I came across this video about music education and I think that it applies to online music education – everyone should have the right to explore the individual, creative aspect of human artistic experience.
Music as a Natural Resource (from Youtube)
New Horizon Report (2012) Higher Ed Summary (continued)
November 2, 2012 by
Here’s a quick overview of what we could be embracing over the next few years. The use of gesture-based computing could be quite interesting, as well as the use of learning analytics. Both bring up questions on ethics in education and how we use our digital information storage. There doesn’t seem to be a black or white response and therefore will require some careful thought and consideration during implementation and use.
Upcoming Year:
- Mobile Technologies (i.e. apps and tablets)
Two – Three Years Out:
- Game-based technologies (with collaboration and focus on user engagement)
- Learning Analytics (focus on real-time curriculum revisions)
Four to Five Years Out:
- Human gesture-based technologies (i.e. use of body movement and voice tracking instead of a mouse)
- “The Internet of Things” (i.e. connecting devices to interact with each other to communicate information to the user. Near Field Communication devices, Smart Objects are examples of this.)
Want to read the Higher Education New Horizon Report? Get it here: http://www.nmc.org/publications/horizon-report-2012-higher-ed-edition
New Horizon Report (2012) Higher Ed Summary
November 1, 2012 by
We’ve been hard at work getting through the New Horizon Report that came out earlier this year. Came across some interesting findings from this internationally audited summary:
Trends the are currently out there in Higher Ed Online learning:
- Choice for learning on demand (informal and formal)
- Accessibility – cloud-based
- Collaboration
- Abundance of resources and relationships
- Shifting of Learning Paradigms
- Challenging-based & Active Learning for Student Engagement
I can’t say that these are just online-based trends, hopefully they are traditional classroom trends as well. Same goes for the challenges they brought up:
Challenges:
- Un-precedented competition to bring forth new learning education models
- Evaluation of available new resources (i.e. metrics)
- Digital media literacy skills
- Institutional change/barriers
- Need for scholarly repositories for emerging technologies
Pre-conceived research ideas
September 24, 2012 by
We all come to our research with previous knowledge and ideas. Sometimes our information is helpful for digging into the research and sometimes our pre-conceived ideas are mis-aligned or facts without all of the details. I came across the latter this week as I got into a few articles on research method, specifically case study.
The specific reading that challenged my previous ideas on case study research from researcher Bent Flyvbjerg (2006). Prior to my reading, I have to admit that I had a leaning towards qualitative research as a “more scientific” method of research. Built upon numbers and statistics, probability and scientific design, I thought that quantitative research would likely be the method for my own PhD research. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all the right answers, and after reading Flyvbjerg’s article, my position has changed to a more open acceptability towards case study research.
Now having said that I am open to case study research, I feel that I need to qualify that statement by adding that case study research does need to include obvious rigor, falsification of the problem, clarity of narrative outcome and that the researcher has to re-examine preconceived notions (i.e. biases) and theories throughout study. For the next few posts I am going to go a bit more in depth on my findings for the method of case study research.
What pre-conceived research biases do you have as you begin your research study?
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Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245. doi:10.1177/1077800405284363