blog de notas de juan freire

What is College Readiness?

What does college readiness mean to us? It is so much more than getting accepted. An astonishing five out of six middle and high school students will not succeed in college. The cost in terms of lost potential (and tuition) is huge. College readiness is our mission, and it is our belief that it starts with mastering math.

Why Math?

Teens who master math are more likely to be successful in high school (and success in high school leads to success in college). We conducted dozens of parent and teen interviews and one theme was persistent – teens need help with math. Alleyoop offers teens the ability to practice their subject of choice at their own pace, whether they are struggling or just want to get ahead. Soon we’ll be adding virtual college guidance, English curriculum and career exploration!

How Do We Prepare Teens for College?

We are here to help teens succeed in school now and college later with our personalized learning plans, step-by-step math videos and one-on-one tutoring. We recommend just the help teens need, exactly when they need it. Alleyoop is structured as a game, with missions (a learning plan) built around achievements and Yoop rewards. We are teen tested, partnering with teens to build an environment that reflects how they like to learn. It’s empowering, it’s relevant and it’s a game.

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Alleyoop is brought to you by the world leader in education, Pearson - the company that helps educate more than 100 million people worldwide. Alleyoop is a safe environment just for teens, and follows strict guidelines to protect the privacy of our users.

1. La música ahora es una industria basada en la suscripción
2. Los móviles han desbancado a las cámaras de fotos
3. La descarga y el streaming de videojuegos es tan simple como para las películas
4. Las tarjetas de crédito están al borde de la desaparición
5. Se acabó viajar en hoteles
6. Los productos de diseño ya son accesibles
7. Las clases online ya son una realidad
8. Las recaudaciones de fondos tradicionales están desapareciendo
9. El almacenamiento físico está muerto
10. Ya no tienes que ser un fotógrafo profesional para hacer buenas fotos
11. Las grandes compañías también están apostando por la colaboración social

Back to the “wall”: How to use Facebook in the college classroom, by Caroline Lego Muñoz and Terri Towner. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 12 - 5 December 2011

Abstract: The evolving world of the Internet — blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks — offers instructors and students radically new ways to research, communicate, and learn. Integrating these Internet tools into the college classroom, however, is not an easy task. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the role of social networking in education and demonstrate how social network sites (SNS) can be used in a college classroom setting. To do this, existing research relating to SNS and education is discussed, and the primary advantages and disadvantages of using SNS in the classroom are explored. Most importantly, specific instructions and guidelines to follow when implementing SNS (i.e., Facebook) within the college classroom are provided. Specifically, we show that multiple types of Facebook course integration options are available to instructors. It is concluded that SNS, such as Facebook, can be appropriately and effectively used in an academic setting if proper guidelines are established and implemented.

MIT is developing an online educational platform that will be open-source, largely free, and let users outside of MIT earn certificates for completing Institute-caliber courses online. MIT hopes the initiative, internally dubbed “MITx,” will change the way students learn on-campus — by incorporating elements of MITx into existing curricula — and push MIT’s educational reach beyond campus borders in a way the current OpenCourseWare (OCW) cannot.

By doing “knowledge transfer” online through MITx, says Reif, “students come to a classroom or lab to do more of the enriching experiences they come to a campus for.” With MITx as the basis for teaching on campus, he says, MIT anticipates other types of learning that cannot be done online will increase, like laboratories and UROP, among other faculty-student “face-to-face” interactions …

Users will have the option of getting an MITx “certificate” by successfully completing a course online, though it will cost a “modest” fee, says Reif. Otherwise, they may use the service free-of-charge.

“If you’re taking a course, if you’re just exploring, you want to learn by yourself, and you don’t really care that [you] can show a piece of paper that says you learned, that’s free,” says Reif …

…

The relationship between teaching and research goes to the heart of the meaning and purpose of higher education. The fundamentalist view of the university is that teaching which is not based on research carried out by academics and students is not higher education. The first modern European university, established by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin in 1810, was designed with research and teaching closely aligned. Students and teachers worked together. This model was developed to facilitate the production of new knowledge, against the dogmatic scholasticism of the medieval university, and to establish the “idea of the university” as the highest level of what a society knows about itself as a progressive political project.

The idea of the university as a progressive political project was further radicalised by the students and their teachers in 1968. In Paris and around the world the elitist exclusion of students was challenged by undergraduates who claimed that research is “something that anyone can do”, a claim they supported by publishing work that revealed not just the crisis in higher education but the crisis of society in general. The ongoing student protests in the UK and around the world are at their most compelling when they provide a critical response not simply to cuts in funding but to the debate about the future of higher education. This means discussing the idea of the university as part of a wider debate relating to issues of who has the resources to produce new knowledge, who owns that knowledge and what it is used for beyond the confines of campus life.

