SLASHDOT: Code.org Wants Participating Students' Data For 7 Years

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/28/1623205/codeorg-wants-participating-students-data-for-7-years?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

"As part of its plan to improve computer science education in the U.S., the Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates-backed Code.org is asking school districts to sign a contract calling for Code.org to receive 'longitudinal student achievement data' for up to seven academic years in return for course materials, small teacher stipends, and general support. The Gates Foundation is already facing a backlash from the broader academic community over attempts to collect student data as part of its inBloom initiative. The Code.org contract also gives the organization veto power over the district teachers selected to participate in the Code.org program, who are required to commit to teaching in the program for a minimum of two school years."

Gartner Hype Cycle for Education, 2013

• On the Rise
  • Mashware
  • Quantum Computing
  • Education Tablet
  • Open Microcredentials
  • Campus App Store
  • Affective Computing
  • SIS International Data Interoperability Standards
  • BPO
  • Open-Source SIS
  • Student Retention CRM
  • Citizen Developers 
  
  
• At the Peak
  • Learning Stack
  • Adaptive E-Textbooks
  • Big Data
  • Gamification
  • MOOC
  • Social Software Standards
  • Wireless aaS
  • COBIT
  • Adaptive Learning 
  
  
• Sliding Into the Trough
  • Digital Preservation of Research Data
  • BYOD Strategy
  • Mobile-Learning Low-Range/Midrange Handsets
  • Open-Source Financials
  • EA Frameworks
  • Web-Based Office Productivity Suites
  • ITIL
  • Social Learning Platform for Education
  • Cloud HPC/CaaS
  • Mobile-Learning Smartphones
  • Open-Source Middleware Suites
  • E-Textbook
  • Cloud Email for Staff and Faculty
  • Virtual Environments/Virtual Worlds 
  
  
• Climbing the Slope
  • Emergency/Mass Notification Services
  • Hosted Virtual Desktops
  • Open-Source Learning Repositories
  • SaaS Administration Applications
  • Enterprise Architecture
  • IT Infrastructure Utility
  • Intellectual Property Rights and Royalties Management Software
  • Lecture Capture and Retrieval Tools
  • 802.11n
  • Unified Communications and Collaboration
  • Tablets
  • Game Consoles as Media Hubs 
  
  
• Entering the Plateau
  • E-Book Readers
  • Self-Publishing
  • Mashups 
  
  https://www.gartner.com/doc/2559615
  

Froebel Gifts

The Froebel Gifts are a range of educational materials designed by Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852). Fröbel advocated the importance of free play in childhood. Each gift (Gabe) was designed to be given to a child to provide material for the child's self-directed activity. These Gifts are a series of activity-based playthings ranging from simple sphere-shaped objects, through to geometric wooden blocks and more advanced Gifts pertaining to sewing, cutting, weaving and the modelling of objects in clay.

Gift 1 - Yarn balls
Gift 2 - Sphere Cylinder Cube
Gift 3 - Eight Cubes
Gift 4 - 8 Rectangular prisms
Gift 5 - Cubes & Prisms
Gift 6 - Caps, Columns & Bricks
Gift 7 - Paper Tablets
Gift 8 - Wood Laying Sticks
Gift 9 - Points

How Music Affects and Benefits Your Brain by Belle Beth Cooper

http://blog.bufferapp.com/music-and-the-brain

 

Ambient noise can improve creativity

We all like to pump up the tunes when we’re powering through our to-do lists, right? But when it comes to creative work, loud music may not be the best option.

It turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise apparently gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do.

The way this works is that moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. In other words, when we struggle (just enough) to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.

In high noise levels, however, our creative thinking is impaired because we’re overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.

This is very similar to how temperature and lighting can affect our productivity, where paradoxically a slightly more crowded place can be beneficial.

Classical music can improve visual attention

It’s not just kids that can benefit from musical training or exposure. Stroke patients in one small study showed improved visual attention while listening to classical music.

The study also tried white noise and silence to compare the results, and found that, like the driving study mentioned earlier, silence resulted in the worst scores.

