Searching for "digital learning"
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-12-18-pearson-ceo-john-fallon-to-retire-in-2020
Digital education assets were not spared, either. That same year, Pearson also sold PowerSchool, one the most widely used student information system in K-12 schools and districts today. (my note: about LMS, including PowerSchool, pls watch this animation: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/12/22/bar-chart-race-lms/)
At the time, Fallon said PowerSchool was “an administrative system rather than a tool for learning, teaching or assessment,” and which did not jibe with Pearson’s transformation strategy.
The company offered a similar reason for selling its U.S. K-12 courseware assets, which Fallon described as “textbook-led” and one that “does not fit in with our digital transformation strategy.”
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more on Pearson in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=pearson
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-10-31-virtual-reality-experiences-can-be-violent-and-intrusive-they-need-an-artist-s-touch
Blended Reality, a cross-curricular applied research program through which they create interactive experiences using virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D printing tools. Yale is one of about 20 colleges participating in the HP/Educause Campus of the Future project investigating the use of this technology in higher education.
Interdisciplinary student and professor teams at Yale have developed projects that include using motion capture and artificial intelligence to generate dance choreography, converting museum exhibits into detailed digital replicas, and making an app that uses augmented reality to simulate injuries on the mannequins medical students use for training.
The perspectives and skills of art and humanities students have been critical to the success of these efforts, says Justin Berry, faculty member at the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media and principal investigator for the HP Blended Reality grant.
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more on VR in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
McMindfulness: how capitalism hijacked the Buddhist teaching of mindfulness
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/mcmindfulness-and-the-case-for-small-talk-1.5369984/mcmindfulness-how-capitalism-hijacked-the-buddhist-teaching-of-mindfulness-1.5369991
On McMindfulness
dthic
quote the former Buddhist monk Clark Strand here. This was in a review of your work. “None of us dreamed that mindfulness would become so popular or even lucrative, much less that it would be used as a way to keep millions of us sleeping soundly through some of the worst cultural excesses in human history, all while fooling us into thinking we were awake and quiet.”
corporate mindfulness programs are now quite popular. And as we all know, most employees these days are extremely stressed out. The Gallup poll that came out about four or five years ago said that corporations — and this is in the U.S. — are losing approximately 300 billion dollars a year from stress-related absences and seven out of ten employees report being disengaged from their work.
The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions rather than launching kind of a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large. That sort of dialogue, that sort of inquiry, is not happening.
An integrity bubble is where there is a small oasis within a corporation – for example let’s take Google because that’s a great example of it.
You have a small group of engineers who are getting individual level benefits from corporate mindfulness training. They’re learning how to de-stress. Google engineers [are] working 60-70 hours a week – very stressful. So they’re getting individual level benefits while not questioning the digital distraction technologies [that] Google engineers are actually trying to work on. Those issues are not taken into account in a kind of mindful way.
So you become mindful, to become more productive, to produce technologies of mass distraction, which is quite an irony in many ways. A sad irony actually.
mindfulness could be revolutionized in a way that does not denigrate the therapeutic benefits of self-care, but it becomes interdependent with these causes and conditions of suffering which go beyond just individuals.
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more on mindfulness in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindfulness
How to Give Your Students Better Feedback With Technology ADVICE GUIDE
y Holly Fiock and Heather Garcia
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191108-Advice-Feedback
students continue to report dissatisfaction with the feedback they get on assignments and tests — calling it vague, discouraging, and/or late.
The use of technology in the classroom (both in face-to-face and online environments)
- Rubrics: online scoring guides to evaluate students’ work.
- Annotations: notes or comments added digitally to essays and other assignments.
- Audio: a sound file of your voice giving feedback on students’ work.
- Video: a recorded file of you offering feedback either as a “talking head,” a screencast, or a mix of both.
- Peer review: online systems in which students review one another’s work.
Two main types of feedback — formative and summative — work together in that process but have different purposes. Formative feedback occurs during the learning process and is used to monitor progress. Summative feedback happens at the end of a lesson or a unit and is used to evaluate the achievement of the learning outcomes.
Good feedback should be: Frequent, Specific, Balanced, Timely
guide on inclusive teaching, frequent, low-stakes assessments are an inclusive teaching practice.
Time-Saving Approaches: rubrics and peer-reviews.
When to Use Audio or Video Tools for Feedback: personalize your feedback, convey nuance, demonstrate a process, avoid miscommunication
Faculty interest in classroom innovation is on the rise. Professors are trying all sorts of new techniques to improve the first few minutes of class, to make their teaching more engaging, to hold better class discussions. Buzzwords like active learning, authentic assessment, technology integration, and case-based learning are more and more a part of faculty discussions.
Don’t assume technology will solve every problem.
Avoid making long videos
Video and audio feedback doesn’t have to be perfect.
