I was reading Stephen Downes‘ article on the Future of Online Learning, and ran into a paragraph that hit home more than the rest, about the marketplace for course content.
…Today, much of the value derived from the learning marketplace is based on an artificially imposed scarcity – a scarcity of seats in classrooms, a scarcity of credentialing agencies, and a scarcity of educational publications, for example.
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Loading...Over at BoingBoing Cory Doctorow points us to a 3-year multi-million-dollar research effort to discern what the youth of America are doing online, and whether it is good for them or not. 
Two-pager, White paper, Book: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (download), Digital Youth homepage…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...In a recent report by Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb we discover Howard Rheingold has been busy making the Social Media Classroom. This may have a significant effect on Moodle, another open-source project for a CMS (Classroom Management System).…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...New York Times has an article about the best of online professors. Now that many universities are making their lectures available online for free, sometimes directly and sometimes through services like iTunesU, the next logical step is to separate the wheat from the chaff.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...In linguistincs and psychology we talk about the cognitive load of any task. A task that requires calculation or analysis has a larger cognitive load. A task in a foreign language, or using an unfamiliar tool, like a computer, also increases cognitive load.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing pointed me to this NY Times article Ambient Awareness, the effects of the Facebook and Twitter on culture and psychology. A great read. Combined with my reading for cck08, more than 200 pages, I’m glad today is Sunday.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...One of the blogs I read (I think it was Robin Good’s) sent me to cck08, an open online class in Connectivism. I’ve been curious about this concept of distributed knowledge and its use in learning and education. It is coming at just the right time.…
(No Ratings Yet)Loading...Did you see the article last week in the Chicago Tribune about changing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to a standard that would measure student progress each year rather than demand that all students meet the same standards?
The article includes a quote that says “There are things that get in the way of learning that schools have no control over.”…
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