I keepTweetdeck open on my desktop while working. I find that it's a great way of picking up news and notes during the day, even though the unmistakable sound of an incoming tweet irritates some of my co-workers. This morning...

  Matthew Blackman, an AP Physics teacher, talks about his use of games in his classroom as well as his interest in game design and his website, The Universe and More where he publishes his own physics-based games.   Follow Matthew http://twitter.com/universeandmore   All Links and shownotes at http://www.chrisnesi.com/2014/05/houseofedtech11.html   FEEDBACK Call: (732) 903-4869 Voxer: cnesi4602 Email: feedback@chrisnesi.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrnesi Send a voice message from http://www.chrisnesi.com

.@christine_quong My iPad shelf. Front view http://t.co/afYzQPy3sz Back view http://t.co/XWM27cKL1u #iosedapp #iPaded Tags: iosedapp iPaded

At LINK Research Lab, we have a full slate of speakers for fall, including topics on distributed learning, synchronous instruction, success for under represented students, learning analytics, engagement, design based research, openness, flipped classrooms, health and the built environment, mentorship, and wonder. The full schedule is here. We will be streaming the events online and are exploring options for asynchronous interaction as well. If you’d like to be informed of event details, recordings, and links to live sessions, please register.

So the first three days of the school year have come and gone.  The joke, negative as it tends to be, is, there are now only 177 more school days left in the year.  Its really sad to actually start counting down to the end of the year, starting the first day.  What makes a […]

During the week of March 22-26 I'm taking the Roadtrip to Orlando Florida to participate in the eLearning Guild's Learning Solutions (formerly Annual Gathering) Conference. Cammy Bean, VP Learning at Kineo and I are going to be co-hosting a session...

  Theresa Stager is an elementary school principal who just completed her first year as the lead learner. Principal Stager talks about her use of technology as a school administrator.   Follow Theresa http://twitter.com/principalstager   House of #EdTech is sponsored by Audible.com. There are over 150,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or other mp3 player. http://www.audibletrial.com/houseofedtech   All links and shownotes at http://www.chrisnesi.com/2014/06/houseofedtech12.html   FEEDBACK Call: (732) 903-4869 Voxer: cnesi4602 Email: feedback@chrisnesi.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrnesi Send a voice message from http://www.chrisnesi.com

Lovingly borrowed from Mr. G Online Good Stuff for visual learners!! Found this fantastic infographic touting the success of infographics. Reading it ( or more correctly, viewing it) immediately focused my thoughts on the use of visual texts in classrooms today. Click on the screenshot above to view the animated, interactive info graphic that presents  13 reasons why we […]

Gdocs on iPad #edcamphbg @jgates513 http://t.co/IkupYoS4 Tags: edcamphbg

When I worked at Adobe Systems I kept track of how the various Adobe products were used by and for elearning stakeholders. Students. producers, administrators, content managers. People have always assumed that the biggest Adobe product used in elearning is...

