School innovator incorporates blended learning in teacher training | EdScoop News

Photo: Corinne Lestch

Corinne Lestch, Education staff reporter - EdScoop, FedScoop and StateScoop reports, "Yorktown Community Schools has a culture of “embracing what’s next.”"

Those are words from the district’s director of eLearning and Curricular Innovation, Holly Stachler, who is ushering students and teachers into the future and opening their minds to the possibilities of technology.

The district, about an hour north of Indianapolis, Indiana, already has a one-to-one device program where students use a mix of both iPads and Dell laptops so that they become familiar with both platforms. But Stachler said the environment of the district, which has about 2,500 students, is what makes it unique.

“What makes our district innovative is that we are willing to try new things,” she said in an interview with EdScoop. “All of our stakeholders, including students, parents and the administration, are accepting of a 21st century learning environments.”

Photo: Holly Stachler

Stachler was named a NextGen Leader by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and EdScoop in a national program to recognize rising leaders in K-12 education technology. She will be recognized along with her fellow finalists at the annual CoSN conference this month in Chicago.

Stachler plays a key role in development curriculum and policy, and she has to some extent filled the capacity of technology director. She also does all the professional development for teachers on new tools and devices.

“I do all teacher PD to make sure they are trained in how to [use technology], and I provide support to students as well as far as their access and online course availability,” said Stachler, who is serving her fourth year on the job.

The level of professional development at Yorktown is arguably on another plane from many other districts — Stachler runs a blended learning professional-development program, which means teachers can choose how they receive their training.

“They have some choice in what information they get live, what information they get digitally and then they get a choice in how they apply what they’re learning,” she said.

She said giving educators autonomy in the way they learn is useful, since the training is mandatory. She added that giving them the experience of being digital learners also helps them better understand how to be digital instructors.
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Source: EdScoop News (press release)

Thinking Small About Online Learning | Inside Higher Ed

Follow on Twitter as @joshmkim

An alternative narrative by Dr. Joshua Kim, Director of Digital Learning Initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL).

When it comes to online learning, size seems to get the attention.

Photo: GraphicStock.com

The latest example is an excellent article on the overall status of online learning from in the 4/5/17 edition of Inside Digital Learning - Online (Slowly) Rising.  

In this article, we learn that online program growth is slowing from past years, due to a maturing market and the entry of new competitors. 

We also learn that some players, like Liberty University (94,000 students), Western Governors University (80,000 students), and SNHU (80,000 students) dominate the not-for-profit online postsecondary world. 

Understanding the changing dynamics of the big players in online learning is important - but I fear that these numbers may dissuade some institutions from exploring distance education.   

An alternative way to think about online learning is not about scale - or even really about revenue generation - but about specialization. 

Online programs can be a vehicle to highlight differentiation. 

What school, department, program, or area of research does your school do better than anybody else? 

What degree programs are you most proud? 

What areas of teaching and knowledge creation have you build a critical mass of faculty? 

Building online programs around your strengths is a way not to compete with the Liberty’s, WGU’s, and SNHU’s of the world.  My advice is that you don’t want to compete with these schools anyway.  They have figured out the efficiencies around scale.  Competing against the recruitment and student services and course development and instructional engines that they have built is a losing proposition.

So do something different.  The economics of online education mean that it is possible to build a very small program that is financially sustainable.  If the focus is institutional differentiation and program quality - economic sustainability should be enough.

Starting up a new small online program around your institutional area of strength is a way to invest in those strengths.  An online program in a schools specific areas of expertise and accomplishment will bring new resources, and new ideas, into this area.

I have seen time and time again how the capacities built in small online programs filter into the core residential offerings.

Online teaching is the world’s greatest faculty development program.
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Source: Inside Higher Ed (blog)

Where cooperation thrives | Harvard Gazette - Science & Health

"Harvard scientists helped develop an algorithm for predicting whether a social structure is likely to favor cooperation." summarizes Peter Reuell, Harvard Staff Writer.

Shing-Tung Yau (from left), William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics, Ben Allen, researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED), and Martin Nowak, PED director, are co-authors of a new study that examines how cooperation emerges in social networks and debuts an algorithm that can calculate the likelihood that a network will foster cooperation.
Photo: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer.

In new research on social networks, ‘a mathematical argument for stable families or for stable friendships’. 

Large social networks foster connections by erasing national, geographic, and even linguistic barriers. But when it comes to fostering cooperation, global connectivity leaves something to be desired, new research says.

