Disrupting learning II – Day of reckoning Internet – both as a stack of technologies and as the vector of a sharing culture – brings us credible alternatives to classroom-based education in schools and universities. Most of them involve video lectures, with clear advantages: the pause button, the rearranging of content in 6-20 minutes packets, and the ability to attend from anywhere, at any time. Furthermore, the locus of learning is not so much the lecture, as the peer-to-peer interaction among students, through forums wikis, Twitter lists, Facebook groups et cetera. The real news (at least for me) is that the disruption of learning happened in one year instead of ten. Just how many are the students: I asked Lada: there were 55,000 signups. Not everything is perfect. In a sense, it is a return to a non-industrial approach to education, to the universitas studiorum of the Middle Ages: a global community of scholars, wandering the world to meet and learn from each other. It is the day of reckoning.
Essay critiques the ideas of Clay Shirky and others advocating higher ed disruption Clay Shirky is a big thinker, and I read him because he’s consistently worth reading. But he’s not always right – and his thinking (and the flaws in it) is typical of the unquestioning enthusiasm of many thinkers today about technology and higher education. In his recent piece on "Napster, Udacity, and the Academy," for example, Shirky is not only guardedly optimistic about the ways that MOOCs and online education will transform higher education, but he takes for granted that they will, that there is no alternative. Just as inevitably as digital sharing turned the music industry on its head, he pronounces, so it is and will be with digital teaching. And as predictably as rain, he anticipates that "we" in academe will stick our heads in the sand, will deny the inevitable -- as the music industry did with Napster -- and will "screw this up as badly as the music people did." His views are shared by many in the "disruption" school of thought about higher education.
40 Useful Tips For Anyone Taking A MOOC As these resources have grown in number and the list of institutions providing them has become ever more prestigious, free online courses are gaining legitimacy with employers as a method of learning valuable job skills. While there’s still a long way to go in terms of acceptance, more and more employers are recognizing the value of cheap, effective educational programs that can keep employees up-to-date and engaged in their field without spending a dime. Whether you’re looking to online education for personal reasons or to get ahead in your career, use these tips to help you get more out of open courses and use what you learn to market yourself, improve your performance, and stand out on the job. Treat them like real classes .
Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: MOOCs Part 5 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series The Year of the MOOC Massive Open Online Courses. And oh man, did we talk about it. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that 2012 was dominated by MOOCs as the trend started to really pick up in late 2011 with the huge enrollment in the three computer science courses that Stanford offered for free online during the Fall semester, along with the announcement of MITx in December. Who cares what Cormier thinks and predicts? January: Googler and Stanford professor (and professor for the university’s massive AI class) Sebastian Thrun announces he’s leaving Stanford to launch Udacity, his own online learning startup. February: MITx opens for enrollment. April: Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller (also involved with Stanford’s fall 2011 MOOCs) officially launch their online learning startup Coursera. May: June: July: August: September: October: The University of Texas system joins edX.Coursera strikes a deal with Antioch University. November:
Online Courses and the Future of Higher Education Online courses began around 1990 with the growth of more widespread access to the Internet. They spread rapidly in the United States during the last half of the 1990’s buoyed by the dot-com boom, and fell sharply after that bubble burst. During this early period, online courses typically charged fees. Some of the courses catered to individuals who wanted to improve their job prospects, others were meant solely for intellectual enjoyment, while some could be used to obtain college degrees. For-profit schools with physical facilities, such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, were often sponsors of online courses, although a few of these courses were sponsored by nonprofit universities. What is new about the MOOCs (which stands for “massive open online courses”) is not the use of the Internet to instruct in particular subjects, but that they are free, and they often are sponsored by some of the very best universities, such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford.
Online courses need human element to educate Online courses are proliferating, says Douglas Rushkoff, but will really succeed when they bring humanity to learning process Douglas Rushkoff: Education is under threat, but online computer courses are not to blameHe says education's value hard to measure; is it for making money or being engaged?He says Massive Open Online Courses lack human exchange with teachersRushkoff: MOOCs should bring together people to share studies, maintain education's humanity Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff writes a regular column for CNN.com. (CNN) -- Education is under threat, but the Internet and the growth of Massive Open Online Courses are not to blame. Like the arts and journalism, whose value may be difficult to measure in dollars, higher education has long been understood as a rather "soft" pursuit. What is learning, really? Douglas Rushkoff Education is about more than acquiring skills. What we consider basic knowledge has grown to include science, history, the humanities and economics.
