Learning Systems

Vancouver Island University has created a new online resource for teachers called "Teaching Tips from the Trenches". Some of the thirty available tips from 2011/2012 include "using speed-date learning for students to share personal experiences, silent brainstorming to encourage participation from reserved students, and producing "word clouds" at the beginning and end of courses to show new understanding of topics." Take a look at some of the other tips, all structured to resemble activity/technique cards that can be distrubted to instructors.

This should be a good read and hopefully shed some light...

From: http://fipa.bc.ca/home/news/308

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC has published guidelines for public bodies considering the benefits and risks of cloud computing.

“Cloud computing” refers to the practice of using the Internet to process, manage and store data on remote network services, rather than on one’s own computer hard drives.

As the popularity of cloud computing grows, public bodies (including schools, hospitals, municipalities and local police forces) are looking to take advantage of the cost-savings and functionality these services offer. But the use of cloud computing by both public bodies and private enterprises in Canada is controversial.

If the servers on which information is stored are located in a foreign country, any personal information stored may be outside of the jurisdiction of Canadian privacy laws and subject to foreign laws that provide far less privacy protection, such as the infamous USA Patriot Act.

The Commissioner’s report provides information to public bodies about how BC’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act applies to the use of cloud computing, including:

Data storage and access: The law requires that personal information in the custody or under the control of a public body be stored and accessed only in Canada, subject to limited exceptions, and

Data security: The law requires public bodies to take reasonable
steps to protect personal information against such risks as unauthor-
ized access, collection, use, disclosure or disposal.

Commissioner’s news release Click Here

CLOUD COMPUTING GUIDELINES FOR PUBLIC BODIES Click Here

FREE!

Zotero is the only research tool that automatically senses content, allowing you to add it to your personal library with a single click. Whether you're searching for a preprint on arXiv.org, a journal article from JSTOR, a news story from the New York Times, or a book from your university library catalog, Zotero has you covered with support for thousands of sites

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 Create and join research groups to focus on any topic you choose. Each group can share its own research library, complete with files, bibliographic data, notes, and discussion threads. Tag and analyze your research together with others. Work with a single colleague or an entire class: Zotero groups can include as many members as you please.  Zotero groups can be private or public, open or closed. You decide. For example, you and a few colleagues might initially work on a research project in private.

Website: Zotero

Zotero is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

This is an interesting article that talks about a recent MIT study that examined the behavior of children presented with a brand new toy in four different situations: (1)pedagogical (2)interrupted (3)naive & (4)baseline. The study discovered that "children expressly taught one of its functions played with the toy for less time and discovered fewer things to do with it than children in the other three scenarios." Read the article and find out what else they discovered.

Spider Scribe is a new concept mapping tool that allows you to easily add text boxes, insert documents, images, maps, etc. Spider Scribe is in Beta, and free to use!

Read a review of Spider Scribe, written by Sue Frantz at Technology for Educators.

Today Martin Dougiamas presented the keynote at the Canadian Moodlemoot in Edmonton.  As he went to the stage he was introduced as the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world.

Martin updated us with the current stats on Moodle:

• 54,000 verified sites worldwide.
• 41 Million users
• 97 language packs (17 fully complete, the rest are in various states)
• 54 Moodle Partners who fund the project and its going very well ensuring the project will continue into the future.
• USA still has the highest raw number of installations and Spain has half of that with much less population.
• Brazil is now 3rd in the world and has overtaken the UK now in total installs.
• 3 of the top 10 are English speaking
• per head of population, Portugal has the largest number of Moodle installations.

What will be in Moodle 2.1?

• Performance
• Restore 1.9 backups
• Quiz/question refactor
• Page course format
• Interface polishing
• Official Mobile app (there now is a Mobile division)

What is going to happen in 2.2 and beyond?

• Grading and Rubrics
• Competency Tracking (from activity level, course level, outside courses to generate a competency profile)
• Assignment (planning to combine all 4 into one type and simplify it)
• Forum (big upgrade probably based on OU Forum)
• Survey (to include feedback/questionnaire – being rewritten currently)
• Lesson
• Scorm 2
• Improved reporting
• IMS LTI
• IMS CC (although it is in 1.9 needs to be redone)

Moodle also has rolled out the Moodle course hubs as part of Moodle 2. It was first dreamed of 6 years ago. It is about sharing courses and communities of practice. This will change how people share courses, enabled private and public repositories of courses. Check out MOOCH

Taken from Some Random Thoughts