The library cooperative OCLC recently ran a conference at the University of Pennsylvania for academic librarians entitled, “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?” and the Chronicle of HIgher Education was there to report on this convening. In this article, the Chronicle points to one librarian from Duke University who mentioned that the popularity of MOOCs has caught people by surprise. Additionally, “She’s been hearing from instructors that ‘the…
A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age
January 24, 2013EdSurge discusses a Bill of Rights and Principles, newly developed by a group of people passionate about learning, serving today’s students, and using every available tool to respond better to the needs of students in a global, interactive, digitally connected world....
Digital Content: What Does the Future Hold for Education Systems?
January 23, 2013GETideas.org hosted this GooglePlus hangout on the future of digital content. The online discussion featured a panel of education experts, including Nicole Allen, affordable-textbooks advocate, Student PIRGS; Una Daly, communication college outreach director, OpenCourseWare Consortium; and Cable Green, director of global...
Explaining Inequalities in School Achievement: A Realist Analysis
January 22, 2013In Explaining Inequalities in School Achievement, author Roy Nash argues that a realist framework for the sociological explanation of educational group differences can, and must be, constructed. A move to such an explanatory framework will allow society to take into account the...
Education 3.0: Seven Steps to Better Schools
January 14, 2013In Education 3.0: Seven Steps to Better Schools, renowned educator and technology expert Jim Lengel provides a refreshing and hopeful picture of what schools should look like, including a groundbreaking seven-step process for envisioning and building them that draws on the...
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April 25, 2013GETideas.org is the incubator where education leaders can develop their professional learning networks. This community provides tools, research, and inspiration to help transform learning institutions. The primary goal of GETideas.org is to bring people together to exchange ideas towards solving education challenges. During the last few months, GETideas.org has been specifically exploring four themes particularly relevant to today’s school leaders. These themes have been: -The Cultivation of Leadership-The Design of…
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April 11, 2013DMLcentral has published another useful blog post; this time from the Mozilla Foundation’s Doug Belshaw. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation has been busy developing an open badging system that allows people to get recognition for skills learned in formal and informal learning environments. According to the Open Badges web site, “It’s free software and an open technical standard any organization can use to create, issue and…
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April 9, 2013The New York Times reports on a new tool that may help publishers and educators gain insight into the reading habits of college students. Silicon Valley-based CourseSmart tracks data points such as skipped pages, neglecting not to highlight key passages in the text, lack of note taking and how many times a digital textbook has been opened. Using this data, CourseSmart creates “an engagement index” for individual students. The theory…
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March 3, 2013Check out this playlist of talks from the 2012 Big Ideas Fest and among these videos, you will find one from Karen Cator, former head of the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology. Have we reached “education’s Internet moment”? Cator elaborates on four themes that are driving education right now: Mobility, Social Interactions for Learning, Digital Content and Big Data. These trends will help us make many more…
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March 3, 2013The state of Idaho in the United States is partnering with the Khan Academy to pilot the use of its instructional videos in classrooms. A grant from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation will pay for training, technology, technical assistance and assessment. The Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at Northwest Nazarene University will support implementation of the Khan Academy program and will conduct research focused on using the videos to improve math…
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March 2, 2013In another great blog post from KQED’s Mind/Shift blog, tips are given on using and creating open educational resources. These tips are gleaned from a presentation at Educon 2.5 by Funny Monkey Founder, Bill Fitzgerald, who thinks, “… educators are focusing too heavily on acquiring content, rather than contributing and improving to it…”. As teachers and students become content curators as well as creators, it’s essential that they understand basic concepts…
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February 8, 2013For the past 10 years, the New Media Consortium has been the global leader in documenting new and emerging trends for higher education, K12 institutions, and museums. Through a series of reports generated by the NMC and international advisory boards of thought leaders, tools and trends are identified in across three adoption benchmarks, or horizons. For this year’s higher education report issued in conjunction with Educause, six emerging technologies are…
