“Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook.” Chronicle of Higher Education
This 6O minutes piece raises some interesting possibilities and concerns about the possibilities of creating learning systems that respond to actual brain processes.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9pzcq_the-present-future-of-mindreading-t_news
A company called Cerego just launched a new adaptive learning system for English speakers who want to learn a new language: iKnow!
“‘Emerging technologies for learning’ aims to help readers consider how emerging technologies may impact on education in the medium term.”
By Paula San Millan Maurino
“Threaded discussion forums have been a popular topic for the past few years in distance education research and studied as a factor in student participation, satisfaction, learning outcomes, social presence and interaction. Only recently has it been considered as a potential vehicle for the development of critical thinking skills and deep learning. Thirty-seven current studies on critical inquiry, deep learning, presence and interaction in distance education were synthesized. The studies were compared for findings about participation quality, participation quantity, critical thinking skills and deep learning, and recommendations. The synthesis revealed that current literature touts the potential for development of deep learning and critical thinking skills through online threaded discussions. For the most part, however, research does not show this happening at a high level or to any great extent. Confounding the issue is the fact that current research is predominated by examination of education and graduate level online classes and is mainly focused on student perceptions and outcomes. This is at odds with the profile of today’s “typicalâ€Â? distance education student. The need for more instructor involvement and effort is indicated in much of the research, but bulk of the research has focused on students and not teachers.”
Speak Up is an annual national research project facilitated by Project Tomorrow. The purpose of the project is to:
Collect and report the unfiltered feedback from students, parents and teachers on key educational issues.
Use the data to stimulate local conversations.
Raise national awareness about the importance of including the viewpoints of students, parents, and teachers in the education dialogue.
Over 319,223 students, 25,544 teachers, 19,726 parents and 3,263 school leaders shared their ideas through Speak Up 2007.
“Over the past thirty years, there has been much dialogue, and debate, about the conduct of educational technology research and development. In this brief volume, Justus Randolph helps clarify that dialogue by theoretically and empirically charting the research methods used in the field and provides much practical information on how to conduct educational technology research. Within this text, readers can expect to find answers to the following questions: (a) What are the methodological factors that need to be taken into consideration when designing and conducting educational technology research? (b) What types of research questions do educational technology researchers tend to ask? (c) How do educational technology researchers tend to conduct research? (d) What approaches do they use? What variables do they examine? What types of measures do they use? How do they report their research? (e) How can the state of educational technology research be improved? In addition to answering the questions above, the author, a research methodologist, provides practical information on how to conduct educational technology research–from formulating research questions, to collecting and analyzing data, to writing up the research reports–in each of the major quantitative and qualitative traditions. Unlike other books of this kind, the author addresses some of research approaches used less commonly in educational technology research, but which, nonetheless, have much potential for creating new insights about educational phenomena–approaches such as single-participant research, quantitative content analysis, ethnography, narrative research, phenomenology, and others. Multidisciplinary Methods in Educational Technology Research and Development is an excellent text for educational technology research methods courses, a useful guide for those conducting (or supervising) research, and a rich source of empirical information on the art and science of educational technology research.”
The Push to Improve STEM Education
U.S. schools face pressure on science, technology, engineering, and math.
President yet again proposes to eliminate federal ed-tech funding