Web Learning Tools Research - version J351
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Hits: 292
NYT: New U.S. Dept. of Education Digital Promise web site
The New York Times of Tuesday 11.10.18 reported that the White House announced the creation of a new web site, DigitalPromise.org. "Digital Promise [is] a new government and private industry-sponsored non-profit organization and web site (created) by President Obama and Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan to advance technologies that (supposedly) can transform teaching and learning. The White House said preliminary results from a US military "digital tutor" project [jgw: an artificial intelligence-based project existing since the 1980s!] suggested the time needed to become an expert in information technology could be reduced from years to months. Achieving similar results in subjects such as math would transform K-12 [US primary] education."
Hits: 317
Free Skool (Schools)
A project in it's "early stages of development" which serves as an example of the budding (emerging) movement to offer free classes online.
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Common Sense Media
On this site there is some obvious "edutainment" of questionable educational value. But the site also has as of Apr. 2010 at least one new online class for children assessing how they behave in various situations and giving them suggestions to improve their behavior "when (the software) deems" that to be necessary. In the PI's opinion, the site needs more exploration and in-depth reviews of it's content. See also the New York Times article available 4/8/10, but dated "4/9/10", about the behavior correction class for children.
Hits: 368
NYT Article: Cyberkids learn better behavior
In an article dated 4/9/10, the New York Times reported that in Milpitas, California (USA) children are using computers to learn better behavior. They connect to the "Common Sense Media" web site. On that site they take an online course which assesses their behavior and makes recommendations for how they can improve their behavior. To this PI that implies the online class for children uses verbal and visual (graphic) role playing, possibly somewhat similar, but as a more "primitive" version of what Dr. Shank, NWU, has used in past decades in a programs using AI Case Based Reasoning techniques. Shank's programs teach adults successful situational behaviors and decision making.
Hits: 360
Education for Educators: KQED-TV Public TV, San Francisco
KQED-TV, the public television station in San Francisco, has an Education sub-site (or in technical language: a sub-tree of their web-site's web pages). In the Education sub-site there are web tips and web techniques for non-technically adept educators. One such tip is how to use "web maps" (such as Google Maps) and how to insert a map in educational materials the educator publishes as web pages. And in this PI's opinion, with apologies to the somewhat famous U.S. home-economics celebrity Martha Stewart, "that's a good thing". But the breadth and depth of those tips and techniques needs further exploration and evaluation.
Hits: 353
EduBlog (available free or at cost as 'pro' or 'campus')
EduBlog.org is a blogging service web site hosting very many "WordPress MU" educational blogs (i.e. blogs created in and powered by multi-user WordPress, probably v2.9.2 as of 6/19/10). The free version apparently is just for the use of small groups of students. The 'Pro' version is for teachers and their students. And the "Campus" version is for schools and universities. In this PI's opinion it would be interesting to determine which campuses using the somewhat aging Moodle CMS for education are also using EduBlog and why. Also my first impressions of EduBlog are that their CMS "system" is little more than a primitive what I call "first generation" CMS-enabled web page maker, enabling more end-users like faculty to author and post web pages, a web page and other site content organizer system, and a "Web 2.0"-style content display system surrounded by some access control code limiting who can access the material, change it, and when they can do so. The educational content possible to put on an EduBlog site is and will be still "static", if more easily and quickly changed than ed-web site content could be changed in the 1990s through mid 2000s.
Hits: 318
The Internet Archive project
The Internet Archive non-profit project established in 199_ has taken electronic "snap shots" every 3 or 6 months of almost all of the Internet sites existing at the time of each "shooting" almost since the advent of the world wide web (www) global public version of the Internet in 1991. The "snap shots" (i.e. copies of web pages on each web site 'touched' by the Archive's 'Internet robots') are stored in a huge digital data storage facility in downtown San Francisco, CA, USA. The visitor to the Archive web site, www.archive.org, can search for past revisions (or versions) of web pages of existing web sites and of web sites that no longer exist on the Internet. The Archive also links to their "virtual library creation project" for schools and universities which the Internet Archive project has facilitated since 199_. NOTABLY since 2005 the Internet Archive project has had a 'child project' called the Open Library Project. See "Open Library" on this web site for more information or go to www.openlibrary.org.