There is such a thing as too much information.
Have a plan.
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more on feedback in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=feedback
Positioning the Academic Library within the Institution: A Literature Review
John Cox, Galway, Ireland, May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2018.1466342
Higher education institutions are experiencing radical change, driven by greater accountability, stronger competition, and increased internationalization. They prioritize student success, competitive research, and global reputation. This has significant implications for library strategy, space, structures, partnerships, and identity. Strategic responses include refocusing from collections to users, reorganizing teams and roles, developing partnerships, and demonstrating value. Emphasis on student success and researcher productivity has generated learning commons buildings, converged service models, research data management services, digital scholarship engagement, and rebranding as partners. Repositioning is challenging, with the library no longer perceived as the heart of the campus but institutional leadership often holding traditional perceptions of its role.
My note: 17 years after, and several generations after (Millennials, Gen Z) the observations still hold
Singer, M. (2002, February 13). Teaching the MTV Learner. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Teaching-the-MTV-Learner/46241
Britney Spears does have more appeal than most quadratic equations. With thousands of dollars of high-tech digital engineering spent on every word uttered, or in this case, sung, how can the typical college professor compete?
“In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears-and that is our problem.” ― Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/304461-in-china-today-bill-gates-is-britney-spears-in-america
MTV Learners are seeking warp-speed answers to their life issues. They want to know: “What does this information (your course) have to do with me (self-actualization)?” and “What does this information (your course) have to do with my career (my choice of vocation)?”
Be democratic, not autocratic. Instead of management by fiat, try taking regular opinion polls and surveys of your students to determine the specific methods of teaching your course.
Try to eliminate the lecture-test, lecture-test, lecture-test format and substitute other learning models that accentuate the choices of the MTV Learner. Focus on the quality of your syllabus as a giant “master operating agreement” that presents the learning objectives of your course and related policies in a manner that is as clear and as easy to understand as possible. Without sounding too litigious on your syllabus, present the consequences of missed absences, overdue work, incomplete assignments, and the like.
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/48902/digital-note-taking-strategies-that-deepen-student-thinking
Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) “The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard” as well as Carter, Greenberg and Walker’s (2016) “Effect of Computer Usage on Academic Performance.” claim that students in lecture-style courses perform worse on assessments when allowed to use devices for note taking.
However, none of these studies question the teaching methods used in the classes themselves or whether teachers are recognizing the power of digital devices for students to create, share, connect and discover information.
Digital Organization and Content Curation
Much like students understand the concept of binders, notebooks and notes in the physical world, they need a similar system in the digital one. Whether working with dividers and subjects in a tool like Notability or sections and pages in OneNote, students need to build vocabulary to support how they house their learning.
Tagging this way not only helps students stay organized, but it could also help them to examine trends across courses or even semesters.
As a doctoral student, I use OneNote. First, I create a new digital notebook each year. Inside that, I add sections for each term as well as my different courses. Finally, my notes get organized into individual pages within the sections. When I can recall the precise location where I put a particular set of notes, I navigate directly to that page. However, on the numerous occasions when an author, vocabulary term or concept seems familiar but I cannot recall the precise moment when I took notes, then the search function becomes critical.
Multimodal Notes
With most tools (Notability, OneNote, Evernote, etc.), students can not only capture typed and handwritten notes but also incorporate photos, audio and even video. These versatile capabilities allow students to customize their note taking process to meet their learning needs. Consider these possibilities:
- Students may take notes on paper, add photos of those papers into a digital notebook, synthesize their thinking with audio or written notes, and then tag their digital notes for later retrieval.
- Students might use audio syncing — a feature that records audio and then digitally syncs it with whatever the student writes or types — to capture the context of the class discussion or lecture. When reviewing their notes, students could click or tap on their notes and then jump directly to that point in the audio recording.
- Teachers might provide students with their presentation slides or other note taking guides as PDF files. Now, students can focus on taking notes — using any modality — for synthesis, elaboration, reflection or analysis rather than in an attempt to capture content verbatim.
In 1949, neuropsychologist Donald Hebb famously wrote, “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
Concept Mapping
One of the powerful components of digital note taking is that the pages never end, and a full page isn’t an artificial barrier to limit thinking. Students can work on an infinitely expanding canvas to include as much information as they need. For example, concept mapping tools such as Coggle or Padlet allow students to create networks of ideas using text, links, images and even video without ever running out of room. (my note to John Eller – can we renew our 201-2013 discussion about pen vs computer concept mapping?)
Visible Thinking Routines
Visible Thinking routines, sets of questions designed by researchers at Harvard’s Project Zero, encourage thinking and support student inquiry.