Working with colleagues at Emmanuel College, Harvard scientists have developed an algorithm that predicts whether a social structure is likely to favor cooperation, and the findings suggest that strong pairwise relationships — not loose networks scattered across the globe — are the most conducive to cooperation. The study is described in a March 29 paper in Nature.

“What we are able to do is calculate the critical benefit-to-cost ratio for cooperation to thrive on any fixed population structure,” said senior author Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and of biology and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. “And what we find is truly interesting. We can take any graph or social network, and if it has strong pairwise ties, that is what is most conducive for cooperation. This is a mathematical argument for stable families or for stable friendships.”

“I think one of the messages here is that while global interconnectedness has increased rapidly over the past few decades, there are downsides to that,” said first author Benjamin Allen, an assistant professor of mathematics at Emmanuel College and a researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. “More connectivity won’t necessarily promote people being good to each other. It’s not that global connections are bad, but they are no substitute for a small number of strong local connections.”

Scientists for decades have sought to understand the interplay between social structure and evolution, beginning with “well-mixed” populations. Mathematical models have demonstrated that in such populations — where every individual interacts with every other individual — evolution selects against cooperation, causing it to eventually die out.

In 2006, however, Nowak and colleagues showed that in certain “special” populations — particularly those in which all members have the same number of connections — selection leans in favor of cooperation.
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Source: Harvard Gazette

Generation Us: Artificial intelligence may help combat isolation | The Daily Progress - Lifestyles

Photo: David McNair

"When we complain, feel lonely or are going through a hard time, it’s often said that all we really need is someone to listen to us, not try to fix things for us. Something like “I hear what you’re saying” or “I support you 100 percent” will often work wonders, despite how robotic the supportive listener might feel the offering to be." notes David McNair, as handles publicity, marketing, media relations and social media efforts for the Jefferson Area Board for Aging.

Well, then, what if an actual robot were offering this kind of emotional support? Could it be as effective as a human listener?

ElliQ is a robotic companion that helps the elderly remain active and engaged  

According to an Israeli research study completed last year, the answer is yes.

Study participants were asked to tell a personal story to a small desktop robot. Half the participants spoke to a robot that was unresponsive, while the other half spoke to a robot who responded with supportive comments and common gestures of understanding and sympathy, like nodding and turning to look the participant in the eye. Researchers found that people can develop attachments to responsive robots, and they have the same feelings and response behaviors they would have had if the listener had been human.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology is creating all kinds of possibilities, and raising all kinds of questions, too. However, researchers are discovering that this new technology could most help most those who understand it the least: older adults.

“Technologies like Siri and Alexa already exist that can help provide a natural language interface to online resources and that don’t require keyboard skills or computer literacy,” said Richard Adler, a distinguished research fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, and a nationally recognized expert on the relationship between technology and aging. “As this kind of technology becomes more powerful, it will become easier to use and more helpful.”

In other words, Mom and Dad can interact with technology the same way they would with family and friends.

“There are also interesting experiments underway to use AI for predictive monitoring that can do things like detect changes in gait that could signal a greater risk of falling,” Adler said.

At Standford University, there’s a special Artificial Intelligence Assisted Care Research Program in which researchers are developing AI technology that can monitor seniors in their homes using multiple sensors to detect lifestyle patterns, physical movements, vital signs — even emotions — and then use that data to accurately access the senior’s health, safety and well-being.
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Source: The Daily Progress and The Last News Channel (YouTube)

Science fiction is here | University of Sydney - Science and technology

"Workplace diversity will soon include artificial intelligence." writes Rebekah Hayden.

Dr Micheal Harre is thinking through how the AI future will work.
Photo: University of Sydney

A tsunami of change is already arriving. Artificial intelligence is now capable of doing desk jobs that were previously safe from automation. The social and economic effects remain to be seen, but is AI what we think it is?

Workplaces that include artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be reality, say researchers who believe the rise of AI in all areas of life is not only inevitable, it’s set to reshape the way we think about consciousness and human identity.

From Metropolis to 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Terminator, robots and super-intelligent AIs in film have seduced and terrified our collective consciousness, having an impact on how we view artificial intelligence. But will they really crush the puny humans and take over the world?

The truth is both less dramatic and more exciting.

Michael Harré (PhD ’09), AI enthusiast and lecturer in Complex Systems at the University of Sydney, believes living and working with AI will force us to reassess basic assumptions about our sense of self.

