A Manifesto for EduChange on the Eve of Hacking Education

A Manifesto for EduChange on the Eve of Hacking Education

Posted on 05. Mar, 2009 by jon in Education

I’m currently en route to New York City for an event called Hacking Education that is being put on by the good folks at Union Square Ventures. Fred and crew have invited some of the leading thinkers, entrepreneurs and investors in the edu space for some spirited discussion about how we can revolutionize education. I’m honored to have been invited.

I have a lot of my own thoughts on the subject, some of which I’ve posted here before. I wanted to try to sum up my thoughts in a blog post. I know I’m naive and don’t understand how much of the education world work. But I guess we all to some extent. And I’m not entirely unconvinced that people who are naive won’t come up with the best solutions to the massive and mind-blowingly colossal failure that is the modern education so here goes…

A Manifesto for EduChange

Conference Humiliation: They're Tweeting Behind Your Back

By Marc Parry

Tweckle (twek'ul) vt. to abuse a speaker only to Twitter followers in the audience while he/she is speaking.

Conference speakers beware: Twecklers are watching.

They're out for blood.

And you may be their next victim.

Once upon a time, conference goers could do little more than passively fork their cheesecake when a snooze-inducing keynote speaker took the podium. No longer. The microblogging service Twitter is changing a staple of academic life from a one-way presentation into a real-time conversation. Flub a talk badly enough and you now risk mobilizing a scrum of digital-spitball-slinging snark-masters. This is from a higher-education conference in Milwaukee:
we need a tshirt, "I survived the keynote disaster of 09"

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Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education

Recognition in education is the acknowledgment of learning achievements. Accreditation is certification of such recognition by an institution, an organization, a government, a community, etc. There are a number of assessment methods by which learning can be evaluated (exam, practicum, etc.) for the purpose of recognition and accreditation, and there are a number of different purposes for the accreditation itself (i.e., job, social recognition, membership in a group, etc). As our world moves from an industrial to a knowledge society, new skills are needed. Social web technologies offer opportunities for learning, which build these skills and allow new ways to assess them.

Authors

Jan Philipp Schmidt
United Nations University MERIT

Christine Geith
Michigan State University

Stian Håklev
University of Toronto

Joel Thierstein
Rice University

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Parents dissatified with the technology skills their children are learning in schools?

I am always a bit skeptical about sharing survey data especially when large for profit organizations are involved in conducting the survey. I decided to share this article because of my concerns about the digital divide and also because of my belief that today's global society demands superior technology skills.

Read the article here