TCC Worldwide Online Conference 2018: Call for Proposals

By Bert Kimura

The theme for the 23rd Annual TCC Worldwide Online Conference, April 17-19, 2018, is “Navigating the Digital Landscape.” Participation in this event is entirely online. All sessions are delivered online in real-time. Sessions are recorded for later viewing.

Please consider submitting a proposal for a paper or general session related to all aspects of learning, design, and technology, including but not limited to e-learning, online learning communities, collaborative learning, social media, mobile learning, emerging technologies, international education, and professional development.

The proposal submission deadline is December 15, 2017. The submission form is available at http://bit.ly/2018proposal.

For a list of suggested topics and more information, see Call for Proposals.

TCC Hawaii, LearningTimes, & the Learning Design and Technology Department, College of Education, UH-Manoa collaborate to produce this event. Numerous volunteer faculty and staff worldwide provide additional support.

Contact: Bert Kimura (bert@hawaii.edu) or Curtis Ho (curtis@hawaii.edu).

Homepage: tcchawaii.org
Hashtag: #tcc23rd

To subscribe to the TCCOHANA-L mailing list, see: http://tcchawaii.org/tccohana-l/

 

What’s Wrong with MOOCs: One-Size-Fits-All Syndrome

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

The Malaysian government is taking steps to “make 30 per cent of higher education courses available as massive open online courses (or MOOCs) by 2020” (Financial Review, 2 Oct. 2016). The MOOCs are free, but there’s a fee for assessments that grant credit for courses taken at other universities. From 64 courses in 2015, the number has grown to 300 this year.

The down side, as I see it, is that they’re relying on a single MOOC management system (MMS) — in this case, OpenLearning, which is based in Sydney. This shoehorning of course design and development into a proprietary box is a clear sign that the Malaysian administrators don’t have a clue about MOOCs.

This problem of overreliance on an MMS is endemic in the vast majority of universities that are tiptoeing into MOOCs. It’s the same mindset that tosses all online courses into a single LMS. If this one-size-fits-all approach were applied to F2F courses, professors would be outraged by this brazen violation of academic freedom.

The web is an infinite frontier with limitless resources for creating a wide range of MOOCs. In contrast, boxed platforms being hawked by non- and for-profits such as Coursera, edX, and OpenLearning don’t even begin to scratch the surface of possibilities. Jumping whole hog into one of them is to automatically accept an MMS’s limited views of what a MOOC can be.  Continue reading

A Network for Under-served Populations

By Bonnie Bracey Sutton
Associate Editor

The article below is from a dear friend, Joyce Malyn-Smith. Please send her names and interests. We are trying to get funding for programs and grants for more minorities.

A Network for Under-served Populations

By J. Malyn-Smith

Joyce Malyn-Smith

Joyce Malyn-Smith

I want to expand my own professional network in order to share information and opportunities I come across in my work to build the next generation of technology enabled citizens and workers. As someone who has spent many years working with under-served populations I am particularly concerned that persons of color, Hispanics and Native Americans may not be aware of many of these opportunities, or may learn of them too late to participate. For example, I am working with NSF’s Cyberlearning and ITEST resource centers, both hosting workshops in June aimed at helping people, who have not received Cyberlearning or ITEST funding, to develop strong NSF proposals.

The first goal for the expansion of my own professional network is to do what I can to ensure that these workshops are accessible to persons of color, Hispanics and Native Americans. To that end, I am asking you to help me expand my network so that I can forward relevant information, answer questions they might have about the events, and make sure a diverse group of potential participants are aware of when applications open so that these types of events are more accessible to them.  Continue reading

Preparing Your Child for a Robotic Future

Don’t Let a Robot Take Your Child’s Future Career: Roboticist’s Book Offers Educational Advice for Parents

Illah NourbakhshIllah Nourbakhsh says robots and artificial intelligence will increasingly displace people from many conventional jobs. The professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University has even written a book about it, called “Robot Futures.”
It’s enough to make parents despair over their children’s career prospects, he acknowledged, and that’s why he’s publishing a pair of follow-up books, “Parenting for Robot Futures.” Part 1: Education and Technology is now available on Amazon.com.

The key, he said, is to raise children who are “technologically fluent.”

“If we want our children to flourish in a technology-rich future, we need them to understand technology deeply— so deeply that our kids influence the future of technology rather than simply being techno-consumers, along for the ride,” he writes.

“There are no shortcuts to developing tech fluency, and there is no way to outsource the parent’s role to school, after-school or video games,” Nourbakhsh writes.