In a few weeks, our edX course Data, Analytics, and Learning (#DALMOOC https://www.edx.org/course/utarlingtonx/utarlingtonx-link5-10x-data-analytics-2186) will start. We (Carolyn Rose, Dragan Gasevic, Ryan Baker, and I) have spent the last several months thinking through the course structure and format. This is a short overview of the innovations that we want to explore during the course. The innovations build heavily on community and network approaches that I and others (Stephen Downes, David Wiley, Alan Levine, Jim Groom, Dave Cormier) have used in previous open courses. Since MOOCs gained popularity with top tier universities, significant effort has been put into finding new ways to present learning content. Videos, simulations, and graphics now contribute to formal MOOCs often costing several hundred thousand dollars to develop. In terms of content presentation, DALMOOC will pale in comparison to existing well-funded courses. Our focus has been on improving the social experience of learners. In particular, we are looking to solve the following problems with MOOCs: Students often flounder in MOOCs as there is limited social contact between learners and limited timely support. Learners have limited engagement in developing knowledge together. Many MOOCs reflect a structured and linear process of content presentation. There is little alignment with the architecture of knowledge in a participative age. Learners have a difficult time getting to know each other or finding like others as major platforms do not focus on developing learner profiles The connection between learning and application is hampered as MOOC resources do not always persist after a course has ended and there is limited search functionality in MOOCs. Courses are not adaptive and serve the same content to all learners, regardless of prior knowledge To address these challenges, we have adopted/developed the following approaches. Timely help resources: Through the use of a tool developed by Carolyn Rose’s team called the Quick Helper, course participants will have access to timely help resources. When a student would like to ensure their request for help is seen, they may click on the Quick Helper button, which will guide them to formulate a help request. A social recommendation algorithm will then match the help request to three potential helpers from the community. They will be presented with these three choices, and will have the option to select who will be invited to their help request thread. The Quick Helper will then send an email to each selected helper with a link to the help request thread and an invitation to participate. The intent with this approach is to provide timely help to students and to engage other learners in helping answer questions asked by peers. Social embeddedness Social has become an abused term. Everything now has social attached. Aside from this hype, the value of social learning is clear in academic literature. In order to improve connections, we will also be using a social competency based software (ProSolo) that will give learners the opportunity to identify learning goals, connect with others around shared goals, and create a pathway for recognition of learning. A second aspect of ProSolo is the creation of learner profiles so students can find others with shared interests. DALMOOC has been designed to model a distributed information structure. As such, learners will be encouraged to participate in roughly any space they would like: blogs, facebook, twitter, edX discussion forums, etc. I have a bias for the value of learners owning their own learning spaces. A key challenge that arises as learners engage in different spaces is one of fragmentation. Learning is a coherence forming process and knowledge is a state of connecting information pieces. As such, we will be adopting an aggregation approach similar to what Stephen Downes pioneered with early MOOCs: gRSShopper. Content will be aggregated and shared in a daily email to learners. By aggregating learner content and providing persistent profiles, we anticipate higher levels of learner engagement. Another social layer is the inclusion of group work using synchronous chat activities supported by intelligent conversational agents. This intervention builds on the work by Carolyn Rose’s group on dynamic support for collaborative learning using an architecture called Bazaar also developed by her team. Group work is difficult in MOOCs because of high drop out rates. To address this challenge, we are using a lobby tool developed by Rose’s lab that enables groups to form on the fly, on an as needed basis. When students reach a point in their trajectory through the course when they are ready to engage in discussion, they will click on a live link to enter the lobby program, which will match them with other learners who are also ready to engage in that activity. This is a benefit of MOOCs - with many learners online simultaneously, scale works for quick, weak tie, group formation. Persistence. The content of the course will remain available for students to access post-course, particularly the summary emails and learner profiles in ProSolo. Learners will have the option to search context relevant resources in ProSolo. We hope that this will assist in creating a persistent practitioner community where learners will access resources post-course and continue to engage with each other on social media and in ProSolo. Adaptivity. While adaptive learning is a rapidly growing area of research interest, it isn’t being done well yet. Early projects like CMU’s OLI focus on content focused courses with an emphasis on supported mutli-step problem solving. Adapting a course on learning analytics is more challenging as the problems are much less well-formed. "Right answers" are not always clear, and more importantly, ideal learning trajectories are more individualize. To compensate for this weakness, we’ve taken an idea from DS106: the assignment bank. The assignment bank focuses on adaptivity at the level of application. All learners experience the same instructional content. Each learner is able to challenge herself by selecting assignments with various gradients of complexity. Matt Crosslin - lead designer on DALMOOC - has been blogging on the design decisions we have made throughout the course. His blog is a great resource. There are numerous other research opportunities with MOOCs, including adaptive pathways during the course, personalized learning, self-regulated learning, alternative credentialing approaches, automated assessment, evaluating the impact of socially created artifacts on learning, alternative approaches to lectures and content presentation, and so on. Those are topics for future exploration. For DALMOOC, our focus is on timely help, social learning, persistence, and adaptivity through assignments. Even this seems like a slightly heaving set of alterations to the traditional MOOC. As with previous MOOCs that I’ve taught, the intent is to provide learners with a range of tools, technologies, and approaches and provide learners with the opportunity to sensemake and wayfind through complex information spaces. All the fun (and deep learning) happens in that process.

iPad productivity apps - Matt Gemmell | http://t.co/YSPogBSv Good blog post about necessary apps. #ipaded #appchat Tags: ipaded appchat

ok, sorry Paul Simon, I had to go there… Things are rolling along nicely in my classes this year!  My 7th graders are excited about being able to use their devices to learn science and my 8th graders are actually teaching ME new ways to get those devices to do interesting things. Let’s take Twitter […]

