South Korea Says Good-Bye To Print Textbooks, Plans To Digitize Entire Curriculum By 2015 (video) | Singularity Hub
I worry when the government mandates technology, but I don’t hate this idea. I’m looking forward to this. The publishers are going to have to turn into digital media companies. Publishing these types of materials is going to be extremely difficult.
I’m hoping beyond hope that they will include the ability for teachers to integrate their own materials and web-based materials.
Freeing the LMS – Pearson’s free entry into the LMS field with OpenClass (anyone have feedback on this?)
OpenClass can be used “absolutely for free,” says Adrian Sannier, senior vice president of product at Pearson. “No licensing costs, no costs for maintenance, and no costs for hosting. So this is a freer offer than Moodle is. It’s a freer offer than any other in the space.
Color me intrigued. I would ditch my Moodle in a second for a better option. Of course, I don’t know how much of this hype. The system could suck. Anyone out there with some experience?
They say that they are taking a cue from Google, but that’s not really the case. They are taking there cue from Apple (at least originally). It’s all about the content. Come inside for free and while you are here can I offer you some books at a nominal fee?
I’m going in eyes wide open, but I’ll certainly go in
We Are the 99 Percent – Common themes: student debt and healthcare debt
Student debt and healthcare debt seem to be the trend for these sad stories. Regardless of your politics, you must admit that there is a need for significant change. There are no simple solutions. These folks are already in trouble and are unlikely to get out of it any time soon. However, we can try to avoid future problems.
I’ll let other, wiser souls comment on healthcare. I don’t really feel like getting into that one. However, I think I can comment on education.
Simply blaming students is misplaced (though they do share the blame). Our educational institutions are one big pyramid scheme. Professors and administrators can only justify their existence by filling their programs. Whether students can get gainful employment as a result of this education is secondary. The more students in your programs, the more faculty and facilities you can afford, which allows you to recruit more students. It’s a terrible cycle that results in departments filled to the brim with under-employable students who have yet to feel the fire at their feet.
Faculty likely don’t think of it this way, but I can’t see how they don’t. Faculty are often blinded by the relative importance of their field. For them, this field is full of work. Their friends, colleagues, and some past students do work in the field. What they lose site of are the scores of students who don’t make it in the field. They justify this by talking about the alternative paths they take and their poor decisions (never about the original poor decision of joining their department).
I struggle with this daily. I teach in a department that is seeing negative job growth (pubic school teachers) in Korea. I tell students at every chance that they must have a plan B. The benefit of an English Education degree in Korea is that they have communication and translation skills that are in relatively high demand. With this in mind, we are having to reconsider what an English Education program should prepare students for. Are we still preparing public school teachers? Or are we preparing “communicators”? If the latter, it’s just not good enough. They need marketable skills that prepare them for specialized fields including sales, trade, publishing, and so forth. If the former, we are looking at less than 1 in 10 who will get that coveted public school job. What about the other 9?
So back to student debt. There are 3 ways to address student debt. (1) enter programs in which graduates earn good money. (2) Don’t go to school at all and have the same low paying jobs at 18 that you’d have after graduating from a low-employment major. (3) Programs have to adjust to make their students more employable. Now, these are all ways that have to do with schools as they currently stand.
Another way to deal with student debt is to reduce the costs associated with education. Very few majors (if any) require long-term, residential programs to adequately learn the content. Does a degree in English literature really require one to be in a classroom for 4 years? I’d argue that it works against a good education in that field. What about math? Same problem. Education? A little more justification of face-to-face modeling. The list goes on and on. We need to give up on tradition and move to what is not only effective, but efficient.
The bubble is going to burst in education. There will be winners and losers. I just hope that when the dust clears, the winners are the students and the losers are the organizations.
To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees – Advice
To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees
Mark Shaver for The Chronicle
Dear faculty members: I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you’re not doing your job.
Lest you think that by advising, I mean editing research papers and dissertations, let me disabuse you. I offer those services, but rarely am I asked for them.
A former tenured professor at a major research university, I am now running an academic-career consulting business. That’s right: I am doing graduate advising for pay. I am teaching your Ph.D. students to do things like plan a publishing trajectory, tailor their dissertations for grant agencies, strategize recommendation letters, evaluate a journal’s status, judge the relative merits of postdoctoral options, interpret a rejection, follow up on an acceptance, and—above all—get jobs. And business is so good I’m booked ahead for months.
via chronicle.com
I see how this is just really good advertising on the part of the author, but it’s really an interesting issue. I can see the benefits of hiring someone like this from the very beginning of your Ph.D. program. Seriously, someone needs to be on you to publish early in your studies.
Of course, the other question is why don’t faculty do this. Overburdened? Organizational?
Educational technology: The evolution of classroom technology (infographic)
I love infographics. I’m easy to please.
Princeton bans academics from handing all copyright to journal publishers
This is good news. The dominoes are beginning to fall. Pay journals are a dying breed. Yeah!
For non-academics or for those academics at huge universities with large library budgets, this might not seem important. For guys like me on faculty at a university with very little access to international journals in my field, this is a much welcomed movement..
I would easily pay $500/yr for access to these works, but that wouldn’t even get me in the door. For an average research paper, I need access to roughly 15-30 difference journals (not just different issues). This is particularly true for me as I do research that spans the fields of Education, SLA/TESOL, and technology, not to mention other tangents that some research flows into.
As stated in the article (http://theconversation.edu.au/princeton-bans-academics-from-handing-all-copyr…, this model is built on the backs of academics doing this work for free (or as part of their university roles). Publications really could offset costs with minimal advertising on their sites. In addition, as most journals are associated with professional organizations the cost of providing journal access could go back into member services and even, perhaps, cut membership costs and increase membership. (Yes, I see the potential for those who join solely for the publication to cut and run).
Some might say that the publishers offer a platform that innovates in delivery, but this is a joke compared to what other 3rd party products could do if they were competing on service rather than content.