Autistic Students Make Music Using iPad Apps (WATCH) The first time you listen to Ryan Rodriguez, Denzel Jackson and Jasmine Latham's music, you might think they sound like any high school band. But the three autistic musicians, along with the rest of their classmates, use a special learning technique and perform on their iPads. The innovative new music program comes out of P177Q, a school for special needs students in Queens, New York. Teacher Adam Goldberg integrated iPads into his class as a way of getting around the challenging, technical aspects of traditional instruments and allowing students to focus on creating music. "Right away, these students are learning to work together, they're learning to share, and cooperate, and to be like a team, because that's really what's going on when people play music -- it's team work," he told Fox News. Goldberg's class performed a challenging jazz song for the reporters, followed by free-styling their own compositions. Are you inspired by the musicians of P177Q?
MOOCs—Implications for Higher Education “MOOCs,” an acronym for “massive open online courses,” denotes an important, possibly a revolutionary, development ineducation. These courses are online, free of charge, open to anyone in the world who has a laptop and an Internet connection, and offered by entities with strange names such as coursera, codeacademy, edX, khanacademy, and udacity. The offerors are mainly university consortia or university-affiliated. Moreover, and critically, the universities are elite universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia. Not that online education is new; there are adult-education online courses such as are sold by The Teaching Company; there are even online college degree programs, offered mainly by for-profit colleges. The courses, like conventional college courses, are sequenced by difficulty, enabling the student to progress from beginner to advanced. The format seems superior to the conventional lecture. It may help to see this by thinking of MOOCs in demand and supply terms.
Open online courses – an avalanche that might just get stopped These days there are plenty of prophets preaching hi-tech and digital solutions to the problems of expanding access to knowledge and higher education. Barely a week goes by without some new hymn to education technology, open-source software or open-access publishing. In the US, the growing chorus for online education through massive open online courses, or moocs, has been deafening. But in Britain, it has barely registered. Last December, the commercial launch of the Open University's mooc platform, FutureLearn, attracted the participation of a dozen universities and the support of David Willetts, but little response from Britain's beleaguered academics. No wonder that last month Sir Michael Barber, the chief education adviser of Pearson, the world's largest profit-making education provider, proclaimed that universities were powerless to stop the online avalanche. Historically, the University of California has often proved a weathervane for global trends in higher education.
Palm Sounds Welcome to YouandYourChildsHealth.org There is a widely held belief that if we start teaching children to write, read, and spell in preschool and kindergarten, they will become better writers, readers, and spellers by the time they reach the first and second grades. This, however, is not what I have seen clinically. The truth is that children should be only taught to write, read, and spell when their neurological pathways for writing, reading, and spelling have fully formed. First, children need to develop a strong sense of balance, both when their bodies are moving and when their bodies are still. In order for a child to be able to sit still, pay attention, and visually remember the shapes of letters and numbers, the child first needs to have developed his or her proprioceptive system, a sense of the body in space. Children, if not coached by a parent or teacher, will draw their brain's proprioceptive connections to their bodies when they are asked to draw a picture of a person. Learning to Write, Read, and Spell:
Quelles sont les différents types de plates-formes de MOOC et comment choisir celle qui nous convient ? Le développement des MOOC, initié par les différents facteurs évoqués lors de notre précédent article, est à la fois soutenu et alimenté par les nombreuses possibilités techniques offertes à tous ceux qui souhaitent diffuser leur cours en ligne. Effectivement, l’aspect communautaire lié au MOOC a poussé au lancement de nombreux outils de création, de mise en ligne et de gestion des MOOC, tous plus ou moins destinés à faciliter le partage des cours. Des outils simples et performants étant ce qu’il y a de plus efficace pour aider un enseignant à se lancer. Il existe donc non seulement des plates-formes lancées développées par de grandes universités qui se chargent de les maintenir et de fournir le contenu, mais on peut également trouver des outils open source que l’on peut employer uniquement pour la publication sans forcément avoir l’âme d’un développeur. Il est impossible de réaliser une étude des MOOC sans aborder le point des plates-formes MOOC.
Synthtopia The developers at Retronyms have kicked off a series of weekly video previews on the development of iMPC Pro – a new music production center app that they are creating in partnership with Akai Pro. Continue reading When Akai Pro released the iMPC iPad music production center, a lot of Synthtopia readers were left wanting more. It looks like that may soon change. MobMuPlat (short for Mobile Music Platform) – a free app that lets you create custom audio software for iOS – has been updated to version 1.5. Here’s what’s new: AudioBus integration (input, output, and filter port).Menu widget, to choose item from pop-up list.Button to invert interface.Panels can optionally pass touches to scroll the canvas. Here’s how you can create a custom app with MobMuPlat: Get the MobMuPlat iOS appCreate a user interface in the MobMuPlat EditorCreate an audio engine in PureDataDrag those two files into the MobMuPlat Documents folder in iTunesPlay your app on your iOS device. Here’s a video intro to MobMuPlat: