Welcome to the 2009 Teaching and Learning Innovation Award Ceremony Acknowledging and celebrating excellence and innovation in blended learning at The. - ppt download

Welcome to the 2009 Teaching and Learning Innovation Award Ceremony Acknowledging and celebrating excellence and innovation in blended learning at The. - ppt download: Dr Vincent Ng Ms Mei Li Mr Peter Duffy Mr Liu Chun Yu Core SL – HK PolyU in Second Life Dr David Kurt Herold Mr Paul Penfold Mr Newman Lau Ms Au Yeung Yuen Yee Team Members Core SL is the first virtual campus in Asia. Using the 3D world Second Life, it provides interactive and immersive learning for students.

Welcome to the 2009 Teaching and Learning Innovation Award Ceremony Acknowledging and celebrating excellence and innovation in blended learning at The. - ppt download

Welcome to the 2009 Teaching and Learning Innovation Award Ceremony Acknowledging and celebrating excellence and innovation in blended learning at The. - ppt download: Dr Vincent Ng Ms Mei Li Mr Peter Duffy Mr Liu Chun Yu Core SL – HK PolyU in Second Life Dr David Kurt Herold Mr Paul Penfold Mr Newman Lau Ms Au Yeung Yuen Yee Team Members Core SL is the first virtual campus in Asia. Using the 3D world Second Life, it provides interactive and immersive learning for students.

Email alerts for Google Scholar

Google Scholar has added the option to get email alerts when new articles related to your research interests are published. This will be very useful for researchers or students. To try the new feature, go to Google Scholar, search for something you're interested in and click on the email icon placed at the top of the search results pages. You will then receive an email alert directly into your mailbox

How to Automatically Clean and Organize Your Desktop, Downloads, and Other Folders

Few people are disorganized because it's their preference. But organization takes time, and however little time it may be, it's generally easier to do nothing than to take a few seconds to file something away in the appropriate folder. Easier, that is, until your desktop ends up looking like this:
 
(Photo by awjmfotos).
Help is on the way with some free software that can automatically clean and organize your desktop. See the link with instructions here. Thanks to Lifehacker for this tip.

The 2010 Horizon Report - looking at emerging technology trends that affect education

The Horizon Report 2010 identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in the series and is based mainly on US data, which Asia tends to follow/modify a few years later. Here are four key trends (extracted from the report executive summary) that are currently affecting the practice of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry:

1. The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount. Mentoring and preparing students for the world in which they will live is essential.
2. People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. Life in an increasingly busy world where learners must balance demands from home, work, school, and family poses a host of logistical challenges with which today’s ever more mobile students must cope. The implications for informal learning are profound, as are the notions of “just-in-time” learning and “found” learning, both ways of maximizing the impact of learning by ensuring it is timely and efficient.
3. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized. The continuing acceptance and adoption of cloud-based applications and services is changing not only the ways we configure and use software and file storage, but even how we conceptualize those functions. It does not matter where our work is stored; what matters is that our information is accessible no matter where we are or what device we choose to use.
4. The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments. Increasingly, both students and their professors see the challenges facing the world as multidisciplinary, and the need for collaboration great. Over the past few years, the emergence of a raft of new (and often free) tools has made collaboration easier than at any other point in history.

Here are four critical challenges faced by institutions:

1. The role of the academy - and the way we prepare students for their future lives - is changing. It is incumbent upon the academy to adapt teaching and learning practices to meet the needs of today’s learners; to emphasize critical inquiry and mental flexibility, and provide students with necessary tools for those tasks; to connect learners to broad social issues through civic engagement; and to encourage them to apply their learning to solve large-scale complex problems.
   
2. New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind. Citation-based metrics, to pick one example, are hard to apply to research based in social media. New forms of peer review and approval, such as reader ratings, inclusion in and mention by influential blogs, tagging, incoming links, and retweeting, are arising from the natural actions of the global community of educators, with increasingly relevant and interesting results. These forms of scholarly corroboration are not yet well understood by mainstream faculty and academic decision makers, creating a gap between what is possible and what is acceptable.
3. Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession. The challenge is due to the fact that despite the widespread agreement on its importance, training in digital literacy skills and techniques is rare in any discipline, and especially rare in teacher education programs. As faculty and instructors begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm.
4. Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate. Across the board, institutions are looking for ways to control costs while still providing a high quality of service. Schools are challenged by the need to support a steady - or growing - number of students with fewer resources and staff than before. In this atmosphere, it is critical for information and media professionals to emphasize the importance of continuing research into emerging technologies as a means to achieve key institutional goals.

Finally, six emerging technologies to watch:

1.  Mobile computing, use of the network-capable devices students are already carrying, is already established on many campuses, although before there is widespread use, concerns about privacy, classroom management, and access will need to be addressed.
2. Open content, is expected to reach mainstream use in the next twelve months. Open content represents a profound shift in the way students study and learn. Far more than a collection of free online course materials, the open content movement is a response to the rising costs of education, the desire for access to learning in areas where such access is difficult, and an expression of student choice about when and how to learn.
3. Electronic books have been available in some form for nearly four decades, but the past twelve months have seen a dramatic upswing in their acceptance and use. Convenient and capable electronic reading devices combine the activities of acquiring, storing, reading, and annotating digital books, making it very easy to collect and carry hundreds of volumes in a space smaller than a single paperback book.
4. Simple augmented reality - refers to the shift that has made augmented reality accessible to almost anyone. Augmented reality used to require specialized equipment, none of which was very portable. Today, applications for laptops and smart phones overlay digital information onto the physical world quickly and easily.
5. Gesture-based computing is already strong in the consumer market and there is a growing number of prototypical applications for training, research, and study, though this technology is still some time away from common educational use. Devices that are controlled by natural movements of the finger, hand, arm, and body are becoming more common.
6. Visual data analysis, a way of discovering and understanding patterns in large data sets via visual interpretation, is currently used in the scientific analysis of complex processes. As the tools to interpret and display data have become more sophisticated, models can be manipulated in real time and researchers are able to navigate and explore data in ways that were not possible previously.

The full report is available here, and you may have some comments or thoughts on other challenges and trends you see from an Asian perspective.

Moodle App for iPhone

All students and teachers in PolyU will migrate from Blackboard/WebCT to Moodle over the next 18 months or so. However, with applications and devices getting smaller the use of phones for learning is quite interesting.

On 19th March a live demo of Moodle for iPhone was released. See Youtube movies, for an introduction. For the development stages and launch see this link.

There is also a demo course here

First Principles

A thought provoking article on life's values - First Principles from Dave Pollard talks about 3 key principles -

1. Being generous: Paying attention to others, listening, giving, caring, sharing, ignoring one’s illusory ’self’ and focusing on collective — community and planet;
2. Valuing time: Taking every moment as a gift. It means living Now, not in the past (regrets, nostalgia) or the future (dreams, fears);
3. Living Naturally: Nature shows us how to live: to adapt rather than trying to control. To love, abundantly. To see and enjoy beauty. To be honest, always, even when it hurts. To imagine and to improvise. To learn by doing and by watching, not by being told or even by reading. To let go of outcome and of what is past or might be in future, and just be.

See full article here