Blog posts

When it comes to online games, women over 40 play the most often and spend the greatest number of hours doing so, even beating out teenage boys, according to a study conducted by Digital Marketing Services.

When students know that anyone in the school with an Internet connection – or around the world, for that matter – can read what they have written or created, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking improves, not to mention the final product.

It is not whether we can meet the same learning outcomes <br> with technology, but how do we use the technologies to enrich the experience, to go beyond what can be done in the face-to-face or other delivery environment.

<li>Create guided tours of websites</li> <li>Display a list of houses or other products to clients</li> <li>Bundle education resources or research data </li> <li>Make shows of favorite places when visiting or traveling</li> <li>Create briefings or tutorials and tours on virtually any subject</li> <li>Present a whole series of news stories on a topic to digg or del.icio.us and others for scrutiny </li> <li>Interactively submit "collections" of stories and data</li>

If I were writing a manifesto for 21st century teaching and learning, one of the items would be, “The 21st Century classroom does not teach writing — it teaches communication.”&nbsp;&nbsp;

Oh, I can hardly bear to go on… in fact I can’t, so I’ll finish here, except to say that that such an interesting overview of a slice of ed tech history has rarely, if ever, been followed by such a reactionary, limited and incomplete ivory-towered, condescending and ill-informed argument (if you can call it that).

"The creativity it brings to all of us is remarkable," said Schlachter, who teaches fourth- and fifth-graders at St. Catherine of Siena School. "I'm teaching in a totally different way as a result."

Heck, as an absolute amateur in everything I do I've noticed that, in this day and age, being expert is not about getting more and more knowledgeable about a narrower and narrower field. It's all about being as clued up on the reasoning behind a wider and wider range of fields. Expertise has been redefined. It's just that academics like Keen have trouble swallowing it. There, folks, is the real digital divide.

For several years, many of us have been trying to make a case for thinking about education in new ways, largely as a result of technological advancements and their affects on how we use information.&nbsp; I think that many education leaders are listening now.&nbsp; I think that they are ready for clear images and stories about 21st century classrooms and what teachers and students should be doing to better prepare a generation of new century citizens.

I almost lost it when I read, in Cheryl Oats’ comment, “<em>..someone told me they didn’t want to learn one more new thing, they didn’t like new things..</em>“&nbsp; I would want to ask, “You call yourself a teacher?”&nbsp; Who more than teachers should be willing and eager to learn new things?

But if it isn't the tools, is it the process? Is RA simply the dropping of ADDIE in favour of quickly reiterated prototypes or indeed of making it up off the top of your head and getting it out there same day? If that's the case why are we saying it needs instructional design?

A problem with the PLE, VLE, CMS etc - is they imply separate entities; whereas the SLE paints a picture of using the tools most suitable for the job, from both the user and institutional prospective, then working together and sharing across boundaries - surely a worthy goal?

Equally, and perhaps more importantly, the PLE concept focuses on the individual learner. All well and good, but the concept (or perhaps just the name) doesn’t give great emphasis to the fact that individuals contribute to the learning of others. Whilst PLEs clearly accept the importance of the networks learners establish in supporting their own learning, there’s also the significant fact that the very nature of the emerging technologies that support PLEs also play a huge role in allowing each learner to help others learn – the community nurturing learning and giving rise to an almost greater conciousness that helps support, develop and nourish learning amongst all the community participants.

At this point I’m not completely sure whether I’m introducing a new concept here or simply posting a plea for help but it does strike me that there’s a wider entity beyond the PLE and VLE – the idea of sharing learning – helping others in a mutually supportive community to foster learning and encourage participation – to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts – <strong>a shared learning environment</strong>.

<p>We compute the reputation of Wikipedia authors according to how long their contributions last in the Wikipedia. Specifically, authors whose contributions are preserved, or built-upon, gain reputation; authors whose contributions are undone lose reputation. </p> <p>We call this a <em>content-driven</em> reputation, since the reputation is computed automatically via text analysis. This contrasts with other reputation systems, such as those in use at <a class="external" href="http://www.ebay.com"><img src="http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/wiki/modern/img/moin-www.png" alt="[WWW]" height="11" width="11"> Ebay</a>, where buyer and seller reputations are computed on the basis of user-provided ratings.</p>