Timothy Charleston is the Supervisor of Instruction and Technology for Green Brook Township Public Schools Supervisor of Social Studies and Global Education at Princeton Public Schools [UPDATED: 10/31/14]. Mr. Charleston stops by the house to share his views on technology integration and to share is favorite apps and education technology.   Follow Timothy http://twitter.com/mrcsays   House of #EdTech is sponsored by Audible.com. There are over 150,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or other mp3 player. http://www.audibletrial.com/houseofedtech   All Links and shownotes at http://www.chrisnesi.com/2014/06/houseofedtech13.html   FEEDBACK Call: (732) 903-4869 Voxer: cnesi4602 Email: feedback@chrisnesi.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrnesi Send a voice message from http://www.chrisnesi.com  

I had a g-r-e-a-t discussion on Friday with 10 instructional designers that I happen to follow on Twitter. Serendipitously, I am working on a presentation that is germane to the discussion that follows. We were, once again, spinning around the...

I’ve seen several, but this is my new fav… a student using his device to learn… classic.

http://t.co/BvHfoQc9 awesome, lots of potential for social reading in 1:1 iPad schools. #subtext #ipaded Tags: subtext ipaded

This last week we launched our open course on Data, Analytics, and Learning on edX. The course is structured in a dual layer model, an approach that Matt Crosslin has nicely articulated. We have 20,000 registered students, with 32% having actually logged in and taken part in the course. 180 countries are represented, with the top being US, India, and UK, representing 25%, 11%, and 4% of students. I’ve run numerous MOOCs over the past six years. I’ve used a range of platforms, including Moodle, D2L, Canvas, Drupal, Downes’ gRSShopper, and others. In the process, I’ve used roughly any tool I can get my hands on, including Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, G+, Netvibes, blogs, Wikispaces, Diigo, and so on. The largest group of learners in a course that i have run is ~5,000. The current course on edX is unique in the number of learners involved and in the dual-layer approach. Our goal was to enable learners to select either a formal structured pathway and a self-directed "learner in control" pathway. I’m biased toward learners owning their own content and owning the spaces where they learn. My reason is simple: knowledge institutions mirror the architecture of knowledge in the era in which they exist. Today, knowledge is diverse, messy, partial, complex, and rapidly changing. What learners need today is not instructivism but rather a process of personal sensemaking and wayfinding where they learn to identify what is important, what matters, and what can be ignored. Most courses assume that the instructor and designer should sensemake for learners. The instructor chooses the important pieces, sets it in a structured path, and feeds content to learners. Essentially, in this model, we take away the sweet spot of learning. Making sense of topic areas through social and exploratory processes is the heart of learning needs in complex knowledge environments. Though I am biased toward learner-in-control, I do recognize the value of formal instruction, particularly when the topic area is new to a learner. Even then, I would like to see rapid transitions from content provision to having learners create artifacts that reflect their understanding. These artifacts can be images, audio, video, simulations, blog posts, or any other resource that can be created and shared with other learners. Learning transparently is an act of teaching. My reflections after week one of DALMOOC: 1. The first few weeks are identical to any other MOOC I’ve run. It’s chaos. Learners are unsure about how to position themselves in relation to the content and the interaction spaces. This is a critical sensemaking and wayfinding process. In a MOOC, we not only learn content, but we also learn the metcognitive processes and digital space markers that enable us to be active participants. This can be stressful for learners. 2. Learners really, really like content. I view content to be as much a by-product of the learning process as a pre-requisite. Lectures can be helpful in framing a topic. What is important though, is that learners create artifacts. An artifact represents how we understand something and then allows others to provide us feedback and shape, fact-check, and refine our thinking (have a look at a Private Universe - a detailed account of what happens when students only answer questions we ask rather than create artifacts that reflect how they understand a topic area). 3. There seems to be a growing number of professional learners in formal platforms (edX & Coursera). These learners have clear goals, want a certificate, and have expectations of the experience. In one forum interaction of DALMOOC, a learner mentioned that he/she had taken 30 MOOCs and this one was the most disorienting. Another learner said this was the worst MOOC that they had ever taken. Early MOOCs were easy to run because expectations hadn’t normalized. It’s different now. Learners engage with MOOCs with views of what should be happening and are comparing courses to what they’ve taken recently. The standards of quality content are higher than they were in the past. 4. The most important learning shift is not yet happening. Learning in complex knowledge environments requires navigating distributed spaces (wayfinding), acting with partial information, sensemaking, and becoming comfortable without reading everything. This shift is difficult - it’s as much a world view shift as a learning task, as much about our identity as the learning content. It’s not easy and it’s unsettling and frustrating. 5. Learners act differently in different spaces. If you are in the course, skim the edX discussions. Then log into ProSolo. Skim the interactions there. Do the same with social media (our G+ and Facebook pages as well as the #DALMOOC twitter timeline). The tools and spaces are linked here. The conversation in edX, when discussing the course, is ~60% critical. In Prosolo, it’s largely positive. I find the negative comments in edX about structure a bit confusing as I view choices as giving learners the ability to be where they want to be rather than where designers and instructors force them to be. I chuckled at Matt’s tweet: Interesting how some people will look through all of the options in #dalmooc, find the one they don't like, and then complain about it — Matt Crosslin (@grandeped) October 28, 2014 6. We need to get better at on-boarding learners to engage in digital distributed spaces. My comments above reflect real experiences of learners who are finding the course format confusing. It’s not sufficient to say "well, what you really need is a world-view shift". As designers, we have to support and guide that transition. We are not doing that well enough. Even though early Hangouts that we did in the course emphasized learner autonomy and the importance of developing a personal digital identity that is under the control of the individual learner, this message is understood through practice not to proclamation. It’s a challenging proposition: a learner understands the design intentions of the course by engaging in the activities but these activities are confusing because they do not understand the design intentions. 7. Technology glitches are tough. We are using a number of new tools in DALMOOC, including Carolyn Rose’s Bazaar and Quick Helper, a visual syllabus, Prosolo, assignment bank, and so on. We’ve had some glitches with most of those, as can be expected in a new tool being scaled to a large number of users. Learners may forgive a glitch or two. But each additional glitch or tool creates additional stress. A few learners have said "I feel like a guinea pig" and "I feel like I’m just beta testing software" and "I feel like a rat in a maze". We need some tolerance for failure during experimentation. There is a line though where even the most committed learners feel overwhelmed. 8. Learners use discussion forums for different reasons. I’ve generally used them for discussion. Learners in edX use them for a range of reasons including quick search/help, venting, and as a way of orienting to the course. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much in MOOC forums about social relationship formation. MOOC providers have done a bad job of building learner profiles. I can’t get to know my peers in edX or Coursera. This is an issue. Distributed social media improves this, but the social connectedness in edX forums is almost non-existent. Overall, the first ten days of DALMOOC have provided an excellent learning experience for me. I’ve included a short presentation below on Sensemaking and Wayfinding Information Model (SWIM) that focuses on how learners engage in and navigate open learning spaces, largely reflective of the experiences of learners in this MOOC.

