There is a lot of noise about badges at the moment with opinions ranging from “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges” to “badges will lead to global peace.” I have been one of the original instigators (PDF) of the badges for learning movement (is it really a movement?), but my favorite session at the recent DML […]
Worth checking out Matthew Ladner’s guest post on Jay Greene’s blog in which he argues that we need to create more space within the education system for market forces to bring down cost and increase quality. It lists some of the pro-business (e.g. more private & less public, let the market solve our problems) arguments and those […]
This announcement about Harvard receiving a US$ 40M gift to support teaching and learning innovation made me think more about the platform conversation we’ve been having (here and on the mailing list). Besides giving an elite university a lot of cash, how can we foster more innovation in learning and teaching in ways that will affect […]
I have been interested in certification (and assessment related to certification) for a while. I believe it will drive the next big step for P2PU.org as well as for the open education movement as a whole. Getting it right is important. Thanks to Brandon Muramatsu and Vijay Kumar I’ve spent some time this week trying […]
Ok, I did twist the title of Jeff Young’s latest piece for reasons of pure sensationalism (and recursive puns). I also wouldn’t mind a more diverse readership and ranking higher in a google search for “naked” should help with that. Anyways, Jeff’s article for College 2.0 suggests that less technology in the class-room might lead […]
One factoid from the Open Ed conference in Utah that has been banging around the inside of my head is this: Apparently students that access video lectures online like to speed them up. At the University of Taiwan, students watch calculus lectures between 1.6 and 2 times faster than they were recorded. Willem from the […]
A response to Nicholas Carr‘s recent piece in The Atlantic points out that the “digital divide” goes much beyond access to technology issues. A UCLA researcher studying memory and aging, notes that the use of certain technologies can rewire the way we think – with wide ranging implications on what social practices we develop. In […]
Candace Thille from Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, spoke about a research network that CM and the Open University UK are starting in order to find better ways to analyse effectiveness of open educational resources. Besides the much needed focus on rigorous analysis of the benefits of open education on the individual learner (something that […]
Derek pointed me to this post on entrepreneurial education by Jon Bischke, CEO of eduFire.com. I like the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that Jon promotes. Where I don’t agree with him is that entrepreneurial is the same as market-driven. Reading through his post, I remembered Derek Bok’s excellent “Universities in the Marketplace“, which analyses […]
Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams from UCT’s Opening Scholarship project and I ran a short OER Workshop for participants of the ICEL 2008 conference yesterday. We split the workshop into a shorter seminar/presentation and a longer hands-on practical session and ended up having a lot of fun with participants from the Cape Town universities as well as from […]
