Creativity and learning

Smartphones and laptops mean students on field trips can interact with universities

 

A postgraduate student is on a field trip to the Orkney Islands collecting data for her PhD in cultural heritage. She checks her RSS feed on her smart phone over breakfast, honing in on the most relevant reports from hundreds of professional journals and blogs that she follows.

 

Her working day begins with a Skype meeting with supervisors in Leicester and Glasgow. Together they edit an article via Google Docs. She then publishes a blog via Wordpress, which she uses to share and test ideas-in-progress with peers and experts worldwide. Some critically appraise her thoughts, linking their own knowledge and research. She tweets about her blog, asking for ideas.

 

She shares her data with research team members via data storage Dropbox. She uploads a video of her field excursion to one of the most remote islands on YouTube, alongside other clips she's archiving for her dissertation.

 

This is a model postgraduate, employing technology to the full, according to Prof Allison Littlejohn, director of the Caledonian Academy at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Educators at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh outline their vision for future learning.

 

Children in developing countries could educate themselves using computers, the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh has been told.

Prof Sugata Mitra was outlining details of the first "school in the cloud".

While there would be an online adult moderator at times, the pupils would largely organise themselves, he said.

 

Meanwhile, an MIT professor laid out his vision of bringing the very best university education to some of the poorest parts of the world.

Prof Anant Agarwai already has one million students enrolled in his online school, edX, an online platform offering courses from some of the highest-profile universities.

Why advice about revising might need to be revised.

 

Revision charts, highlighter pens and sticky notes around the room are some of the methods people use to ensure information stays in their mind.

But now psychologists in the US warn many favourite revision techniques will not lead to exam success.

 

Universities, schools and colleges offer students a variety of ways to help them remember the content of their courses and get good grades.

These include re-reading notes, summarising them and highlighting the important points.

 

Others involve testing knowledge and using mnemonics - ways of helping recall facts and lists, or creating visual representations of the knowledge.

But teachers do not know enough about how memory works and therefore which techniques are most effective, according to Prof John Dunlovsky, of Kent State University.

 

 

He and his colleagues reviewed 1,000 scientific studies looking at 10 of the most popular revision strategies.

They found that eight out of 10 did not work, or even hindered learning.

What happens when mom is blind? A new study shows that the children of sightless mothers develop healthy communication skills and can even outstrip the children of parents with normal vision.

Via a combination of thinking about 'what makes a successful MOOC?', and looking for a topic for my final project on the Infographics MOOC, I [Katy Jordan, PhD student at The Open University] decided to try to pull together the various statistics ...

The ethical use of digital technology is a challenge. I am not talking here of Internet safety, I am talking here of how aspects are owned and managed.

 

iPads ,Chromebooks, tablets, readers etc introduce teachers and students into “walled gardens” – how many teachers have thought through the implications of who really benefits from what?

Where does teachers and student data exist in the digital space?

Who owns what and where is the server that stores it?

What does free mean?

Free apps, free suites of productivity tools, and so on. What happens when free develops a paid model or “free” simply closes down.What might be done with student and teacher data?

Who has the right to search it?

Who has the right to make money from it?

How will we teach students (and teachers) to protect their data, keep it safe,claim ownership of it and indeed make money from it should they be so lucky!

How is attribution acknowledged and respected?

Chinese college graduates are less entrepreneurial than their U.S. counterparts.

 

Three of China's most elite universities, Tsinghua and Peking Universities in Beijing, and Fudan University in Shanghai, have created incubator programs to help entrepreneurs develop commercial applications.

 

So what's the solution for entrepreneurship in China? Schools and universities are an important part of the solution; many Chinese perceive their own schools and colleges to be focused on rote learning and not receptive to creativity and critical thinking.  One international business student chose to attend an English language university, run by Britain's Nottingham University, specifically to acquire the "critical thinking" that her uncle says is lacking in Chinese graduates.

Industrial Design content and community site - articles, discussions, interviews and resources.

 

In the coming week we'll be publishing posts by frog's researchers drawing on their experience of working for commercial and non-commercial clients in some of the less predictable places of the world: Afghanistan; post-revolution Egypt; Rwanda; Burundi; Brazil, Ethiopia; South Sudan; India and China—the list of countries is extensive, the global insights team ratchet up more than 150 projects a year across industries— financial inclusion, healthcare, automotive, fast moving consumer goods.

