March 28th 2017 archive

academic search engines

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning educatorstechnology.com · Dec 23, 2016

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/71072500350222752/

10 Great Academic Search Engines for Research Students

https://scholar.google.com/ | https://eric.ed.gov/ | http://www.virtuallrc.com/ | http://www.citeulike.org/ | http://jurn.org/  |   http://academic.research.microsoft.com/  | https://www.loc.gov/  |  https://www.refseek.com/  |  http://www.sciencedirect.com/  | https://www.academia.edu/  |  https://www.researchgate.net/

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more about research in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=research

fake news resources

Fake News: A Library Resource Round-Up

February 23, 2017 By  ALA Public Programs Office
http://www.programminglibrarian.org/articles/fake-news-library-round
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/218917231867987168
Evaluating Information,” ALA LibGuide
Fake News,” Indiana University East Campus Library

From
Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
(https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/)
Fact-Checking Organizations

There are many fact-checking sites outside the U.S. Here is a small sample.

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An Extremely Helpful List of Fake and Misleading News Sites to Watch Out For

By   

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/11/fake-facebook-news-sites-to-avoid.html

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/237776055306492834

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview

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UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-the-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/

Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.

It features sites such as Infowars.com, hosted by informal President Donald Trump adviser Alex Jones

There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com.

It isn’t a traditional left-right political axis, she found. There are right-wing sites like Danger & Play and left-wing sensationalizers such as The Free Thought Project. Some appear to be just trying to make money, while others are aggressively pushing political agendas.

The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism — deep suspicion of free trade, multinational business and global institutions.

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The News Literacy Project

http://www.thenewsliteracyproject.org/

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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news

fake news

Most students can’t tell fake news from real news, study shows

Posted by

Most students can’t tell fake news from real news, study shows

A Stanford study found that the majority of middle school students can’t tell the difference between real news and fake news. In fact, 82 percent couldn’t distinguish between a real news story on a website and a “sponsored content” post.

The WSJ: Of the 8,704 students studied (ranging in age from middle school to college level), four in ten high-school students believed that the region near Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was toxic after seeing an unsourced photo of deformed daisies coupled with a headline about the Japanese area. The photo, keep in mind, had no source or location attribution. Meanwhile, two out of every three middle-schoolers were fooled by an article on financial preparedness penned by a bank executive.

But with 62 percent of U.S. adults getting the majority of their news from social media, the responsibility for this issue also lies with the social media organizations themselves, such as Facebook and Twitter. Both Google and Facebook have made steps toward thwarting the fake news onslaught, including banning fake news organizations from their ad network.

Even in minuscule amounts, fake news has a much greater ability to spread quickly and be consumed by many given the nature of the salacious headlines themselves.

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more on fake news in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news

definition of blended learning

The Definition Of Blended Learning

January 18, 2013 http://www.teachthought.com/learning/blended-flipped-learning/the-definition-of-blended-learning/

the Sloan Consortium defined hybrid courses as those that “integrate online with traditional face-to-face class activities in a planned, pedagogically valuable manner.” Educators probably disagree on what qualifies as “pedagogically valuable,” but the essence is clear: Hybrid education uses online technology to not just supplement, but transform and improve the learning process.

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more on blended / hybrid learning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blended

digital learning

The Disruption of Digital Learning: Ten Things We Have Learned

Published on Featured in: Leadership & Management    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/disruption-digital-learning-ten-things-we-have-learned-josh-bersin

meetings with Chief Learning Officers, talent management leaders, and vendors of next generation learning tools.

The corporate L&D industry is over $140 billion in size, and it crosses over into the $300 billion marketplace for college degrees, professional development, and secondary education around the world.

Digital Learning does not mean learning on your phone, it means “bringing learning to where employees are.” In other words, this new era is not only a shift in tools, it’s a shift toward employee-centric design. Shifting from “instructional design” to “experience design” and using design thinking are key here.

evolution of L&D The Evolution of Corporate Training

1) The traditional LMS is no longer the center of corporate learning, and it’s starting to go away.

LMS platforms were designed around the traditional content model, using a 17 year old standard called SCORM. SCORM is a technology developed in the 1980s, originally intended to help companies like track training records from their CD-ROM based training programs.

the paradigm that we built was focused on the idea of a “course catalog,” an artifact that makes sense for formal education, but no longer feels relevant for much of our learning today.

not saying the $4 billion LMS market is dead, but the center or action has moved (ie. their cheese has been moved). Today’s LMS is much more of a compliance management system, serving as a platform for record-keeping, and this function can now be replaced by new technologies.

We have come from a world of CD ROMs to online courseware (early 2000s) to an explosion of video and instructional content (YouTube and MOOCs in the last five years), to a new world of always-on, machine-curated content of all shapes and sizes. The LMS, which was largely architected in the early 2000s, simply has not kept up effectively.

2) The emergence of the X-API makes everything we do part of learning.

In the days of SCORM (the technology developed by Boeing in the 1980s to track CD Roms) we could only really track what you did in a traditional or e-learning course. Today all these other activities are trackable using the X-API (also called Tin Can or the Experience API). So just like Google and Facebook can track your activities on websites and your browser can track your clicks on your PC or phone, the X-API lets products like the learning record store keep track of all your digital activities at work.

Evolution of Learning Technology Standards

3) As content grows in volume, it is falling into two categories: micro-learning and macro-learning.

