Monthly Archives: April 2012

How Should Schools and Parents Be Involved in Kids’ Online Lives?

April 25, 2012 | 4:15 PM | By

Flickr:Demos Helsinki

By Matt Levinson

Parents are constantly grappling with how to deal with online privacy issues with their kids. Issues about whether to share passwords to email and social media accounts, whether to filter or monitor Web sites, and how much leeway to give kids of different ages as they experiment with their online identities.

Because kids spend most of their time at school, it’s not unusual when questions about these issues come up at school but have to be dealt with at home — and vice versa.

A recent example presented itself when a parent discovered that her middle-school-age daughter was interested in a social network site called Zorpia, which bills itself as a site to “share unlimited photos, post journals and make friends.” She found out about it by reading her daughter’s email, a policy they had both agreed to.

But after reading a review of the site, the mother was concerned about whether it was too risky to allow her daughter to interact with strangers online. She wrote to the daughter’s school “in the spirit of keeping the school abreast of what is going on off-campus” and with the goal of “educating more parents about the types of sites that exist and what are some good, common-sense ground rules.”

The goal is to maintain open communication, explaining to kids the responsibility that comes along with having an email account.

This incident brings up a few complicated issues, including whether parents should be reading kids’ private emails, and how parents should deal with open social media sites.

But even before addressing those questions, should schools even be involved in this conversation? Is this an issue for each family to sort out among themselves? One of the reverberating effects of online life is the fluidity of the connection between different environments, and with an instance like Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Facebook, privacy, Social Media, Zorpia

MIT Joins Forces with Khan Academy to Produce Videos for Young Students

April 25, 2012 | 9:32 AM | By

MIT’s seminal OpenCourseWare and MITx have brought free, high-quality educational content to anyone who wants it. Now MIT is turning its attention to younger students with the newly announced MIT+K12, developed with the Khan Academy. With this venture, MIT students will develop videos on science and engineering topics aimed at younger students.Some of the videos will also be featured on the Khan Academy. Read about this new collaboration in the press release below.


MIT has launched an initiative encouraging its students to produce short videos teaching basic concepts in science and engineering.The videos — aimed at younger students, in grades from kindergarten through high school — will be accessible through a dedicated MIT website and YouTube channel. A subset of the videos will also be available on Khan Academy.

Read more at: web.mit.edu

Is Peer Input as Important as Content for Online Learning?

April 24, 2012 | 1:01 PM | By

Flickr: Incase

By Nathan Maton

Back in 2001, MIT launched OpenCourseWare, a bold idea to put world-class MIT professors’ lectures, syllabi and resources online to the world for free. Today, Open Education Resources (OER) industry leaders are arguing that the free content is only the starting point.

The next stage of the open education movement has evolved into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) — the key word being “massive,” as in drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Last fall, Sebastian Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course enrolled 160,000 students and Thrun recently gave up tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, a company that will offer more MOOCs.

But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content.

“It was totally clear to me [several years ago] that content is only the starting point,” Schmidt said at recently at a SXSW session. “The really exciting stuff is going to be the learning, the assessments and the stuff that you need the content for. In a way, we started P2PU because institutions weren’t doing it. How do we build community around it and recognition for this open content is my question.”

The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to.

“It was totally clear to me that content is only the starting point.”

You’d expect MIT to tout its content as the solution. But that’s not how Steve Carson, director of external affairs for OpenCourseWare, describes the benefits of their project.

“The most exciting thing is that the last six months of open education have been spectacularly disruptive,” Carson says. “It was kind of a sleepy enterprise for the last 10 years where MIT was doing its thing and there were other projects doing their thing. It was all good and there were positive global benefits, but in the past 10 years I’ve heard people say campus-based education Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, MIT, MIT OpenCourseWare, MOOC, open education resources, Open Source, Stanford

Ivy League Poetry Professor Will Try Yelp-Style Crowd-Sourcing

April 24, 2012 | 10:06 AM | By

Flickr: UTCLibrary

By Steve Henn

Last year when Andrew Ng, a computer science professor at Stanford University, put his machine learning class online and opened enrollment to the world, more than 100,000 students signed up.

“I think all of us were surprised,” he says.

Ng had posted lectures online before, but this class was different.

“This was actually a class where you can participate as a student and get homework and assessments,” he said.

The class was interactive. There were quizzes and online forums where teaching assistants, fellow students and Ng answered questions. In the end, tens of thousands of students did all the same work and took the same tests that Stanford students took; thousands passed.

“By providing what is a truly high-quality educational experience to so many students for free, I think we can really change many people’s lives.”

“Stanford has always been a place where we were not afraid to try bold new things, often without knowing exactly what the consequences were going to be,” said Jim Plummer, the dean of engineering. “And this is an instance of that.”

Now Ng and Daphne Koller, a Stanford colleague, are launching a company called Coursera to bring more classes from elite universities to students around the world for free online.

“By providing what is a truly high-quality educational experience to so many students for free, I think we can really change many, many people’s lives,” Koller says.

Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan will join Stanford. Two Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Coursera, online learning, Stanford

Good Read: 6 Ideas for Deploying iPads in Class

April 23, 2012 | 3:57 PM | By

Learning from her successes and shortcomings, e-Learning Laura offers some important key ideas to keep in mind when using iPads in class.


Here are six pieces of advice I would pass on to anyone leading the Teaching and Learning side of an iPad deployment. I’ve learned as much from our successes as our shortcomings and hope you find this helpful. 1. Start with the learning Bringing new technology into your classrooms will evoke change, but it won’t improve poor pedagogy.

Read more at: www.elearninglaura.net

Budding Writers Benefit from Sharing Their Work Online

April 23, 2012 | 9:53 AM | By

Figment

By Kyle Palmer

When Jacob Lewis was growing up, he liked to write “really terrible Stephen King-like fiction stories.” Looking back on those early works, the former managing editor of The New Yorker said he’s glad they never saw the light of day. But for thousands of teenage writers across the country, Lewis has helped do the exact opposite.

The Web site Figment—founded by Lewis and New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear in 2010—gives young writers a forum to freely publish their work. The site now boasts more than 220,000 registered users and has stocked a library of more than 350,000 individual pieces, ranging from reflective poetry to multi-chapter novellas.

“We really thought at first that it would be more of a social network site,” Lewis said. “But it has been all about project creation. The amount of new content our users produce is amazing.”

Lewis said Figment users post more than 1,000 new original pieces every week, many of them only a few hundred words representing a large range of genres, from heart-tugging romance to dystopian fantasy.

“It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there like they have,” Lewis said. “We knew there was a need for this, but we’ve been surprised at the passion and the ownership our users have shown.”

“We just want these young writers to see how empowering it is to be able to share your ideas.”

Similar to Facebook, Figment users—most of whom are between 13 and 24 years old—create a profile and upload their work, giving it a title and picking from a large selection of stock images to use as cover art. Other users can read the pieces online and leave comments and provide feedback.

Not all pieces are read widely, but some works, like Diamonds in the Rough by a user from Wisconsin who goes by the screen name Fish Fingers, have received 130 comments and more than 200 “Hearts” (Figments’ version of Facebook’s Like button).

“Wow! This [story] is beautifully sad!” one user commented about Fish Finger’s work.

“Your similes are impeccably accurate,” wrote another.

“The one negative thing I’d say is that I think it would’ve been better if you had let people figure out the moral for themselves then say what it is at the end of the story,” posted another user. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Figment, Social Media, writing