Kevin Chilton :: Blog

Education is on the cusp of a transformation because of recent scientific findings in neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning that are converging to create foundations for a new science of learning.

Writing in Friday's (June 17) edition of the journal Science, researchers report that this shift is being driven by three principles that are emerging from cross-disciplinary work: learning is computational, learning is social, and learning is supported by brain circuits linking perception and action that connect people to one another. This new science of learning, the researchers believe, may shed light into the origins of human intelligence.

Read more at: http://www.physorg.com/news166972974.html 

  

"Fair warning, you could easily eat up a big chunk of your day following the links in this post! But hey, you’ll be helping out the world a bit in the process."

Source: http://blog.missiontolearn.com/2008/04/learning-games-for-change/

FLOSS Manuals, located at <a href="http://flossmanuals.net/">flossmanuals.net,</a> is a collection of manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source software.

The FLOSS acronym stands for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The manuals are friendly and simple, and they are intended to encourage people to explore the wide range of free, open source alternatives to expensive and restrictively licensed software.

Technological literacy, a broad understanding of the human-designed world and our place in it, is an essential quality for all people who live in the increasingly technology-driven 21st century. This website explains what technological literacy is, why it’s important, and what’s being done to improve it.

http://www.nae.edu/nae/techlithome.nsf

The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working  together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training
systems. The Immersive Education Initiative is focused on 10 specific areas.

 read more at: http://immersiveeducation.org/

As part of my ongoing studies I have registered for the course "Composing free and open online educational resources" at Wikiversity.

I will be using this blog as my study record for this course and as one of the channels for collaborating with my fellow students and tutors. 

My full profile is available here http://eduspaces.net/kevinc/profile/ 

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Cape Town in September 2007. The aim of this meeting was to accelerate efforts to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education.

The first concrete outcome of this meeting is the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy and a statement of commitment. It meant to spark dialogue, to inspire action and to help the open education movement grow.

The Declaration has already been signed by hundreds of learners, educators, trainers, authors, schools, colleges, universities, publishers, unions, professional societies, policymakers, governments, foundations and other kindred open education initiatives around the world. We encourage you to join us. 

Firstly of all, this course is free: free to attend without any charge, free of cost for books or other materials, free for anyone independently of prior education; and free in terms of your personal time commitment that you decide to dedicate to it (Though we would like you to spend on a minimum 2 hours per week). The only thing you will need is a PC and internet access.

The course is supposed to be an open and participatory learning experience that involves practical ‘hands-on' sessions where your learning activities and the things you create will become a part of the course. This is to say that future course participants should be enabled to benefit from your achievements and build upon the things you started, instead of starting from scratch.

The course will allow you to act not only as a learner, but to become an active contributor and co-creator. You will be asked to establish your own course learning projects or to join into course learning projects of others; and you also will have a voice to tell us what you think this course still needs.

This course is a pilot course in the light of free and open education. Participants of this course can expect tutoring (support), but will not receive any official degree awarding certificate or credit points from the course team.

The Education Arcade explores games that promote learning through authentic and engaging play. TEA's research and development projects focus both on the learning that naturally occurs in popular commercial games, and on the design of games that more vigorously address the educational needs of players.

Qedoc is about interactive learning resources which centre on quiz-making and quiz-taking. Qedoc learning modules are self-contained modifiable pieces of learning software which you can download to play with, learn from, modify and upload again. Under our open content concept, anyone can use or contribute learning resources for free. We provide:

• Free interactive learning software (quizzes).
• Cost-free software to inspect how resources are made, modify them and create and contribute more of them.
• A cost-free high performance quiz player for interactive playback of resources and modules.

Find out more about Qedoc here.