David Wiley spoke of content as infrastructure at the recent UNU/UNESCO conference on higher education, “Pathways towards a shared future”. The idea resonates with my own thoughts on how we can engage with content, and what tools might support this engagement. In traditional education was characterised by a process of combining and pulling together; content, [...]
In the past few months, I have participated in the open courseware consortium’s governance discussions. The consortium is a network of (mostly) universities who are committed to publishing and using open courseware, and who have so far released over 4200 university level courses under free and open licenses. Until now MIT has hosted and incubated [...]
OK - enough - time to start writing again. Partly because one has to keep those fingers busy and the mind occupied, partly because I am hoping this will make it easier to keep my PhD supervisor informed of what is going on (and make sure it is going on), partly because it’s just too [...]
i am thinking about open educational resources, and need to start dumping thoughts — so why not do so on this blog, and maybe someone will pick it up.
It seems (excuse my ignorance) one big issue with remittances is that the financial transaction costs are too high, because sending small amounts of money is very expensive (comparably) and some of the intended recipients live in remote places…. so rather than focus on local loans and saving, the could consider their potential role in the global flow of remittances.Also, mobile telephones are emerging as a new financial transaction instrument.
The project facilitators from afrISPa just presented some of the impact their work has had over the past 3 years, and they used the decreasing cost of access (more than 50% reduction of international traffic via the SAT-3 cable as well as end-user prices) and the increase in local traffic (up to 400% in some countries)…. Bottom line is that the Internet is still too expensive for most Africans, but it’s good to see that some initiatives are able to convince policy makers of the wide benefits that bringing down cost and increasing access can have for local development.
A first step could be to design incentive schemes that focus on interim outputs and progress of PhD students rather than exclusively acknowledge the completion of degrees or the amount of publications by Professors themselves (regardless of involvement of their students).A recent investigation by the Council of Graduate Schools discovered that after 10 years of study, the completion rates were only 64 percent in engineering, 62 percent in life sciences, 55 percent in physical sciences and social sciences and 47 percent in the humanities…. is 7.6 years - a figure that has been rising steadily over the last 30 years.(…)Since training doctoral students is a time, money and labor-intensive proposition, such data are profoundly alarming.True, some students will drop out or fail to meet required academic standards, but research shows that significant numbers of doctoral students who do not complete their degrees are performing well academically yet are alienated by poor social and academic integration into their programs, poor mentoring practices, and other factors.
In a recent study of 30 undergraduate students, researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University said the tone of an email message was only correctly interpreted 50 per cent of the time…. The senders of the messages expected their partners to correctly interpret their tone nearly 80 per cent of the time, but in fact they only scored just over 50 per cent, said the report.
But I agree that creating podcasts, even simple ones, takes considerable time and effort.FYI, I just recorded a brief interview with Luc Soete (Dutch site) about the merger of UNU-INTECH and MERIT, including some thoughts on the work we will do in the future, and implications for the PhD programme. It will go online later this month.WIRED article on “podfading” (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70171-0.html?tw=rss.index)Some snippets:Podcasting has drawn thousands on the premise that anyone can create an audio program, build an audience online and even vault to stardom.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do…. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