Hits: 398
The WorldCat Registry
The "WorldCat Registry" is primarily for libraries and consortia (groups) of schools and universities. On the site each institution can create a profile about what data and other services the institution makes available to it's students and to the public.
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U.C. Berkeley to Offer Undergradate Courses and Degrees Online
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on 10.07.12 that the "five star" University of California at Berkeley soon will offer online undergraduate degrees.
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eBrary.com: a commercial digital library creation service
eBrary.com is an 'up-scale' commercial digital library creation service for medium sized to large, well-funded institutions that can afford their fees. For example the (USA) California State University (CSU) uses their service to give access to digital eBooks to CSU students and alumni. The eBrary digital library system imposes various degrees of secure access to the digital eBooks to those students and faculty to which an administration official following an institutional policy grants such access. No free and open digital library here...
Hits: 390
The NYU Global Network University Project
New York University (NYU) has begun a global university building project with 12, ultimately to have 16 "study away" (from the USA), campuses world-wide. The NYU campus in Abu Dhabi may be unique in providing a 1:3 to 1:8 faculty to student ration. The NYU president, Dr. John Sexton, calls this a TUTORIAL TEACHING RELATIONSHIP. This PI completely agrees, but notes that only those sufficiently rich and privileged -- and personally well adjusted -- to attend these campuses will get that tutorial-type of higher education, i.e. the children of aristocrats, plutocrats, and the upper middles classes that want their kids to accend to those classes and accede to their posts. Meanwhile according to Sexton four (4) undergraduates on campuses in the USA commit suicide every day! Also didn't western "civilization" do something like this on a much smaller scale in the 1700s and 1800s? (Click-on the link to the "Introduction to NYU GNU" episode of the Charlie Rose show for more of Sexton's remarks.)
Hits: 384
NYT Article: Learning a Language from an "Expert" on the Web
The New York Times "Technology" section on July 23, 2010, published this article about "Learning a Language..." on the Internet. In the reported case the hapless French learner got serious criticism and unexpected lessons in French slang and Tunisian attitude from a 14 years old Tunisian teenager. The "LiveMocha" firm based in Seattle, Washington, USA, has combined some "social networking" web-tools with teachers apparently of any age who can teach any of 38 different languages. It remains to be determined who if any of these "teachers" is actually qualified to teach a language or how well they teach it to the students with whom "the system" connects them! And in this PI's opinion, those are two very big problems! This may be a low-level, cheap but not free example of exploitive "public education" of a very crude kind; possibly no match for 3-4 years of high school language, 2 years of community college or 1+ years of college language class. If I were trying out the service, I would want to already have mastery of first year college vocabulary and grammar so I could tell if my "instructor" knew his or hers!
Hits: 325
The LiveMocha.com Language Learning Web Site
This is the LiveMocha language learning web site. Initial language lessons may be free, but continued language lessons cost the user $10. LiveMocha was funded by $14 million from venture capitalists, which suggests that VCs see the value in commercial online education, if public schools are as yet unable to take advantage of the medium. The quality and value of the language lessons to the learners cannot yet be determined. The age, months or years of teacher training, and teaching experience of the instructors recruited world-wide to do the online teaching also cannot yet be determined. But the New York Times article of July 28, 2010, cited elsewhere on this web site, mentions some French "instruction" came from a 14 years old Tunisian teenager. Clearly "the risks" and costs are all born by the student.
