My 11 year old daughter and I recently discussed the impact of comma placement, pauses, and intonation on meaning. Hence I was immediately attracted to the title, “Free yourself from oppression by technology”, because it can be parsed 2 ways. I started reading the article from New Scientist by Yair Amichai-Hamburger just to see which it was and found insights on self-determination theory that are very relevant to e-learning.
The article concludes, “I believe that autonomy, competence, relatedness and critical thinking are the best ways to establish a balanced approach to technology, and so enhance our well-being.” The same statement could be made about successful students, online or otherwise. Read the article for a fascinating discussion that might make you – horrors – shut off some of your devices and stop coveting the latest smart phone entry on the market.
Free Yourself from Oppression by Technology
Jan. 15 Deadline for Digital Media Innovation Competition
An open-call competition that will provide $2 million to innovators of digital media and learning is nearing its January 15, 2010 deadline to apply.
The competition seeks designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and others to build digital experiences (“learning labs of the 21st century”) that will help young people interact, share, build, tinker, and explore in new and innovative ways.
All the details to apply can be found at www.dmlcompetition.net
Two types of awards are available: Learning Lab Designer awards and Game Changer awards. Learning Lab Designer awards, which will range from $30,000 to $200,000, are for learning environments and digital media-based experiences that allow young people to grapple with social challenges through activities based on the social nature, contexts, and ideas of science, technology, engineering.
Game Changers awards, which range from $5,000 to $50,000, are for creative levels designed with either LittleBigPlanet or Spore Galactic Adventures that offer young people engaging game play experiences and that incorporate and leverage principles of science, technology, engineering and math for learning.
Each category will include several Best in Class awards selected by expert judges, as well as a People’s Choice Award selected by the general public. The online application system will open on January 7 and will include three rounds of submissions, with public comment at each stage. In February 2010, a special competition will be opened up to youth from ages 12-17.
The competition is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in collaboration with the University of California-Irvine, Duke University and the virtual network HASTAC.
The 2010 Competition winners will join an existing community of 36 awardees from 2007 and 2008, including a video blogging project for young women in Mumbai, India; a cutting-edge mobile phone application that lets children conduct digital wildlife spotting and share that information with friends; a project that leverages low-cost laptops to help indigenous children in Chiapas, Mexico learn by producing and sharing their own media creations; and an online platform for 200 classrooms around the world that allows young people to monitor, analyze, and share information about the declining global fish population.
Call for Papers: LINC 2010
Do you have an interesting story to share relating to technology-enabled education in emerging countries, or as it applies to university education… or life-long learning?
The Fifth International Conference of MIT Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC), which will take place May 23-26, 2010, has announced a call for papers on these topics.
The deadline to submit is February 1, 2010.
LINC organizers are seeking papers that address novel and challenging ideas, and report on real applications with concrete results.
For the 2010 conference, LINC is especially interested in submissions that demonstrate the leadership role of universities in reaching down to secondary schools and reaching up to life-long learners, with the goal of bringing technology-enabled education to learners of all ages.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
– Innovations in educational technology
– New media for instruction
– Virtual universities
– E-learning in emerging nations
– New pedagogical models facilitated by technology
– Open Education Resources (OER)
– Universities and lifelong learning
– Universities and STEM education for high school students (science, technology, engineering, math)
– Web 2.0 and Social Software.
Further information is available on LINC’s website.
eLearn Magazine Highlights from 2009 and Expectations for 2010
Happy 2010! eLearn Magazine has had a wonderfully productive year. With 2009 over, here is a review of some of the highlights and our plans for 2010.
Our biggest news in 2009 was the addition of Jill Duffy, senior editor, ACM headquarters staff, in June 2009. Beginning July 1, 2009, eLearn began a new effort to post more new content, increase readership and traffic to the site, and promote more discussion with user comments.
More content. Since July, eLearn Magazine has been publishing two new articles every week, steadily, in addition to one to two blog posts per week. The range of content has expanded to include not only articles about corporate training and online learning in higher ed., but also: book reviews, research reports, best practices, case studies, tips for both professors and students, trends pieces, and more. Take a look at some of the best content below in the “Top 10 Most Popular Articles.”
Diversified outreach strategy. Readers can find out about the new content by visiting the homepage where it is highlighted, signing up to receive our twice monthly email newsletter, watching for RSS updates (which are synched into ACM’s digital library), and following eLearnMag on Twitter and Plurk. This diversified outreach strategy allows us to reach readers from different sectors of e-learning and different areas of the world, based on their online activity and preferences.
