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

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)

A Wireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig, is the foundational voice and an advocate of the free culture movement, Creative Commons and Open Source. The Open Video Allience will present a live webcast of a talk by Lawrence Lessig at the end of Feburary. For more background on his ideas view his speech: Free Culture: What We Need From You (Ogg). This was Prof. Lessig’s keynote speech at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. (via Lessig.Content: Audio/Video ) In this video he discusses the emerging remix culture as both the source and outcome of societies embrace of digital technology. Lessig feels a new literacy has emerged due to these changes which should be embraced and taught because it is the key to preparing society for further innovation into the 21st Century. Last year at Educause 2009 he stated:

The ‘ecology of education and science,’ Mr. Lessig said, is inherently collaborative, and it is being strangled by copyright-law principles based on exclusivity…”Scientists and educators are busy creating,” he continued, “so it is up to chief information officers and other information-technology specialists to devise ways to make those creations both legal and widely accessible.”

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.”

WhiteHouse.gov Offers First iPhone App

Last week WhiteHouse.gov announced the new White House App.  This new App delivers dynamic content from WhiteHouse.gov on to your iPhone or iPod Touch. This device ushers in a new age of mobile Presidential access.

One of the key features that caught my eye was the live video streaming aspect of the App.  You can use the app to watch the President’s public events at the White House, frequent web chats with Administration officials, and other events like key speeches and press briefings in real time asynchronously. The White House also promises to launch mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, a mobile-ready version of WhiteHouse.gov that is optimized for any internet-enabled mobile device, including many other phones very soon.

The White House’s Press release said; “Mobile internet access is an important way Americans are staying informed.  Mobile web usage grew over 100% in the last year in the United States and higher worldwide.  As part of President Obama’s commitment to an open and transparent government, the White House App makes getting all the latest news and media from the White House easier than ever.  And of course, we’ll continue to look for new and emerging technologies to engage the American people and make information about the President and his administration easily available.” This is a powerful statement that makes me, as a technology advocate and developer, feel America is, once again, back on track to becoming a high tech leader in the world eye.

The Edublog Award Winners

The winners of the 2009 Edublog Awards were announced recently.

I was psyched to see that Karl Fisch, won an award for his viral videos. Karl Fisch won the Lifetime Achievement Award. Karl is the original creator of the “Did You Know?” (Shift Happens) presentations that have been seen by millions of educators world wide. I have posted them on the front page of my site http://UrbanThinking.net many times. The viral video “Did You Know?” is now into its fourth official remix. Be sure to check it out below to learn a bit about the state of the high tech world and how we need to educate our students for the future.

A number of sites that I subscribe to won as well. One of my favorites Free Technology for Teachers won in two categories; Best Resource Sharing Blog and Best Individual Blog. Congrats to all of the winners!

Read the entire post at http://UrbanThinking.net