On education

Here's a rundown of the best s'cool tools from the first quarter of 2013. These are the tools that had you clicking, sharing, and tweeting away.

Each time a teacher or a learner interacts with an Open Educational Resource (OER), these interactions produce data.  This "interaction data" includes "artifact data" routinely captured during any online interaction by Web server logs  (e.g., users' browsers, users' IP addresses) and "social data" created during Web 2.0-style interactions with resources (e.g., tags, comments, ratings, favorites).  Interaction data can serve a number of purposes in a period of increased interest worldwide in OERs quality and uptake. First, interaction data is a valuable source of analytics about OERs and typical audience profiles.  Second, combined with metadata, interaction data can enhance searching, ranking, and recommendations of learning resources. However, obtaining this data is not always easy since OERs, in particular, are generally dispersed among different systems where the interactions between resources and their users take place. This paper describes approaches to unlocking, collecting and aggregating this interaction data.

Google has released a major new education program called Google Play for Education that organizes and manages the way teachers share apps, books, and other learning content with their classes.

Africamooc will bring together a range of free, open, online courses and course providers  from leading universities, training organisations and educators in the same place and under the same brand.

Here is a list of MOOCs  course providers  we found so far and want to share with you. We are constantly updating this list and hope you forward us your favourite links to jens@aelsnet.net.

The Quality of Massive Open Online Courses

The primary criticism of what I will address in this chapter is that success is process-defined rather than outcomes-defined.[1] Without outcomes measurement we cannot measure success, we can’t focus our efforts toward that success, we can’t become more competitive and efficient, we can’t plan for change and improvement, and we can’t define what you want to accomplish as a result. All this is true, and yet there is no measure of outcome or success that can be derived from designer and user motivations, or even from the uses to which MOOCs are put. The only alternative is to identify what a successful MOOC ought to produce as output, without reference to existing (and frankly, very preliminary and very variable) usage.

People who have taken dozens of massive open online courses share their advice for those teaching them.

Coursera is a for-profit company that has joined with top universities to deliver free online courses. The “free” part sounds great until we realize that the real intent of companies like Coursera is to transition into producing monetized, for-credit university courses. To many academics this represents a conflict of interest that compromises the independence and integrity of higher education institutions. I agree and here’s why:

7 Habits Of Highly-Effective Teachers Who Effectively Use Technology

The problem is that Wikipedia in the classroom has gotten a bad reputation in the K-12 world, undeservedly so I think. I would suggest that Wikipedia can be used for a multitude of educational purposes at a wide variety of grade levels. Too many teachers are still afraid to use it in class, so I’m here to right that wrong and show our educators how they can responsibly integrate Wikipedia into their lessons.

Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them.

Response to Intervention (RtI) can target each learner's needs when they need it as they need it.