Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Into the wild – Technology for open educational resources
Reflections on three years of the UK OER Programmes. Between 2009 and 2012 the Higher Education Funding Council funded a series of programmes to encourage higher education institutions in the UK to release existing educational content as Open Educational Resources. This book synthesises and reflects on the approaches taken and lessons learnt across the Programme and by the Support Project.
This book is not intended as a beginners guide or a technical manual, instead it is an expert synthesis of the key technical issues arising from a national publicly-funded programme. It is intended for people working with technology to support the creation, management, dissemination and tracking of open educational resources, and particularly those who design digital infrastructure and services at institutional and national level.
Escola sem salas, turmas ou séries
O Rio de Janeiro começa, nas próximas semanas, a experimentar um novo tipo de escola. Nada de séries, salas de aula com carteiras enfileiradas e crianças ordenadamente caminhando pelo espaço comum. A aposta para dar a 180 crianças e jovens da Rocinha uma educação mais alinhada com o século 21 é o Gente, acrônimo para Ginásio Experimental de Novas Tecnologias, na escola Municipal André Urani. O espaço, que acaba de ser totalmente reformulado para comportar a nova proposta, perdeu paredes, lousas, mesas individuais e professores tradicionais e ganhou grandes salões, tablets, “famílias”, times e mentores.
Learning design – making practice explicit
New technologies have immense potential for learning, but the sheer variety possible also creates challenges for learners in terms of navigating through an increasingly complex digital landscape and for teachers in terms of how to design and support learning interventions. How can learners and teachers make informed decisions about what technologies to use in the design and support of learning activities? This presentation will consider this question and present a new methodology for design – ‘learning design’, which aims to shift the creation and support of learning from what has traditionally been an implicit, belief-based practice to one that is explicit and design based. Learning design research at the Open University, UK has included the development of a set of conceptual design views, a tool for visualising designs (CompendiumLD) and a social networking site, for sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs (Cloudworks). An overview of this work will be provided, along with a discussion of the perceived benefits of this new approach to educational design.
The Dance of Technology and Pedagogy in Self-Paced Distance Education
This paper describes the dance like relationship between pedagogy and technologies that creates distance education programming. Using a dance metaphor, the paper describes earlier generation of distance education and notes the evolving role of the self-paced learner as a focus of distance education. The paper argues that control of the learning sequence is an important pedagogical issue and that new tools of networked learning can afford opportunities for social interaction, while retaining self-paced programming control. The paper explores and defines connectivism as a pedagogical lens to look at both learning activities and technologies.
Self-paced instruction of the past century challenged older models of education based upon seat time in lectures. In this century self-paced instruction challenges both seat-based lectures and predominate group and cohort based models of distance education. Though disruptive to these older models it promises a model of education that maximizes individual freedoms and choice, supports participative course designs and thus is a an appropriate new dance for the networked era.
Three generations of Technology enhanced Distance Education Pedagogy
This paper expands on an earlier work, Three generations of distance education pedagogy, by describing the technologies and the synergetic results of using effective pedagogy in combination with emerging technologies – to create powerful learning opportunities. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education, which were based solely on the technology used, this analysis focuses on the pedagogy that defines the learning experiences encapsulated in the learning and instructional designs. The three generations of technology enhanced teaching are cognitive/behaviourist, social constructivist and connectivist. The paper looks at recent developments in emerging educational technology and discusses the ways in which these tools can be used and optimized to enhance the different types of learning that are the focus of distance education theory and practice.
ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2012
ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2012, ECAR collaborated with 195 institutions to collect responses from more than 100,000 students about their technology experiences. The findings are distilled into the broad thematic message for institutions and educators to balance strategic innovation with solid delivery of basic institutional services and pedagogical practices and to know students well enough to understand which innovations they value the most. See the 2012 report for a full list key messages, findings, and supporting data.
- Blended-learning environments are the norm; students say that these environments best support how they learn.
- Students want to access academic progress information and course material via their mobile devices, and institutions deliver.
- Technology training and skill development for students is more important than new, more, or “better” technology.
- Students use social networks for interacting with friends more than for academic communication.
The human-centric future of work
In the networked economy, information products and services can now be created and co-created in a human-centric way, by voluntary, interdependent individuals, interacting with each other by utilizing free or very low cost social media.
We are living in a world that is built on the centrality of information and radically distributed intelligence. The organization is not necessarily a given entity or hierarchy any more, but an ongoing process of organizing. The factory logic of mass production forced people to come to where the work is. Work was a place. The crowdsourcing logic of mass communication makes it possible to distribute work to where the (willing) people are, no matter where on the globe they may be. Knowledge work is not about jobs or job roles but about tasks. Work is what you do, and most importantly what you want to do!
Des machines susceptibles de déstabiliser l’ordre économique?
Le registre de développement de l’impression en 3 dimensions n’est pas vraiment celui d’une résistance frontale contre les modalités dominantes du système économique, mais ce dernier pourrait néanmoins s’en trouver déstabilisé. Le réseau sociotechnique qui se met en place avec le développement de cette technologie pourrait contribuer à une réorganisation profonde de toute une série de réseaux qui s’étaient déployés avec le mouvement de globalisation économique. Les changements dans les modes de production pourraient en effet se répercuter dans les structures industrielles, dans le statut des biens comme marchandises et jusque dans les échanges commerciaux mondiaux.
La généralisation des imprimantes 3D pourrait affecter profondément un tel schéma. Si chacun peut fabriquer une grande partie des objets dont il a besoin, plutôt que de les acheter, ces nouveaux outils peuvent faire sortir d’un modèle industriel massifié et dépendant de grosses unités productives. Ce ne sera peut-être pas la fin des grandes usines et manufactures, mais ces machines peuvent être de nature à en réduire le nombre. Elles auraient par la même occasion un potentiel de rupture dans les tendances oligopolistiques qui marquent de nombreux secteurs des biens de consommation. « […] if you have a machine that can copy itself, you can’t sell it. You’ll only ever sell one! »
Quelques caractéristiques d’une nouvelle culture rendue possible par un nouveau type d’imprimé
Quelles capacités les imprimantes 3D donnent-elles ? Des capacités de fabrication certes, mais dont la répartition sociale semble pouvoir se faire différemment par rapport aux anciens modes industriels. Une technologie peut-elle être alors un vecteur d’émancipation ? La question peut être posée à nouveaux frais. Ces machines peuvent en effet se répandre dans des espaces où elles peuvent permettre des activités renouvelées. Elles trouvent un milieu de soutien qui peut aider à développer leurs potentialités et, en contribuant à éroder les logiques d’une consommation passive, elles pourraient réactiver des formes d’autonomie dans les pratiques individuelles.
L’impression tridimensionnelle, agent de changement mais aussi vecteur de reconfiguration politique ?
Il y a quelques mois, j’avais entamé une réflexion sur les effets politiques que pourrait avoir une technologie qui connaît apparemment des développements nouveaux et rapides, celle des imprimantes 3D. Les prémices de cette réflexion avaient été retenues pour une présentation plus développée dans le cadre d’une conférence internationale qui aura lieu le mois prochain à la London School of Economics and Political Science sur le thème “Materialism and World Politics”. Comme un blog peut aussi servir à mettre en discussion un travail en cours, je vais en profiter pour mettre en ligne au fur et à mesure le résultat de ces cogitations, au cas où cela pourrait intéresser des lecteurs et lectrices qui passeraient par ici. La forme est évidemment plutôt académique, mais j’espère qu’elle ne dissuadera pas les réactions éventuelles. Et si ça peut faire avancer l’analyse…
