July 19, 2012
A Video Lecture You Won’t Soon Forget: Video Games and Storytelling
Wesley Fryer,
Moving at the Speed of Creativity, July 19, 2012.
I don't like the high-pitched voice that results from speeding up the video, but other than that the pacing and content is pretty good. Wes Fryer calls this video "a video lecture you won’t soon forget." and "the most intense, 'rapid-fire' visual presentation of related images I’ve seen in a video lecture to date." One of the underlying messages is that games have become a narrative medium over the years, albeit one of uneven quality.
EdReach
Various Authors,
Website, July 19, 2012.
Jennifer Wagner is back in the world of podcasting again with a new project, EdReach. This is a new site to me: "EdReach provides a platform for passionate, outspoken educators- aiming to strengthen their voices by highlighting innovation in the field of education, through reporting critical educational news, providing commentary, and offering criticism of the educational issues of the day." Cool. Anyhow, Wagner's show is called 'the Backchannel' - see it here - which I promptly cofused with an actual backchannel.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Project Based Learning, Podcasting, Online Learning]
Edmodo's New $25 Million Investment: What It Means for Schools
Audrey Watters,
Hack Education, July 19, 2012.
I think it's interesting that Edmodo has raised a total of $47.5 million in seed capital for a free tool. "It’s clear that the real value of Edmodo lies in user data. And here I’ll repeat the oft-quoted “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.” An acquisition of Edmodo wouldn’t be about the software (which frankly isn’t particularly spectacular and whose functionality has been replicated by others); it wouldn’t necessarily be about the team – not in terms of engineering talent, at least. It would be about an 8 million userbase." A good object lesson for the people around here.
Massive online learning and the unbundling of undergraduate education
Benjamin Lima,
Weblog, July 19, 2012.
The secondary wave of interest in massive open online learning is now upon is, with the education blog commenators reacting to the spate of news stories recently following Coursera's expansion. We have for example this post on the 'unbundling' of education that the MOOC is supposed to represent. "This unbundling will happen in three ways: for the whole college education, for the individual course, and for the way that college is paid for." Of course, proposnents of online learning have talked of unbundling for decades; that was one of the major features of my 1998 'Future' paper and of course of David Noble's criticism of digital diploma mills in the 1990s. So, no, unbundling is not what MOOCs are all about, but observers could be forgiven for noticing that this is one aspect of them.
DataBib
Various Authors,
Website, July 19, 2012.
I can see how this has the potential to be useful, though right now the test searches I've tried have come up empty. Forwarding from Michael Witt: "Databib, http://databib.org, is a tool for helping people to identify and locate online repositories of research data. Over 200 data repositories have been cataloged in Databib, with more being added every week. Users and bibliographers create and curate records that describe data repositories that users can browse and search." Not that DataBib is currently seeking nominations for editorial board positions to ensure the accuracy and relevance of the data being indexed.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Research, Learning Object Repositories]
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