 

In this series, the posts are written by Jan Chipchase, Cara Silver and Mark Rolston to coincide with the publication of their new report: In The Hands of God: A Study of Risk and Savings in Afghanistan that explored issues related to the design and adoption of mobile money services. As you might expect from a country at war, Afghanistan is very much an outlier, but as such it can reveal behaviours that are far more difficult to spot elsewhere in much the same way that lead users are different from mainstream users. It's a journey that revealed the best and worst of humanity: from the family bonds, trust, betrayal and even an attempted kidnapping.

Open University has developed a fun way to market their design courses: a series of six short animations called “Design in a Nutshell” that briefly survey important movements in the arts and architecture—from the late-nineteenth century Gothic...

Workshop interfaces typically greet users with a blank canvas, requiring them to envision their results in advance. However, as Jakob Nielsen argues, not everyone is a Michelangelo who might readily see a statue hidden in an uncarved marble block. Professional looking templates can help users by providing them with guidance and inspiration.

The problem with these templates, however, is that they are unlikely to provide genuine creative inspiration. As they come bundled with a million copies, by necessity they have to be in line with very common, widely accepted ideas. Although technically well crafted, they are not genuinely creative.

 

Inspiration, as important as it is, does not have to come from templates anyway. It can come from a good book or a walk in the park. Getting inspiration is a very personal experience and while it is always good if an application can do more, it does not need to give inspiration as well. However, it should certainly allow users to get an idea onto the canvas.

Memory game (credit: Tilanus/Wikimedia Commons)

 

The cornerstone brain-training exercise in this field has been the “n-back” task, a challenging working memory task that requires an individual to mentally juggle several items simultaneously. Participants must remember both the recent stimuli and an increasing number of previous stimuli. These tasks can be adapted to also include an audio component or to remember more than one trait about the stimuli over time — for example, both the color and location of a shape.

Through a number of experiments over the past decade, Susanne Jaeggi of the University of Maryland, College Park, and others have found that participants who train with n-back tasks over the course of approximately a month for about 20 minutes per day get better at the n-back task itself, but also experience “transfer” to other cognitive tasks on which they did not train.

People often hide constructive criticism inside a compliment, and those on the receiving end never hear it. Is there a better way to provide feedback?

 

One experiment surveyed students in beginning-level French classes and advanced-level French literature classes. Participants completed a questionnaire about choosing an instructor. They were asked if they would prefer an instructor who emphasized what students were doing well in class and talked about their strengths, such as when they pronounced new words well, or an instructor who focused mostly on what mistakes they made and how to fix those mistakes.

 

Those who had just started learning the language wanted the positive feedback, while those who had been taking the French classes longer were more interested in hearing about what they did wrong and how to correct it.

Don Norman on design thinking:

"Although I still stick to my major point that design thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators have practiced it—I now do believe that designers have a special claim to it. Design thinking has become the hallmark of the modern designer and design studios.

 

Two powerful tools of design thinking summarize the approach: the British Design Council's "Double-Diamond, Diverge-Converge Model of Design"; and the iterative process of Observation, Ideation, Prototype, and Test called "Human-Centered Design." "

 

On Tuesday, we gave you a Visualization of the Big Problem for MOOCs, which comes down to this: low completion rates.

Massive open online courses could be hindering the development of open educational resources because they do not allow everyone to contribute to the innovation of content, a conference has heard.

 

Patrick McAndrew, professor of open education at The Open University, said that although some online resources were genuinely open in this way, the best known Mooc platforms - such as Coursera and edX - were not.

 

Speaking at Open Educational Resources 2013, held at the University of Nottingham on 26 and 27 March, he praised the work of platforms such as Peer to Peer University and the OpenCourseWare Consortium for “really being careful to do everything in a way that truly meets criteria of ‘open’”.

“However, a lot of the organisations involved more recently, like [US Mooc providers] Coursera and edX, have not paid so much attention. Often you can’t actually see into the [course] materials until you make a commitment,” he said. “They are creating a sort of closed community in the open.”

A system developed by a joint venture between Harvard and M.I.T. uses artificial intelligence to assess student papers and short written answers, freeing instructors for other tasks.

Amid a glut of new college graduates, young Chinese say they want to work for the government or big state-owned firms, which are seen as recession-proof, rather than the private companies that have powered China's remarkable economic climb.

Does technological innovation have to come from within the sector? Claire Shaw hears from the current wave of edutech players with their roots firmly in higher education