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more on note taking in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=note+taking
https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5155654/IT-Issues-2020?sguid=60122224
what i find most important:
Future IT Workforce: Deploying a broad array of modern recruitment, retention, and employment practices to develop a resilient IT talent pipeline for the institution
Digital Integrations: Ensuring system interoperability, scalability, and extensibility, as well as data integrity, security, standards, and governance, across multiple applications and platforms
Engaged Learning: Incorporating technologies that enable students to create content and engage in active learning in course curricula
Student Retention and Completion: Developing the capabilities and systems to incorporate artificial intelligence into student services to provide personalized, timely support
Administrative Simplification: Applying user-centered design, process improvement, and system reengineering to reduce redundant or unnecessary efforts and improve end-user experiences
Improved Enrollment: Using technology, data, and analytics to develop an inclusive and financially sustainable enrollment strategy to serve more and new learners by personalizing recruitment, enrollment, and learning experiences
Workforce of the Future: Using technology to develop curriculum, content, and learning experiences that prepare students for the evolving workforce
Holistic Student Success: Applying technology and data, including artificial intelligence, to understand and address the numerous contributors to student success, from finances to health and wellness to academic performance and degree planning (my note: this is what Christine Waisner, Mark Gill and Plamen Miltenoff are trying to do with their VR research)
Improved Teaching: Strengthening engagement among faculty, technologists, and researchers to achieve the true and expanding potential of technology to improve teaching
Student-Centric Higher Education: Creating a student-services ecosystem to support the entire student life cycle, from prospecting to enrollment, learning, job placement, alumni engagement, and continuing education
https://www.wired.com/story/digital-textbooks-radical-transformation/
Pearson “digital first” strategy.
My note: see our postings
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/07/09/pearson-selling-us-k12-business/
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/04/19/change-in-the-k12-sector/
It also enables Pearson to staunch the bleeding caused by an explosion in the second-hand market. A company called Chegg launched the first major online textbook rental service in 2007; Amazon followed suit in 2012. Both advertise savings of up to 90 percent off the sticker price.
But more technology doesn’t always mean better results. Within K-12 learning environments, the digital divide means that students in low-income and rural households have less access to reliable internet and fewer connected deviceson which to complete the online portions of their homework. And while Pearson’s initiative applies only to textbooks in higher ed, the shift to digital has implications at the collegiate level as well.
Just as traditional software has a thriving open source community, textbooks have Open Educational Resources, complete textbooks that typically come free of charge digitally, or for a small fee—enough to cover the printing—in hard copy. And while it’s not an entirely new concept, OER has gained momentum in recent years, particularly as support has picked up at an institutional level, rather than on a course by course basis. According to a 2018 Babson College survey, faculty awareness of OER jumped from 34 percent to 46 percent since 2015.
One of OER’s leading proponents is OpenStax, a nonprofit based out of Rice University that offers a few dozen free textbooks, covering everything from AP Biology to Principles of Accounting. In the 2019–2020 academic year, 2.7 million students across 6,600 institutions used an OpenStax product instead of a for-profit equivalent.
The knock against OER is that, well, you get what you pay for. “One faculty member told me only half-jokingly, that OER is like a puppy that’s free. You get the free puppy, but then you have to do all the work,” says Cengage’s Hansen, who argues that traditional publishers provide critical supporting materials, like assessment questions, that OER often lacks, and can push more regular updates.
By virtue of being free, OER materials also heavily skew toward digital, with hardcover as a secondary option. (Or you can download the PDF and print it out yourself.) The same caveats about efficacy apply. But at least OER doesn’t lock you into one digital platform, the way the major publishers do. OpenStax alone counts around 50 ecosystem partners to provide homework and testing support.
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Or you could always split the difference.
That’s the territory Cengage wants to stake out. Late last summer, the educational publishing behemoth—it announced a planned merger with McGraw Hill in May; the combined company would surpass all but Pearson in market capitalization—rolled out Cengage Unlimited, a “Netflix for Textbooks” model that rolls all textbook rentals and digital platform access into a single rate: $120 for a semester, $180 for a full year, or $240 for two years. Almost a year in, the US-only program has a million subscribers.
My note: more about Cengage and McGraw Hill in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/06/22/textbook-model/
this added Sept 13, 2019:
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more on textbooks in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=textbooks
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-07-12-microcredentials-could-be-a-game-changer-for-educators-but-hard-questions-remain
According to the authors of a newly published report, at least 10 state education agencies—Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Washington—have launched official microcredential pilots. And another five states—Illinois, Maryland, Montana, New York, and Wyoming—are experimenting with microcredentials in some way.
sponsored by the non-profit Digital Promise, the report argues that we’ve reached a kind of tipping point in the evolution of the “emerging micro-credentialing ecosystem,”
Reports from early adopters (among them, the NEA, the country’s largest teachers’ union) have been promising, and the potential market for such programs is potentially huge. According to Digital Promise, nearly three out of four U.S. teachers are currently engaged in some type of informal professional development or learning.
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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredent