By Hedda. During the upcoming week, we will put focus on the main outcomes of a recently completed project on higher education in the Western Balkans called “European integration in higher education and research in the Western Balkans“. See more...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences, June - December, 2014
Clayton R. Wright, Stephen's Web.
Clayton R. Wright has distributed his seminal calendar of education technology related events once again, as usual in MS-Word format. As he explains, "A Word or an OpenOffice format is used to enable people with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference abstracts or proceedings." Click here to download. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mini-Lectures Using Learning Objects: Bosch's The Haywain (1516)
Susan Smith Nash, E-Learning Queen.
Janet Clarey comments, "I love this for its simplicity." It is a set of mini-lessons offered by Susan Smith Nash, each one small and self-contained, using learning objects the way (I think) they were intended to be used. She writes, "Animated learning objects that bring together images, audio, and interaction are a perfect place to engage students. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Contemporary Privacy Theory Contributions to Learning Analytics
Jennifer Heath, Journal of Learning Analytics.
According to the abstract, "This paper provides an overview of privacy and considers the potential contribution contemporary privacy theories can make to learning analytics." I personally consider privacy one of the key issues in learning analytics; anyone can mine a big set of data, but how do you do what when you need permission from each person before continuing? More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Mesh Networks of People
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog.
I think that the more you get out and talk with people the more you find these deep mesh networks of people around domains, ideas, disciplines and hobbies. As Alan Levine says, "connections I make, not just PLNing or linking online, just by talking and listening… are gold." More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conceptual Connections, once again
Matthias Melcher, x28’s new Blog.
Concepts can form networks, says Matthias Melcher. "Words can change each other’s subtle nuances, for example when a newer word gradually displaces an older one from a certain meaning, while the older word slowly shifts its connotations, just by being used differently." I don't inherently disagree with this. I was pretty careful in my statement to allow for non-causal changes of state: "can cause or result in..." - and the purpose was precisely allow that networks could be formed by non-physical entities. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Understanding and learning outcomes.
Gardner Campbell examines "the seemingly endless fascination with 'learning outcomes'" and the ingenious idea that "teachers should think about what they believe should happen in the student as a result of the class." But this, he says, leads toward a behaviourist paradigm and away from "the cognitivist turn" that has characterized education in recent years. It leads toward 'specific knowledge'. "Two of the words we must never, ever use are 'understand' and 'appreciate.'" - we are told that these are vague words, when (as Chronicle blogger Robert Talbert says) we should specific words to describe outcomes. More...
By Phil Hill. The Instructional Technology Council (ITC), an affiliated council of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), has conducted a distance education survey since 2004 focusing on online education trends among community colleges in the US and Canada. With this focus, the member colleges tend to be those with a stronger interest in online education programs and therefore are more progressive in technology usage than the general community college population. One part of the ITC survey is on general LMS usage at member schools, and this provides another source of data on the higher ed LMS market. Read more...
By Cathy Davidson. Today's Chronicle of Higher Education includes a very interesting article on a new program by a former MIT prof that generates syntactically complex and grammatically correct yet nonsensical "babel" in order to test automated machine-grading tools. The babel-filled but gramatically correct essay gets read by a popular machine-grading device and scores 5.4 out of 6 ... http://chronicle.com/article/Writing-Instructor-Skeptical/146211/
What do we make of this Fight Fire With Fire fable? Is it like MOOCs? Decry the beast, rage against the machine, and then go back to business as usual? Or is there something interesting to learn here? More...
By Cathy Davidson. It is the greatest imaginable honor to be able to open HASTAC’s first international conference outside North America. It looks as if we will be welcoming over 400 people from over fifteen countries to “Hemispheric Pathways: Critical Makers in International Networks.“ To be here in the beautiful, historic city of Lima, Peru, with so many new and exciting things happening, is truly a pleasure and an honor. We are ready for four days of ideas and making, creating and experimenting, designing and exploring around technology, learning, policy, science, the environment, language and culture, all the grand challenges facing our world today. Diversity is our motto this conference program. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
