Tent City Uni teach-in outside Bank of England from Jon Cheetham on Vimeo.
The wave of protests against the failure of the world capitalist system and the banking collapse are throwing up all kinds of alternative education events and movements. The #OccupyLondon protest has set up TentCityUniversity and this video reports on one of their seminars.
Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education from sam seidel on Vimeo.
I had the pleasure to present alongside Mike Neary and Joss Winn at the Mobility Shifts conference in New York. They are working on the idea of students as producers. This theme is also taken up in this excellent video, which looks at the theme of students as producers within hip hop culture.
This vid has got absolutely nothing to do with the fact that WALES ARE NOW IN THE SEMI FINALS OF THE WORLD CUP (ac mae’r tim Saesneg wedi mynd adre). It is a learning object and I’m using it to illustrate an article I read today about a BBC Wales project, targeting ‘hard to reach’ teenagers, that used rugby as a vehicle for informal learning.
By the way, the title of this post translates (possibly) as “Informal Learning through the Internet: a learning journey through the world of rugby.” ; ) – which is actually the title of a report on the project (more…)
The ideas are great but I’m not convinced they are ‘new’. The remarkable thing is that unlike most of the academics who have been advocating similar ideas, they have actually delivered them – demonstrable proof that they work in practice.
I am not sure that I agree with Jon Dron’s idea of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ technologies. But there are many ideas worth thinking about in this presentation. Terry Anderson comments “We had a bit of discussion if holist isn’t just a term for appropriate use of all three pedagogical generations, which we argue for in the paper, thus making the need for a fourth term redundant – just as modern distance education uses multiple generations of communications technologies (print, video, web etc.)”
We are always on the look out for great multi media presentations to feature on the front page of the Pontydysgu site. So I don’t know how we missed this excellent contribution by our very own associate and friend, Cristina Costa.
Neat short intro to Freire’s idea of Critical Pedagogy. I particularly like the definition: “Critical Pedagogy is teachers asking why and students being allowed to ask the same question”.
We certainly need more debates about the future of education. And as Ceri Facer says in this video of an RSA seminar attitudes towards change in schools seem to swing in a schizophrenic swing between apathy and catastrophe.
By the way it is nice to see a serious debate about education that is not a TED talk. TED is getting horribly formulaic.
Yes its me! Nowadays we seem to spend half of our time at conferences interviewing each other. I am increasingly recognizing that asking the right questions is a skill. And I very much liked the questions I was asked in this video for the Institute for Emerging Leadership at Penn State University.
Sorry for the bad hair day!
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.
We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.