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.

dissatisfaction with curricula offered by commercial providers

OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.

taking advantage of free, "open source" textbooks.

Unlike many of my peers, I do think that there are direct and relevant connections between efforts by progressive students to regulate content Look: I have already said more about trigger warnings than I want to. I will simply note that every trigger warning necessarily contains ideological presumptions and political baggage. Someone I know said “I don’t want to ban American Sniper on campus, but I do want it to carry a trigger warning as war propaganda and Islamaphobia.” That trigger warning preempts the very critical conversation that we should be having about it! It’s a classic “when did you stop beating your wife?” tactic. It’s tautological; it presumes precisely the issue in question. Clint Eastwood, who made the damn movie, called it an antiwar film. I disagree with him; I quite despised it, actually, and for political reasons most of all. But I don’t pretend that my opinion on this question amounts to proof positive. Every trigger warning ever devised makes presumptions about the nature of trauma, the treatment of PTSD, and which kinds of content are potentially offensive. You would think that a bunch of close-reading academics would recognize that.

Flexibility

Shared information

So, rather than an exploration of a work in which instructor and student collaborate on meaning-making, Education Genius maintains a hierarchical divide between teacher and learner.

The TLA components align with 4 key concepts: experience tracking, learner profiles, content brokering and understanding, and competency networks.

The Training and Learning Architecture (TLA) encompasses a set of standardized Web service specifications and Open Source Software (OSS) designed to create a rich environment for connected training and learning.

The student account option provides a greater privacy for the user

Teacher Console, where the teacher can create and manage student accounts, with student email addresses being optional)

what labor, whose labor is saved, is replaced in this, an age of economic precarity, adjunct-ification, anti-unionism, automation?

“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”

All available evidence suggests that over 60% of new Ph.D.s in science in the United States will not have careers in academic research, yet graduate training in science has followed the same basic format for almost 100 years, heavily focused on producing academic researchers.

the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free

Slentz, Kristine

Krogh, Suzanne

Teachers Know Best is a multi-year research effort to better understand how teachers use digital instructional tools and how these tools can be improved to foster personalized learning.

to interact and collaborate with others.

Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources,

The focus on "decoding" should send shivers down the spine of every English teacher who has ever had a student demand they just tell them what the poem means.

he greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.

I first discovered the power of collaborative annotation

Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

words and phrases

PRINT THIS PAGE

including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

Read closely

If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears. To solve the problem of college completion, you first need to get inside the mind of a college student.

For our purposes as educators, Hypothesis is an easy-to-use tool for collaboratively studying web resources.

SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle. FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO BERNARDO Who's there? FRANCISCO Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

Mission: Build an entry level (under $500) EDM machine for making carbide/HSS tooling and/or lead screws.

The computer science taught in colleges still focusses more on theory than on commercial application; the business of teaching practical coding skills has the whiff of trade school. So-called coding “boot camps,” such as General Assembly, founded in 2010, are trying to fill the gap, teaching crash courses in how to design Web sites and write code. But Jake Schwartz, the co-founder and C.E.O. of General Assembly, told me, “There’s simply not enough senior people in the system.”

Britain’s Coalition government is rushing through an anti-terrorism bill that would require universities to take action to stop students and staff from being drawn into terrorist activity. According to Home Secretary Theresa May, this would require higher education institutions to ban extremists from speaking on campus.

If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.

The federal government already spends enough on student aid to cover tuition for every public college student in America. Maybe it's time to try.

Audrey Watters, hackeducation.com Education APIs: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I wish I had not known the wretched-ness of wasting so much of my youth in this way. I wish that the scholars of rhetoric and dialectic would heed my advice and would sometimes think of the truth and usefulness of their subjects instead of tenaciously and obstinately quarreling over matters which they have naively accepted at a first hearing, without ever giving them proper consideration

the rules which are laid down in the art of oratory could not have been observed, and noted, and reduced to system, if they had not first had their birth in the genius of orators

For it is because they are eloquent that they exemplify these rules; it is not that they use them in order to be eloquent.

For even the art of grammar, which teaches correctness of speech, need not be learnt by boys, if they have the advantage of growing up and living among men who speak correctly.

But the other sort of speakers call that force which ought rather to be called violence.

But there are some things concerning this point that very naturally deceive the unskilful; for division, though it is of great consequence in pleadings, diminishes the appearance of strength; what is rough is imagined more bulky than what is polished; and objects when scattered are thought more numerous than when they are ranged in order.