Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)

• Outcomes-Based Education and the Conservative Radicalism of the AAC&U | e-Literatee-Literate

  "National Survey of Student Engagement"

  tags: CBE competency-based learning competency-based AACU Feldstein GEMS DQP DETT607

• Essay on why faculty members work so much | Inside Higher Ed

  tags: faculty work workplace academia university professors

• An Affinity for Asynchronous Learning - Hybrid Pedagogy

  tags: affinity asynchronous learning hybrid pedagogy synchronous DETC630 OMDE603

  • But we feel the enthusiasm for audiovisual synchronicity often comes without sufficient discernment, and without deliberative consideration of how asynchronous learning can be not only viable but productive
  • The first is a tendency to think of ways of approximating their face-to-face teaching into an online format as much as possible — instead of considering the possibilities afforded by the new medium, with the diverse opportunities for engagement and communication. The (problematic) assumptions behind this include a belief that text is less personal, that immediacy is inherently more valuable, and that approximating face-to-face is beneficial. The second, which relates to the first, is the belief (as Kolowich suggests) that increasing the “human” element of an online course is best done by either showing the face/voice of the teacher (e.g., as in pre-recorded lectures used in many xMOOCs), approximating a non-interactive lecture-based face-to-face class, or interacting synchronously (as in Google Hangouts), approximating a discussion-based face-to-face class.

• CourseSmart, the publishing industry's e-textbook provider, acquired by Vital Source | Inside Higher Ed

  tags: publishing industry provider inside higher ed ebooks etextbooks textbooks DETC630 DETT611 DEPM622

  • the platform owned by the distributor Ingram Content Group, has more than 4 million faculty and student users -- a number that will be bolstered by CourseSmart’s more than 1.5 million faculty accounts. By acquiring CourseSmart, Vital Source also gains a deeper catalog of e-textbook titles.
  • The acquisition also means Vital Source will be better positioned to sell its products directly to consumers, which Joseph J. Esposito, a digital media, software and publishing consultant, said puts the company in direct competition with many of its customers, including college bookstores.
  • Michael Feldstein, who along with Hill last year founded the firm MindWires Consulting, said the acquisition could be interpreted as the publishers backing away from the e-textbook industry to focus on other digital products.
  • The sale provides some confirmation that the publishers see ebooks of the type published by CourseSmart and Vital Source as the low end of the market from a profitability perspective and are therefore not strategic for their respective efforts to get on better financial footing,” Feldstein said in an email. “The ebook market is important to them because it provides an alternative to the used textbook market that is less financially painful for them, but it’s not where their future revenue and profit growth will come from.”
  • In this fully digital future, textbooks will go away as the dominant container for educational content, making way for more modular, personalized, and open information

• Scholarly Research and Writing in the Digital Age | On public humanities

  tags: scholars scholarship scholarly digital-age writing research digital

  • It might be that in some fields quick and easy communications between scholars makes a difference in scholarly work. I kept my Twitter followers informed, mostly through entertaining quotes on the nature of museum work in my sources, and posted a bit on my blog. But the topic’s pretty esoteric; not much response there. A paper written over a longer period, with presentations of preliminary work, might get more from the online community. I’ve made my Zotero library public, but again, it’s pretty specialized, and hardly likely to attract a crowd. It does present a new kind of openness: my notes are there, and it should, in theory, make it easy for anyone to check my footnotes, and my sources.
  • One question: why publish in a journal at all? It’s easy enough simply to put the manuscript onto Scribd and my blog, let the few dozen people who care about it know that it’s there, and move on. Over the course of a few months it will be seen by a few hundred people, which is probably more people than will see it in all but the largest circulation historical journal. True, it won’t be indexed – but it will be Googleable. It won’t get me official credit in my job, but I’m at the stage in my career where that doesn’t matter.
  • And publishing means taking it off the open web.
  • No answer to this question here; it’s a conundrum that the world of scholarly communications needs to work out. And it will certainly all look very different in another decade

• You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.

  • The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they don’t. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don’t listen to those who do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.

• Scholars, Scholarship, and the Scholarly Enterprise in the Digital Age (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

  tags: scholars scholarship scholarly digital-age educause OMDE670 DETC630

  • "Technology is not something that happens to us. It is something we create." He continues: "We must not confuse a tool with a goal. We must, therefore, be sure that technology serves the fundamental purposes of higher education."¹
  • First, we may rightly argue that information technology has truly revolutionized the mission of higher education and is a prime enabler of the knowledge-driven era. The place in such an era for scholars and in particular for scholarship is secure. Second, we may also rightly argue that those forces that have doomed the current form of the newspaper, music, television, and book-publishing industries will soon be unleashed in education — particularly higher education. The stability of traditional higher education
  • They are liberating scholars and scholarship from many traditional bounds of culture, community, and practice. They are redefining or even eliminating the rationing of academic tools and resources (e.g., space telescopes, particle colliders). They are predisposing scholars to a scholarship of open content, knowledge, and learning. And they are liberating us all from the "busy-ness" of knowledge work.
  • he propensity of networked people and scholarly resources to negate the "busy-ness" of scholarship

• SAMR as a Framework for Moving Towards Education 3.0 | User Generated Education

  tags: SAMR education education 3.0 edtech K-12

• Mooc fans step out of the shadows | Education | theguardian.com

  tags: MOOCs education guardian students profile

• Business Model Innovation in Higher Education (Part 2) | Acrobatiq

  tags: business business model model innovation strategy management online higher education DETC630 DEPM622

• Business Model Innovation in Online Higher Education | MANAGEMENT & STRATEGY in DIGITAL HIGHER ED

  "Business Model Innovation in Higher Education, Part 2"

  tags: business business model model innovation higher education online management strategy DEPM622 DETC630

• Online Or In Class: The Shifting Educational Paradigm | The EvoLLLution

  tags: online class online education online learning benefits

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.