Serendipity35

Of Course, There Is Life After College

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 09:05:00 -0400

A new book, There Is Life After College by Jeff Selingo, is out this month. It looks at stories of 20-somethings and their experiences in and out of school and how those experiences shaped their success in the job market.

He looks at factors such as the skills that proved most helpful, in an attempt to discover why some students prosper, while others fail. (There is a free preview of the book's introduction.)

Jeff Selingo previously wrote College (Un)bound and there is some crossover, such as the need for students to understand the jobs (especially ones that did not exist a few years ago) available to them and the need to be lifelong learners.

&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=poetsonline" style="float:left; margin:3px 6px" />There Is Life After College is about after college and the concerns about that time come not only from students but from parents. Parent are anxious about their college-educated child to successfully landing a good job after graduation and their own or the student's significant debt which (especially in an uncertain job market) may leave that child financially dependent on their parents for years to come. Both parties may well ask, "What did I pay all that money for?"

While Selingo's earlier book may have answered that question with thoughts about alternatives to the degree, such as MOOCs or competency-based degrees, this new book looks a lot at that Return on Investment (ROI).

Does where you go to college matter? Most of the data says it does. The better schools get more students to graduation on time and their name recognition value is real. My one son is in finance and for many of the Wall Street banks and firms he interviewed with they only wanted to look at Ivy League graduates. There is a nice interactive visualization tool from Jon Boeckenstedt that shows graduation rates by the selectivity of the school. The ability of the nation's oldest and wealthiest colleges to graduate white men who end up wealthy is real. Not that less selective schools mean no chance of success, but it may come with more effort required. But the really surprising take on this kind of data to me was that it's not that you should choose a college because of its graduation rate, but that the college will select you based on your propensity to graduate.

For the book, Selingo conducted a survey of young adults who had at least some college experience and were born between 1988 and 1991, giving them some time to start a career in their mid-twenties. Based on that survey, they divided the transition from adolescence into adulthood by new college graduates into three groups: Sprinters, Wanderers, or Stragglers. This charts appears in his newsletter.

The full results of the survey are in the book, but one result was that two-thirds of new college graduates fail to find meaningful employment in the years after they leave school. They either drift from job to job, live with their parents or work part-time gigs that don’t require a college degree.

Of course, there IS life after college, but the book taps a trend we see of more difficult and longer transitions to post-college life and looks to suggest ways that graduates can market themselves. He suggests that process to plan for a young professional starts at the end of high school through college graduation. Seems like this book would make a good high school graduation gift.

Measuring MOOCs

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 08:27:00 -0400

MOOC enrollment surpassed 35 million in 2015 and though the blush is off the MOOC rose, they are clearly a new learning context for many people.

Are they transformative? I believe so, in the ways that they have created new platforms for online learning, reached new audiences and started conversations about alternative forms of learning and even alternatives within traditional education around credits and degrees.

Many of the current offerings labeled as MOOC are more moOC - that is, the numbers are less massive and the courses and content are not really "open" in the original intent and definition of that word.

Certificate-granting MOOCs and ones for college credit and professional development are what I see as the current trends of interest.

But the topic of quality in MOOCs, and online learning in general, has never gone away. Two reports recently examine that consideration.

The Babson annual “Online Report Card” is in its thirteenth (and I read, its final) year. The report's introduction caught my attention because it says that we are at a stage when “distance education is clearly becoming mainstream” and the divide between "online learning" and simply learning is less evident. The report doesn't spend much time on quality and seems to put MOOCs in the same category as other online learning.

The report titled “In search of quality: Using Quality Matters to analyze the quality of Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs)” applied the Quality Matters™ higher education rubric (not the Continuing and Professional Development version) to six MOOCs, offered by three providers, Coursera, edX and Udacity.

Was that a fair test?

Critics of MOOCs will point to the result that all six MOOCs failed to meet QM’s passing grade of 85%. The QM rubric standards are grouped into eight dimensions and the MOOCs performed especially poorly at learner interaction and engagement, and learner support.

