Filtering EdTech news & deconstructing the ENT

…"Mo Money Still No Business" titles Edukwest's ceducation news - ENT #23 for July 16- 22 and may refer to big money spent on acquisitions. yet to show earnings or have business plans. Coursera, among others, comes to mind.

Deconstructing the Acronym, ENT reminds me of the slow moving, ancient trees in Lord of the Rings. Education is anything but slow moving lately, to a fault many say. The same cannot be said of all practitioners. Therein lies conflict yet to resolved. EN is obvious for Education News. I'm still working on the T. Education News Today? EduKWest (KW for publisher/content curator's initials) is self-described as "on the search for better education," although "better investments in" might be just as if not more apt.

Any collection of annotated news links within a field is a potential filter. Bear in mind that the ENT bent leans to edtech, edu-biz, sales, startups, acquisitions, launches and the like ~ strong commercial, corporate and pro-privatization, as in this recent article about education reform. Not agreeing with this particular (and increasingly pervasive) bias is all the more reason to track it.

This weeks stories are no exception: acquisitions, launches, edu-biz start-ups. Tech and newswire services, not higher ed media, are the major contributors. Blogs, opinion pieces, guest posts and other features yield links and learning resources to check out, share, perhaps bookmark. Language Garden, destined for sharing on Blogging English and the StudyCom's online Help Board, is just one example.

Mo Money Still No Business – ENT #23 July 16th to July 22nd 2012

Zen, the Art of Metacognition & #MOOC Maintenance

Or more about Quality-Based Discrimination, Peer Assessment & Technology in Academic Matters, (Canadian) Journal of Higher Education. All are relevant to autonomous learning and other topics current on various mooc blogs and under discussion among participants. As the post progresses, I see it connect with New Faculty Majority (higher ed teaching, assessment), community (networked publics, informal learning), specific MOOC (Change11, Bon's digital identities) and personal networks /blogging concerns.


Steve Joordens, professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, writes... 

In 1974, Robert M. Pirsig wrote a book entitled “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, within which he provided a philosophical argument for the primacy of quality. Quality is described as a metaphysical underpinning of, well, just about anything; an underpinning from which other characteristics can be derived. I read this book for the first time about 2 years ago, after I had become passionate about using technology to better support the development of meta-cognitive skills in students. I was completely amazed how well Pirsig’s conceptions fit with the sorts of assignments I had been promoting as powerful and much needed. In some sense, his depiction of the primacy of quality made explicit an assumption that was at the core of much of what I was doing.

Goodbye #MOOC Season Hello ~ #CMC11, #POTcert11, #change11, #evomlit

It's a wrap for Mira Costa's Program for Online Teaching Program certificate course, which will return in September as #potcert12. Forget about the POThead jokes: we've already made them all. Change 11, not the infinite MOOC after all, is also coming down to the wire. Dave Cormier exhorts the weary and mooc-worn to catch their second wind and face the final five sessions like a fresh, much shorter version. Vance Stephen's Multiliteracies (evomlit) never turns the lights off. That's why there is no number at the end of the hashtag. I signed up and get the Dailies but never got into either CCK12 or LAK12.

 Good news for CMC11 participants. The beat goes on. Carol Yaeger writes, 

CMC11 is still open for your participation ... the playground for connectivist learning adventures.  There are several recent registered participants and a few who have come in the past few months (please let me know who you are by sending me an email ... thanks).  I do know about Becky from China, Brandy and Sarah in the US and the few who have been posting blogs and Tweets from time to time ... and you know who you are :-) 

Since we will be open for Independent Study ESC students starting 1 May, I will endeavor to add my blog commentary on a weekly basis and send out the NewPosts at least weekly, if not more often.

The folks in China are not able to access Facebook or Google, and their blogs may be slightly different in format.  This means that they are unable to join in the hangouts and You Tube presentations.  We will be looking for additional ways to communicate beyond the NewPosts, Twitter and such.  If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them along.  I think the discussion posts here and the material in the NewPosts should be OK ... Becky, and others in China, please let me know.  Thanks.  (Greetings to the Current Participants ~ CDL Projects)

I responded, opening a discussion on the site:

Google+ Hangout: takes more bandwidth than I have access to. Sure would be nice to have a transcript (text) or report (blog post)
Continuations, China, connecting (because you can't do connectivism let alone exchange ideas about it unless you do): using mostly Fb because it is convenient, I suspect I've missed out on some announcements (i.e. final projects) and discussion here. I found the creativity/trans-multicultural literacy engaging and a natural for me. I am all for keeping on. I start tagging again. Are we using social bookmarking? FYI Diigo, among other features, has a good comment and sharing features, enough to use as a discussion forum.  

China ~ it's a good and perhaps even necessary exercise to think about how we can connect / communicate without (eek!) Facebook or Google. A challenge, but hardly the end of meaningful online communication. Let's start with what is open and where Chinese participants *can* connect. What blogging platforms are available? Can we use theirs? What about Yahoo, email lists, bulletin boards, other social media, bookmarking, photo sharing with comment features? 

Not entirely OT, I offered to help an Italian friend in Australia with a project for low bandwith access project putting basic literacy / skills / K-12 education resources online for a Haitian orphanage. How multi-cultural can you get? 

Technology and culture: a test case

This relates to Lisa's post, It's a Facebook thing and ignorance of the internet. Both make me think of high school debate topics in the late 50s. I was set to write "remind." They are not the same. "Better Dead than Red vs Better Red than Dead" was a popular topic along with whether or not to recognize China. 

Which is stronger: technology's power to shape local culture, or local culture's power to influence the way technology is adopted and used?

If it's the former, as I suspect it is, then technology becomes a homogenizing force, tending in time to erase cultural differences. If it's the latter, then technology plays a subservient role; the uniformity of the tool does not impose uniformity on the tool's use. Culture prevails.

We're going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers - in the form of both devices and apps - spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries - the U.S. and Germany - the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes. E-books are booming in the U.S. Less than five years after the introduction of Amazon's Kindle, e-book sales already account for about a quarter of all U.S. book sales, and that percentage continues to rise sharply. In Germany, where e-readers are also readily available, e-books still represent just 1 percent of overall book sales.

The difference is largely a cultural one. Germany, the birthplace of Gutenberg...

Read the rest of Technology and culture: a test case

Digital Student Writing (Tags #change11 #potcert11 #evomlit)

Upfront disclaimer and confession: this post has nothing to do with current or even recent lesson topics in either Change 11 or Program for Online Teaching. Aha, serendipity alert: inadvertently, I seem to be in sync with the POT Wk 20 topic, instruction design. 

 

Whatever, Digital Student Writing and the perennial problem of getting students to write are germane and central both to the declared focus of this blog and online or computer assisted learning (whatever the current nomenclature flava is). Moocxtination (just made that up, more or less a mashup of MOOC + destination) is less clear, especially without a map or well beaten path to follow. For now, I'm relating it online writing and study groups (e.g. in areas such as GED, ESL, college prep, continuing education, DIY PD, etc. that I have perhaps futile hopes of adapting MOOC model to)


Taking where learners write from the most and are more comfortable writing strikes me as a logical starting point. It's like planning a drainage systen: first see where the water wants to go (or not) and then design accordingly.

Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students :: WIDE Research Center, Michigan State University

This white paper reports initial findings from a Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center study entitled Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students. These initial findings are drawn from a survey of students enrolled in writing classes at a sample of US postsecondary institutions.