Mathieu Plourde's List: EME6613 Resources

"Gmail is one of the most popular email services with more than 500 million users, so chances are pretty good that you’re one of them. But are you making the most of your email account? Many of us complain that our inboxes are too full and that responding to email is too time-consuming, but several tools are available that will streamline your email experience.

Take a look at these 10 plugins--most of which are free. They might just make your inbox a friendlier place to visit:"

""It seems that, if you just present the correct information, five things happen," he said. "One, students think they know it. Two, they don’t pay their utmost attention. Three, they don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking. Four, they don’t learn a thing. And five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.""

"I’ve been mulling over a series of ideas in my analysis of digital literacies, and one of them is the concept and practice of ‘curation’ as a digital literacy, and what the implications are for curation practices to be better understood, theorised, and subsequently harnessed for educational purposes."

"To be clear, this isn’t an official YouTube tool (though I’d still argue that YouTube really, really ought to build one) — so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work forever , particularly if YouTube’s legal team gets too bummed about the use of their trademark right in the domain. This is a side project by the team behind the super GIF-centric messaging app Glyphic."

"People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses?

That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations."

"Students are heading back to campus. And when they finish writing that first paper of the year, a growing number will have to do something their parents never did: run their work through anti-plagiarism software.

One company behind it is called Turnitin. And the database it uses to screen for potential plagiarism is big. Really, really big."

What’s more, 60 percent of the students responding said they saw an overall big positive effect on the classroom atmosphere, and 67 percent said they were able to concentrate a lot better in class without the phones.

"On the first day of school, instead of going over your classroom rules, why don’t you just create some memes explaining your rules. A quick and memorable way for your students to connect with routines and procedures. Either way, these are fun ways to express your sentiments."

"the work of Chris Argyris and his theory of double loop learning. This is a simplified explanation of the theory, so those who wish to read more deeply should read to the volume in the reference section."

"Faculty and students at UC Davis, meanwhile, are developing what they call "hyperlibraries" of faculty writings, homework questions, research and other content available online that are then vetted, and, like a Wikipedia page, constantly expanded and adapted to meet specific needs.

The goal is to produce e-textbooks in the chemistry, biology, statistics, math, physics and geology fields — dubbed ChemiWiki, BioWiki, MathWiki, etc. — that eventually will supplant traditional texts, which can cost up to $300 per copy, said UC Davis chemistry professor Delmar Larsen.

A pilot study of the ChemWiki last spring found that students in a general chemistry class who used the online materials would have spent about $125,000 had they bought new textbooks, Larsen said."

"Contrary to a progressive lens of technology where asynchronous patterns replace older asynchronous patterns, I like to think that the big picture here is that the gathering collection of asynchronous technology over time — with all of its varieties of communication frequency and durability — gives humans more choice and autonomy over how we interact and what we interact about. Radio has not been replaced by television or even podcasts, but only declined in popularity and taken its place among what is now available. An abundance of asynchronous options is not really a shift that we have been experiencing, but liberation from a narrow range of vastly different options."

"The Chronicle asked students, recent graduates, parents, and experts a simple question: What is the most you should borrow for a bachelor's degree?"

"alev Leetaru has been liberating a ton of public domain images from books and putting them all on Flickr. He's been going through Internet Archive scans of old, public domain books, isolating the images, and turning them into individual images. Because, while the books and images are all public domain, very few of the images have been separated from the books and released in a digital format."

"Righting the ship will require borrowing a page from the community-college playbook, by adding employment-ready programs like nursing (as Holy Family has done) and computing to entice disaffected degree-seekers. Developing online and hybrid teaching methods might also raise revenue from adult learners. Mostly, self-preservation will require both professors and administrators to accept cost-cutting, which will hardly be easy. Even though St. Joe’s ended the year with a $7 million surplus by embracing some of these measures, its administration became cannon fodder for faculty. But if more schools don’t follow suit, it could spell closures. “For those college presidents unwilling to reboot,” Hartman warns. “I’ve got one word for them: Detroit.”"

"As these online course products have improved, more and more schools have plugged them into their curricula. The result is a creeping homogenization of basic classes throughout many U.S. universities. That’s raising some uncomfortable questions, starting with: Why should I pick one school over another if they offer the exact same classes? And: Why are universities buying ready-made frozen meals instead of cooking up their own educational fare?"

"“On both ends of the spectrum, this middle piece is taking away browsing from the iPhone and the tablet,” Adobe Digital Index principal analyst Tamara Gaffney tells WIRED."

"Online course design strategies from an instructor at the University of Oklahoma."

"University officials say the higher tuition rates for online courses are the result of expensive infrastructure and the costs for designing the courses, which often involve partnerships or contracts with outside online education providers.
 
Nassirian said the infrastructure costs make it difficult to create online classes cheaply on a small scale."