When my university first started to have students evaluate their online courses at the end of the last century, it used the same criteria and survey that was used for regular classes. That made some sense at first because they wanted to measure one against the other. Online offerings always did well in "the use of technology and media" category, but not very well in some of the face-to-face items such as lectures and teacher engagement. After a few years, it was clear that a new survey made specifically for online courses was needed. But our online student survey would not be fair to use for a MOOC, especially one that is truly Massive and Open. A well designed course with many thousands of students, using OER, possibly no textbook, and taken for no credit or fees is just not going to be able to be measured against a good online course with a small number of students motivated by tuition, a grade, credits and a degree to be completed.

Efforts the past few years to evaluate MOOCs and establish standards of quality are important, but we have quite a ways to go.

Backwards Design

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 08:43:00 -0400

I brought up the topic of "backward design" last fall in one of my classes at NJIT and the students had never heard the term. One of them, not surprisingly, took his phone and did a search on Wikipedia, and we were both surprised that there was no entry. Not on Wikipedia? Then it kind of doesn't exist.

So, I put in a request for a page to be created, and recently I was notified that one has been created and we are adding and revising it.

Backward design is a method of designing educational curriculum by setting goals before choosing instructional methods and forms of assessment. That seems so logical, but we very often go the other way. "Teach to the test" would be a very obvious example.

The 3 stages are usually described as:

1. Identify the results desired (What are the big ideas and skills you want students to take away from the learning? What should the students know, understand, and be able to do?

2. Determine acceptable levels of evidence that support that the desired results have occurred (How will you assess those results? What will you accept as evidence that student understanding took place - observations, tests, presentations, projects?

3. Finally, design learning events that can make desired results happen (For example, what knowledge, skills and even tools will students need to achieve those desired results?

Backward design challenges common methods of curriculum planning, such as starting with a textbook as the content.

A common analogy used in explaining backward design is to think of it as using a "road map" where we start with the destination and then look for the best way to get there. By that analogy, traditional design would be using a road map with no destination in mind.

My NJIT students, some of whom are engineers, thought this sounded like "reverse engineering." Reverse engineering, also called back engineering, is the processes of extracting design information from anything man-made and re-producing it - a process that often involves disassembling something (a mechanical device, electronic component, computer program, or biological, chemical, or organic matter) and analyzing its components and workings in detail.

Backward design is not so hands-on, but it wasn't a bad place to start with the students. Actually, backward design is closer to the components of the ADDIE model which is commonly used in instructional design. These days instructional design is most often associated with technology and platforms for the development of learning experiences, especially online, and, unfortunately, less often associated with face-to-face teaching and pedagogy.

Historically, Ralph W. Tyler is given credit for the idea of "backward design" (though he didn't use that term in 1949). He was referring to a statement of objectives used to indicate the kinds of changes in the student to be brought about so that instructional activities can be planned and developed in a way likely to attain these objectives.

In curriculum design in the late 1980s, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins launched Understanding by Design (UbD)which promotes a backward approach to design that delays the planning of classroom activities until goals have been clarified and assessments designed. They promote this as a way to avoid the problems of "textbook coverage" and "activity-oriented" teaching, in which no clear priorities and purposes are apparent. UbD also promotes the use of standards and regular reviews of results (achievement data and student work) followed by targeted adjustments to curriculum and instruction.

UbD has been widely used in K-12 education and Wiggins' and McTighe's "WHERE" approach is also used for the assessment stage of the process. W stands for students knowing where they are heading, why they are heading there, what they know, where they might go wrong in the process, and what is required of them. The H stands for hooking the students on the topic of study. E stands for students exploring and experiencing ideas and being equipped with the necessary understanding to master the standard/outcome being taught. R stands for providing opportunities for students to rehearse, revise, and refine their work, and the E stands for student evaluation.

As the new Wikipedia entry notes, criticisms of this backward design approach do exist. For example, this approach ties teacher effectiveness more on the success of the students based on formulated assessments rather than ability to connect knowledge and skills to the needs and interests of students. Some critics feel that this approach shows a lack of concern with social and cultural differences within the classroom.

