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
only very few institutions other [...]
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 [...]
The preview Cape Town Open Education Declaration is live. The document is the result of a 2 day workshop in Cape Town that 27 people spent brainstorming, strategising, discussing, agreeing and disagreeing – and then many more weeks of the same by email. It was drafted by members of the community, for the community – [...]
I found a mention of the active learning triangle (in this slideshare presentation on education in Web 2.0, which references “Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching” by Holt Rinhart and Winston). It posits that the more we engage / internalise / transform what we learn (or act on what we learn) the more of it we remember [...]
We are in the process of reading and summarising papers that will help us inform our thinking on rip-mix-learn practices in higher education. We are keeping them on an internal wiki, which has a few public pages. I am working on a way to making it easier to navigate only the pages that are accessible. [...]
Reading an article about “Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis”, a book by two Canadian academics, I came across this fascinating story. It does not directly have anything to do with our research on rip-mix-learn practices at UWC, but maybe we need to start asking ourselves, if (how) new ways of teaching and [...]
