Category: Education

Peter Baumgartner reminds us about the role of usage context for quality assessment of learning materials: In all the projects funded by the German BMBF we have tried to deliver excellent e-Learning content. As chairman of the “audit commission” I led a group of experts who recommended the ministry a change of gears: Instead to…

Will Richardson on Weblogs Creating a whole new Campus Culture: Article about the Weblogging program set up by a student at Reed College in Oregon where any student who wants one can have one. He’s got 147 going right now. An interesting read that gets to both sides of college level use of blogs and…

George Siemens: I’ve long been a fan of John Seely Brown. His views of how knowledge is shared, how people work, and how digital media are impacting society are visionary. Thanks to Maish for providing a link to JSB’s website. [via elearnspace]

Scott Berkun was program manager at Microsoft for Internet Explorer. He wrote a nice essay about what he missed in university (and what might have been the reasons for it). Looking back on his work experience he summarizes what is important: The challenge is that what makes you credible to a developer, marketing executive, documentation…

George Siemens (who doesn’t state his name anywhere on his blog) discovered a new e-Learning resource that is editerd by Jane Knight: e-Learning Centre is the most complete elearning resource I’ve encountered. The site goes on and on and on…There news page with an RSS feed. [via elearnspace]

Jon Buscall describes how he uses Tinderbox in class: “As a teacher, it takes ages to create a set of worthy lesson plans. If you keep lesson plans/details as a hard copy you often have to make changes, can’t get a quick overview of your work and they tend to get tatty stuck on your…

Moses A. Boudourides: “The purpose of this paper is to present a brief review of the various streams of constructivism in studies of education, society, science and technology. It is intended to present a number of answers to the question (what really is constructivism?) in the context of various disciplines from the humanities and the…

One of the seminars I had in mind for quite some time is starting this semester: »Simplicity«. Conceptually it is a sequel to the “Density” seminar that went very well and was insightful for students and me as well. Like “Density” the new seminar is dealing with a particular but general design strategy that seems…

Spike Hall describes some structuring elements in knowledge creation efforts in classes: Formal Debate Each participant committed to active participation with a reward for doing so. Moral Dimension of Student Product: Students were assigned to an advisory committee advising a business on the negative impact of business activity on public health. Student activity within advisory…

Lilia Efimova did a marvelous job on collecting thoughts on “Communities versus Courses”: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. She also points to Sebastien Paquets weblog research directory. There is a lot of arguments that need consideration here. Some turn on light bulbs in my head – and I disagree with others. I…

The two seminars that started last week are picking up steam: One is about “Social software” and one about “Design with algorithms“. There are not as many students as I expected. So (as actually always): anyone should feel free to join the seminar online.

Found this article from Jay Cross through Lilia Efimova’s weblog and her very iformative post on “Learning: communities vs. courses” I wish I had more time right now to do a deep dive into this stuff, because it really touches many issues I am interested in. Lilia is making a difference between novice learners and…

The University of Illinois is thinking about starting a Master of Fine Arts in Software. Elegant solutions, engaging ideas, inspiring work; these are some of the defining characteristics of art. Do they apply to software and is software design therefore an artform? [Solitude] Well, what I can tell for sure is that you need ideas…

»New to teaching online? Consider this resource via Ray: Distance Learning: Step by Step (.pdf)…covers many areas of consideration for the online environment (including assessment and issues in moving to online).« [via elearnspace blog: Distance Learning: Step by Step] [BildungsBlog]

»This is a sourcebook for academics and students who want to develop collaborative learning environments (or communities of practice) in which lecturers, students and others can work together to create new knowledge while learning new skills. Click on the links on the left to browse through the book. The book is currently in the process…

»TIP (theory into practics database) is a tool intended to make learning and instructional theory more accessible to educators. The database contains brief summaries of 50 major theories of learning and instruction. These theories can also be accessed by learning domains and concepts.«