Girl Scouts of USA Hires TLC

Every year, Girl Scouts of the USA serves over 2,000,000 girls and 900,000 volunteers internationally.  Through a myriad of enriching experiences, such as extraordinary field trips, sports skill-building clinics, community service projects, cultural exchanges, environmental stewardships, and online endeavors, girls grow courageous and strong.

Girl Scouts of the USA has hired The Learning Collective to conceive an engaging online experience that will help girls across the globe reduce their carbon footprint.  This is part of GSUSA’s Journeys program.  Learn more.

The Learning Collective is proud to work with the Girl Scouts on this important project.

TLC Members’ Work Webby Nominated

Youth Venture’s social change website, which Members of The Learning Collective helped created, is nominated for a Webby.  Adam Aberman, along with Lior Ipp (former TLC Member), created the original specifications for the website, developed by Interfuel, up for a 2011 Webby in the Youth category.  Adam Aberman and Lior Ipp did this work in 2009 while employed by Ashoka’s Youth Venture.

Related articles

• The 2011 Webby Awards (viralblog.com)

College Board Hires TLC

Each year, the College Board serves seven million students and their parents, 23,000 high schools, and 3,800 colleges through major programs and services in college readiness, college admission, guidance, assessment, financial aid, enrollment, and teaching and learning.

The College Board has hired The Learning Collective to help develop College Board’s new online professional development model

TLC Announces Three New Clients

The Learning Collective announces three new clients.   We are acting as the “in-house” online educational experts for Ketchum and their account with a leading provider of online classes to middle and high school students.  We’re advising UCLA on the potential development of an online emergency preparedness tool for developmentally disabled adults.  And we’re overseeing Mojo Markeing & Media’s Jamaican charitable programs, and related digital promotions, stemming from The Mojo 6 LPGA/CBS golf tournament.  Learn more about what we do.

The Emotional Web

Online communities and resources focused on peoples’ emotional health have been around for a while.  This includes the youth space through efforts like icouldbe.org’s online mentoring community which has been around for the past 10 years.  And other resources tailored to help youth deal with particular issues, such as thesafespace.org to help prevent and cope with teen dating violence, have been adding value for a while.

But online functionalities, coupled with sourced content, designed to help folks deal with emotional issues represent a new direction for the web … an emotional rather than factual web.

Consider pepfly.  Currently in beta, Pepfly is built on the scientifically supported idea that changing your everyday feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in small ways can have a powerful effect over time.  Pepfly is an app that connects people to emotional experiences using the web.  Pepfly uses a psychology recommendation engine to recognize the words you use to describe yourself and make sense of them in psychological terms.  It uses a matching algorithm to connect your psychological state to a piece of media that might work for you. It uses a learning system to find patterns in your ratings so that it can deliver more of what works for you and less of what does not.  Check out their FAQs.

Related Stuff

• New Study Proves Jealousy Blinds and Distracts (beliefnet.com)
• 2005 Just in time coaching emotional intelligence (slideshare.net)
• Emotional Intelligence: Learning To Roll With The Punches (peterhbrown.wordpress.com)
• Psychology Professor to Examine Relationship Between Music and Emotions Using Moodagent (indiemusictech.com)

Cloud-Based, Open-Source For Teachers?

A computing device for every teacher and student so they can access the Internet at school or at home? That, along with an embrace of cloud computing, Creative Commons, and open-source technologies is part of a new set of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Education.

On March 5, the department released an 80-page draft of its National Educational Technology Plan entitled Transforming Education: Learning Powered by Technology. The plan lays out an ambitious agenda for transforming teaching and learning through technology.

Much of the NETP emphasizes “21st Century learning” as the path to transforming education: “engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners… and leveraging the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits all curriculum.” The plan seeks to challenge the traditional model of the isolated teacher in a classroom, promoting the idea of “always on” learning resources and online communities for both educators and students.

In addition to changes to the US education model, there are some bold technology recommendations in the plan.

