ctslearning

We are born with what some psychologists call an “explanatory drive.” You give a baby a strange object or something that doesn’t make sense and she will become instantly absorbed; using all her abilities — taste, smell, force — to figure out how it fits in with the world. I recently met someone who, though in his seventh decade, still seems to be gripped by this sort of compulsive curiosity. His name is Philip Leakey. ... Some people center their lives around money or status or community or service to God, but this seems to be a learning-centered life, where little bits of practical knowledge are the daily currency, where the main vocation is to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen. Some people specialize, and certainly the modern economy encourages that. But there are still people, even if only out in the African wilderness, with a wandering curiosity, alighting on every interesting part of their environment. The late Richard Holbrooke used to give the essential piece of advice for a question-driven life: Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.

Before the invention of the printing press, Mazur said, lecturing was an effective way to impart information to many people simultaneously. But with the ability to mass-produce books—and especially now, with video clips that can be viewed online—information transfer can take place effectively outside of school, leaving valuable class time to ensure that students understand the material and can apply it in various contexts. That’s what a growing number of educators are doing by adopting an inverted, or “flipped,” model of instruction, in which students are exposed to the content for homework and then practice or apply it under the guidance of the instructor—and Mazur explained how he does this in the physics classes he teaches at Harvard, with very effective results, through peer instruction.

Sign up for the e-newsletter of the 21st Century Fluency Project and you'll be  designated a "sardine"; here's the definition and explanation provided:

In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. ... But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

[S]ending everyone to college is simply misguided. With one out of two kids not finishing four-year colleges, and community college completion rates as low as 25 or 30 percent (no one has precise numbers), I have come to think that the "college for all" movement is a self-destructive fantasy - and I am a college professor. Americans hate the idea of educational tracking, and I'm not proposing is a system that would give teachers and administrators all the power to determine a teenager's educational trajectory. But right now the only tracks are "college" or "bust." We need to provide alternative pathways for high school students, including those that would mix classroom learning with apprenticeship and applied-skill training.

I just listened to this webinar on free tools for online education. Here are the three products the speaker recommended and demonstrated:

Jing

Camtasia Studio

Elluminate Live

No big new insights on them, just a how-to and run-through. In the chat forum I plugged one of my favorite apps, Screencast-o-matic.com . Here's what I said:

Jing is pretty good, but I prefer Screencast-o-matic.com . It's even more user-friendly than Jing, has a 15 min limit (60min for Pro), you can embed your webcam, it highlights your mouse as you move it, and you can upload to YouTube. (And it's also free.)

(Also see roundups here and here of screencasting tools, mostly free.) The webinar was held on Elluminate Live; I noticed it really slowed up my computer and I got kicked off a few times. This might be a downside for distance learning students.

Citation

I’ve argued before that Apple is good at producing great user interfaces thanks to its top-down, designer-centric product development process. But that approach becomes a liability for building scalable network services. For those kinds of tasks, Google’s bottom-up, engineer-driven organizational structure works better. A good way to visualize this is by thinking of a computing platform as a funnel.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

It's high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead. For one thing, Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

from Teaching Theology and Religion via Butler University Commons:

One factor contributing to success in online education is the creation of a safe and vibrant virtual community and sustained, lively engagement with that community of learners. In order to create and engage such a community instructors must pay special attention to the relationship between technology and pedagogy, specifically in terms of issues such as course design, social presence, specially tailored assignments, learner expectations, and objectives, and facilitation of sustained engagement with the course material, fellow learners, and the instructor. Several strategies for accomplishing this goal are presented here based on the author's experiences teaching second-career students in hybrid introductory theology courses at a mainline denominational seminary.

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Citation

Today’s workforce is expected to be highly educated and to continually improve skills and acquire new ones by engaging in lifelong learning. E-learning, here defined as learning and teaching online through network technologies, is arguably one of the most powerful responses to the growing need for education. Some researchers have expressed concern about the learning outcomes for e-learners, but a review of 355 comparative studies reveals no significant difference in learning outcomes, commonly measured as grades or exam results, between traditional and e-learning modes of delivery.

Education technology has many supporters in its movement to alter traditional teaching methods. This list of the top 50 education technology blogs includes writers, technicians and social media experts…but they all are teachers. The “movers” are teachers who facilitate learning among other teachers and in the classroom, the “shakers” teach new philosophies and innovations, and the folks “on the ground” offer news, tools and methods of using those tools in the classroom. This list is divided into those three categories, and each link within those categories is listed alphabetically. The links lead straight to the recently updated blogs, and the descriptions supply information about that blogger’s achievements, including careers and jobs.

A common myth I hear about online education is that it is inherently lower quality than classroom education. It's true that many online education programs are poor quality (and it's true that many residential education programs are poor quality), but it's not true that the online environment is an obstacle to good learning. In fact, a U.S. Department of Education study says the opposite. In a 2010 study entitled “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning:  A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies”—a composite review of existing studies of the outcomes of online learning—the DOE concluded:

"Students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction."

"Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction."

"Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed than in those studies where online learners worked independently."

"The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types."