…

The slogan “Student as producer” is derived from an article written by the Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin in Germany in the 1930s. In it he made a series of suggestions as to how radical intellectuals should act in a time of social crisis. This included finding ways to enable students, readers, and audiences to become teachers, writers and actors – as producers of their own cultural and intellectual products. The wider political point was for passive consumers of culture and knowledge to transform themselves into the subjects rather than simply the objects of history and to recognise themselves in a social world of their own design.

In a moment when higher education is in crisis, and in a context where the crisis of institutions is part of a much wider crisis at the level of global society, a critical engagement with the notion of student as producer, based on Benjamin’s progressive programme for action, seems like the right place from which to be reinventing the undergraduate curriculum.

The way to improve the student learning experience is not to treat students as consumers nor to claim, as the white paper on higher education does, that students lie at the “heart of the system”. It is rather by recognising that universities are about the expansive production of knowledge and meaning and that this can best be achieved by students and academics working collaboratively on research projects inside and outside the curriculum.

Examples of undergraduate research:

The British Conference for Undergraduate Research

Reinvention: A Journal of Undergraduate Research

Student as Producer: reinventing the undergraduate curriculum

Higher Education Academy : Developing Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (pdf)

Undergraduate Research in Australia

… The Internet, on the other hand, was designed and deployed by small groups of researchers following the credo of one of its chief architects, David Clark: “rough consensus and running code.” Its early standards — uncomplicated, consensual — were stewarded by small organizations that resisted permission or authority. And they won: The Internet Protocol on which every connected device relies was a triumph of distributed innovation over centralized expertise.

The ethos of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, to innovate, to program, without asking permission. No one can know the whole of the network, and by design it cannot be centrally controlled. This network was intended to be decentralized, its assets widely distributed. Today most innovation springs from small groups at its “edges.”

This technical strategy has led to the creation of a gigantic network of far-flung innovators who develop standards with one another and share the products of their work in the form of free and open-source software. The architecture of the Internet and its abundance of free software and components has driven down the cost of manufacturing, distribution and collaboration — of innovation. It used to cost millions of dollars to start a software company. Today, for little or no money, entrepreneurs are able to develop and release a “minimum viable product” and test it with real users on the Internet before they have to raise any money from investors. 

…

I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

…

«En este país, al contrario que en el resto de la OCDE, saber más no se paga mejor: ¿para qué estudiar?». La denuncia es de Luis Garicano, catedrático de Estrategia y Economía de la London School of Economics. En una entrevista publicada esta semana, Garicano pidió al futuro Gobierno, junto a otras medidas de choque contra la crisis económica, que conceda «prioridad absoluta» a la reforma de la Educación. A ese asunto se ha referido también, aunque desde una perspectiva opuesta, el catedrático emérito Jordi Llovet, autor del ensayo ‘Adios a la universidad. El eclipse de las Humanidades’. Ese docente acusa a los impulsores del plan Bolonia de haber introducido “la mano neoliberal” en la enseñanza superior. Y se lamenta de que la universidad se esté convirtiendo en «una empresa», cuando su función es formar «ciudadanos civilizados»…

Emerging Practice in a Digital Age explores how colleges and universities are embracing innovation and using emerging technologies to enhance learning in a climate of economic pressure, changing social circumstances and rapid technological change. 

Aimed at those in further and higher education who design and support learning, the guide draws on recent JISC reports and case studies to investigate how the emergence of new and more powerful technologies together with an increase in personal ownership of these technologies are changing the way we connect, communicate and collaborate, and how these changes can benefit learning. The focus of this guide is on emerging practice rather than emerging technology.

The case studies describe a series of exploratory journeys through the themes of:

• Working in partnership with students 
• Developing students’ employability potential
• Preparing for the future

Emerging Practice in a Digital Age is a companion guide to Effective Practice in a Digital Age (JISC 2009) and Innovative Practice with e-Learning (JISC 2005).

Available in PDF y text-only Word format  

Index:

Working in partnership with students
1) Supporting student transition through reflective video sharing. University of Ulster
2) Engaging students as agents of change. University of Exeter
3) Students as partners in blending learning. University of Wolverhampton

Developing students’ employability potential
1) Developing professional practice using simulations. Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, Universities of Exeter and Plymouth
2) Moving into virtual worlds. University of Derby and Aston University
3) Springboard TV: enhancing employability. College of West Anglia
4) Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS). Universities of Leeds, Bradford and Huddersfield and Leeds Metropolitan and York St John Universities

Preparing for the future
1) Linking learning to location. University Campus Suffolk
2) Mobile Oxford: opening access to information. University of Oxford
3) Creating the culture: a holistic approach to technology-enhanced learning. Gloucestershire College