Teach Online, Even If Your School Doesn't Offer a Platform

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 09:00:00 -0400

If you have never had the opportunity to teach online and have wondered what it's like, here's a chance to find out. Canvas offers you a chance to try out their learning management system (LMS) for free. They offer two options: Take Canvas for a test drive with a free, two-week trial account that is pre-loaded with course content so that you can explore without having to build from scratch. But, even better, is the offer to actually teach your existing class on Canvas for free, forever. "You bring the content and students. We’ll provide the awesome platform, " says Canvas.

Sure, this is an offer meant to help market the platform and entice you to recommend it at your institution, but take advantage of it. That is especially true if you have never taught online and want to give it a try. Perhaps your school doesn't even offer the option to supplement your face-to-face class with an online section. Though I am more involved in how any LMS including Canvas is used in higher education, this is probably even more applicable to pre-college. (Look at how the platform is being used in K-12 education.)

I have designed online learning and taught in a number of learning management systems over the years - WebBoard, WebCT, Blackboard, eCollege, Sakai, Moodle and Canvas. My first experience with Canvas was when I taught a MOOC in the Canvas Network back in 2013. That was a meta-MOOC called "Academia and the MOOC" and was intended to attract teachers as well as others in academic roles (instructional designer, support staff, administration and student).

I found Canvas easy to use, but it seemed like a work-in-progress at the time. It lacked many of the tools I was used to having built-in (equation editor, white board, blog, wiki and journal features etc.). But here are some interesting things that came out of that experience.

Teaching that MOOC led me to connect with many other online instructors. Some had take my "course" (which was more of a large conversation) in order to try out Canvas as much as to learn about MOOCs.

While I was facilitating the MOOC, I was contacted by two other New Jersey colleges that were considering moving to Canvas. The instructional designers at both schools separately reported the same phenomena at their colleges. The instructional design staff felt as I had when I encountered Canvas - it seemed "underpowered." But, their faculty really liked it for pretty much the same reason: it was clean and simple and didn't have all those "tools we never use." Both colleges now use Canvas.

I think that anyone currently teaching at any level should have experienced being a student and being a teacher in an online setting. There is just no getting around the fact that it is and will continue to be a part of what learning has become and how it is offered.

Dip your foot into the online water - or just jump in with your whole course. It's not as scary as it looks.

How Do You Define Personalized Learning?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 09:58:00 -0400

Higher education leaders share how they define personalized learning.

Including: Randy Bass, Vice Provost for Education, Georgetown University; Tahnja Wilson, Sr. Mgr. of Strategic Design Initiatives, Arizona State University; David Wiley, Chief Academic Officer, Lumen Learning; Bryan Alexander, Founder, Bryan Alexander Consulting LLC; Shannon McCarty, Dean of Instruction & Academic Affairs, Rio Salado College; Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University; Tristan Denley, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs ,Tennessee Board of Regents

via educause.edu

Coding as a (second) Language

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 08:55:00 -0400

There is global interest in teaching programming in schools. Initiatives that come from outside education, like Code.org, which is backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, are trying to get more students learning a second (or third) language, but it's not one that is spoken. But I also see a backlash of those who say that writing code is a terrible way for humans to instruct computers and that newer technology may render programming languages "about as useful as Latin."

I support some middle ground. Teaching some coding as part of regular language study in English and world language classes.

This week I am giving a presentation at the NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase that I titled "Code as a (second) Language." It's not about becoming a programmer. Learning about code, like learning about grammar, is about understanding how a system of communication works below the surface.

There are several "computer science, meets humanities" programs. One is at Stanford University, which offers a new major there called CS+X which is a middle ground between computer science and any of 14 disciplines in the humanities, including history, art, and classics.

What are the cognitive advantages to learning a second language? Learning any system of signs, symbols and rules used to communicate improves thinking by challenging the brain to: recognize & negotiate meaning, work within structures and rules, and master different language patterns.

As a longtime language teacher - and shorter term coder - I know that code-switching (and that is the term) occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation. That can be done between English and French, but also between English and Java.

Whether you are working in a traditional language class or a programming class, memorizing rules and learning new vocabulary strengthens overall memory. Multilingual people are better at remembering lists or sequences. Language study & coding forces a focus on knowing important information & excluding extraneous information. We have all heard and read beautiful” and elegant language, such as in a Shakespeare play or great poem, but programmers and mathematicians also talk about beautiful and elegant code and equations.