Because this study was so small, the conclusions need to be explored further for validation, but I find it really interesting how music and noise can affect our other senses and abilities—in this case, vision.

Music training can significantly improve our motor and reasoning skills

We generally assume that learning a musical instrument can be beneficial for kids, but it’s actually useful in more ways than we might expect. One study showed that children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn’t learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.

They also tested better on vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills, which involve understanding and analyzing visual information, such as identifying relationships, similarities and differences between shapes and patterns.

These two areas in particular are quite removed from musical training as we imagine it, so it’s fascinating to see how learning to play an instrument can help kids develop such a wide variety of important skills.

Similar research shows this correlation for exercise and motor skills in the same way, which is also fascinating.

http://blog.bufferapp.com/music-and-the-brain

Take college and university courses online completely free

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/take-college-and-university-courses-online-completely-free

In recent years massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become a trend in online education. The term was coined in 2008 by David Cormier, manager of web communications and innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island. The first MOOC was created the previous year, at Utah State University.

MOOCs are designed like college courses but are available to anyone anywhere in the world, at no cost. You do not receive a college credit, but you will receive a certificate of completion when you complete all coursework. The courses span dozens of subjects and are taught by some of the leaders in those fields. The courses are designed to be interesting, fun and rigorous; the courses are not just in science, and not just in English.

Coursera is perhaps the most well-known of the online education facilitators. Their latest numbers indicate that they have 17,000,000 enrollments from students representing 190 countries. There are 240,000
students in their most popular class. Coursera has over 400 courses in more than 20 categories, created by 85 Universities from 16 countries. Their courses are available in 12 different languages.

EdX is another non-profit course site created by founding partners Harvard and MIT and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. EdX offers MOOCs and interactive online classes in subjects including law, history, science, engineering, business, social sciences, computer science, public health, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has partnerships with tertiary institutions in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, China and Korea.

MIT has their own open courseware, where most of the materials used in the teaching of almost all of MIT's subjects are available on the Web, free of charge. They have more than 2,000 courses available. Stanford also has their own online and open courses. These are great options if you prefer to work at your own pace, as compared to structured classes like those offered at Coursera and EdX.

European institutions are also getting in on the act. Germany-based Iversity offers courses in both English and German and the first courses went online in October this year. Future Learn is a subsidiary of the British Open University and is currently in its beta stage. It already has partnerships with universities across Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The courses will begin this coming November.

For those looking to learn a language Duolingo offers completely free language education. If you're interested in learning a valuable skill CodeAcademy teaches programming and coding in online, free and interactive lessons.

Other sites, like Open Culture, are not affiliated with tertiary institutions. On Open Culture, the editor finds the free courses and audio books on the web and hosts them on the site. The courses are audio & video and can be downloaded straight to a computer or mp3 player.

This is by no means a complete list of all site and institutions that offer free online courses. http://www.mooc-list.com/ has many more listed.

Gamification Examples

CourseHero: Improving the Teacher-Student Interactions Online

 

Course Hero is an online learning platform for students and a portal for educators to distribute their educational resources. The site collects and organizes study materials that have been uploaded by educators and student users to form a vast learning repository. The Education Gamification platform provides materials such as syllabi, problem sets, and practice exams are combined with class notes, flash cards, and study guides that have been uploaded. In addition, Course Hero offers access to tutors, digital flashcards, and video lectures. 

GoalBook: Brings student teams together around their individual Learning Plans

Goalbook is an online platform that helps teachers, parents and students collaboratively track progress. Blending qualities of social networking and Individualized Education Program (IEP) tracking software, the program makes it simple for students and teachers to set goals and for all involved parties to watch everything unfold.

Brainscape: Turns Confidence Based Repetition into a Game

Brainscape is a mobile and wed-based education platform that is designed to help students study smart. The program uses adaptive algorithms to create flashcards, whose presentation pattern can change in response to what students know and what they seem to be struggling with, focusing attention on the more difficult topics.

ClassDojo: Turns Class into a Game of Rewards and Instant Feedback

ClassDojo is a classroom management tool to help teachers improve behavior in their classrooms quickly and easily. It improves specific student behaviors and helps engagement by issuing awards and recording real-time feedback.

