It's About Learning

Digital Alternatives to Traditional Textbooks

Dwayne Harapnuik — February 9, 2012 — 2 Comments

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/temple-project-ditches-textbooks-for-homemade-digital-alternatives/35247?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Temple U. Project Ditches Textbooks for Homemade Digital Alternatives – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout

Temple University gave 11 faculty members $1,000 each to create a digital alternative to a traditional textbook. The goal of this pilot project was to demonstrate the learning benefits of working with primary sources and other relevant materials and to also help students save money on textbooks.

Kristina M. Baumli, a lecturer in Temple’s English department offered the following summary of the project’s pedagogical benefits:

By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book.

Read the full Wired Campus article…
Read the Temple U blog post about the pilot project…

In 21st century learning Learning, OER, Open Educational Resources, primary sources

The State of Digital Education

Dwayne Harapnuik — February 1, 2012 — Leave a comment

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Three new trends in particular are bringing education into the modern age and helping to improve learning outcomes: digital content (digital textbook sales are projected to grow rapidly over the next decade), mass distribution (the transformation of content from print to digital formats streamlines distribution and enables learning to happen anywhere), and personalized learning (new technologies generate individual learning profiles and custom solutions that ensure concept mastery).

In 21st century learning digital, Learning

Make Everything an Experiment

Dwayne Harapnuik — January 5, 2012 — 2 Comments

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/the-power-of-failing/7181?tag=nl.e106

The power of failing | TechRepublic via kwout

Patrick Gray offers this driving principle for the New Year:

Reward success, celebrate failure, and punish inaction.

From learning theory perspective error and error correction (failure) is integral to learning and yet for the most part our learning and business environments punish failure or at least penalize it enough that many people become paralyzed by the fear or anxiety that thought of failure may bring.

Perhaps the easiest way to deal with this challenge is to make everything an experiment. We all know that failure is part of experiments so if we start out with accepting the fact that something could go wrong then it is OK to fail and the potential for innovation and learning can flourish.

In Innovation experiment, failure, Learning, trial and error

Top 5 EdTech Predictions for 2012

Dwayne Harapnuik — January 4, 2012 — 3 Comments

Top 5 Ed Tech predictions for 2012 | ZDNet via kwout

Christopher Dawson predicts that the following major technologies will have a major impact on Education in 2012:

Analytics and BI will go mainstream
Google’s tablet will NOT be the holy grail of 1:1
BYOD will make 1:1 possible in a big way
Khan Academy, et al, will give publishers and mainstream educators a run for their money
We will say goodbye to a lot more libraries and hello to a lot more information

Of the 5 predictions that Dawson makes I have to agree with him fully on his final three. Bring your own device (BYOD) not only makes logistically with the cutbacks we face in Education it also makes sense financially. Technology is the easy part of this major trend but the challenging part is the fact that since some faculty and staff have lived and worked in an environment of control where technology has traditionally been provided that it may be difficult for them to give up some control and adopt to this change.

Similarly, open education resources like Kahn Academy and many others as well as the move from books to digital resources will be technologically easy to implement but will face opposition from those who still prefer the “traditional” approach that has worked for so many years.

One of the consistent trends that I have seen over the years is that getting the technology in place is the easy part but the hard part is getting the faculty to use technology to enhance the learning environment. I was willing to cut faculty and staff some slack on their apprehension toward adopting technology even up until about 19 months ago but with the release of the iPad and subsequently the iPad2 and Android tablets my patience has run out. Why? Prior to the IOS and Android devices becoming so popular and readily accessible it wasn’t that easy to live and work digitally and faculty and staff could use the excuse that they needed training and support in order to be able to work digitally. We are finally at a point where training isn’t required to use technology like an iPad or Android tablet. Faculty still do need significant instruction and support in learning how to create effective learning environments but at least now the technology part of this process is no longer a hindrance.

In Learning 2.0 byod, digital learning, Learning, mobile learning