Opening Education: Using Open Education & Open Pedagogy to Transform Learning and the Educational Experience
The Open Education Southern Symposium at the University of Arkansas is accepting proposals for its day and a half conference on Monday, Oct. 1 and Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2018. Proposals should fall into one of three categories:
o Presentations: 15-20 minutes (Please allow 10 to 15 minutes for Q&A after presentations.)
o Panel Discussions: 45 minutes (Please allow 10 to 15 minutes for Q&A after panel discussions.)
o Lightning Talks: 7 minutes (A short 5 to 10 minute Q&A will follow all lightning presentations.)
We welcome proposals from organizations, including colleges and universities of all sizes, community colleges, special libraries, and any others involved in open education and open pedagogy. We’re particularly interested in proposals with topics centering around:
o Adoption and creation of resources
o Publishing platforms
o Best practices and the impact of Open Education
o Creative Commons, copyright, and other licensing
o Marketing and advocacy
o Pedagogy and student success, including K-12 highlights
o Instructional design strategies for OER
o Trends and innovation
o OER in community colleges
o Tenure, promotion, and OER
o OER community building
o Assessment
o Inclusion and diversity in Open Education
Submission Details:
The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2018 at 11:59 p.m. Central Time. The submission form can be found on our eventwebsite under the Call for Proposals page.
Proposal social media summaries should not exceed 240 characters (spaces included).
Proposal abstracts should not exceed 2000 characters or approximately 500 words.
All submissions will be evaluated based on the relevance of the topic and potential to advance the thinking or practice of Open Education and Open Pedagogy. Proposal reviewers will use similar proposal criteria to those being used by the Open Education Conference and OER18.
The planning committee will deliver decisions by June 29, 2018.
Presenters will be asked to accept or decline invitation to present by July 13, 2018.
All presenters will be required to register for the symposium.
Registration is $99 for our day and a half event on October 1 & 2, 2018 at the University of Arkansas. Registration covers full participation for both days, shuttle service between the hotel and event location, lunch on the first day, snacks and beverages, and event goodies.
the power of storytelling. Which allows brands to be more memorable and build more meaningful connections with the audience.
Every business website has an “About” page. Most businesses fill this page with boring stats and statements when they should be using it to tell their story.
According to a case study by HBR, making an emotional connection with your audience is much more important than customer satisfaction.
Getting your customers to share their own stories, also known as brand-driven storytelling, is a powerful approach that can increase your authority and brand awareness at the same time.
Basically, my response to ed tech is “It depends.” And one key consideration on which it depends is the reason given for supporting it.
ads in education periodicals, booths at conferences, and advocacy organizations are selling not only specific kinds of software but the whole idea that ed tech is de rigueur for any school that doesn’t want to risk being tagged as “twentieth century.”
Other people, particularly politicians, defend technology on the grounds that it will keep our students “competitive in the global economy.” This catch-all justification has been invoked to support other dubious policies, including highly prescriptive, one-size-fits-all national curriculum standards. It’s based on two premises: that decisions about children’s learning should be driven by economic considerations, and that people in other countries should be seen primarily as rivals to be defeated.
But the rationale that I find most disturbing—despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it’s rarely made explicit—is the idea that technology will increase our efficiency…at teaching the same way that children have been taught for a very long time.
a deeper question: “What kinds of learning should be taking place in those schools?” If we favor an approach by which students actively construct meaning, an interactive process that involves a deep understanding of ideas and emerges from the interests and questions of the learners themselves, well, then we’d be open to the kinds of technology that truly support this kind of inquiry. Show me something that helps kids create, design, produce, construct—and I’m on board. Show me something that helps them make things collaboratively (rather than just on their own), and I’m even more interested—although it’s important to keep in mind that meaningful learning never requires technology, so even here we should object whenever we’re told that software (or a device with a screen) is essential.
more worrisome are the variants of ed tech that deal with grades and tests, making them even more destructive than they already are: putting grades online (thereby increasing their salience and their damaging effects), using computers to administer tests and score essays, and setting up “embedded” assessment that’s marketed as “competency-based.”
we shouldn’t confuse personalized learning with personal learning. The first involves adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores, and it requires the purchase of software. The second involves working with each student to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests, and it requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.
a recent review found that studies of tech-based personalized instruction “show mixed results ranging from modest impacts to no impact” – despite the fact that it’s remarkably expensive. In fact, ed tech of various kinds has made headlines lately for reasons that can’t be welcome to its proponents. According to an article in Education Week, “a host of national and regional surveys suggest that teachers are far more likely to use tech to make their own jobs easier and to supplement traditional instructional strategies than to put students in control of their own learning.” Last fall, meanwhile, OECD reportednegative outcomes when students spent a lot of time using computers, while Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes
Ed tech is increasingly making its way even into classrooms for young children. And the federal government is pushing this stuff unreservedly: Check out the U.S. Office of Education Technology’s 2016 plan recommending greater use of “embedded” assessment, which “includes ongoing gathering and sharing of data,” plus, in a development that seems inevitable in retrospect, a tech-based program to foster a “growth mindset” in children. There’s much more in that plan, too—virtually all of it, as blogger Emily Talmage points out, uncannily aligned with the wish list of the Digital Learning Council, a group consisting largely of conservative advocacy groups and foundations, and corporations with a financial interest in promoting ed tech.