The conference this week is about STEAM -- STEM plus the arts, including language arts.

Engineering and other STEM subjects are appealing to students in part because they often include hands-on, real-world applications. Many students also feel that these majors lead to better job prospects. Of course, learning to think like an engineer could be useful no matter what students decide to pursue. An increasing number of high schools offer introduction to engineering courses that are project-based, an inquiry-centered.

There is a Code as a Second Language National Initiative that brings tech professionals and software engineers into schools to introduce students to coding in classes, but also in after-school sessions and events like coding jams.

This is all great, but my interest here is bring the coding found in STEM courses into languages classes.

How is a programming language comparable to a spoken language?

My idea is not without precedents. Natural language processing looks at syntax, semantics and models of language analysis, interpretation & generation. Human language technology continues to grow. On a large scale, products like Google and other search tools and Apple's Siri and speech drive commercial uses. The field of computational linguistics is one that grew out of early machine translation efforts and generated mechanized linguistic theories.

There are many programming languages we might use, depending on the grade level and applications. Although JAVA is the most popular programming language, and the AP computer science exam uses a Java subset, it is more than many students will have time to learn. There are coding options that I have written about here for using simpler languages (such as SCRATCH) and tools to aid in writing programs.

Although Java might not be the coolest language to use these days, you can do many things with it - including tapping into the current interest by young people for Minecraft. Using mods for Minecraft makes Java more beginner-friendly.

Language teachers can work with STEM teachers, especially in K-12 schools, to show students the connections between concepts like syntax and help bridge student knowledge of the two fields and also understand commonalties in communications.

The 2016 NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase is a venue to showcase faculty work, work-in-progress or posters to the New Jersey Higher Ed and K-12 communities. Registration and Information on the presentations at NJEDge.net/activities/facultyshowcase/2016/

View the "Coding as a (second) Language" slides via Slideshare by Kenneth Ronkowitz

Making More Makers

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 09:32:00 -0400

I suppose I was a "do-it-yourselfer" and a "maker" in some ways long before those terms took on new meanings. But the Maker Movement is a subculture that is a lot less "sub-" than it was a few years ago.

Back in the 1970s, when the big computers became available as personal computers (PC), it started a subculture of DIY types who were building their own computers and writing their own software. The maker movement definitely has roots in that and the hacker (in the good guy, white hat, sense of the word) movement.

In 2005, Dale Dougherty launched Make magazine to serve a community that was growing and the following year they launched Maker Faire.

Though makerspaces have varying names attached to them, they attract those DIYers who want to build something rather than just buy it. While hacker culture which is focused on software rather than the physical objects,both groups share an interest in building new creations as well as hacking at existing ones and making them something new.

A makerspace in a school setting may have a more obvious educational purposes and intentions, but all of these spaces foster an informal way of using and learning practical skills and applying them to design.

Two events that I am involved in this month use the maker approach to informal learning.

New Jersey Makers Day runs two days this year - March 18 and 19 - so that it can be marked both in schools (on Friday) and have a school audience in community spaces such as libraries on Saturday. There are many activities planned across that state in schools, libraries and other makerspaces. Last year, there were over 15,000 individual attendees at 150 participating sites, including libraries, museums, schools, commercial makerspaces, and AC Moore stores that were spread across all 21 counties of New Jersey. There is probably something similar going on where you live.

As this movement grows, companies and makers selling their creations has become a commercial segment that is also growing. This includes big companies that sell hardware like 3D printers and supplies to the individual selling custom items on a much smaller scale. Both are "shaping the future of our economy."

The NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase on March 23, 2016 at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ is focusing on STEAM - that's STEM with the needed addition of the Arts, including language arts and the digital humanities.

I am doing one of the presentations along with Emily Witkowski (Maplewood Public Library) and Danielle Mirliss (Seton Hall University) titled "The Maker Movement Connects STEAM Across New Jersey." The maker movement really fits well with the STEAM (and STEM) approach to learning.

