Here’s a useful breakdown of how the stimulus bill will affect education… [Tags: stimulus economy education ]

1 Comment »

Lots of good links to Open Courseware courses, tools, and aggregations at The .Edu Toolbox.

[Tags: open_courseware open_access education ]

Be the first to comment »

Boston University has decided to set up an open access archive for scholarly work produced there. Yay. This seems to stop short from mandating that academics there are required to put a copy of their published work into the archive, but it’s a good step.

On the other hand, the Open Access Blog reports:

Congressional Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has re-introduced a bill (HR801) that essentially would negate the NIH policy concerning depositing research in OA repositories.

Here are the first three points in a letter posted by Jennifer McLennan:

H.R. 801 is designed to amend current copyright law and create a new category of copyrighted works (Section 201, Title 17). In effect, it would:

1. Prohibit all U.S. federal agencies from conditioning funding agreements to require that works resulting from federal support be made publicly available if those works are either: a) funded in part by sources other than a U.S. agency, or b) the result of “meaningful added value” to the work from an entity that is not party to the agreement.

2. Prohibit U.S. agencies from obtaining a license to publicly distribute, perform, or display such work by, for example, placing it on the Internet.

3. Stifle access to a broad range of federally funded works, overturning the crucially important NIH Public Access Policy and preventing other agencies from implementing similar policies.

Here’s a draft letter opposing it.

[Tags: open_access boston_university copyright copywrong john_conyers nih ]

5 Comments »

CALI and the Berkman Center have launched the Legal Education Commons, a place for law educators to exchange info with Creative Commons licenses, of course.

[Tags: berkman law_education law_school education commons ]

Be the first to comment »

A site called Christian Colleges has posted a list of top 100 open courseware courses in theology and philosophy. Open courseware, of course, are real world courses recorded for distribution over the Net. MIT has blazed this path, and this particular Top 100 list is dominated by courses from that school, with Notre Dame showing heavily as well. The Online Education Database has its own, more generic, Top 100 list.

Open courseware is a fantastic idea. It will only spread further and further, because it wrings significant extra value — value perfectly aligned with most educational institutions’ mission — at relatively little extra cost. And while simply recording a class without paying attention to the needs of those watching afterwards is suboptimal, we’re getting better at it. In any case, I don’t mean to carp. Less-than-perfect open courseware is a zillion times better than no open courseware. And we’re just beginning this. Open courseware will change, and it will also change how courses are taught in the real world. Here comes atomization, the Long Tail, network effects, backchannels, and, OMG, spam and undoubtedly porn and …

The most obvious missing piece has to do with metadata. Right now, there is a relative scarcity of open courseware, so sites like iBerry aggregate the known offerings. But, as recording and posting courses becomes the norm, we will have the problems of abundance. And then we’ll want the usual — and perhaps some unusual — ways of filtering to find exactly the courses we want to invest in. For undertaking to listen to a course is not a trivial task. Listening to the first three minutes may lead you to dismiss a course that would have changed your life if you’d made it to the third lecture. We need tags, ratings, reputation systems, trust mechanisms, social networks, and ways to talk with our fellow auditors. And the sites that do this for us well will take on some of the role, value, authority, and standing of universities themselves.

(And now y’all get to tell me about all the sites I’ve missed that do exactly that already.) [Tags: open_courseware ocw education ]

3 Comments »

Nature Magazine, which should be the stodgiest of the stodgiest, continues to show an admirable flexibility (stopping short of doing the full open access Monty). It’s now created Scitable, “a collaborative learning space for science undergraduates.” It’s got articles, online class tools, teacher collaborative tools, student collaborative tools, discussion areas, consultable experts… I haven’t yet gone through it all.

This initial implementation focuses on genetics. Nature is planning on expanding the topics.

On top of all that, it’s great to contemplate how blase we’ve become about the primordial value of collaborative tools. Collaboration is the new greed.