Open Discussion: VR in Education | Тема: Виртуалната реалност в образованието
Where | Университет Пловдив https://goo.gl/maps/bLBYXkp5S1S2 and online ( виртуално) When | Кога: 3. май, 2018, 15 часа | May 3, 2018, 3PM local time (Bulgaria) Who | Кой: преподаватели и суденти | faculty аnd students How | Как: използвайте “обратна връзка” за споделяне на вашите идеи | use the following hashtag for backchanneling #BGtechEd
Виртуална реалност в учебния процес – теория и практика- 1-1, 1/2 час продължителност Virtual reality in teaching and learning – theory and hands-on
Уточняване на понятията относно различните видове реалност: виртуална реалност, video 360 ; разширена реалност; смесена реалност. VR/AR/MR in education.
Подход и усвояване на различните видове реалност в образованието. Връзка между трите вида реалност в образованието и конструктивизма като теория на преподаването. Връзка между трите вида реалност в образованието и игровия подход и игрофикацията на образованието. Оценяване на обучението базирано на различните видове реалности.
When a student is brilliant on the street corner but falling asleep in class, something is wrong with the schooling system Ако учащ се е страхотен на ъгъла на улицата, но се проваля или заспива в клас, тогава нещо е грешно с учебната система https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/04/17/education-teched-frenemies/
Дискусия относно методиката на приложение в учебния процес
2 min video from the entrance of your University is viewable through Google Cardboard and your laptops. Study the video and seek answers to the following questions:
******https://youtu.be/VmOpsrVhEQE ********
– what are the advantages of Video 360 to all other known-to-you media formats?
кои са предимствата на Видео 360 в сравнение с всички други медийни формати, които познавате?
– what would you do better in terms the video footage?
какво бихте заснимали, което да подобри видео материала за преподавателски и учебни цели (например: както друго място бихте избрали)
– how is / can be this medium advantageous to implementing core learning / teaching techniques
как този медиен формат може да се използва за да се подобрят съществуващите условия за успешно преподаване и обучение
По избор – разговор с Марк Гил от Щатския университет Сейнт Клауд и демонстрация на виртуална реалност в учебния процес – 10-15 мин
1. Determine what the customer craves and deliver it. In the case of college and university students, there are limits. Balancing student wants and desires with what they actually need to be successful students and engaged citizens can, in fact, be extremely challenging. “The customer is always right” philosophy practiced by many businesses simply does not fit with the mission of postsecondary institutions. Instead, the role of educators is to advance and apply knowledge, facilitate the exploration of ideas, foster cognitive dissonance, prepare students as lifelong learners and productive workers, and even, hold them accountable for their actions or inactions. Ideally, the college experience should be transformational—helping students become the best person they can be. With that said, failing to align teaching methods, curriculum, academic programs, and institutional services with the needs and expectations of students is a perilous path.
2. Create unexpected value. Incumbent institutions tend to focus on known problems (e.g., student attrition causation factors, poor service delivery, cumbersome processes, undersubscribed programs, insufficient class availability). True disruption seldom occurs in this space. Creating value where it did not exist before or was not expected spawns disruption. In the private sector, such intuitive value ideation is seen in Disney’s “Imagineering” the attractions in its theme parks, Apple’s invention of the iPhone, and Airbnb’s alternative to staying with the multitudes at expensive, disturbingly uniform hotel chains. This is what the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy characterize as swimming in the “blue ocean”, where there are few, if any, competitors (Kim, W. C. & Mauborgne, R., 2005). No disruptor is found in the “red ocean” crowded with similar competitors.
3. Avoid being average. If your school is one of the elite, well-known few, with highly selective admissions, it is not average. However, the vast majority of colleges and universities do not fit this profile. They have to find other ways to distinguish themselves. A capstone student experience, an innovative curriculum, guaranteed internship placement or study abroad, digital career portfolios, or a unique pricing model represent just a few examples. While it would be ideal to find something that makes your institution distinctive throughout the nation or the world, that is highly improbable. A more attainable goal is to position your institution uniquely among your direct competitors.
