Considering the Curriculm: TeachMeet Newcastle Keynote
Shelly Terrell, Teacher Reboot Camp, March 4, 2011.

Video presentation from a teacher who is engaged in new learning technologies attempting to motivate other teachers by sharing some of her stories. Shelly Terrell tells how her parents were able to use education to break out of one generational cycle and enter a new one. "When we go to college we have a chance of getting out of poverty," she says. " believe that Newcastle is definitely a mecca for innovative teaching, especially with technology. It was Gateshead that helped Dr. Sugata Mitra with his Hole in the Wall experiments. Simon Finch was really great in getting me to see the way mobile learning and elearning is improving education in Newcastle." Nice video. I didn't intend to watch the full 15 minute presentation, but I did.

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Does Texting Makes You Smarter | e-Learning Today TV
Denis Soukhanov, et. al., Learning Today, March 4, 2011.

Is e-learning TV something people watch? I'm still not sure whether people would listen to e-learning radio, much less drop what they're doing to watch e-learning TV. But then again, I was raised in a radio world (yes, we had TV, but as a family we tended to listen to radio rather more than we watched TV). I had some pretty rough playback issues - always a risk when you host your own video. And it's not the most polished broadcast in the world. I can't say I really recommend the show, but I think people should be able to look and judge for themselves.

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The Daily Click: Student Opinions of the iPad
Sarah Motiei, The Xplanation / YouTube, March 4, 2011.

A video I played on the radio today. Interesting set of opinions. Interesting to hear all the student opinions on the iPad in retrospect - especially all the negative opinions. Also, see much more from the Xplanation on reax to the iPad 2.

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Questions at Education Regulations hearing - 3.1.2011
Rep. George Miller, YouTube, March 4, 2011.

I ran this on #ds106radio this afternoon. No comment; I jut thought it was interesting. "Federal education law should move from a command-and-control system to an outcomes-based system, says Rep. George Miller at the March 1 hearing on federal education regulations. He makes an eloquent defense of data."

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Twitter Puts the Smack Down on Another Popular App: Whither Twitter as a Platform?
Mike Melanson , ReadWriteWeb, March 4, 2011.

Didn't I warn people not to build applications or services that depend on proprietary platforms? Why yes, I did. So I can't really work up too much angst over the "huge consequences on scholars' ability to conduct their research" (as media Awareness Network puts it) caused by Twitter's new terms of service. I mean really, what did you expect? "This morning TwapperKeeper, the Twitter-based service that allowed users to create and export archives of Tweets around certain words or hashtags, announced that it would be shutting down a number of key features of the service to remain in compliance with Twitter's Terms of Service."

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Learning Analytics – 1st conference
Heli Nurmi, Heli Connecting Ideas, March 4, 2011.

I have said this before (see illustration), that we (ought to) evaluate our learning not though the performance of specific tasks (such as answering test questions) but rather through a wider range of non-specific activities described collectively as (something like) 'performance in a social network'.

Heli Nurmi captures this bit of theory nicely in her summary of some of David Wiley's comments to the Learning Analytics conference that took place recently in Banff. She writes: "Behaviour in context, social practice. How do we observe behaviour in online environments? We need
- Structural equation modeling
- Multilevel data structures
- Continuous, longitudinal measures
- Tasks nested within practice."

From my perspective, learning analytics is an evaluative activity (Nurmi says it's an "ethical" idea, but I totally don't get her meaning here). And because it's an evaluative activity, it must not focus on specific quantifiables (like counting lines of code written, or number of posts read, which unfortunately is 90 percent of learning analytics) but in assessing a person's degree of alignment within a network.

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Social Intranet – The Intersection Diagram
Joachim Niemeier, 7 Days and More, March 4, 2011.

This is a pretty intelligent diagram that captures the nuance of the difference e-learning and knowledge management technologies from within the perspective of the enterprise. I don't think I ever recall having seen a Venn diagram labeled with what each of the segments is missing.

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