Learning for All Daphne Koller

As you probably know TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in under 20 minutes. You may also know that TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, global issues, the arts and more.  As I was looking for some new inspiration for my eLearning module I came across this talk by Daphne Koller. I found her talk refreshing and engaging in that she was so passionate about giving education back to the learner, regardless of their status. 

It links in nicely to the work being done by Curriki As I have written before Curriki is an online, free, open education service. It is structured as a nonprofit organisation to provide Open Educational Resources in support of education, helping to minimise the educational divide.  Curricula and instructional materials are available at the Curriki website to teachers, professional educators, students, lifelong learners, and parents. The majority of the resources on the Curriki site fall under a Creative Commons license.  Educational materials are provided by the Curriki community and are peer-reviewed for quality and adherence to standards, so you might want to have a look at their  resources. Maybe one day you can contribute.

Any way, back to Daphne Koller, she is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free. She is doing this not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. Together with Andrew Ng she cofounded Coursera, which aims to provide universal access to the world’s best education.  With Coursera, Daphne Koller and co-founder Andrew Ng are bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them. Bio: http://www.ted.com/speakers/daphne_ko...

Two excellent examples of eLearning. My intention is to look at some of the ideas presented and to develop a blended approach in order to meet the needs of my learners.  This in turn should hopefully encourage them to consider how they can hone the best aspects into their teaching in the post 16 sector.

Looking back & forward together

It is the time of the course that I like to get my first year students to discover the collaborative power of the Wiki. So I took a little journey myself. I had a look at what Curriki were up to these days. Curriki was the wiki that inspired me back in 2007 so it made perfect sense to begin there this year too. They have created a summery of their mission and their history in a neat little PDF this summer, which is worth a peek. Although there is funding from a variety of partners, they rely on members like us, educators, for content. It is individuals and organizations that are making world-class materials freely available to educators around the world. Curriki's approach of using technology to provide freely available learning resources, plays a key role in improving children's learning all over the world. So when you create something worth sharing, become a member and share on a world wide scale.

Collaborative Technologies

Collaborative software, software designed to help people involved in a common task, achieve their goals – Wikipedia accessed 2/12/2007. Quite a logical and simple definition of something that has become rather a revolution in today’s society. The attraction of the digital lifestyle has been made all the more popular by collaborative technologies especially in the digital native category. It would be a missed opportunity to dismiss such activities as irrelevant to teaching and learning, as I have said before, we as educators need to seize the potential of such tools to support and enhance our education system. We have begun to utilise these collaborative technologies in universities particularly by the use of VLEs to deliver and track content, to collect and share resources and generally bring it all together in an integrated environment.
So this week I am exploring the use of the collaborative wiki with my first year Educational Studies group. I hope to get them motivated in to using a wiki as a forum for their shared experiences.
I was impressed by an article I read in the Guardian last week about the development of Curriki. Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. The article impressed that the Internet has proved to the great world equalizer, providing opportunities to collaborate on the development and delivery of intellectual assets on a global scale. Sounds a wonderful idea, and it is an inspiring concept worth checking out to see if you have anything worth adding to it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o - if you have a few minutes, watch this video, let me know what you think.