Hits: 342
Language Learning with "My Language Exchange dot Com"
The MyLanguageExchange.com web site, mentioned in the July 28, 2010, NYT article about online language learning cited elsewhere on this site, apparently "maintains lists of people who know certain languages and want to learn others. Anyone can search the database, but only gold members (of the service), who pay $24 a year, can send e-mail easily to others." In this PI's opinion this service is "just" a special interest social networking service with "no frills" and no evident web-site-based or computer assisted or supervising expert language instructor creating "added educational value" to any so-called language learning that might take place via emails. Nor does there appear to be any "monitoring" of so-called educational experiences for quality, efficiency, effectiveness or for long-term retention of any acquired language knowledge and skills. Buyer beware.
Hits: 399
Grammerly.com: offering automated proof reading
The Grammerly.com web site offers automated proof reading, including grammar corrections, of documents written in English and possibly Urdu (Aramic) as well. Grammerly in a portal site to these and to some other educational services. This PI has not yet explored or rated any of them. I suspect the grammar corrections are done by an AI engine similar to what the Microsoft Word word-processing program has used in the last 10-15 years to suggest grammar corrections to typists.
Hits: 389
Grammarly.com: offering grammar corrections
Grammarly, spelled with two 'a's, offers grammar correction of typed text. The link is part of the educational links on the Grammerly.com, spelled with an 'a' and an 'e', portal web site cited on this web site.
Hits: 432
Audible Books .com
Audible.com, an Amazon company, has authors and actors reading books. The Audio Books come to the Internet browser user as digital audio streams. Some audio books are free; some will cost you. Clearly there is a need for a national or global online library catalog of digital books, or eBooks, including textbooks and the audio and video virtual versions or supplements to the eBooks.
Hits: 322
Million Ways to Teach
The "Million Ways to Teach" web site encourages adults to consider working or volunteering in the teaching professions. This PI notes that to be more effective they certainly could use more lower-cost and free learning materials, perhaps as many as possible delivered via the Internet as digitized and digital reading materials, in-print materials upgraded and re-purposed as multi-media materials as well as individualized interactive educational experiences.
Hits: 322
Edutopia
The George Lucas Educational Foundation, created by the famous filmmaker, George Lucas, has used some of those funds to establish the Edutopia magazine and Edutopia.org web site. Supposedly the staff finds and publishes in their magazine and online "what is new" and "what works" in public and private education. However, this PI has yet to see reports in their publications of any supporting, high quality, verifiable educational research. Nor do the publishers seem interested in presenting any hypotheses with which researchers in education can create, propose, and execute research which might verify or refute the usefulness of "what is new, what allegedly works", why those educational contexts, means and methods work in education, and how the findings about "new" methods compare to those of "traditional" methods used in past, less technology-mediated, decades.
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TropeTraining Software web site
You do not have to be Jewish to love this commercial TropeTraining distance learning software from Kinnor.com. It has a number of exceptional training features worth studying and implementing in a more general scalable free and open source web-way. I (this web site's PI) am interested in TropeTraining because as of November 2010 many of those features need to be added to free and low-cost open source distance learning systems to benefit students of any age of any subject.
Hits: 470
NYT: TropeTrainer: Bar Mitzvah Studies Take To The Web
The New York Times of 10.11.22 reports on the special purpose uses and features of TropeTrainer distance learning software that some Jewish parents are using to prepare their children for Bar and Bat Mitzvah.
Hits: 318
Nuance.com: Voice Recognition Education Solutions
Nuance.com has improved their speech recognition software for over a decade. Part of improving such software is repeatedly 're-training' the software to better recognize most used words and phrases in a particular field of work such as education. WLTRes web site users are invited to submit their comments and ratings on Nuance's current software offerings that may improve, or burden, educational experiences using computers.
Hits: 299
U.Wisconsin Educational Materials
(From the site:) "The IDEAS site (at U. Wisconsin, USA) provides educators with teacher-reviewed, (Wisconsin state) standards-aligned lessons, interactive tools, video, high-quality digital images, and other resources for use in curriculum development and classroom instruction."
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Conovate: tools for real time testing and feedback
Conovate.com provides software tools for educators which enable real time assessment (testing and instant results feedback) of students.