• Adequate broadband and wireless access inside and outside of school
• At least one Internet access device for every student and educator inside and outside of school
• R&D into the use of gaming, simulations, and virtual worlds for instruction and assessment
• Encouragement of cloud computing for school districts
• Use of Creative Commons and Open Education licenses
• Changes to FERPA (Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act) to open access to student data
• Changes to CIPA (Children’s Internet Protection Act) to open access to the Internet and rethink how filtering works in schools.

Continue reading via Read Write Web

Related articles

• Cloud-Based, Open-Source Future For Teachers? (readwriteweb.com)
• Should School be Taught in the Cloud? (chris.pirillo.com)
• Free Classroom Management Software Now Supports Mixed Platform Environments (prweb.com)
• Tom Vander Ark: The 3×5 Learning Revolution (huffingtonpost.com)
• Debunking the Myth of Isolated and Inaccessible Learning: 3 Resources (conversationagent.com)

Google Labs + News = Living Stories

Google Labs always has something interesting for me to explore. This time the guys at Google in conjunction with the Washington Post and The New York Times are tackling online news. I think this tool has allot of value, and if it is adopted widely it could change the way we discover, read and research news topics, using online news outlets. The fact that they are offering a open source API makes it even more compelling. They came up with a very powerful way to explore a news topic. They used their search algorithms that are already searching out all of the online sources on any given topic to add context and pull together a research hub on the desired news topic.

Here’s how it works. After a search is completed, and a story is selected you are presented with a variety of links of varying importance from any site that has covered the topic. There are a wide variety of ways to filter the content from media type to personalities in the story. It also offers a time line from the stories’ development across the web.

The implications for education are immediately apparent. Students now have a way to do one stop research. If they understand how to validate and attribute sources it can save them allot of time. This is an important factor, as classes in media literacy are not currently taught as a requirement in most school district’s curricula. This API is powerful enough to change the way modern news is interacted with and if newspapers are smart they are already implementing it as part of their online offerings.

Since most “old school” news (and publishers in general) organizations are nowhere near as open minded or nimble as they need to be, we may never see wide spread adoptions of this new delivery method. Most news organizations are too busy building subscription based,  “walled gardens” in the futile effort to protect their content and retain advertisers to consider any innovative open source offering that helps a reader understand a topic better. Especially one that pulls together a variety of sources from around the web to build a re-mixed conglomerate version of the story that is more informative that any single story can ever be. All said, judging by how quickly news papers are folding under this mind set, they may not last long enough to benefit from the increased exposure from this new browsing option. Kudos to the New York Times and Washington post  for their insightful work and Google for pulling them together. Here is an overview of the Living Stories feature set:

Related articles

• Google Open-Sources its Experimental News Format (mashable.com)
• Google Declares “Living Stories” Experiment Success, Offers as Open Source (readwriteweb.com)
• Google Launches a New Way to Read the News (mashable.com)
• Google’s news experiment Living Stories to go open source (guardian.co.uk)
• Exclusive: Google News to Share “Fast Flip” Through Open API (beet.tv)
• Read news fast with Google Fast Flip (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google and Top Newspapers Experiment with a New Way to Deliver the News (mashable.com)

Connectivism And Modern Literacy

In the 20th century literacy was simply the “ability to read and write”. The subset of skills necessary to be called literate has changed greatly and the definition has expanded to encompass the, ” …ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) With the advent of the internet and social media students have been challenged to add new resources to their tool set to be prepared to be productive citizens in the information age. Modern literacy in the information age calls for lifetime learners with a set of skills that are constantly evolving and is permeated by dynamic, participatory media (social), and web-based tools that aid collaboration and information sharing.

In the book “Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement,” Howard Rheingold wrote: “If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

Participatory media include (but aren’t limited to) blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, digital storytelling, virtual communities, social network services, virtual environments, and videoblogs.”

Modern youth multi-task more often, multi-task more effectively and have shorter attention spans than any up to this point in history. This student demands the use of rich multimedia learning environments and, project-based instruction that engages the student and challenges him to use dynamic web-based tools and participatory media. Terms like “Connectivism” and “Networked Learning” are now being used to describe the new processes that are emerging. Here is a excellent video that explains these new paradigms and what they mean for the 21st century classroom.