“What will it be like to regularly confront an AI, or a robot with an AI in it, that behaves like a human?” Harré asks. “The fact that we will be interacting with the appearance of consciousness in things that are clearly not biological will be enough for us to at least unconsciously revise what we think consciousness is.”

AI development has a long way to go before then. AI and humans have very different decision-making processes. Humans rely strongly on intuition, while AI crunches all possible options and calculates the most likely answer. All this data-crunching comes at a cost: the vast computational power that’s needed limits the number of tasks AI can do. It tends to be a one-trick pony. This means we won’t be relegated to the evolutionary scrapheap just yet.

Though movies often feature robots with sophisticated AI minds, that combination is still a distant possibility.

So what is AI? A very different discipline from robotics, artificial intelligence is a field of computer science that mimics the natural learning process of the human brain by creating what are called artificial neural networks. For example, an AI is given a picture of a wolf and told to trawl through millions of animal photos and find other pictures of wolves. Each correct answer reinforces the AI’s neural pathways, so it actually learns from experience. The software isn’t specifically coded – rather the program evolves its own algorithms and uses feedback to refine the results.
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Source: University of Sydney

Is It Déjà Vu All Over Again? | Columns - Viewpoints

Photo: Eric Denna

"Higher education must avoid the déjà vu of repeating the system implementation mistakes from years past." according to Eric Denna, Vice President and CIO at the University of Marylan.

In 2002, the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) published “The Promise and Performance of Enterprise Systems for Higher Education,” by Robert Kvavik, Richard Katz, and others. In it the authors estimated that more than $5 billion had been spent on administrative and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems.¹ One can only imagine what has been spent since then—and what is being spent this year and what will be spent in the coming years. Whatever the amount, it is likely to be very substantial.
 
When the Kvavik and Katz data gets resurrected at a discussion around the water cooler or at conferences these days, the reactions range from “so what, that’s the cost of doing business” to “hmmm, I didn’t know that, I wonder what we spent” to “you have got to be kidding me, that can’t be right.” What seems the most striking is that we don’t know if the money spent was too much, too little, or just right. We have a hard time showing, in a verifiable way, that the benefits exceeded the cost of implementing the new systems. Regardless of the reaction, we seem poised to do it all over again.

Even more troubling than the amount spent, Kvavik and Katz reported that many of the projects that contributed to the $5 billion price tag failed in that they came in over budget, took longer than planned, or did not deliver the expected value. Why? Kvavik and Katz explain:

External forces such as quality of software or consulting were found to be less influential than internal forces. When asked, these institutions revealed that the major obstacles to completion were mostly internal to the institution. They include data issues, cultural resistance to change, and lack of understanding of software capabilities. The realization that the greatest implementation challenges are the result of internal institutional issues—not external forces—contradicts a popular message prevalent in the industry for the past few years. It’s interesting to discover that the institutions themselves—their cultures, their people, and their historical decisions—are the primary hurdle to clear for a successful implementation, not the technology, the consultants, or the vendors.²

In other words, the project aspects over which we had absolute control were the most frequent causes of failure. No wonder, then, that in a recent discussion Vicki Tambellini, a widely regarded expert in the higher education software market, noted that a number of institutions seem to be deliberately waiting to replace or upgrade these systems. As she has tried to understand why, she has learned that most of them anticipate making significant investments in administrative systems in the coming three to five years and are waiting to see what shakes out in the software (tool) marketplace. Specifically, many are watching the emergence of cloud-based software vendors, otherwise known as Software as a Service (SaaS).³ What is troubling, however, is that most appear to be preparing to make another “silver bullet” bet, thinking all they need to worry about is picking the right software tool to be successful. In other words, they are concerned with external forces, which Kvavik and Katz found to be “less influential.” There appears to be little happening in terms of dealing with internal forces—the “major obstacles” to which Kvavik and Katz refer.
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Source: EDUCAUSE Review

eBook: Mobile Learning for Performance Support | CommLab India

The eBook titled, Mobile Learning for Performance Support from CommLab India will help you understand what performance support is and how mobile learning can be an effective tool to deliver and raise the performance of your employees.

Photo: CommLab India

The eBook will provide insights into:

• Performance support
• Mobile learning
• How mobile learning can deliver performance support
• Best practices for creating mobile learning nuggets for performance support
• Some smart performance support techniques
• Drawbacks to keep in mind

Download the eBook now!