4. Identify the potential for expansion. As it relates to student enrollment growth, expansion opportunities are usually found within one or more of four domains: (1) thorough penetration of your existing primary market, where the institution and its academic programs have a strong presence, (2) the introduction of new programs into your primary market, (3) promotion of the institution and existing programs in a new market, and (4) diversification—new programs and new markets. Each domain has inherent risks and potential rewards. Risk levels are illustrated in Figure 1 and are described here.
Primary market penetration possesses the lowest risk, requires the least investment of resources, and has the fastest return on investment. Depending on an institution’s primary market, this domain also may produce only modest new enrollments. Option two, mounting new programs in an institution’s existing primary market has risks associated with conducting the proper market research to determine student and industry demand as well as market saturation. Another common risk relates to the degree to which new program offerings are adequately promoted. An obvious upside to this domain is that the institution already has visibility in the market. Takingthecurrent program array to a new marketrequires the time and resources to develop a presence where none has previously existed. Sending recruiters to a new territory once or twice a year is woefully insufficient. Creating such visibility requires a sustained physical presence with area recruiters or alumni volunteers, targeted advertising, networking with schools and other organizations in the region, and strategic partnerships. Finally, diversification carries with it the highest level of risk because it involves assuming all the risks of launching new programs in a market with no prior visibility. If executed effectively, however, this domain can generate an abundance of new students.
5. Disruption always comes at a cost. It is true that your institution may create a disruption by leveraging existing technologies and human capital. Yet, no organization can avoid the cultural and real costs associated with unlearning old ways, creating new programs and business models, scaling innovations, or marketing a new approach. These costs must be weighed judiciously against potential benefits of such a paradigm shift. Once a decision is made to pull the trigger, the change process must be managed carefully with the upfront inclusion of key stakeholders.
6. Equate disruption with innovation, not extinction. The rise of educational disruptors can be unsettling. If disruption is simply perceived as a threat to the way of life in the academy or ignored, the results will be devastating for many higher education institutions. Conversely, if disruption pushes college leaders and enrollment managers out of their comfort zone and they reinvent their institutions, the educational experience of students will be greatly enhanced. In a time of creative destruction, the winners are those who exert extraordinary efforts to go beyond traditional norms, which is not always the early adopters of a new educational model or practice.
7. Successful disruptors pursue four disciplines simultaneously. The four disciplines translated into the higher education lexicon include low costs, relational connections with students, program innovations, and rapid time-to-market. Of these, student connections is the only discipline college and universities excel at consistently. To thrive in a future with a seemingly infinite number of nimble disruptive innovators, educators must compete in the other three disciplines as well.
despite China’s many technological advances, in this new cyberspace race, the West had the lead.
Xi knew he had to act. Within twelve months he revealed his plan to make China a science and technology superpower. By 2030 the country would lead the world in AI, with a sector worth $150 billion. How? By teaching a generation of young Chinese to be the best computer scientists in the world.
Today, the US tech sector has its pick of the finest minds from across the world, importing top talent from other countries – including from China. Over half of Bay Area workers are highly-skilled immigrants. But with the growth of economies worldwide and a Presidential administration hell-bent on restricting visas, it’s unclear that approach can last.
In the UK the situation is even worse. Here, the government predicts there’ll be a shortfall of three million employees for high-skilled jobs by 2022 – even before you factor in the immigration crunch of Brexit. By contrast, China is plotting a homegrown strategy of local and national talent development programs. It may prove a masterstroke.
In 2013 the city’s teenagers gained global renown when they topped the charts in the PISA tests administered every three years by the OECD to see which country’s kids are the smartest in the world. Aged 15, Shanghai students were on average three full years ahead of their counterparts in the UK or US in maths and one-and-a-half years ahead in science.
Teachers, too, were expected to be learners. Unlike in the UK, where, when I began to teach a decade ago, you might be working on full-stops with eleven-year-olds then taking eighteen-year-olds through the finer points of poetry, teachers in Shanghai specialised not only in a subject area, but also an age-group.
Shanghai’s success owed a lot to Confucian tradition, but it fitted precisely the best contemporary understanding of how expertise is developed. In his book Why Don’t Kids Like School? cognitive Dan Willingham explains that complex mental skills like creativity and critical thinking depend on our first having mastered the simple stuff. Memorisation and repetition of the basics serve to lay down the neural architecture that creates automaticity of thought, ultimately freeing up space in our working memory to think big.
Seung-bin Lee, a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, told me of studying fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for the three years leading up to the Suneung, the fearsome SAT exam taken by all Korean school leavers on a single Thursday each November, for which all flights are grounded so as not to break students’ concentration during the 45 minutes of the English listening paper.
Korea’s childhoods were being lost to a relentless regime of studying, crushed in a top-down system that saw them as cyphers rather than kids.
