EdSurge has recommended this video by Education Elements (a blended learning consulting company) for its clear explanation of blended learning, which is, for many of us, a fuzzy concept. I have to agree it’s a good introduction, especially because the video ends with four models that seem to be emerging in the field (that’s where things are at their fuzziest).
Watch Blended Learning Explained.
Image Source: video still
Justin Reich’s recent article that asserts OER might increase the achievement gap, even as it raises the performance of all students, has sparked a new debate thread in the community. This article anticipates his forthcoming empirical research publication on the different uses of wikis within different learning environments, rich and poor. The article’s strength is found not only in the pause for concern it gives to ed tech utopianism, but also for its recommendations for more inclusive ed tech interventions. Of interest, too, is Tom Vander Ark’s response (posted at his Getting Smarter blog), which suggests focusing that we focus instead on the potential for improving all student opportunities and performance–encouraging teachers, cities and states, in supporting and growing this potential–even if the rich may be benefited more significantly than the poor.
by Justin Reich / Educational Technology Debate / 8 December 2011
Basically, I think there are two visions for free and Open educational resources and technology, that can be summarized by these two figures.
Scenario #1: Closing Gaps
In the left figure, we have the “closing gaps” vision. In this vision, everyone benefits from new educational technologies, but low-income students disproportionately benefit. The hope here is that as the ecology of education is flooded with new free and nearly free resources, low-income students will have access to resources previously only available to students in schools in affluent places. [...]
Scenario #2: Rising Tide
In the right figure, we have the “rising tide” vision. In this model, everyone still benefits, but now the wealthy disproportionately benefit. From a John Rawls framework, this is still a good thing–everyone is better off than before–but the opportunity gap between wealthy and poor has expanded.
Image Source: article (Reich)
The factors Michael Staton details as game changers in educational technology are as much economic as technical. Infusions of new venture capital, as well as the promise of increased educator buy-in and expanded markets, are increasing competition and diversification. The gains are not restricted to ed tech aimed at higher education, either, although that is Staton’s focus in this piece.
by Michael Staton / Mashable Tech / 21 December 2011
In 2011, entrepreneurs and startup activity sprouted up everywhere. Not coincidentally, the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Austin, Portland and every college town from Abilene to Gainesville is fostering young, eager minds. The millennial generation is proving it can create companies — and thus, jobs — that solve real problems.
Trends like these are quickly impacting how young people relate to and absorb education. These days, higher education is a dynamic and increasingly digital environment — and some are questioning the relevance of the traditional educational institution at all. Here’s a look at some of the big changes in tech and funding that have shaped education in 2011.
Image Source: article
Today’s students are digital natives. Some have argued that the very concept of a ‘digital native’ is classist, since not all children have regular and broad access to technology, or can be assumed to gain technical facility effortlessly, via high-tech cultural osmosis. Others make a case for the ubiquity of interactive and social media, and how these are inevitably, inexorably changing our learners, ourselves.
by Sarah Cunnane / Times Higher Education / 15 December 2011
Students currently going through the higher education system are part of a “net generation” who expect instant feedback because of their heavy reliance on mobile phones, social media and video games, a conference has heard.
Arlene J. Nicholas, an assistant professor in the department of business studies and economics at Salve Regina University in New England, spoke at the Society for Research into Higher Education conference, held in Wales last week, giving findings from her research on learning methods among 100 students at a small private university.
She told delegates that the current generation of US students – defined as those born between 1981 and 2000 – were the most diverse, with a third defined as non-white or Latino. But they are also the most demanding, Dr Nicholas claimed. “This multimedia generation seems to expect multiple methods to learn,” she said.
Image Source: stock.xchng
Reports on charter school success have been mixed, and so have reports on the effectiveness of education technologies when considered across the board. Yet, spending is up and profits are too.
Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools
by Stephanie Saul / New York Times / 12 December 2011
Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third
Lance Murphey for The New York Times
do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.
By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.
Image Source: NYT article
The author of the column excerpted below, Meeta Sengupta, “currently runs an enterprise that supports various projects across the sector including Words and More (writing by children), a knowledge sharing platform for educators and supports self –organised efforts of the educators in Higher Education as part of her role as chairperson of the North India chapter of the Higher Education Forum. She is also Fellow, Geopolitics at the Takshashila Institution.”
Technology enabled Learning Systems
by Meeta Sengupta / Times of India: EduCable blog / 14 December 2011
Technology has apparently transformed the classroom into a more interactive engaging environment. Both
in India and abroad, the more progressive schools seek to engage with learning tools powered by multimedia. The debate on ICT [information communications technologies] for Education has been wide ranging and passionately fought over the years, with naysayers bringing data to prove that educational attainments do not improve while supporters claim that access, achievement and engagement are higher if such tools are used.
[...]
Thus learning becomes interactive, a bit competitive and uses a wider range of resources than the teacher could have accessed alone. Online, when on twitter, I have said hello to classes in Finland, New Zealand and Canada and talked about my country. Even for poorer sections of society, I have received assignments on email – a free service provided to learners in many countries. Web based seminars and Open source resources all depend on availability and access to multimedia connected resources.
