If, at the dawn of the web, I was to take a list of things the web would bring about and show them to a researcher, they might disagree on the level of interest people would have in things (what’s with the cat pictures, spaceman?) but there’d be little there to surprise them except for one item: the most used reference work in the world will be collaboratively maintained by a group of anonymous and pseudonymous volunteers as part of a self-organizing network.

Here’s the basic idea — slow & measured reform is often a web of unfortunate compromises, but its protection of the status quo generally preserves business regulation, at least at some level. Because this is unacceptable to business interests, business needs to create a crisis or scale up an existing crisis. It needs to make the status quo malfunction to the point where there is supposedly “nothing left to lose”. With the system reduced, supposedly, to rubble, economic interests can move in to “solve” the problem — if the public will only place its faith in them, and abandon their old public institutions and outdated business regulations.

In other words, the solution isn’t to turn away from public funding for higher education. Rather, taxpayers should take some of the money they’ve been inefficiently sending to the for-profit sector, and channel it toward America’s underfunded public higher education system. There, the emphasis should be on emulating some of the flexibility of the for-profit sector while offering the quality of non-profit schools. That should boost graduation rates and employment prospects, and result in taxpayers getting stiffed a lot less in the future.

Asking What Students Spend on Textbooks Is the Wrong Question

Convinced that big undergraduate lectures are ineffectual, Wieman long ago ditched those big performances in favor of getting students to problem-solve. He gets them actively engaged with course material, working in smaller groups. The techniques have become known as an evidence-based, "active learning" style of teaching.

The University of New Hampshire Open Educational Resources Ambassador Pilot

Those with the highest degree of functional literacy aren’t necessarily those with the highest social status.

The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory

Love in pedagogical work is an orientation. It’s a commitment to the personhood of learners, to their intersectionality, to their deep emotional backgrounds, to the authenticity of their lives. It is a decision to commit first to the community of learners and second to the material we’ve come to teach.

not to provide citizens with jobs. That's the role of the economy.

The product of education should be effective citizenship that is enacted out in the open

After the 2007-2008 financial crisis in the United States, a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets are seeing education — and educational technology – as growth areas. Resistance by students, parents and educators to high-stakes standardized testing and the Common Core State Standards confronted them with a temporary setback, but now they are poised to make an end run around the Opt Out movement by concentrating on “personalized learning” which requires a huge investment in computerization of classrooms as well as software. Along with this remaking of schooling, the powers that be plan a data-based reinvention of teacher education that will require the closing, or reinvention of colleges of teacher education. If these plans go through, a majority of the nation’s teachers and teacher educators could lose their jobs in the next 10 years, replaced by people who will largely be temp workers making little more than minimum wage. This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky thinking. It is happening in higher education with the switch to adjunct labor. I fear it is about to sweep through our public schools with the force of a juggernaut.

Open data

Open Learning

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

open annotation.

True personalized learning calls for a "rethinking and redesign" of schools, which could require them to overhaul classroom structures and schedules, curricula, and the instructional approaches of teachers, Mr. Calkins of EDUCAUSE argued. For instance, in an effective personalized learning model, teachers' roles are more like those of coaches or facilitators than "content providers," he said.

"Technology can help provide students with more choices on how they're going to learn a lesson," Ms. Patrick said. "[It] empowers teachers in personalizing learning" and "empowers students through their own exercise of choice."

It reminds me of the New Math of the 1960s, which fashioned mathematics in a dramatically more abstract, more analytic way than before. And if Johnny Can’t Add with the new math, maybe Jenny Won’t Code with an overly abstract presentation of computing. Papert points us in the opposite direction

One striking comment follows a couple of pages later, where the phrase “computer-aided instruction” evokes in Papert the unappealing idea that “the computer is being used to program the child” — his vision, of course, is that the child must program the computer.

In 1980, Seymour Papert published the book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas” [2]. Papert was co-director, under Marvin Minsky, of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1967 to 1981. Previously, he had worked with Jean Piaget in Geneva. Piaget was a developmental psychologist best known for pioneering the learning theory known as constructivism: simply put, that learners construct new knowledge (in their minds) from the interaction of their experiences with previous knowledge. Papert, in turn, developed the theory of constructionism, adding the notion that learning is enhanced when the learner is engaged in “constructing a meaningful product.”

Credentalism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity. Over the past 40 years, professions that never required a college degree began demanding it. "The United States has become the most rigidly credentialised society in the world," write James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield in their 2005 book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. "A BA is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four."

Inquiry Learning Vs. Standardized Content: Can They Coexist?

What do we know about sharing?

Framing our Open EdTech project

We don’t know if content will be interoperable – that is, usable beyond the Amazon (Kindle) ecosystem – or if there’ll be integration with other software systems.

With more than 18 million downloads to date, Minecraft is the best-selling computer game of all time; the game’s free-form structure has made it popular with kids and adults alike. But little by little, teachers, parents, and students have discovered that the game can be used for educational purposes, too.

We have an obligation to help all students become the best they can be, according to each one’s unique constitution of abilities and interests.

It is safe to say that the most limited member of the populace has potentialities which do not now reveal themselves and which will not reveal themselves till we convert education by and for mediocrity into an education by and for individuality.

It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

An Open Education Reader

“ Whatever happened to Instructional Technology? ”. With this publication , he highlighted a nd attempted to explain the persistent failure of ICT to penetrate the world of higher education, despite several decades of effort and massive inve stment (Geoghegan, 1994)

One of the founders of Games Workshop, who helped revamp the computing curriculum, is to open 2 new free schools specialising in computer science, technology and the arts, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan announced today (5 February 2016) as she revealed the latest batch of this Parliament’s 500 new schools. Drawing on his experience as a videogame entrepreneur, Ian Livingstone will open the Livingstone Academies in Tower Hamlets and Bournemouth, which will provide over 3,000 children with a rigorous education rooted in STEAM - science, technology, engineering, arts and maths.

improve the educational ecosystems in underserved communities.

the latest teaching and learning technology and pedagogical innovations that have the potential to scale quality across the world.

educators and business leaders are increasingly recognizing that CS is a “new basic” skill necessary for economic opportunity. The President referenced his Computer Science for All Initiative, which provides $4 billion in funding for states and $100 million directly for districts in his upcoming budget; and invests more than $135 million beginning this year by the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service to support and train CS teachers.

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

Job functionOther,Marketing

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

societies which continue their commitment to, compulsory, universal schooling insists on a frustrating and ever more insidious enterprise of multiplying dropouts and cripples

inevitably, to academics working as part of a team

Dweck’s message is that we can’t just adopt a growth mindset and forget about it, and simply praising effort regardless of actual progress is completely counterproductive. Successfully cultivating a growth mindset is an ongoing process that consists of teaching strategies for growth and praising effort thoughtfully, rather than regardlessly.

learning “in the wild”

Moreover, the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery is itself a form of experiential learning, indeed a kind of metaexperiential learning that vividly and concretely teaches the experience of networks themselves.

massive advances in Open Educational Resources

The whole organic nature of learning experience through the #walkmyworld learning events meant that I learned what I needed to learn as I needed to learn it. It wasn’t a top down dictate of learning outcomes because the outcomes were determined by the process. It is a revolutionary concept — yet as ancient as Aristotle. Learning should never be measured solely by standard outcomes; people learn, and I mean really LEARN, when they discover for themselves what they know, what they want to know, and how they want to know it.

Over the years, I've challenged the notion of just having kids read on their own at school. (Or, maybe not so much challenged the notion as told people about the actual research findings on this topic which aren't so wonderful.) I’ve not been a friend to DEAR, SSR, SQUIRT, or similar schemes that set aside daily amounts of time for self selected reading in the classroom.              Most studies don’t find much pay off for this kind of reading—either in reading achievement or motivation to read. There are many better things to do if your goal is to encourage reading than to just tell kids to go read on their own (a directive that sounds a lot like, “go away and leave me alone").

Here’s what the Finns, who don’t begin formal reading instruction until around age 7, have to say about preparing preschoolers to read: “The basis for the beginnings of literacy is that children have heard and listened … They have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed [things] with them … They have asked questions and received answers.”

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

Imagine if we could actively facilitate conversations between college-bound high school students and professionals in the fields in which they believe they want to enter. Wouldn’t this have the potential to dramatically increase a student’s understanding of the industry before they commit an exorbitant amount of time and money towards it?

“The key is deliberate practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.”

But my favorite part was the “get ahead” part of this answer. Because, to me, it demonstrates how Clinton — as a Presidential candidate — thinks about public education in America. Education is a scarce resource that helps some poor kids individually “get ahead,” but only if they demonstrate talent and ambition. Educating the poor is not a thing Clinton believes benefits the nation, it’s just a thing that individual kids can do to enrich themselves.

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.

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

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

purchasable à la carte

no research

Universities bundle services like mad

perfect storm of bundling

only unbundling health clubs suffer

Unbundling has played out in almost every media industry.

consumer choice will inevitably force them to unbundle.

Yes, my intention was to show the most easily replaced in dark and move it to the least easily replaced.

customers become less willing to pay

In every industry, the early successful products and services often have an interdependent architecture—meaning that they tend to be proprietary and bundled.

course design is more important than the LMS

It is possible to achieve a more humane and personal education at scale

To combat this trend, a broad movement is underway to raise the performance level of American students, driven primarily by the adoption of the Common Core State Standards by most states and the District of Columbia.

policies aligned with college- and career-ready academic standards

increase the number of college graduates in STEM fields

Active Learning

group-based discussions

Standards based learning and “rigorous” testing are not going to be successful in elementary school, unless your goal is to get children to hate education at a very early age.

