphones and tablets pop up on college campuses every year. And whether they’re personal or university devices, they contain information that shouldn’t be shared. U.S. residents were using nearly 96 million smartphones and PDAs through June 2011, a 57 percent increase from the previous year, according to a 2011 CTIA Wireless Association report. And they also lost mobile phones at a cost of approximately $30 billion last year, reports mobile security firm Lookout Labs, which located 9 million lost smartphones through its app.

http://www.convergemag.com/policy/Smartphone-Security-Campaign-Infiltrates-UC-Davis.html

By David Brooks, Houston Chronicle

Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007. But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures. John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.” What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Brooks-Higher-education-faces-wave-of-online-3535945.php

By Mike Elgan, Computerworld

It’s an election year, so you’re going to hear a lot about the “culture wars.” You know: The endless battle between conservative and progressive values. I want to discuss the culture wars too — but not the political culture wars. I’m talking about the technology culture wars, the endless conflict between, for lack of a better term, “geeks” — technical people who like to tinker with tech — and “noobs” — nontechnical people who want gadgets to “just work.” (These might be vaguely offensive terms to some. But I think they’re equally offensive to both groups. Gimme a break, there are no better labels than geeks and noobs.) Anyway, I believe that if you scratch the surface of many recurring online debates and differences of opinion — the PC vs. Mac, Android vs. iPhone and Google+ vs. Facebook conflicts, as well as arguments over issues like privacy — you’ll find that it’s often really a culture-war argument between geeks and noobs.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226884/Dispatch_from_the_technology_culture_wars

by Dave Thompson, WSLS

There are teenagers at E.C.Glass High School who eat lunch in the bathroom. The revelation gets looks of disbelief when Penelope Doss, the school’s resource officer, talks with students about bullying. Doss estimates cyberbullying affects about one in 10 students at the school. The estimate may be low, she said, but the impact on victims can be tremendous. “They can’t get through the school day without checking their phone to see if there’s another text,” she said. “They’re distracted, they can’t sleep and they’re sad. Their grades will fall … It’s never easy for a kid to hear, ‘You’re ugly,’ or ‘Everybody hates you,’ or ‘You should just go kill yourself.’” Text messages, along with Facebook, Twitter, online gaming and other websites, are popular forums for social interaction, but each has the potential to become a venue for the type of electronic aggression known as cyberbullying.

http://www2.wsls.com/news/2012/may/05/cyberbullying-impacts-many-half-area-teens-ar-1892627/

by Horace Dediu and Dan Benjamin, 5 by 5

Horace interviews his teacher Clay Christensen to discuss his new book, How Will You Measure Your Life. We discuss some of the concepts of learning, jobs to be done and approaches to self-disruption. We also cover what Clay is working on next in his writing and research. Lastly, we talk about what Apple should worry about in its disruptive journey.

http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/

by Logan James Ivey, Hack College

If you don’t know, Khan Academy is a free online educational website that consists of an amazing set of videos (over 3000) made by the amazing, Salman Khan. Khan uses a Wacom type of tablet and a headset to make videos to teach a variety of subjects. Khan Academy is mostly known for Khan’s mathematics and science videos but he also covers economics, art, history and more. Khan has made hundreds of videos for math including ones covering about every subject imaginable in algebra. The best thing about Khan Academy is that not only are there thousands of videos on multiple topics, but they are taught extremely well; he is definitely the teacher you dream of having in college. Khan explains more than just how to do problems, but actually gives you the intuition behind them. Khan Academy can be very a handy reource, and here are three good reasons to use it.

http://www.hackcollege.com/blog/2012/05/08/three-uses-for-khan-academy.html

by Ken Yeung, Bub.Blicio.us

The results are in…the Internet community has made their choice on who they think did a bang-up job promoting themselves online. New York City is set to be the place that everyone online is looking towards as the winners of the 16th annual Webby Awards are announced and awarded their prize. Established in 1996 during the web’s infancy by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the Webby Awards are probably among the most prestigious international awards out there that honor excellence on the Internet. Honor bestowed by the Academy means receiving accolades from among some of the best minds in the industry–web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries, creative celebrities, and other Internet professionals help make up the judging panel.

http://bub.blicio.us/webby-awards-2012-winners/

By Sharon Otts, Tampa Bay Times

A vast wealth of online learning tools is available to anyone — and it’s free. Educating yourself online may not give you that expensive sheepskin, but it will give you knowledge and won’t hurt your pocketbook. Here’s how to get started. You might begin your online search with the Khan Academy, which has a particularly interesting story. Its founder, Salman (Sal) Khan, an educator with an MBA from Harvard Business School and three degrees from MIT, began remotely tutoring his cousin Nadia in math and later extended his tutoring to other family members and friends.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/online-learning-sites-are-informative-fun-and-best-of-all-free/1228724

by Rachel Metz, Technology Review

When you learned about the Doppler Effect in high school physics class—the wave frequency shift that occurs when the source of the wave is moving, easily illustrated by a passing ambulance—you probably didn’t envision it helping control your computer one day. But that’s exactly what a group of researchers are doing at Microsoft Research, the software giant’s Redmond, Washington-based lab. Gesture control is becoming increasingly common and is even built into some TVs. While other motion-sensing technologies such as Microsoft’s own Kinect device use cameras to sense and interpret movement and gestures, SoundWave does this using only sound—thanks to the Doppler Effect, some clever software, and the built-in speakers and microphone on a laptop.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/40368/?p1=A1

By Lee Cowan, CBS NEWS

A Georgetown University study says 8 million jobs will be open in the math, science and technology fields by 2018. But the next generation of American workers will be unprepared, especially girls. CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan reports that one move to level the playing field is found at a school in Oregon. A class once dominated by boys, is now for girls only. The average high school woodshop is a landscape that is decidedly masculine. The ratio of boys to girls in one Oregon classroom near Portland is usually about 28 to 3. But a little later, the landscape shifts to a class where you won’t find a single boy in sight. “Just because we’re girls doesn’t mean that we can’t do the same thing, if not better than they do it, because we’re perfectionists more than they are,” said Milena Boscole, a junior.  This is the NBA — or the No Boys Allowed class — at Sherwood High School near Portland, Oregon.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57428787/all-girl-classes-can-help-in-math-sciences/

By Sebastian Anthony, Extreme Tech

Not one to be outdone by Disney’s any-surface touch interface, Microsoft Research, working with the University of Washington, has developed a Kinect-like system that uses your computer’s built-in microphone and speakers to provide object detection and gesture recognition, much in the same way that a submarine uses sonar. Called SoundWave, the new technology uses the Doppler effect to detect any movements and gestures in the proximity of a computer. The Doppler effect, if you remember high school physics, is where the frequency of a sound alters depending on your distance from it — the Doppler effect describes the change of a police car siren’s pitch as it moves towards you and then recedes into the distance. In the case of SoundWave, your computer’s built-in speaker is used to emit ultrasonic (18-22KHz) sound waves, which change frequency depending on where your hand (or body) is in relation to the computer.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/128735-microsoft-creates-kinect-like-system-using-your-laptops-built-in-speaker-microphone

by Steve Guttenberg, CNET news.com

NYU’s advanced audio production course is offered to both master’s and undergraduate students. They work in 10 recording and computer music studios, listening rooms, and research labs where more than 40 music technology courses are taught.  The night I attended the class, the students were preparing to record a large jazz band, with horns, piano, keyboards, electric guitar, bass, and drums. One of the students, Charles DeChants, currently works in a studio in Brooklyn; he hopes to eventually make records for a living. “That’s the dream, and that’s why I came out here, so I have to keep pushing,” he said.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-57428092-47/meet-the-next-generation-of-music-tech/?tag=mncol;txt

By Curt Hopkins, ars technica

Today, it is not unusual to see students armed to the teeth with laptops, web books, tablets and smart phones. Instead of merely recording the audio of a lecture, students can video it. They can also chat, read Pitchfork, post photos to Facebook and, time allowing, collaborate with their fellows on in-class projects in real-time. Students today have access to as much data from their portable devices as was in existence for the students of the first universities. “The students I’m teaching now,” one professor of the European history of ideas told Ars, “can get infinitely more information so much quicker than earlier classes ever could. But they are capable of doing less with it. They seem stunned in the face of analytical demands.” This intellectual alchemy is more difficult, he seemed to think, in an era with an emphasis on data and speed.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/05/future-u-classroom-tech.ars