MicroLearning vs. MacroLearning
Understanding Macro vs. Micro Learning

4) Work Has Changed, Driving The Need for Continuous Learning

Why is all the micro learning content so important? Quite simply because the way we work has radically changed. We spend an inordinate amount of time looking for information at work, and we are constantly bombarded by distractions, messages, and emails.

The Overwhelmed Employee
Too Much Time Searching

sEmployees spend 1% of their time learning

5) Spaced Learning Has Arrived

If we consider the new world of content (micro and macro), how do we build an architecture that teaches people what to use when? Can we make it easier and avoid all this searching?

“spaced learning.”

Neurological research has proved that we don’t learn well through “binge education” like a course. We learn by being exposed to new skills and ideas over time, with spacing and questioning in between. Studies have shown that students who cram for final exams lose much of their memory within a few weeks, yet students who learn slowly with continuous reinforcement can capture skills and knowledge for decades.

Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

Spaced Learning: Repetition, Spacing, Questioning

6) A New Learning Architecture Has Emerged: With New Vendors To Consider

One of the keys to digital learning is building a new learning architecture. This means using the LMS as a “player” but not the “center,” and looking at a range of new tools and systems to bring content together.
The New Learning Landscape

On the upper left is a relatively new breed of vendors, including companies like Degreed, EdCast, Pathgather, Jam, Fuse, and others, that serve as “learning experience” platforms. They aggregate, curate, and add intelligence to content, without specifically storing content or authoring in any way. In a sense they develop a “learning experience,” and they are all modeled after magazine-like interfaces that enables users to browse, read, consume, and rate content.

The second category the “program experience platforms” or “learning delivery systems.” These companies, which include vendors like NovoEd, EdX, Intrepid, Everwise, and many others (including many LMS vendors), help you build a traditional learning “program” in an open and easy way. They offer pathways, chapters, social features, and features for assessment, scoring, and instructor interaction. While many of these features belong in an LMS, these systems are built in a modern cloud architecture, and they are effective for programs like sales training, executive development, onboarding, and more. In many ways you can consider them “open MOOC platforms” that let you build your own MOOCs.

The third category at the top I call “micro-learning platforms” or “adaptive learning platforms.” These are systems that operate more like intelligent, learning-centric content management systems that help you take lots of content, arrange it into micro-learning pathways and programs, and serve it up to learners at just the right time. Qstream, for example, has focused initially on sales training – and clients tell me it is useful at using spaced learning to help sales people stay up to speed (they are also entering the market for management development). Axonify is a fast-growing vendor that serves many markets, including safety training and compliance training, where people are reminded of important practices on a regular basis, and learning is assessed and tracked. Vendors in this category, again, offer LMS-like functionality, but in a way that tends to be far more useful and modern than traditional LMS systems. And I expect many others to enter this space.

Perhaps the most exciting part of tools today is the growth of AI and machine-learning systems, as well as the huge potential for virtual reality.

A Digital Learning Architecture

7) Traditional Coaching, Training, and Culture of Learning Has Not Gone Away

The importance of culture and management

8) A New Business Model for Learning

he days of spending millions of dollars on learning platforms is starting to come to an end. We do have to make strategic decisions about what vendors to select, but given the rapid and immature state of the market, I would warn against spending too much money on any one vendor at a time. The market has yet to shake out, and many of these vendors could go out of business, be acquired, or simply become irrelevant in 3-5 years.

9) The Impact of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Slack Is Coming

The newest versions of Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts and Google Drive, Workplace by Facebook, Slack, and other enterprise IT products now give employees the opportunity to share content, view videos, and find context-relevant documents in the flow of their daily work.

We can imagine that Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn will result in some integration of Lynda.com content in the flow of work. (Imagine if you are trying to build a spreadsheet and a relevant Lynda course opens up). This is an example of “delivering learning to where people are.”

New work environments will be learning environments

10) A new set of skills and capabilities in L&D

It’s no longer enough to consider yourself a “trainer” or “instructional designer” by career. While instructional design continues to play a role, we now need L&D to focus on “experience design,” “design thinking,” the development of “employee journey maps,” and much more experimental, data-driven, solutions in the flow of work.

lmost all the companies are now teaching themselves design thinking, they are using MVP (minimal viable product) approaches to new solutions, and they are focusing on understanding and addressing the “employee experience,” rather than just injecting new training programs into the company.
New Capabilities Needed

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more on elearning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=elearning

limitations and delimitations in research

Shortly:
Limitations are influences that the researcher cannot control.   They are the shortcomings, conditions or influences that cannot be controlled by the researcher that place restrictions on your methodology and conclusions. Any limitations that might influence the results should be mentioned.
Delimitations are choices made by the researcher which should be mentioned. They describe the boundaries that you have set for the study.
Assumptions are accepted as true, or at least plausible, by researchers and peers who will read your dissertation or thesis.

More:
https://www.bcps.org/offices/lis/researchcourse/develop_writing_methodology_limitations.html

https://www.phdstudent.com/Choosing-a-Research-Design/stating-the-obvious-writing-assumptions-limitations-and-delimitations/Page-2

http://dissertationrecipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/AssumptionslimitationsdelimitationsX.pdf

Dissertation Guidelines
http://www.regent.edu/acad/schedu/pdfs/residency/su09/dissertation_guidelines.pdf

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more on dissertation research in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=dissertation+research