[Tags: nature_magazine education collaboration genetics teaching ]

Be the first to comment »

JP Rangaswami chooses his favorite among the 151 responses to Edge’s question: “What Will Change Everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” JP chooses Chris Anderson’s essay on Web-empowered teaching. (This is the CA of TED, not the CA of Wired.) JP also recommends reading all 107,000 words of all 151 responses, which I have not done. But it’s a great pool to take a random dip in.

[Tags: edge teaching education future jp_rangaswami ]

Be the first to comment »

The University of Huddersfield is making publicly available the metadata about the circulation of its books — 3 million transactions — over the past thirteen years. This includes a book’s ISBN, number of times it’s been checked out, by which academic department. (It does not include information about individual borrowers.)

BTW, the library used LibraryThing‘s ISBN lookup service to derive some of the ISBNs, and it includes “FRBR-ish” data, i.e., other books that may be closely related.

(Thanks to Seb Schmoller’s post for the tip.)

[Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous librarything metadata ]

1 Comment »

Chris Dede is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on using the new immersive environments. [Note: I’m live-blogging, which means IO’m not checking for errors, and that I’m missing stuff, getting things wrong, paraphrasing, etc.]

Why immersion? “Immersion is the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience.” Immersion can help learning by providing multiple perspectives, situated learning, and shifts in identity. Chris is interested in how we can make meaning out of complexity, using immersive interfaces in middle schools.

He sketches three types of immersive interfaces:

1. Augmented reality. You’re in the real world — you’re not an avatar — with a device that lets you overlay the real with the virtual. Entertainment and education can be anywhere. He shows a bit of his middle school math curriculum called “Alien Contact,” which uses mobile phones. Aliens have landed outside the school. The students explore the area (the real physical area), interviewing virtual characters and using mathematical and literacy skills. Students see different pieces of evidence based on their roles (FBI agent, linguist, computer expert, chemist), and have to collaborate to see the entire picture.

2. Alice-in-Wonderland, like SecondLife. Chris’ project has its own MUVE (multi-user virtual environment). This is partial immersion because you’re sitting in front of a monitor. He shows a clip about RiverCity. It’s a 3D simulation of a 1880 town battling infectious diseases. The students have to figure out what’s going on, learning the scientific method.

Situated learning — e.g., a medical internship — i s another example. You learn by doing and by watching people who know what they’re doing. Chris is using a virtuated environment to created a distributed-learning community.

3. Full immersion. Head-mounted displays. E.g., NewtonWorld, where you can see how balls interact, varying mass, velocity, etc. Similarly for MaxwellWorld.

He opens up the discussion.

Q: Would this work with university students? More sophisticated students?
A: A virtual ecosystem can be easy enough for a middle school student, but you can also imagine one complex enough for a university or graduate student.
Q: Complex environments are hard to create.
A: The good news is that the tools are being created by the entertainment industry. We then re-fit them our purposes. E.g., the authoring shell for the game Oblivion is very powerful. Within 5 years we’ll probably be able to build mixtures of emergent behaviors and scripted behaviors that are really compelling.

Q: Why did you make RiverCity historically situated. Doesn’t that make less obviously relevant to the kids.
A: We needed our kids to be experts. Even the least sophisticated kid today knows more about medicine than the most sophisticated person in the 1800s. [I love this idea.] Also, I wanted to show you could teach multiple things at the same time: science, history, English…

Q: [jz] Harvard Libraries have an outpost in SecondLife but not in Wikipedia. There seems to be something about participating in virtual places. Do you think of Wikipedia as an immersive environment? What would it mean to make it so? And would it improve it?
A: Wikipedia doesn’t work for sensory immersion, actional immersion (being able to fly, e.g.), but it might for symbolic immersion (what you get late at night if you’re reading a horror novel), depending on what you’re reading about or co-creating. A better example might be a Harry Potter fan fiction site. You can imagine putting the Wikipedia for HP inside a virtual HP world — your HP avatar could write an entry in the inner Wikipedia. And would it be better? Lectures are generally better in the real world. But it’d take a lot of discussion to answer your question fully….