Socrative 101: In-Class mobile interaction between Teacher and Student

Socrative 101 makes it easier to engage students through a response system that offers educational exercises and games over a laptop or mobile device.

Recent conference on using personal response systems ("clickers") in Trinity College

A conference sponsored by one of the providers of student personal response systems, Turning Point, took place in Trinity College recently. A keynote presentation was given by Eric Mazur who has used Peer Instruction faciliated by clickers to good effect.

A storify collection of tweets from the conference is available by clicking here; Storify archive from Turning Point conference 
A blog entry from an attendee, Sharon Flynn reflecting on the conference can be found by clicking here; Sharon Flynn's blog entry on Turning Point conference

Three Simple Storyboarding Templates To Organize Your Content Creation Projects

What Makes Great Infographics?

Naming Student Experiences and Experiencing Student Naming

http://www.maxvanmanen.com/files/2012/12/Student_Naming.pdf

Van Manen, M., McClelland J., Plihal J., (2007).

Educators commonly speak of student experience. But do we really know what happens when a student has an experience? In everyday life, in schools and classrooms, teachers call on students, address students by their names, pronounce, mispronounce, or confuse their names, and sometimes forget student names altogether. We engage the art of phenomenological inquiry to explore the meaning and significance of student experience, by using the phenomenon of naming—and its relevance for pedagogy—as an example and as
a source for reflection.

African teachers must play a central role in the mobile phone revolution by Niall Winters

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/oct/23/african-teachers-role-mobile-revolution

Only projects that work with existing education systems, not against them, will bolster learning and eradicate poverty.

You've no doubt heard of the mobile phone revolution sweeping sub-Saharan Africa – perhaps mobile money transfer, or mHealth. The hope is that these technologies will transform lives by improving health, education, finance and women's position in society.

However, as knowledge management expert Piers Bocock notes, there is a vast disconnect between the companies that produce and market these technologies and on-the-ground implementers – with the hype perhaps best exemplified by Bill Clinton.

Referring to a 2010 UN report, the former US president stated that mobile phones "are one of the most effective advancements in history to lift people out of poverty". However, the report was clear that impact depended "on the context and on the environment in which ICTs are introduced and used".

Some may ask: what could be wrong with this focus on the mobile phone revolution? Don't we all support progress? In short, no. While innovation is welcome, in some cases, the way it is implemented risks increasing – not reducing – marginalisation. I'll discuss just one example from education: teachers and their role in mobile learning projects in sub-Saharan Africa.

Excluding teachers

Let's begin with a simple question: when was the last time you heard the voice of teachers from sub-Saharan Africa extolling the virtues of mobile phones in education? I'm not talking about nicely staged interviews – I mean really telling us how their teaching was fundamentally improved.

Now, a second question: when was the last time you heard that teachers in Africa are not trained properly, are demotivated and that the formal education systems in which they work are weak? My hunch is that you've heard much more about this than you've heard teachers praising mobile technology.

My concern is that some people use the problems with education systems to justify excluding teachers from the design and development of mobile learning interventions. Teachers' voices are marginalised. And the mobile operators association, GSMA, to take just one example, characterises the teaching profession in a way that divorces it from progress and innovation.

The difficulties teachers face are used as a starting point for criticism, rather than as a motivation to address systemic issues. A good example of this is how the technology community has openly welcomed 2013 TED prizewinner Sugata Mitra's work on learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge, even though his approach to achieving this is highly contested among educational researchers and practitioners.
It is a mistake to run down teachers' professionalism to justify technology use in education.

Alternative vision

Instead, we need to create an alternative vision that values and prioritises teacher involvement in mobile learning.

First, begin by acknowledging that supporting teacher involvement is a messy, time-consuming and resource-intensive process. And commit to it – there is no magic technology bullet.

Second, understand that many teachers in sub-Saharan Africa work under tough conditions; and build on research that analyses how these affect their teaching. A study last year in Tanzania, for example, found that teachers wanted to improve their qualifications and be respected but were constrained by resource limitations and the demands of daily life, which Unesco – the UN body promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture – clearly recognises: overcrowded classrooms, malnourished students, low pay and a high-pressure workload.