Classrooms in India too are becoming more complex, especially those in richer schools that can afford to invest in the technology.
Image Source: stock.xchng
Although this op-ed addresses parents, urging them to become more involved in their children’s education, it may also inspire us as education professionals to consider what we can do to better encourage this involvement. Do we stick with tried and true methods already used? What new methods can we try? I wonder especially how educational technologies can help us to improve our rates of success. Educational social media and web accessible learning applications seem to offer yet another potential-filled point of entry for parents into their students’ school lives.
How About Better Parents?
by Thomas L Friedman, op-ed columnist / New York Times / 19 November 2011
I[n] recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s
achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.
How do we know? [...]
Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the three main findings of its study:
“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”
Image Source: stock.xchng
As more and more resources and aids in college academic libraries go digital, secondary education is faced with increased demands to prepare students for using the libraries of the future, now. Here are some of the latest statistics about college-based academic libraries, according to a recent NCES study:
• Academic libraries held approximately 158.7 million e-books and about 1.8 million electronic reference sources and aggregation services at the end of F
Y 2010.
• Academic libraries spent approximately $152.4 million for electronic books, serial backfiles, and other materials in FY 2010. Expenditures for electronic current serial subscriptions totaled about $1.2 billion.
• During FY 2010, some 72 percent of academic libraries reported that they supported virtual reference services.
Article Source: Academic Libraries: 2010 (“summarizes services, staff, collections, and expenditures of academic libraries in 2- and 4-year, degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the 50 states and the District of Columbia”)
Image Source: stock.xchng (New York Public Library)
Advocates of standardized tests as a primary measure of student learning claim that the test of essential competencies that prepare students for college and careers. Without standardized tests to ensure that students meet minimal standards for competencies in reading and math, we are doing them a disservice. But are standardized tests really getting at essential competencies? The experience of one successful adult suggests this continues to be a valid question.
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids
by Marion Bradley / Washington Post / 5 December 2011
A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and
reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.
By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.
He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
Image Source: stock.xchnge
Journalist John Bohannon takes up how new social media and internet technologies are changing the learning landscape.
by John Bohannon / Online Educa Berlin / 9 September 2011
John Bohannon
Nowadays we use the Internet as an extension of our brains. If we wish to find out the name of the actor we have just seen in a movie we google it on our computer or smartphone. We can look up the recipe of a dish or re-read a newspaper article we liked at any time online. But this way of accessing information “in the cloud” is changing the way we process and store information. We no longer try very hard to recall facts, and students are now better able to remember how to find information than the actual information itself.
What are the implications of this for teaching and learning? John Bohannon, a Boston-based journalist for Science magazine and visiting researcher at Harvard University will examine this question in his keynote speech at OEB 2011.
Image Source: article
A claim now sometimes made is that mathematics is the new lingua franca of the scientific world, at least in pursuit of new knowledge. I’m skeptical that such a claim for coding can be made for scientific or any other knowledge communities (since coding is more akin to an underlying syntax than to overt semantic expression), the calls for all fields of knowledge to express themselves through a concretizing means via technology, and to render some dimensions of their disciplines interactive and experiential, is persuasive.
And perhaps the ability to realize this brave new intellectual world should trickle down in the same way that traditional scholarly praxis has been hoped to do with undergraduate students, the ability to research, design, and make competent arguments about different domains of knowledge being assumed as an important competency among the generally educated. There is, of course, a continuum of competencies, rather than a single competency, which is at stake, both in the traditional cognitive and discursive skill sets and in the technological skill sets evoked here and elsewhere.
Coding is supposed to be a threshold where, once crossed, transforms consumers into makers, who can go from limited off the shelf end users to designs and implementers of ideas. As is the case with the more established hallmarks of general education skill sets, however, to code or not to code is not merely the question. Technical literacy goes much beyond coding, as does the technical imagination and how it operates within contemporary culture. Every technical shop in which I’ve worked has made a distinction between a coder and a developer, between a developer and a designer, between a designer and an innovator with the ability to envision new uses for existing technologies and new technologies for needs old and new.
So while coding may not be the new Latin, technological literacy (into which I lump analytical thinking, statistical and other mathematical competency, a grasp of physics and electronics, hardware options, software methods and more) and the ability to apply that literacy through forms of technological expression make a good deal of sense for students now and tomorrow.
by Rory Cellan-Jones / BBC News Technology Correspondent / 28 November 2011
The campaign to boost the teaching of computer skills – particularly coding – in schools is gathering force.
Today the likes of Google, Microsoft and other leading technology names will lend their support to the case made to the government earlier this year in a report called Next Gen. It argued that the UK could be a global hub for the video games and special effects industries – but only if its education system got its act together.
The statistics on the numbers going to university to study computing make sobering reading. In 2003 around 16,500 students applied to UCAS for places on computer science courses.
By 2007 that had fallen to just 10,600, and although it’s recovered a little to 13,600 last year, that’s at a time in major growth in overall applications, so the percentage of students looking to study the subject has fallen from 5% to 3%. What’s more, computing science’s reputation as a geeky male subject has been reinforced, with the percentage of male applicants rising over the period from 84% to 87%.
Image Source: stock.xchng