Online Learning and the MOOC in Pre-college

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 09:00:00 -0500

The MOOC has not had very wide usage in secondary schools in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Acually, online learning in general has not made significant inroads into the pre-college educational segment.

A recent issue of the studentPOLL, published by the standardized test provider ACT and the consulting firm Art & Science Group, suggests that incoming college students still believe they will pursue higher education by attending most of their courses in person.

My own observation, somewhat contrary to this report, is that there are two uses of online learning - specifically MOOCs - in the pre-college population. One is by students who are self-motivated and want to explore college-level subjects. Second, is use by teachers looking to see what colleges are doing with subjects they teach. That is especially true of computer science, physics and other STEM subjects where teacher may feel a need to update their own learning, and also find materials that they can use in their own classes.

That poll showed that most college-bound high school students are concerned about the quality of online education, although a small percentage are open to the idea of taking some of their courses online. 85 percent of respondents said they wanted to take a majority of their courses in person. Only 6 percent said they were open to the idea of taking half, most or all of them online. About one-third (37 percent) said they could see themselves taking a handful of online courses. (9 percent were undecided.)

What does this mean for colleges that offer fully online programs? Well, they are not going to appeal to most freshman.

Online learning takes some geting used to, both as a student and as a teacher. Perhaps, pre-college programs should use online learning as it is used for many college courses - as a tools to augment face-to-face courses.

The Maker Movement Connects STEM and STEAM

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 08:30:00 -0500

Photo: Dave Jenson - We're working on it!, CC BY-SA 2.0

Maker culture has been growing, but it contains a number of subcultures. For me, maker culture now includes hackerspaces, fab(rication) labs and other spaces that encourage a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach to innovation.

These spaces are found around the world and some probably existed prior to the use of the makerspace label. Like-minded people use these spaces to share ideas, tools, and skills.

Some hackerspaces and makerspaces are found at universities with a technical orientation, such as MIT and Carnegie Mellon. But I have found that many of these spaces are quite closed spaces that are available to only students in particular programs or majors and perhaps not to the entire university community or the wider surrounding community.

So, spaces have also emerged in K-12 schools, public libraries and in the community.

The NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase is an excellent venue to showcase your work, work-in-progress or posters to the New Jersey Higher Ed and K-12 communities. This month I will be part of a presentation along with Emily Witkowski (Maplewood Public Library) and Danielle Mirliss (Seton Hall University) titled "The Maker Movement Connects STEAM Across New Jersey." STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) gets plenty of attention these days, but this particular conference is focused on teaching innovations in STEAM - that's STEM with the needed addition of the Arts, including language arts and the digital humanities, and drawing on design principles and encouraging creative solutions.

The keynote speaker at the Showcase is Georgette Yakman, founding researcher and creator of ST?@M. The acronym, in this context, represents how the subject areas relate to each other: Science & Technology, interpreted through Engineering & the Arts, all based in Mathematical elements. The A stands for a broad spectrum of the arts going beyond aesthetics to include the liberal arts, folding in Language Arts, Social Studies, Physical Arts, Fine Arts & Music and the ways each shape developments in STEM fields.

The Rhode Island School of Design is a good example of having a STEM to STEAM program and maintains an interactive map that shows global STEAM initiatives. John Maeda, (2008 to 2013 president of Rhode Island School of Design) has been a leader in bringing the initiative to the political forums of educational policy.

Our Showcase presentation presents three aspects of the maker movement: in classrooms, in libraries and the community, and in higher education. We are part of the NJ Maker Consortium which brings together educators and librarians in K-12 and Higher Ed. The consortium looks to provide local support, networking, and training for individuals working to establish or grow makerspace programs on their schools or library branches.

In 2016, the second annual New Jersey Makers Day has expanded to a two-day event, March 18 and 19. This celebration of maker culture occurs in locations across NJ and connects all-ages at libraries, schools, businesses, and independent makerspaces that support making, tinkering, crafting, manufacturing, and STEM-based learning.

Handwriting and Neuroscience

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 09:19:00 -0500

I had a conversation with a friend this past week about kids and handwriting. She was upset that her grandchild doesn't seem to be able to write or read cursive. She sees this as a big mistake. In fact, the dreaded Common Core standards call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, it is all about the keyboard. Even without those guidelines, handwriting has certainly been pushed out of the elementary curriculum.