CommLab India writes in the conclusion, "It’s clear that mobile learning can be a very effective performance support tool; but why aren’t we seeing it used everywhere that it can be used? The answer to this is clear: there is a misconception that full-fledged mobile learning and performance support are the same thing.
The fact is, a full-fledged mobile learning course is not performance support. Performance support is not training. It’s reinforcement, practice, and stimulation of one’s memory of what has already been learned in the past. Once this misconception is dispelled in the minds of trainers, it will be easy to understand, create, and deliver mobile learning support for performance.

We hope this eBook helps you in your endeavor to incorporate better performance support through mobiles, in your organization.
Download the eBook now! 

Source: CommLab India

Get Connected - WES Annual Conference 2017 | WES events

"The WES Annual Conference, Get connected: Empowering women and enriching careers will take place at University College London (UCL) from 9:30am - 5pm on Friday 12 May, 2017." inform Women's Engineering Society.

Photo: Eventbrite

This year’s theme is all about enriching careers through connection and planning. We will explore ways for taking charge of your career and planning for the future, and empowering yourself and others. 

By taking part in ‘Get connected’ you will be joining other professional women from throughout the breadth of engineering. Whether you are experienced or early-stage career you will have the chance to meet with, and inspire others. A full programme will follow shortly, but confirmed sessions include: 

• Confidence and communication
• Flexible working: Knowing your rights
• What are Returnships, and are they for me?
• Registration and Chartership
• Lifelong learning in the engineering profession
• Preparing for Leadership
• Recruitment
• Networking groups - Panel discussion
• Supporting early-stage engineers
• Knowing when to move on
• Speed-mentoring Q&A for early-career women

In addition, delegates will have the opportunity to attend their choice of two interactive workshops:

• Getting the best out of the mentoring relationship
• Future-focussed career development

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Source: Women's Engineering Society

Understanding Our Strengths and Weaknesses as Teachers | Teaching Professor Blog

"Every teacher has strengths and weaknesses. Have you ever tried to list yours?" says Maryellen Weimer, PhD.
 

Photo: The Teaching Professor Blog

Doing so is a worthwhile activity. I’d recommend doing it in private with a favorite libation—only one, because there is a need to be thoughtful and honest.

I’m still thinking about mid-career issues, and I’m wondering whether by the time we reach the middle of our careers, we can’t confront our weaknesses with a bit more maturity. 

I’ve come to believe that some weaknesses simply must be accepted. That doesn’t mean we no longer care about them. It doesn’t mean we stop trying to improve them, but it does mean they’re never going to be our strengths. That’s where I am in thinking about my organizational skills. I do fine on paper. I can outline. I understand hierarchy, flow, and the need for transitions, but when I present, it’s not always well organized. I get going, and one thing leads to the next: a new idea pops up in my mind, somebody asks a good question that pushes me in an interesting but different direction, and soon I have no idea what I’m supposed to be talking about. It’s the kind of free-flowing style that drives linear, systematic thinkers nuts. I know that, and I try to use strategies that create some order out of the chaos, but presentational organization will never be a teaching strength for me, and that’s OK. Teachers need to accept what they can and can’t do well.
 

The Teaching Professor Blog

For most weaknesses, it’s usually better to accept your limitations and find a work-around rather than try to fight it. You’ve faced the problem, now you can live with it. So if you tend to get sidetracked when presenting, you can hand out an outline announcing that if you start talking about something that isn’t on the outline, everyone should feel free to point that out, and together, you’ll either adjust the outline or list that new item on the back as an interesting new idea to return to later.
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Source: The Teaching Professor Blog

Help Students Stay Current and Build a Career in the Field of Cybersecurity | eCampus Resources

"Give Students an Edge with Updated IT Coursework. ITProTV’s videos, virtual labs and practice exams help students master skills while meeting career and certification requirements." continues eCampus News.

Photo: eCampus Resources

The use of technology is growing exponentially. WIth that, there is an increasing need for skilled, certified IT professionals who have kept up with the latest trends and IT security issues.

 

Download this free guide - PDF

Learn about courses, videos, virtual labs and practice exams that can help students learn about the current IT challenges, thus boosting their earning potential in the field of information systems cybersecurity.

Access and you will learn about up-to-date Associate’s and Bachelor’s degree coursework that can help students: 

• Manage and safeguard an organization’s technological infrastructures from both internal and external threats 
• Prepare information systems, security management, network administration, business concepts, and project management  

Source: eCampus News