I really feel strongly that we should be academically boycotting Israel so perhaps I shouldn’t be posting this? Anyway its a great lecture so I’ll let it slide this once…
I think this is exactly what I was hoping university would be like when I first entered.
You learn in a useful way and you learning the whole process inside
and out. Also its entertaining and fun.
I don’t know why University is so stale. Perhaps theres too many money
men and too much bureaucracy?
This course is also worth a mention. By the end of the course the student is able to make there own amazon.com, a bold claim. Whats more the MIT professor has realeased the book/course for free over the internet. Again the kind of thing I believe Universites should be doing.
It was through a talk with the author on IT conversations that I came across it
Since March, Dixon Deutsch and his students have been quietly experimenting with a little website that could one day rock the foundation of how schools do business.
A K-2 teacher at Achievement First Bushwick Elementary Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., Deutsch, 28, has been using Free-Reading.net, a reading instruction program that allows him to download, copy and share lessons with colleagues.
He can visit the website and comment on what works and what doesn’t. He can modify lessons to suit his students’ needs and post the modifications online: Think of a cross between a first-grade reading workbook and Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia written and edited by users.
New principals for re-using open access published scientific material have been laid out by the UK PubMed Central Publishers Panel. The Statement of Principals will allow scientists and researchers to use published material themselves in databases and linking, which could lead to further scientific discovery.
Under the terms of the statement of principals open access published articles can be copied, and the text data mined for further research, as long as the original author is fully attributed. Re-use of the material must be for non-commercial purposes and cannot alter the moral rights of the original authors.
Project Gutenberg is also worth exploring, many of histories defining texts are avaiable free from the site as their copyright has expired and they’ve entered the public domain. E.G. Walter Lippmans book Public Opinion that shaped the development of western democracy away from true democracy to control of public thought,
it argues that twentieth century advances in the technology of “the manufacture of consent” amounts to “a revolution” in “the practice of democracy” because this allows the control over public opinion about the world and about the public’s interests in that world. Control of public opinion is a means to controlling public behavior.
I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy.
Probably most people working in IT learned most of what they know on their own. Is it possible that creating fixed lessons could damage this enthusiasm? I remember I was a huge technology geek, but found the Computer Studies standard grade so dull, I didn’t go on to do the Higher. It was only later I returned to University to Study Computing and got very bored in the first year where compulsory classes explained what a mouse was. The rest of the article is also very interesting, do we have the PhD because of a lost war?
The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought? by John Taylor Gatto Read the rest of this entry »
Delivering the first major company presentation at TechCrunch 40, Scott Moore and Bill Scott from Yahoo presented Yahoo Teachers, a new research focused service aimed at making life easier for teachers. Yahoo Teachers is a clip to database style service; users utilize the “gobbler” that is an online clipping service with a desktop interface client where they can drag research and reading materials when formulating lessons. Where it becomes an even more appealing service for teachers is with the sharing capabilities: think Wikipedia but written by school teachers with a focus on delivery to children.
School of Everything, designed to connect anyone who can teach with anyone who wants to learn, has quietly launched an early public alpha version of its site.
The site is set up to serve the thousands of people in the UK who now work as independent, self-employed teachers. (Thanks Rick)
[technologies] have nothing whatever to do with the fundamental problems we have to solve in schooling our young. If I do harbor any hostility toward these machines, it is only because they are distractions. They divert the intelligence and energy of talented people from addressing the issues we need most to confront.
I agree the main problems we should all face in education are with its fundamental aims and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get to distracted by technology that doesn’t really allow us to do anything we couldn’t do before. I’d really like to hear peoples opinions on this so please comment.
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Winter 1993 Vol. 2 No. 4
Of Luddites, Learning, and Life
By Neil Postman
“I would bar educators from talking about technical improvements until they have disclosed their reasons for offering an education in the first place.” So wrote Neil Postman in his cautionary tale, “Deus Machina,” in the Winter 1992 issue of TECHNOS. Here he takes his challenge one step further, to those who say that new technologies will soon make schools extinct. They have it all wrong, Postman says, because they don’t understand the real purpose of schools.
At Podcast Academy 2, held in 2006, The Conversations Network’s founder and Gigavox Media’s CTO, Doug Kaye, goes back to basics about podcasting. What started out as a hobby turned into the recording of hundreds of events, which otherwise would have evaporated without being heard. Kaye comments on how IT Conversations got started, and explains why he and other got into podcasting.
For some it is a passion, for others a means of promoting a message, for others still it is a means to archiving and distributing the vast wealth of events happening every single day. The numbers are up, millions of new listeners participate each month. Podcasting is filling the on-demand niche of topics that regular broadcasters would never be able to deliver.
The fact that podcasts are immensely popular is not enough, however. With many new podcasts each day, learning the basics is still a necessity. From finding events which interest you, to recording, producing and publishing podcasts via the internet, Kaye highlights some of the key points a beginner podcaster needs to know. Most important of all, however, is to get out there and do it, don’t get bogged down with specifics and be willing to change and experiment.
Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication.
In response, the European Commission committed more than $100m (£51m) towards facilitating greater open access through support for open access journals and for the building of the infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories that can store the millions of academic articles written each year.
The European developments demonstrate the growing global demand for open access, a trend that is forcing researchers, publishers, universities, and funding agencies to reconsider their role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.
That requirement – called an open access principle – would leverage widespread internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe.
Given the connection between research and economic prosperity, the time has come for governments, their funding agencies, and the international research community to maximise the public’s investment in research by prioritising open access.
After reading these BBC article on Open Access Journals I am convinced that they all should be and as a consequence signed the petition. I think if all Universities made all research available to everyone for free, we would take a large step toward the betterment of all mankind. Also many of the fee paying journal sites are failing to grasp the nature of the internet. Many times I’ve been frustrated with the prospect of a great article only to find I’d need to pay a fee. Aside from anything else, I’m not sure how these fee paying journals will compete. MIT’s open access program has shown that it can be beneficial to offer your information and work for free, and I hope all Universities will follow.
I’ve passed the link onto a few friends who are still at University. Although they were not that interested when I first explained it to them, they came back to me later raving at how useful the open access journals were. They found that although the University offered them free access to fee paying journals, they were not a source they could use from home where they did much of their research and studying.
Posted by Dave 
Posted by Dave 
Posted by Dave 
