Agile Learning Centers - Education Evolved About A collaborative project that has being brought to life just a few days before #openeducationwk in 2017 to curate open stories by educators, researchers, students and other learners and connect individuals and ideas from around the world during #openeducatiowk and the #yearofopen 2017. The team consists of individuals from 6 continents. We are all PhD students and members of the GO-GN. We are looking for stories from educators, researchers, students and other learners from around the world about how they discovered openness and what it means to them. Too often we hear about and experience the divide of the Global North and the Global South but also among nations in neighbouring parts of the world. Your individual open story about you started being an open practitioner, open researcher and/or open learner will help us all get to know each other, share ideas and engage in conversations and identify opportunities to support each other and collaborate. #101openstories team
New ISTE Standards for Educators Highlight Librarians’ Role Educators should continually participate in professional learning, advocate for equitable access to technology, and model positive and ethical use of technology, according to the Empowered Professional qualities named in the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) newly revised and updated Standards for Educators. ISTE CEO Richard Culatta introduced the standards during the opening keynote session at the ISTE 2017 conference in San Antonio in June. Organized into the two categories—Empowered Professional and Learning Catalyst—the newly updated standards shift from the previous Standards for Teachers, which emphasized supporting student learning with technology, to focusing on the roles of educators in “using technology to empower learners.” As Learning Catalysts, educators should be collaborators, designers, facilitators, and analysts, according to the standards. In these roles, they are expected to collaborate with other educators as well as students.
Peeragogy in Action Ashoka Changemaker Schools - Start Empathy Close Golestan Kids Private | Berkeley, CA Golestan Kids is a private, Persian language immersion pre-k school with 80 students, class sizes of 7-10, each with 2 teachers, located in Berkeley, CA. They support the development of curious, innovative, and compassionate children through experiential and reflective learning, with a focus on heritage language immersion and cultural education. About 80% of their teaching materials are Montessori based. They strongly value empathy, innovation, nature, kindness, creativity, diligence, curiosity, and responsibility. Golestan Education carries out its mission through Golestan Kids (the school) and the Golestan Collaborative (The Colab). For more information, please visit:
Why School Sucks (hint: it’s not because it’s “boring”) Read the title. Now notice that I said school, NOT education. Yes, there is a difference. This fall I’m going to be a Sophomore in high school, and although I’ve only had one year of high school so far, I kind of hate it. Hate is a strong word, I don’t hate school. Now imagine little kindergarten me, sitting in a room (on a rainbow rug that only added to the excitement of it all!) So how did my love for school change? Why can’t school be a place where teachers taught slowly, treating their students as equals and engaging with them in meaningful conversations. I too have fallen prey to this harsh reality. So yes, school sucks. Nonacademic Skills Are Key To Success. But What Should We Call Them? : NPR Ed More and more people in education agree on the importance of learning stuff other than academics. But no one agrees on what to call that "stuff". There are least seven major overlapping terms in play. "Basically we're trying to explain student success educationally or in the labor market with skills not directly measured by standardized tests," says Martin West, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. West studies what he calls "non-cognitive skills." The problem isn't just semantic, argues Laura Bornfreund, deputy director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation. As Noah Webster, the great American lexicographer and educator, put it back in 1788, "The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head." Yet he didn't come up with a good name, either. That distinction doesn't bother Bravo-Willey. Nobody I spoke with hates this term. This is tough, right?
How Google Took Over the Classroom - The New York Times But that also caused problems in Chicago and another district when Google went looking for teachers to try a new app — effectively bypassing district administrators. In both cases, Google found itself reined in. Unlike Apple or Microsoft, which make money primarily by selling devices or software services, Google derives most of its revenue from online advertising — much of it targeted through sophisticated use of people’s data. “Unless we know what is collected, why it is collected, how it is used and a review of it is possible, we can never understand with certainty how this information could be used to help or hurt a kid,” said Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group, who vets the security and privacy of classroom apps. Google declined to provide a breakdown of the exact details the company collects from student use of its services. Mr. Some parents, school administrators and privacy advocates believe that’s not enough. Mr.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Information Literacy in the Age of Google “Doodle for Google 2009 Contest Entry.” Kevin Jarrett At the beginning of last school year, I gave my 7th-grade students an assignment. “Draw me a picture of the Internet,” I told them. “How are we supposed to draw the Internet?” “Use what you know, and use your imagination,” I replied. The markers and crayons I provided came in handy. Google: Everywhere and Nowhere For many students, Google is the Internet: it is their gateway to the web, it curates their online experience, and it structures the results of their Internet searches. I teach a class called Library and Technology, wherein 7th-graders learn how to navigate libraries, evaluate sources, and troubleshoot tech problems. Paradoxically, however, Google is so ubiquitous that it is hidden in plain sight. Corporate Interests, Classroom Markets The invisibility and hyper-visibility of Google in the classroom is no accident. Google Literacy
Centre for Digital Scholarship - Library - The University of Queensland, Australia 2016 Fryer Fellow Dr Roger Osborne has done innovative work in the digital humanities. He has been associated with AustLit for many years and continues to contribute to the database as a researcher and compiler. As part of his 2016 Fryer Fellowship he will explore the short story market in Australia and the long-running Australia Journal during the editorship of Ronald Campbell from 1926 to 1955, using the collections of the Fryer Library. His project will also explore the potential for digitisation of the materials in Campbell’s material archive in order to develop a digital archive that better introduces researchers, teachers and students to the career of an editor who played a significant role in Australian print culture. One of the proposed outcomes of his work will be an online peer-reviewed exhibition.
Why EdTech Sucks – Learning {Re}imagined – Medium Is that the sound of laughing gas? “It’s not about a breakthrough. It’s about transformational swim lanes. A marketplace solution generates our blended approaches at the end of the day. This week has been called “London EdTech Week” by a loose and frothy coalition of venture capitalist wannabes short of a few bob, old media vampires looking to drink young blood, a university department propped up by Pearson, and a zombie report generating agency that could be replaced by an AI. But why so negative? I’m not so much negative as disappointed by the lack of ambition and vision of the EdTech community especially the UK chapter. EdTech today doesn’t really exist. Take this “discussion point” from a conference this week about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on Industry, Government & Society and its session on education: “With a shortage of teachers, what can A.I. do to help improve the learning experience? And it gets better, try this gem: Do I even need to spell this one out?
Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future? The articles and books that scholars produce today bear little mark of the digital age in which they are created. Thus the foundation of academic life—the scholarship on which everything else is built—remains surprisingly unaltered. Edward L. Ayers, one of the creators of the Valley of the Shadow Project in 1993, now works with the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, where he is President and Professor of History. Twenty years into the transformation initiated by the World Wide Web, we have grown accustomed to a head-spinning pace of technological and social change. Innovations that would have amazed us ten years ago are now merely passing news, as transient as a tweet. Even the academy, traditionally skeptical of externally generated change, has become blasé about web-induced transformation. Yet the foundation of academic life—the scholarship on which everything else is built—remains surprisingly unaltered. Not many scholars worry about this situation. Notes