In the 64-page first volume, Nourbakhsh provides an overview to help parents understand the strengths and shortcomings of technology education in schools, including the movement to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education, digital learning and massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

Continue reading

MOOC Sightings 002: Oxford Professor Declares MOOCs the Loser

MOOC Sightings2

William Whyte, professor of social and architectural history at St John’s College Oxford, assures us that in the “battle” of MOOCs vs traditional campus-based universities, “The MOOC will prove to [be] the loser.”1 He parades the usual suspects for their demise: low completion rates and absence of credits and degrees.

He tosses Britain’s E-University and Open University in with MOOCs for what amounts to a clean sweep of online programs. Two birds with one stone, as it were. He cites E-University as a costly failure and Open University as “actually a rather traditional university.” Convenient, but what these institutions have in common with MOOCs is baffling.

He bolsters his prediction with survey results: “Only 6% of prospective undergraduates surveyed last year [want] to stay at home and study. The other 94% expected and hoped to move away to a different place for their degrees.”

Whyte declares traditional universities the winner because “people want and expect something rather more than a purely virtual, entirely electronic experience of university. They expect it to be a place.”

Strong reassurance, indeed, for those who see MOOCs as “a horrible sort of inevitability.” Traditional universities have not only withstood the MOOC challenge but actually emerged stronger.  Continue reading

From ‘Yes Ma’am’ to ‘F*** You’

Tracey kashiwa 80By Tracey Kashiwa
Student at Kapi’olani Community College
University of Hawai’i

Justin Bieber Eggs His Neighbor’s House.” “Kendall Jenner…Calls [Her Mother] a…Whore.” “Miley Cyrus Twerks on Married Man.” In American society today, the media is filled with incidents of youths disrespecting their elders. In fact, even the idea that children should respect their elders seems nonexistent (“Respect for Others”). I’m only thirty-two, but even I wonder what happened to respecting our elders.

When I was a child, I looked to my parents and grandparents for advice and to learn about the past. I viewed them as wise old owls who had a wealth of knowledge and experience that I could tap into. Disrespecting my parents was never an option, and if I didn’t show respect, they would ground me for weeks or, even worse, break out the back scratcher. What has changed from my generation to this? Has the internet ruined our need to look to elders as knowledge keepers? Has social media eliminated our need for social pleasantries? Has the frown on spanking created an uncrossable barrier for parents and discipline?

To better understand youth, I interviewed my twenty-year-old housemate, John, a young man plagued by the need to disregard others. John is the kind of person who, if you asked how his day went, walks past you without eye contact or acknowledgement of your existence. He acts as though he is royalty and can’t be bothered by the peasants around him, and he always has music blaring through headphones to drown us out. I doubt he would behave so arrogantly if he knew how much he resembles a chicken pecking the ground for food when he bobs his head to the beat. Like I said, he is the epitome of a disrespectful youth.  Continue reading

What Does Cyberlearning Mean to You? Cyberlearning Summit 2014

By Bonnie Bracey Sutton
Associate Editor

(Note: See Vic Sutton’s report on this conference. -Editor)

Teachers working in classrooms need ideas and frameworks and support for initiatives beyond the ideas that have been classified as regular education. Sometimes funding is a problem. Powerful partners get you permission to do wonderful things in the classroom.

My first involvement with a network of powerful people, learning ideas and new technologies was with Cilt. You can tell that it was some time ago. We called STEM, SMET. Here is a look at what we started with:

bonnie 062514 01

We investigated, learned, shared and promoted ideas. Concord has wonderful free resources to share, and here is a summary:

The Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) was founded in October 1997 with a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to stimulate the development and study of important, technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) learning. Four “theme teams” focused the efforts in areas of highest promise. CILT events, often workshops organized by theme, provided a collaborative forum in which people in the learning science community met to assess the progress of the field, define research agendas, and initiate new collaborations. Many of these collaborations form seed grants funded by CILT. In addition to these successful CILT programs, CILT has generated many resources for the learning science community, including tools, publications, and NetCourses.

In this day and time, people sometimes do not think that meeting people and sharing in conferences is necessary. But the leaders of Cyberinfrastructure have better ideas. They do a conference and put the ideas online. You have a choice. There are pieces of brilliant ideas, presentations and demonstrations, and even poster sessions for you online.  Continue reading

Cyberlearning Summit 2014: A Quick Recap

VicSutton80By Vic Sutton

[Note: See Bonnie Bracey Sutton’s report. -Editor]

There is reportedly a wealth of research being conducted unto cyberlearning, but there are no clear views about how to translate research results into action in the community context, in particular for schools or informal education.

This emerged from the recent Cyberlearning Summit held in Madison, Wisconsin, on 9-10 June 2014, which brought together some 200 participants — mostly academics, plus some educators, industry representatives and grant makers — to highlight “advances in the design of technology-mediated learning environments, how people learn with technology, and how to use cyberlearning technologies to effectively shed light on learning.”

