Even a cursory glance at the education press will shock (if not stun) the reader with the immense glut of high-tech proposals pointed in the direction of the classroom. Take your pick: the virtual classroom, distance learning, xMOOC, cMOOC, learning analytics, the flipped classroom, project-based learning, competency-based curricula, blended learning, eBooks, the LMS, social networking…. [...]
Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, responds to a request for a meta-tutorial on how to make Khan tutorials. In it he describes four guiding principles for making “KSVs,” or Khan Style Videos, as they are now called. Maintain a Conversational Tone Talk the way you would talk to another human being – the [...]
These two stories on the seismic changes underway in education could be footnotes to the post “Witch Hunt or Reformation?” but they seem to stand well on their own. Anya Kamenetz writing for Fast Company recounts a note from Coursera’s Daphne Koller on putting the student first, a trend that will no doubt gather into [...]
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and Inverted (or Flipped) Classrooms have been attracting a lot of attention in education and training circles, but two recent experiments performed far from the rarified heights of North American campuses and training centers, are causing many to stop and reassess what it means to learn and, more importantly, what [...]
Next time you are wrestling with the black dog of educational design loneliness, you might take comfort in the fact that TED Blog has a list of the top 20 most-watched videos on the TED web site and the #1 spot is held by Sir Ken Robinson‘s talk on how schools kill creativity. Given how [...]
It used to be said of teachers that they are the perfect products of the system. They might have technical concerns over a fine point of a course or doubts over the administration of a program but, in general, they are the true believers. It’s no wonder then that so many are starting to paint [...]
Let’s be frank. E-readers and e-books are pretty neat. They can pack an entire library into a portable gadget allowing the reader free range over multiple tomes or ready access to the complete works of a particular author. Passages can be searched, annotated, high-lighted and shared with other readers. But immediate advantages aside, do you have [...]
This published finding may not be scientifically significant (N=1) for some applications, but if nothing else it does provoke a chuckle (and a tendency to draw general conclusions without enough supporting data simply because – let’s face it – we’ve all been there). A study published in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering reports data from [...]
The notion of replacing or limiting the venerable lecture has been visited in earlier posts (The Inverted Classroom and The Future of the Lecture) but it seems the topic is far from exhausted. Recent research in cognitive psychology published in the journal Science points to another dimension in the problem of lecturing, namely, that people [...]
AllThingsD Early Adopters ran a quote in their Voices section from an article at PCPro that reads like a page right out of Marshall McLuhan. Echoing McLuhan’s return of acoustic space and the role of the mosaic in everyday life, Dr Rosie Flewitt of the Open University comments on how the modern learner might be shifting from [...]
Substitute (instructional design | course development | teaching | writing | learning) where you see “research” and “physics” in the excerpts below. “But when it came time to do some research. I couldn’t get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research!… And then I thought to [...]
Rounded rectangles are everywhere. You might think the reason they are so ubiquitous is because web and product designers’ minds are being controlled by an alien graphical design style ray that shows little chance of letting go. Or, maybe not. Beauty, in the case of the rounded rectangle, might be in the eye of the [...]
A recent study from researchers Louis Deslauriers, Ellen Schelew and Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman suggests that the Methuselah of instructional technologies, the venerable broadcast lecture, might finally be showing signs of going the way of geocentricity and the four humors. Applying methods taken from the theory of “deliberate practice” by psychologist Anders Ericsson, the research [...]
Is the Internet Changing the Way We Learn? I like the infographic (see below) “How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education.” It presents an interesting timeline of developments in educational delivery and provides a handy reminder of some things that I’ve forgotten with regard to trends and current industry buzz. And yes, education in all its [...]
It’s not clear whether the presentation experts at InFocus Labs have opened a Pandora’s Box with this event, but their “What Not To Present“ contest apparently overwhelmed even their most staid judges in terms of popular response and the degree to which things can sink and still be considered acceptable. The response from the field [...]