When Cathy Davidson and Duke University gave free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics said they were wasting their money. Yet when students in practically every discipline invented academic uses for their music players, suddenly the idea could be seen in a new light-as an innovative way to turn learning on its head.
Using cutting-edge research on the brain, she shows how “attention blindness” has produced one of our society’s greatest challenges: while we’ve all acknowledged the great changes of the digital age, most of us still toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century.
Archives: Bookmarks
BuddyPress Photos+Tags Plugin Gives Your Community Friend Tagging in Photos, Just Like Facebook
Hot off of development, BuddyPress Photos+tags is a great new plugin that hooks up your BuddyPress community with the same photo-tagging feature enjoyed by more than 750 million happy Facebook users.
After you install this plugin, users can tag their friends and drive more friendly traffic to your community. As a member is tagged, it will show up in the activity stream and he will also receive a notification. This is a very organic way to boost your traffic and gives your users another way to interact with each other.
Badges – MozillaWiki
Today’s learning happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it’s often difficult to get credit for it.
Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are working to solve this problem by developing an Open Badges infrastructure.
Our system will make it easy for education providers, web sites and other organizations to issue badges that give public recognition and validation for specific skills and achievements.
And provide an easy way for learners tomanage and display those badges across the web — on their personal web site or resume, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere.
The result: Open Badges will help learners everywhere unlock career and educational opportunities, and regonize skills that traditional resumes and transcripts often leave out.
Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes | LinkedIn
“The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.
“But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
“And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. [BusinessWeek, Oct. 12, 2004]
Educational Jargon Generator
This fine academic tool was designed to assist in the writing of reports, grant applications, and other documents related to public schools. I believe that it will be particularly useful for people involved in writing reports for WASC accreditation. Amaze your colleagues with finely crafted phrases of educational nonsense! The javascript code is adapted from Dack.com’s Web Economy BS Generator
Back to School with Google Chromebooks | Hack Education
There are things that Chromebooks can’t do, of course. The schools say they are eager for Google to implement offline Apps, as it’s promised to do by summer’s end. They said that high-end video and photo editing desktop software is still superior to Web-based versions. The Chromebooks don’t work with The Fessenden School’s interactive whiteboards, and the USB interface isn’t adequate for uploading things like photos.
The Semantic Grid System: Page Layout For Tomorrow – Smashing Magazine
Open University research explodes myth of ‘digital native’
“We found no evidence for any discontinuity in technology use around the age of 30 as would be predicted by the Net Generation and Digital Natives hypothesis,” says the report. What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation – which is independent of age — between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work.
Twitter / @JesseCFriedman: I saw the tweets from DC a …
“I saw the tweets from DC about earthquake, then 15 seconds later felt it in NYC. Social media is faster than seismic waves!”
-strange times