Increased readership. Readership has increased measurably since we started these initiatives to improve content, frequency of content, and outreach. Our strongest month in 2009 was October, when nearly 23,000 people visited the site and looked at more than 45,000 pages of content. Compared to July, October’s numbers showed a 58 percent increase in readership and a 54 percent increase in pageviews! November proved nearly as strong as October, and the statistics for December are forecasted to be just as strong.
International recognition. In the past six months, eLearn Magazine was viewed in nearly every country across the world – 196 countries and territories by Google’s count (which is more than the number of countries recognized by the U.N.) We have yet to make strides in Turkmenistan, Gabon, and a few other places, though it’s good to have clear objectives for the future!
While the overwhelming majority of our readers were in the United States when they visited the site, we saw thousands of readers from each of the following countries: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, German, The Philippines, Spain, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and France.
Growing advisory board. We’ve also focused on expanding our advisory board to include new names and faces that represent a e-learning on a much broader and more international scale than in the past, and we hope to continue adding new – and more importantly, highly engaged and motivated – board members and editors in 2010. Our board:
Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa, King Saud University, Riyadh (advisory board) -e-learning higher education issues in the Middle East
Saul Carliner, Concordia University, Montreal (advisory board) -education technology
Janet Clarey, Brandon Hall Research (advisory board) -corporate learning and development, as well as research and analysis
Denise Doig, managing editor, ACM headquarters staff
Jill Duffy, senior editor, ACM headquarters staff
Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada (advisory board) -research and education technology
Lisa Gualtieri, Editor-in-Chief
Karl M. Kapp, Bloomsburg University (advisory board) -instructional technology and business operations
Don Norman, Northwestern University and University of California-San Diego (advisory board) -specialized in user advocacy, design
Mark Notess, Indiana University (advisory board) -usability and software development
Clark Quinn, Quinnovation (advisory board) -learning systems design
Allison Rossett, San Diego State University (advisory board) -educational technology and business technologies for learning and performance
Roger C. Schank, eLearn Magazine’s contributing editor and opinion columnist -learning theory, cognitive science, research
More to Come in 2010. We look forward to continuing these efforts to make eLearn Magazine even better in 2010. We have been working on a redesigned web site to better support this endeavor and hope to share more with you on this front in the coming months.
eLearn Magazine is not only for you, but it is by you; please contact us if you are interested in contributing or if you have suggestions for how we can better meet your needs.
And finally: Top 10 Most Popular Articles on eLearnMag.org
From July 1, 2009 to December 22, 2009
1. E-learning 2.0
By Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada
2. 10 Things I’ve Learned About Teaching Online
By Michelle Everson, University of Minnesota
3. Tips and Tools for Fostering a Creative e-Learning Class
By Susan Doctoroff Landay, President of Trainers Warehouse
4. 15 Tips for Webinars: How to Add Impact When You Present Online
By Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE
5. How Tiny Camcorders are Changing Education
By Laurie Rowell
6. E-Learning Tools for STEM
By Maria H. Andersen, Muskegon Community College
7. Discussion Management Tips for Online Educators
By Jo Macek, Anthem Education Group
8. Threading, Tagging, and Higher-Order Thinking
By Mary Burns, Education Development Center, Indonesia
9. Seven Steps to Better E-learning
By Clark N. Quinn, Director, Quinnovation
10. E-learning, Online Learning, Web-based Learning, or Distance Learning: Unveiling the Ambiguity in Current Terminology
By Susanna Tsai and Paulo Machado, InkiTiki Corporation, Island of Kauai, Hawaii, InkiTiki.com
Be a Better Online Student
10 New Years Resolutions for Online Students, by Jamie Littlefield, includes practical advice that can help anyone who works from home ever (and who doesn’t?) as well as online students and faculty. Her advice is particularly important for new students who, lacking the traditional classroom and campus, may not know the steps to take to be successful.
Although e-learning has grown and become more technologically sophisticated, much of Jamie’s advice echos what was in a course I developed in 2001 as part of a team at EDS. The course, How to Be an Online Learner, was developed as the first online course and a prerequisite for other courses for the Laborers-AGC Education and Training Fund, a partnership between the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) and The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC).
We thought it was important to get students online and get them accustomed to being online students before taking a “real” course. Of course, it assumed that students could get online and use a browser, which fewer people could do then than in 2010. The course covered how to be a successful student and how it is different to be a student online than in the classroom, offering guidance about motivation, time management, setting up a good study environment, and online behavior and interaction. It also covered how to use the tools in the Laborers-AGC online course environment.
The next course was on fitting and cleaning a respirator and it was a “blended” course since there was supervised practice. I can still remember the issues as well as the consequences of not fitting or cleaning a respirator well. Which goes to show that the best way to learn something is to teach it. I’ll add #11 to Jamie’s list: Seek opportunities to teach others to reinforce your own learning.