Third, learn from the One Laptop per Child programme. Its uptake in sub-Saharan Africa was generally judged to have failed because of a lack of integration with education ministries. It is teachers who will support students with mobile learning interventions and help safeguard success. They need a central role in truly multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Build local capacity

Clearly, more investment in teacher training is needed within – and beyond – mobile learning programmes. Research has shown the crucial role teachers play in designing, developing and implementing education technologies.

Three things need to happen to support a more central role for teachers: reconfiguration of mobile learning projects, an increased use of participatory methodologies and less techno-centrism. Reconfiguration requires a level of self-reflection. We know that many mobile learning projects are funded by sizeable donations made under corporate social responsibility budgets.

This often means a central role is played by the non-expert funder, not the teacher. If corporate funders stepped back, teachers would have more space to take on the more central role required.
However, this enhanced role cannot be supported without appropriate methodologies. Participatory approaches in development go back at least to the early 1970s and are still used in various ways – including giving a voice to marginalised people in the debate over the post-2015 developmental goals.
There is a vibrant Human-Computer Interaction for Development community that promotes user-centred approaches to technology design, use and evaluation. In my own work over the years, including in a current project for training community health workers in Kenya, we extensively use participatory approaches to help design and develop mobile learning interventions.

The idea that technocentrism or even solely content-based solutions can address important educational challenges by themselves must be dropped. Research shows they cannot.

The path to success is clear: the risks of increasing the marginalisation of teachers – and by extension students – can only be ameliorated by understanding teachers' practice, co-designing interventions with them and providing them with training.

Projects that work with existing educational systems, not against them, should have priority funding. Only then can mobile learning be seen to work for teachers, for their students and for the alleviation of poverty among those at the margins of society.

Crowdsourcing Linked Open Data for Disaster Management

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-798/paper2.pdf

Jens Ortmann, Minu Limbu, Dong Wang and Tomi KauppinenInstitute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Germany


Abstract

This paper shows how Linked Open Data can ease the challenges of information triage in disaster response efforts. Recently, disaster management has seen a revolution in data collection. Local victims as well as people all over the world collect observations and make them available on the web. Yet, this crucial and timely information source comes unstructured. This hinders a processing and integration, and often a general consideration of this information. Linked Open Data is supported by number of freely available technologies, backed up by a large community in academia and it offers the opportunity to create flexible mash-up solutions. At hand of the Ushahidi Haiti platform, thispaper suggests crowdsourced Linked Open Data. We take a look at the requirements, the tools that are there to meet these requirements, and suggest an architecture to enable non-experts to contribute Linked Open Data.

The Spectral Game: leveraging Open Data and crowdsourcing for education

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1758-2946-1-9/fulltext.html

Jean-Claude Bradley¹  , Robert J Lancashire²  , Andrew SID Lang³   and Antony J Williams⁴ 

 

(1) Department of Chemistry, Drexel University, 32nd and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA

(2) Department of Chemistry, The University of the West Indies Mona Campus, Kingston 7, Jamaica

(3) Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Oral Roberts University, 7777 S. Lewis Ave, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74171, USA

(4) ChemZoo Inc, Wake Forest, 904 Tamaras Circle, North Carolina 27587, USA

 

 

Abstract

 

We report on the implementation of the Spectral Game, a web-based game where players try to match molecules to various forms of interactive spectra including 1D/2D NMR, Mass Spectrometry and Infrared spectra. Each correct selection earns the player one point and play continues until the player supplies an incorrect answer. The game is usually played using a web browser interface, although a version has been developed in the virtual 3D environment of Second Life. Spectra uploaded as Open Data to ChemSpider in JCAMP-DX format are used for the problem sets together with structures extracted from the website. The spectra are displayed using JSpecView, an Open Source spectrum viewing applet which affords zooming and integration. The application of the game to the teaching of proton NMR spectroscopy in an undergraduate organic chemistry class and a 2D Spectrum Viewer are also presented.