This is a key reason teaching must change to keep up with the new paradigms called for in the information age. The lecture-based educational model is obsolete and role of the teacher has morphed from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide by a students side”.

Related articles

• Let kids ‘Tweet’ in class, says expert (cbc.ca)
• The presence of a teacher (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• Hunger to learn (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Re:Reinventing Project Based Learning (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• The Future Is Now — 21st Century Teaching And Learning (slideshare.net)
• Why we need another great education debate (guardian.co.uk)
• Techno Literacy (slideshare.net)
• Literacy -> Digital Flow: moving beyond Traditional Literacy. (dougbelshaw.com)
• Mrs. Cassidy’s Classroom: Media Literate 6-year-olds (wired.com)

Develop Idea for A Mobile Learning App

Applications for the first Startl Design Boost are now open for budding entrepreneurs and designers interested in developing cutting edge mobile applications for learning.  Developed in conjunction with IDEO, the first Startl Boost, a five day building, hacking, business and human centered design immersion will be held at the Pratt Institute in New York City, March 15-19, 2010.  There is no tuition cost for the workshop.  Details of the workshop:

Day 1: Define the Idea: Participants present ideas and set criteria for their proposed mobile learning application.

Day 2: Validate the Idea: Participants conduct research with end users and get feedback with learning and marketing experts about their mobile learning app.

Day 3: Design the idea: Participants storyboard their refined idea for mobile learning app and begin creating/ modifying their prototype.

Day 4: Share the idea: Participants create presentation deck to “pitch” their mobile learning app and finalize their prototype.

Day 5: Pitch the idea: Participants will present “pitches” and prototypes to an audience that includes a panel of users, industry experts, and market investors.

The top three teams will be invited to present to a larger audience at the Venture Capital in Education Summit in June in NYC.  While the Startl Design Boost is open to mobile learning applications for all ages, teams creating apps for children ages 3-11 can also apply for the inaugural Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children’s Learning, a national competition intended to generate digital educational innovations with prizes up to $50,000, as well as ongoing business planning support from The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop. Startl is a new social enterprise dedicated to bringing digital media and learning innovations to market – from kindergarten to college, inside and outside the classroom.  Startl was incorporated in 2009 with initial funding from the MacArthur, Hewlett, and Gates foundations.  Startl’s mission is to identify talented people with great ideas and new products that will affect the future of learning.  Through relationships with best of breed design, incubation, and investment partners Startl provides an ecology that allows entrepreneurs to mature and products to evolve.  Related articles:

• Sesame Street comes to Google: Improving our education system at the Breakthrough Learning forum (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• So what does an EIR (at First Round in New York City) do? (thisisgoingtobebig.com)

Harvard Professor: Learn 3 Minutes a Day

Some educators are turning to short online learning activities as a preferred approach to engage students.

Take SpacedEd.  It offers students the chance to “learn most anything in 3 minutes a day.”  Originally developed by Dr B. Price Kerfoot, a Harvard Medical School professor, for medical school students, the method has been proven through 10 rigorous studies to increase knowledge by up to 50% and strengthen retention of concepts up to two years.

SpacedEd feeds short bits of info to users in small spurts of questions and answers.  Learners browse a directory of courses ranging from medical subjects to bartending, music theory and fantasy football.  “Courses consist entirely of questions and answers.  They are sent to you in small amounts (typically 1 or 2 a day) on a regular schedule via email, the Web or RSS … Questions repeat based on answers … Get a question wrong and it repeats sooner.  Get it right one or more times in a row and it is retired from the course.  Retire all questions to complete the course.”

This method is based on two psychological findings: the spacing effect and testing effect.  The “spacing effect” refers to the finding that “information which is presented and repeated over spaced intervals is learned and retained more effectively, in comparison to traditional ‘binge-and-purge’ methods of education.”  In other words, learning over extended time periods works better than cramming.  The “testing effect” refers to the finding that “the long-term retention of information is significantly improved by testing learners on this information.  Testing is not merely a means to measure a learner’s level of knowledge, but rather causes knowledge to be stored more effectively in long-term memory.”