  Katelyn Nesi is the Library Media Specialist at Shore Regional High School (NJ) Wall Township High School (NJ) [Updated 2/15]. Mrs. Nesi, my wife, makes her first appearance on the podcast and shares some insight on moving to a new place and her love for all things technology.   Follow Katelyn http://twitter.com/katenesi   House of #EdTech is sponsored by Audible.com. There are over 150,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or other mp3 player. http://www.audibletrial.com/houseofedtech   All links and shownotes at http://www.chrisnesi.com/2014/07/houseofedtech14.html   FEEDBACK Call: (732) 903-4869 Voxer: cnesi4602 Email: feedback@chrisnesi.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrnesi Send a voice message from http://www.chrisnesi.com

While at DevLearn this past November my ...

This article isn’t about skin color or national origin. This article isn’t about religious beliefs or social norms.  This article is about the two people in my group of 155 who I think about every single day because they are so very different from every other student in my group. J. arrived in the U.S. […]

Make My Groups app - FREE Team Generator http://t.co/PNjLsMZp #ipaded #edapps #iosedapp Will be using this at http://t.co/Tm1Jqjyb this week Tags: ipaded edapps iosedapp

Shachar Pessis is the founder and CEO of Wibki. Mr. Pessis and his team have created a great web-based bookmarking tool. Shachar shares how Wibki is a great addition to every classroom.   Follow Shachar http://twitter.com/shacharp Follow Wibki http://twitter.com/getwibki   House of #EdTech is sponsored by Audible.com. There are over 150,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or other mp3 player. http://www.audibletrial.com/houseofedtech   All links and shownotes at http://www.chrisnesi.com/2014/07/houseofedtech15.html   FEEDBACK Call: (732) 903-4869 Voxer: cnesi4602 Email: feedback@chrisnesi.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrnesi Send a voice message from http://www.chrisnesi.com  

Its time to check our "connectedness" quotient!  Every educator out there has a level of connectedness with other educators.  On various social networks, we all read, share, speak up and reconstruct the art of education for the better.  We are all reformers, we are all working toward a common goal.  We do this by connecting […]