For the past ten years, I've been researching, designing, and building social software for learning, with the goal of helping students help each other. I've been lucky to have had the opportunity to participate in a variety of social learning environments myself — including academic research groups and web startups — and I try to imbue the best of the dynamics from these learning experiences into the systems that I build. You can find out more at http://aribadernatal.com.
If the idea of “blended learning” — combining elements of traditional classroom instruction with software-based supplements — sounds appealing in theory, it’s worth inquiring about how it plays out, in practice. There are a few dozen pilots in progress right now, and the first few findings have been trickling in. One of these was shared [...]
Web video is playing an increasingly prevalent role in online learning: university open courseware initiatives, flipped classrooms experiments, and a growing number of virtual schools all rely heavily on video for direct instruction. And while video is itself a broadcast medium, situating video within a website opens the possibility for peer-to-peer interactions. Most video-hosting websites [...]
While watching Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun, and Sal Khan field questions on their experiences and goals with online education, one set of comments by Peter Norvig absolutely resonated for me (at time 18:52): I think for us, the key that we’re trying to figure out is how to combine a personal experience with a group [...]
[Some thoughts following Badge Working Group #2] A badge — which I think of as a publicly-displayable symbol awarded by a group to an individual as a way to recognize an achievement meeting certain criteria — can be used in a learning context in a few different ways. Gamification is a hot topic right now, [...]
Milton Chen, on minds-on learning: This fall, I humbly propose a new national campaign to teach basketball with textbooks. If the ensuing expressions of outrage by parents and demonstrations at school board meetings lead to energetic discussions about active hands-on, minds-on learning in academic subjects, this short-lived campaign will be very worthwhile. It will make [...]
The LA Times did something controversial this week: They published a database of the “value added” ratings of thousands of Los Angeles elementary school teachers and hundreds of schools, searchable by name. This is a Big Deal. I’ve been working my way through the technical paper that describes the study (PDF), but my mind keeps [...]
There’s a new series of articles being posted on the O’Reilly Radar, and I’m liking it: Education 2.0. The posts touch on several different topics: the role of the DIY ethic in the Maker classroom, ways in which schools will change as a process of disintermediation sets in, and reflections on plans for change, areas [...]
In DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz discusses the economics, sociology, and history of higher ed in the US (“how we got here”) and outlines a variety of promising new trends, techniques, and initiatives (“how we get there”, e.g. OER/CoP/PLN). My favorite passage appears towards the end of [...]
The Mozilla Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation are jointly offering an Education for the Open Web Fellowship: We invite applications from individuals interested in developing innovative approaches that educate people how to promote the open web. …Ideas can connect the open web with learners of any age: opening up the world of web citizenship to [...]