Bonnie's photos

There was no discussion about quite what cyberlearning is, but it appears to be a fancy name for on-line learning.

The meeting was organized by the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and featured a number of eminently qualified speakers.

Yasmin Kafai, from the University of Pennsylvania, reminded participants of the remark by the late Steve Jobs that “everybody in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.”  Continue reading

Social Media Tips for Virtual Conference Attendance

By Melissa A. Venable

[Note: Jessica Knott, ETCJ’s Twitter/Facebook editor, has coordinated the publication of this article. -Editor]

Last month The Sloan Consortium’s 7th Emerging Technologies for Online Learning took place in Dallas, Texas. According to the latest Sloan-C View newsletter, there were “more than 700 onsite and 1,000 virtual attendees representing 47 states including DC and 23 countries.”

Saint Leo University provided virtual access to a limited number of instructors, including adjuncts like myself. In my formal request to attend, I made a commitment to “be active on multiple social media platforms and use the symposium hashtag – #et4online – to further engage in live sessions and network with other attendees.” I was fortunate to be selected to attend, and it was this social media commitment that made all the difference in my experience.

Recorded sessions are helpful but don’t provide the energy and interaction of real-time attendance. And there is a lot to be gained from following the social media backchannel of a conference, but formal registration allows for a different level of access to the sessions and other attendees. This article includes a few of my lessons learned as a virtual conference participant.

Prepare to Participate

Are your social media accounts up-to-date? This may be the best place to start. Take a look at the platforms that are being encouraged by the conference organizers and review your profiles before the event starts. If it has been a while since you logged in to an account, it could take some time to review and refresh the information you are providing about yourself. Keep in mind that these profiles serve as your business card in an online networking sense.

Follow the conference itself and the sponsoring organization. In addition to the conference hashtag, this Sloan Consortium event was also active with social media accounts focused specifically on this conference, including Twitter and Facebook. These accounts provided a constant stream of reminders, letting participants know about upcoming sessions, highlighting participants and presenters, and announcing schedule changes.

Set Realistic Expectations

The Sloan symposium offered fewer streamed sessions than onsite sessions, but there were multiple presentation options for each time slot. The streamed sessions took place in Dallas with a live audience and allowed virtual attendees to watch both the presenter and his or her slide presentation simultaneously. Members of the online group were able to interact with each other via text chat and ask questions of the presenter through an online session chairperson who relayed them in real-time. We also connected and exchanged thoughts and resources through our social media accounts.

Take a look at your schedule for the week and identify, in advance, the sessions you would like to attend. Add these sessions to your calendar. I was tripped up when logging into my first session (an hour early), before I realized I needed to calculate time zone differences. The website mentioned this, of course, but sometimes you have to learn on your own, and I instantly connected with other virtual attendees on Twitter who made the same mistake.  Continue reading

Girl Develop It: A Safe Environment to Learn Coding

By Jessica Knott
Associate Editor
Editor, Twitter

Fields ensconced within the walls of academia grow more technical by the day. As Andrea Zellner of Michigan State University points out in a recent GradHacker post (“Learning to Code,” 14 Nov. 2012), programming skills have become increasingly important in disciplines outside of computer science, especially for those teaching online. If you’re like me, the idea of learning to program is daunting. I’ve taken programming class after programming class, to mixed results. Zellner’s article had me thinking about the struggle to gain technology skills and how faculty members and teachers, already strapped for time, must feel in their pursuit. I asked for insight, and my Twitter network delivered yet again.

Antaya and Zellner

Erin Antaya (@gypsymama75), with a 10-year background in education and counseling and experience working for her family’s business and Biggby Coffee, turned me onto a group called Girl Develop It (@girldevelopit). Girl? Develop It? How had I never heard of this before? With more research, I discovered they are everywhere, and Erin, along with the founders of the Detroit Chapter of Girl Develop It (@GDIdet), Michelle Srbinovich and Erika Carlson, were kind enough to speak to me about what it all means.

Carlson and Srbinovich

Erin took to meetup.com and found the class offered at WDET in Detroit. “It was awesome,” she says. “The class [was] a safe and comfortable environment to ask questions and network.” According to Srbinovich, the story behind the Detroit chapter is amazing. In March 2012, she wanted to learn to code before the year’s end and set about finding the means to learn. In the process, she found Girl Develop It, and, she says, “The prospect of having an in-person introduction to web development and a female support system was exciting, and I knew it would give me extra motivation to continue learning.” Knowing others would feel the same she started her own group. The Detroit chapter was born.   Continue reading