Last week saw the launch of the DML Competition. I’ve been following the development of Mozilla’s Open Badges project for a few months now and so was (and still am) excited by the potential of badges in education. The current ‘elevator pitch’...
I first read about the idea of Open Badges back in the middle of last year. It excited me. One thing I’ve always been interested in is how to shift the power dynamic within classrooms towards learners in a positive way. Changing (or at least...
Last week saw the launch of the DML Competition. I’ve been following the development of Mozilla’s Open Badges project for a few months now and so was (and still am) excited by the potential of badges in education. The current ‘elevator pitch’...
I first read about the idea of Open Badges back in the middle of last year. It excited me. One thing I’ve always been interested in is how to shift the power dynamic within classrooms towards learners in a positive way. Changing (or at least...
Digital media allow us to produce, collect, organise and interpret more data about our lives than ever before. Our every digital interaction contributes to vast databases of information that index our behaviour from online movie choices to...
“A wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Ms. Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations.”
That is an example of some of the...
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s assume we live in a culture where all forms of educational achievement tests have been banned and no one is allowed to assign a letter or numerical grade for anything. How would we...
Often the emphasis in Digital Media and Learning is on K-12 education, and so social computing practices in higher education frequently receive less attention from researchers. A recently released five-year Mellon Foundation study on "...
Meanwhile, back at the pedagogical ranch...You may remember that back in November I reported on my experiment in grading, combining the long tradition of contract grading with what I call “crowdsourced grading.” Since I was already...
Digital media and learning initiatives often talk in utopian terms about a “future without books,” but don’t say that to New School faculty member Trebor Scholz. Scholz, who teaches in the Department of Culture and Media, has had great...
At HASTAC, we’ve been very excited this month to be one of the “community partners” for the upcoming Mozilla Drumbeat Festival: Learning, Freedom and the Open Web taking place in Barcelona, Nov. 3-5. The MacArthur Foundation is one of the...
I’m not teaching a class this term. I’m doing something lots harder. I am making a collaborative, peer-led experience available to students. There are six of them: three graduate students, two undergraduate students, and one...
There are as many reasons to teach as there are reasons to learn. One reason item-response testing (the twentieth-century’s dominant method of testing) is so deficient is that it tends to reduce what we teach to content (especially in the...
In a recent post on her blog, Duke's Cathy Davidson responds to a New York Times article on the increasing popularity of iPads in schools, arguing that iPads, or any technology, aren't a panacea for education. To support her point,...
What are the connections between emotional education and digital media and learning? Faced with a global economic recession, civic unrest, and major environmental catastrophe, governments around the world are now obsessed with cheering us all...
Learning with digital media is often articulated through an affective vocabulary of play, informality, enjoyment, and creativity, as opposed to the formality, standards and routines of conventional schooling. This difference in the language of...
Do we need badges, specifically badges for learning? In recent years, the answer has been increasingly, if not exactly “yes” then something more like “we better find out before it’s too late.” The new interest around badges appears to have...
The latest fascinating report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Families Matter: Designing Media for a Digital Age," offers one of the first large-scale studies to explore ideas parents have about their young children’s use and access of media...
Last week saw the launch of the DML Competition. I’ve been following the development of Mozilla’s Open Badges project for a few months now and so was (and still am) excited by the potential of badges in education. The current ‘elevator pitch’...
