By Audrey Watters. As part of his graduate work, B. F. Skinner invented what’s now known as “the Skinner Box.” His “operant conditioning chamber” was used to study and to train animals to perform certain tasks. Do the task correctly; get a reward (namely food).
Skinner was hardly the first to use animals in psychological experiments that sought to understand how the learning process works. More...

By Audrey Watters. Here are the notes and the slides from my talk today with Justin Reich's HGSE class "The Future of Learning at Scale." Between the jetlag (I got home from England late last night) and the fact that I've got way more to say about teaching machines than can fit into a 20 minutes talk, I'm not sure I was super coherent. But the students had great questions at the end (I've storified some of their tweets). More...

By Cathy Davidson. Punchline:  On higher education:  "Most of the apparatus of our higher educational system was developed between 1865 and 1925, for the industrial era of the telegraph and the Model T. We now live in a world where anyone who has an idea can communicate that to anyone else with an Internet connection--without an editor, without a pause button. We have astonishing new capacities . . . and a very old educational system. Here are easy, simple ways we can improve it. Today." More...

Sugata Mitra’s famous hole in the wall project is the most famous example of this. Other examples such as the Open University or Khan Academy seem to favour equality. Anyone can now watch the greatest Harvard lecturers. However, accessing these resources depends on having a computer, and having the motivation to log on. If we don’t want to favour the rich and well-educated, we should give hardware and software for free. This is more than low cost, this is no cost. More...

Allgemein wird unter M-Learning bzw. mobilem Lernen, abgeleitet vom Begriff des E-Learning, das Lernen mit mobilen Endgeräten wie Tablets oder Smartphones verstanden. Diese Geräte erlauben über einen Internetzugang potentiell überall und zu jeder Zeit Informationen, digitalisieret Artefakte und Dokumente abzurufen (Kulturzugang) sowie eigene Inhalte zu produzieren, zu veröffentlichen und mit anderen zu teilen bzw. zu kommunizieren. More...