I asked a few people I know who teach elementary school about teaching cursive. They said that though they spend less time on it than in the past, kids like to do it. They have been trying it n their own – practicing their signature is especially popular. Like keyboarding, they are doing it outside school anyway, so the earlier the school can address any “formal” training and correct bad habits, the better it seems to be.

Some psychologists and neuroscientists have new evidence that suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development are deeper than suspected earlier.

Quick take: Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information.

Were you taught cursive handwriting in your early days of school? I was unfortunately labeled as “gifted” when I was in second grade and so I was put in an experimental combined second/third grade class. Since the third graders were already writing in cursive, my group was given a fast version of penmanship. My handwriting has suffered ever since. I did become good at printing letters and I took “mechanical drawing” (drafting) classes where we actually practiced precise block lettering. I even took a course in calligraphy in the hopes of improving my handwriting.

But cursive handwriting seems to be a rather obsolete skill, like using a slide rule. (I also learned how to use a slide rule in chemistry and physics class. Yes, I am old.)

What was the last significant document you wrote by hand?

New research seems to indicate that beyond what we write how we write matters. If children had drawn a letter freehand, they showed increased activity when their brain was scanned in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write. In order to be able to read, you need to be able recognize each possible iteration of a letter no matter how we see it written - on a book's page, on a screen in different fonts or written by hand on a piece of paper.

In one study comparing children who physically form letters with those who only watch others doing it, the result seems to be that only the actual effort of writing the letters engages the brain’s motor pathways.

It's not just about letter recognition. Young children (grades 2-5) studied showed that printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and separate brain patterns. Those patterns result in different end products. For example, composing by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas.

The result that most intrigues me was from research on the older children. When they were asked to come up with ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory, and increased overall activation in the reading and writing networks.

I know that for myself and for others I have talked about this subject, we believe that the act of putting thoughts down on paper forces us to focus on what’s important. I still prefer to take notes at meeting and conferences by hand.

Do you remember those charts of how to make the letters that was in almost every elementary classroom? I can’t even remember how to make some letters in cursive – Z and Q are blanks. When did the decline of cursive begin? Some history -

Our Colonial writers had a very elaborate cursive style.

In the 1800s, the popular style was a loopy, “Spencerian” script.

In the 1920s, educators thought that since children learn to read by looking at books printed in manuscript rather than cursive, they should learn to write the same way.

In the 1940s, manuscript (print writing) was the standard taught in kindergarten and cursive was taught in second or third grade. The standardized practical style came from the Palmer Guide to Business Writing from back in 1894. Business practice enters school.

Why has handwriting fallen out of favor? Ask 10 people and I bet at least nine will blame technology? Between computers and smartphones, there’s not much need to write. Hmmmm…

According to the Journal of Educational Psychology, only 9% of American high school students use an in-class computer more than once a week. Just looking at the students around me at the college, most of their note taking and in-class writing is handwriting. And most of their tests still are handwritten. No doubt, email has killed letter writing which was once a formal use of cursive. But in an age of machine-scored standardized tests, handwriting just doesn’t count much in the evaluation of students.

6 Areas of Emerging Technology

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 08:04:00 -0500

Produced by educause.edu/ELI and NMC each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years.

The areas of important developments in educational technology cited for 2016 are:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

1. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

2. Learning Analytics and Adaptive Learning

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

1. Augmented and Virtual Reality

2. Makerspaces

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

1. Affective Computing

2. Robotics

Download a copy of the full report at https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2016/2/hr2016.pdf

Inventing Serendipity

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 12:12:00 -0500

On this Leap Day, inspired by an image and post onThe Paris Review , I retell a tale of serendipity...

Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in a letter to Horace Mann, dated January 28, 1754.

In the letter, he explained the etymology of his new word.

"I once read a silly fairy tale, called “The Three Princes of Serendip”: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, on the them discovered that a mule blinds of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand Serendipity?"

It took nearly two centuries for the adjective form, serendipitous, to come on the scene. Its first recorded usage was in 1943.