Q: Some manuscripts can only be experience in a group via a virtual environment.
A: Yes. You could set up a virtual museum exhibit that brings together works, and that might let you explore the artist’s world. Or, for Van Gogh, what the world looked like a schizophrenic.

Q: How can you keep up with the commercial environments so that the educational ones don’t look old fashioned?
A: It depends on what factors matter. In terms of fidelity, many studies show that you need high fidelity in the parts where the experience requires it — e.g., teaching how to read X-rays — but you can have low fidelity for the parts not directly related to what you’re teaching. If it’s engaging, users don’t care about the low fidelity. None of the 15,000 students who have used RiverCity have complained that it’s too cartoon like, even though it’s not even remotely as photo realistic as the games they play.

Q: Metrics?
A: All of these projects measure gains carefully. They’re research projects. Typically the research shows that if it’s well designed, you get gains in learning…which is what research shows for just about educational technique.

Q: [me] First, I love the idea that in RiverCity, students are treated as experts. How much of this would you do in a day? How much of this is the film strip break in the day?
A: It varies developmentally. For young children, I’d do very little. You learn over and under by crawling, not by having your avatar do it. As they get older, maybe 15-20% of the day? It depends on the topic, the age of the students, etc…For my courses, I’d use the virtual environment at the beginning to let them see the scope of the landscape. In the middle, they’d do a formative experience inside the virtual environment: Here’s what I understand so far. At the end, you’d do a summative experience.

Q: [ethanz] Have people done side by side studies of these environments and other creative interventions, including teachers putting in an enormous of creativity into changing a lesson plan. Your examples tell us about engaged teachers more than about virtual environments, perhaps.
A: It’s a question very relevant to policy. One of the considerations: RiverCity’s cost for 30 kids is about the same as for 3,000 kids. But even the most skilled teacher could give students the sense of going back in time. Where the world is not doing much more than lecturing, you’re right to be skeptical. How are we testing this claim? We have control conditions for RiverCity and Alien Contact. The control conditions are paper-based games. We found a strong difference in engagement. In RC, we found a big difference in learning; in AC we’re breaking even in learing, but it’s a first gen project.

Q: I teach law. You are expected to immerse students into being just, fair and convincing. That’s entirely inter-human. To what extent could this virtual, artificial interface enable the inter-human relation, or perhaps hinder it.
A: Immersive interfaces aren’t equally powerful for all subjects. I don’t know the answer to your question, but one of the thigns we can do in RC is have two people can be in the same room and have different experiences. E.g., you could build a pre-Civil War environment. Two avatars walk down the street together. They see the same things, but one is a slave and one is a slave-holder. That leads to an interesting conversation.

Q: [charlie nesson] Can you establish a transfer of skills from games to real world skills?
A: I’m skeptical about claims of far transfer. The evidence there is weak. I’m quite more convinced about near transfer. So, saying that you’re good at World of Warcraft and thus you’d be good as a lawyer isn’t going to get you too far. It might mean that you can make fast decisions, but WoW aggression probably doesn’t correlate with aggression in the courtroom. The first is a near transfer, and the second is a far transfer.
Q: Has there been a lot of research on this?
A: Not that I’ve found. Closest you get to this is the military that has evidence that military skills transfer to civilian life, and many of those skills are gained by simulation. [Tags: education teaching simulations secondlife chris_dede games learning avatars ]

Be the first to comment »

A three-year research project, headed by Mimi Ito, involving 28 researchers and 800 subjects, and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, finds that the stereotypical idea of the Internet as a soul-devouring, anti-social wasteland for our kids is just plain wrong. If you suspected otherwise, now you know you were right.

The report makes a key distinction that helps explain some of the confusion we’ve been living through. From the press release:

The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on “hanging out” with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.

Here’s one interesting observation, from the overview:

Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority.

The study’s implications for education are significant. From the overview:

Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What, the authors ask, would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? What would it mean to reach beyond traditional education and civic institutions and enlist the help of others in young people’s learning? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, they question what it would mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally.

[Tags: internet_sociology macarthur_foundation education digital_natives ]v

9 Comments »