Elementary school should be about exploration, and exposure to vast amounts of very well-written books. Writing should be an opportunity to capture observations and imagination in a tangible form. Elementary education should include learning about history through storytelling, art, and music.

alliance of Moodle service providers that currently collaborate on Moodle-related projects of mutual interest

In open education we have generally focused on the rights that individuals have to remix content, while not providing or using publishing tools that make it easy to fork content in ways that make sense to non-programming communities. Wikity attempts to apply the tools and logic of forking to WordPress, the world's most popular web content platform. Content published in Wikity is easily forked to new sites while maintaining an attribution trail and keeping track of past versions.

If we look back to the beginnings of the university in ancient Greece, there was a struggle even then against a new technology – writing. Plato thought this new-fangled device would ‘implant forgetfulness in [men’s] souls’; it would destroy their memory. People in his day were taught to memorise thousands of lines of poetry and long speeches as part of rhetoric, the art of ‘enchanting the soul’. He thought writing was an artificial memory that would eat away at our natural skills.

Tertiary education must adapt to the technological changes that are occurring at the moment, from the way that courses are written and delivered to the way that students are assessed. This is not just because we will ‘lose’ students, but because what we teach will become irrelevant.

It’s a useful term if you work in marketing, PR or business development – but I think academics and media students should be more critical. The idea of Media Studies 2.0 is quite funny; is that where the students collaboratively write the course material and give the lectures to each other? Love it.

The goal of education is for the educator to become less and less needed for learners to learn.

jupyterhub Multi-user notebook for organizations with plugglable authentication and scalability. Documentation | Repo

Tools like Hypothesis are the future of education.

Encouraging students to curate their own content

if free textbooks or OER offer learners free access to good quality knowledge

Canada is unique in the world in that it is the only country whose national government has no authority in education;

How do you aid recent high school graduates while at the same time dealing with working adults who are coming back to school?

open access

Non-Traditional Students: The New Majority

Open Education Handbook 2014

creation of an OER culture among faculty

While the thinkers are arguing, textbook publishers are acting. With their traditional business models under pressure, they’ve begun to reinvent themselves as educational technology companies. They’re selling schools and colleges on a new generation of digital courseware—ALEKS is just one example—that takes on much of the work that teachers used to do. The software isn’t meant to replace teachers, they insist. Rather, it’s meant to free them to focus on the sort of high-level, conceptual instruction that only a human can provide.

Justin Reich argues in a blog post for Education Week, computers “are good at assessing the kinds of things—quantitative things, computational things—that computers are good at doing. Which is to say that they are good at assessing things that we no longer need humans to do anymore.” The implication is that adaptive software might prove effective at training children to pass standardized tests. But it won’t teach them the underlying skills that they’ll need to tackle complex, real-world problems. And it won’t prepare them for a future in which rote jobs are increasingly automated.

But the collaboration between university and for-profit startup raised some troubling questions about just who owned all the data that flowed from students’ use of the software—and what they might ultimately do with it. Knewton’s Ferreira says he envisions a future in which students’ educational records added up to much more than a series of letter grades that make up traditional transcripts. By tracking everything they read, every problem they solve, every concept they master, Knewton could compile a “psychometric profile” on each student that includes not only what she learned but how readily she learned it, and at what sorts of problem-solving she struggled and exceled. That sort of data could be of great interest to admission committees and employers. It could also, in theory, erode the privacy that has traditionally surrounded young people’s schoolwork.

“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”

They found that, more than any particular type of activity, achieving flow was determined by the mix of challenge and support teachers provide: Engagement was high when students were appropriately challenged by complex goals and high teacher expectations but also supported through positive interactions with their teacher.

They found that students were most engaged in school while taking tests, doing individual work, and doing group work, and less so when listening to lectures or watching videos. In addition, the students were most engaged and reported being in a better mood when they felt that their activities were under their own control and relevant to their lives. The researchers conclude that teachers can encourage more flow in their classrooms through lessons that offer choice, are connected to students’ goals, and provide both challenges and opportunities for success that are appropriate to students’ level of skill.

But one place where we might not find too much flow these days, sadly, is in American schools. For years, the learning conditions in classrooms have been practically antithetical to the conditions people need to achieve flow and all the benefits that come with it. Especially in the era of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing, schools have often favored regimentation over self-directed learning, making it harder for students to get deeply engaged with topics that interest them. Paradoxically, these trends might be undermining the kind of student achievement they were designed to promote, and could even be causing student burnout.

The positive response to the program was almost immediate. “In one classroom, the children went from having the most behavioral problems in the school—as measured by number of visits to the principal’s office—to having zero behavioral problems, after only two to three weeks of instruction,” says Schonert-Reichl.

Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge. Why should students be limited to a textbook that was printed two years ago, and maybe designed 10 years ago, when they could have access to the world's best and most up-to-date textbook?

He gave the example of digital textbooks which can be updated as an example of how online technology could be better than traditional methods.

Still, it’s reasonably certain that in the late eleventh century a group of students in Bologna got together and decided to pool their resources—financial, intellectual, and spiritual—in order to learn.