A decade ago, we consoled ourselves that although kids in China and Korea worked harder and did better on tests than ours, it didn’t matter. They were compliant, unthinking drones, lacking the creativity, critical thinking or entrepreneurialism needed to succeed in the world. No longer. Though there are still issues with Chinese education – urban centres like Shanghai and Hong Kong are positive outliers – the country knows something that we once did: education is the one investment on which a return is guaranteed. China is on course to becoming the first education superpower.
Troublingly, where education in the UK and US has been defined by creativity and independent thinking – Shanghai teachers told me of visits to our schools to learn about these qualities – our direction of travel is now away from those strengths and towards exams and standardisation, with school-readiness tests in the pipeline and UK schools minister Nick Gibb suggesting kids can beat exam stress by sitting more of them. Centres of excellence remain, but increasingly, it feels, we’re putting our children at risk of losing out to the robots, while China is building on its strong foundations to ask how its young people can be high-tech pioneers. They’re thinking big – we’re thinking of test scores.
soon “digital information processing” would be included as a core subject on China’s national graduation exam – the Gaokao – and pictured classrooms in which students would learn in cross-disciplinary fashion, designing mobile phones for example, in order to develop design, engineering and computing skills. Focusing on teaching kids to code was short-sighted, he explained. “We still regard it as a language between human and computer.” (My note: they are practically implementing the Finland’s attempt to rebuild curricula)
“If your plan is for one year,” went an old Chinese saying, “plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years, educate children.” Two and half thousand years later chancellor Gwan Zhong might update his proverb, swapping rice for bitcoin and trees for artificial intelligence, but I’m sure he’d stand by his final point.
Beyond scripted shows, Twitch streams like Critical Role and Girls, Guts, Glory along with podcasts like Godsfall help make learning the game more accessible to newbies. Creators, artists, and celebrities, such as Vin Diesel, Joe Manganiello, Deborah Ann Woll, Patton Oswalt, Wil Wheaton, Chris Hardwick, Matthew Lillard, Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert, publicly attest to how playing Dungeons & Dragons fosters creativity.
The ISTE Standards for Students provide a guide for the end game. The objective is to help individuals learn how to take ownership of their learning, make positive contributions to society, and analyze and use resources effectively while working together to build innovative new solutions to problems. What was once thought of as the R’s (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic) have grown to include the C’s of creativity, communication, collaboration, cooperation, contribution, critical thinking, computation, compromise, and community. These new C’s aren’t meant to be accidental, ancillary byproducts of educational practices but, instead, are the focus and intention of the design of instructional experiences. According to the Every Student Succeeds Act and the National Educational Technology Plan, the charge and expectation is that these skills are meant for the masses. Dungeons & Dragons provides a platform for students of varying abilities to practice all of these skills in a safe, enjoyable environment.
AR and VR are mediums for the transmission of information, and many people will judge these mediums by the content that is produced within them. For educators seeking to gain buy-in from administrators and other colleagues it is critical for them to justify the reasons their content requires new reality media.
Given the newness of these mediums, it is no surprise that few curricular resources exist to support courses around VR and AR. Professional development sessions on new reality tools are almost non-existent, which means educators seeking to use virtual or augmented reality simply need to dive into the subjects.
3. Go Beyond Storytelling
Studies using VR demonstrate the ‘Proteus Effect’—taking on the psychology of inhabiting a different body and unconsciously changing our behavior to conform to it (learning empathy through VR)
4. Master the Machines
“The equipment matters. If there is a latency between the computer and the VR set that can cause a lot of problems,”
With VR equipment ranging from about $15 to $600 educators will have to check the budget or start writing grant proposals to gain access to the higher quality machines.
5. Understand Your Student’s Needs
described as a “quantum shift” in the way we interact, learn and experience.
A virtual reality headset can take students on an immersive journey to another world. But no matter how cool it is, if that $3,000 piece of equipment enters a classroom and doesn’t provide any real instructional value, it can quickly become a very expensive paperweight.
Most schools don’t do edtech procurement really well yet. Sometimes we buy products that end up in closets because they don’t fit the instructional needs of students, and we end up not being good stewards of taxpayer dollars.
Located in the district’s central office, where hundreds of teachers and staff members stop by each week for professional development, the playground offers a creative space that encourages teachers to explore new tools that have been vetted and approved by the district’s tech department.
In the United States, K-12 schools spend more than $13 billion a year on edtech — often without any idea whether it will make a difference in learning outcomes.
Join ISTE CEO Richard Culatta and a panel of educators and students to understand what digital citizenship means today and how we can empower students to engage in our complex, connected world
#TGdigicit
ason Ohler’s online course in Digital Citizenship is available as a MOOC, and contains many terrific resources. In his book, Digital Community, Digital Citizen, he stressed the importance of building positive culture and involving students in policy making. I highly recommend his work and the course.
