Interested in iPad apps for learning?
The Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA). a state organization devoted to the use of technology in education, has an open Google doc, listing hundreds of TCEA recommended iPad apps for use in education and classified under different subject and topic areas.
The deadline for submissions for the PLE2012 conference has been extended to March 16th.
Following the highly successful events in Barcelona, Spain (#PLE_BCN), and Southampton, UK (#PLE_SOU), the next PLE Conference will be held simultaneously in Aveiro, Portugal from July 11th to 13th 2012.
The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experiences and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions and demonstrations aiming to sustain the dynamic and interactive discussion environment established by the previous events in Barcelona and Southampton.
Full details on the PLE Conference Website.
From a Jisc press release:
Over 14,000 items of archived TV footage from 17 European countries are now available via the EUscreen online portal for teaching, research and general interest.
EUscreen – the result of a collaboration between 36 partners across Europe – provides a rich insight into Europe’s television heritage with content dating from the 1920s to the present day.
The portal includes rare footage and commentary on key events in history, including a 1962 interview with Martin Luther King about racial discrimination in the US.
John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and principal investigator on the EUscreen project, said: “This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe. The portal is available to anyone (not only academics) and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage.”
The expansive footage has also proved popular as a learning aid for foreign language students, with clips available in 14 languages.
By the end of September 2012, there will be around 30,000 items of digital content freely available on the portal as the European providers continue to add carefully selected material.
Jisc are hosting an open, online seminar on ‘Making Assessment Count (MAC)’ on Friday 3rd Feb – 1-2pm. The presenters are Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster).
The mailing for the seminar says” “The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.”
You can find out more ans sign up for the seminar at http://jiscmac.eventbrite.co.uk/
The EC-TEL 2012: Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills takes place on 18-21 September 2012 at Saarbrücken in Germany.
The focus for the conference includes:
– How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
– How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
– How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?
The deadline for proposals is April 2.
David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.
Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.
Graham Attwell is delivering a keynote presentation on Learning and New Technologies to the ‘Encouraging participation in continuing training in Romania, with focus on disadvantaged employees’ project in Bucharest on Wednesday 7 December.
Here is a quick summary of this week;s live radio broadcasts from Berlin. To listen to the programmes just point your browser to http://bit.ly/uEmhus and open it in the program of your choice (e.g. iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.)
Wednesday November 30
Live Radio: Welcome to ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2011
Time: 18:00 – 1830 CET
Thursday December 1
Live Radio: Question Time Debate
Time: 1215 – 1255 CET
Friday December 2
Live Radio: OEB Live on Friday
Time: 1100 – 1200
The fourth UK ESRC seminar in the series on careers, will be hosted by the University of West of Scotland, Glasgow, on 29th November, 2011. The seminar title is: ‘Digital technologies: exploring emerging and potential uses to deliver enhanced careers practice’. A number of ICT and guidance experts will present, including Dr. Raimo Vuorinen, from Finland, whose presentation title will be: ‘The perceived role of technology and social media in career guidance among practitioners who are experienced internet users: chances and challenges’. As the detailed programme for the day firms up, will available shortly on the seminar website
. For more information or to be added to the mailing list contact Sally-Anne [dot] Barnes [at] warwick [dot] ac [dot] uk
The WSIS Knowledge Communities platform, run by UNESCO, has announced the publication of a new resource. “Open Educational Resources: A guide for teachers” is a web, PDF, and print guide focused on OER for teachers at the basic education level. It was created to fill a gap in materials available to discuss OER in the Portuguese language, as well as local demand in Brazil. It is available with a Creative Commons license.
The announcement says: ‘We made a concrete effort to remix materials from existing resources (UNESCO, JISC, Curriki, WikiEducator), translating and adapting as necessary – but also developed new material. The guide is complemented by a wiki which contains a list of portals and sites which offer resources (OER and more restricted) in Portuguese. We hope the guide will be useful to our colleagues in Portuguese-speaking countries, and Portuguese-speaking communities around the world.
The guide is available here (wiki/PDF) and a brief (English) description of the process is available here.
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.