Hits: 280
KQED's Mind Shift: articles for educators
Mind Shift is a new department of the San Francisco public radio and television station operations, KQED. KQED has offered educational television programs to the SF Bay Area population for decades. The new "MindShift" department collects and web publishes innovative new ideas for improving education.
Hits: 266
CarnegieLearning.com
Carnegie Learning was founded in 1998 by several professors at the nearby Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. CMU has run one of the 5 top Computer Science departments in the USA. Carnegie Learning has made unique online courses which teach mathematics.
Hits: 346
NYT: Open Courses, Nearly Free
The New York Times of 11.08.26 reported that the "University of the People" set up three computer centers in Haiti after the earthquake of January 2010. Now UOP has added several online courses served to students using one of the computer center. But as of Fall 2011 they will be charging from $10 to $50 per course. This PI must ask: why not completely free courses?
Hits: 341
The University of the People web site
The University of the People, established about 2008-10, claims to be the world's first tuition-free university. While tuition is free, in Haiti, they are charging $10 to $50 per student to take a single course.
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Pearson: The Open Class LMS (free)
This is the press release issued 11.10.13 from Pearson.edu announcing their new, free, 'cloud-based' Learning Management System (LMS) called "Open Class." Open Class is available for download care of Google Apps.
Hits: 281
The RocketShip Education web site
Rocket Ship is a for-profit charter school "franchise" operation headquarted in the Silicon Valley south of San Francisco California. Rocket Ship offers a first web-based generation of what is currently called "Blended Learning." Blended Learning by Rocket Ship puts K-3 students in front of computer screens for 100 minutes per day where they interact with "edutainment" courseware delivered over the Internet from a Rocket Ship courseware server and proprietary "learning management system." According to a report and 1 child's recorded anecdote on the KQED-FM (SF) Forum talk show of Monday 12.01.23, "the kids love the excitement" of playing a computer game (they are motivated to continue playing the game) and they like "the simpler questions" they can more often answer correctly apparently than they can answer the harder questions posed to them on the same subject by their teachers when they are in class-room learning situations. Some critics of Blended Learning in general suggest that the teachers are forced to become the servants, the assistants to, the courseware delivered on the computer.
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The Udemy.com web site
Udemy.com is a grass-roots do-it-yourself community online education operation based in New York City, USA. Anyone can author and web-publish as "web education" a class or a course. The author can make their class or course available for free or for a usually low fee. Classes and courses are overwhelmingly computer technical or vocational classes. For a superficial overview, see also the short 3 minute 40 seconds BBC video stream report of 12.03.05 in the "Trends in Education" web links category.
Hits: 316
The Khan Academy web site
As of March 2012, the Khan Academy offers 3000+ instructional videos in a wide variety of subject, most of which are available for free viewing. Khan Academy also has a new teaching strategy being tested in several California schools. With new software they developed, a student watches a 10 minutes long instructional video in the evening at home. The next day in class each student works on problems based on the video they watched the night before. Instructor software tells the instructor which students are struggling with which problems, gives some reasons why they are struggling. This real-time feedback gives the instructor important information with which to tutor those struggling students immediately. The special ad-hoc small group tutoring is more likely to be effective because the struggling students' focus has been on the subject matter, their motivations are highest and their personal and social satisfaction at learning how to correctly solve the problem at hand very likely will be the greatest... dramatically reinforcing their long term memory of the learning experience and material.
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The Coursera.org Web Site Offering Free College-level Classes
The Coursera.org web site is larger scale, better provisioned web site that is based on the enormous success of the 3 undergraduate classes offered for free online by Stanford University in Fall 2011 and Spring 2012. Coursera as of the end of 2012 offers first year college classes as lecture, demonstration, plus online testing and exercises. The class lectures and other materials are provided by Stanford, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins universities based in the USA. All classes at this writing are presented in English.
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The EdSurge.com Clearinghouse Web Site About Educational Technology
The EdSurge.com web site, announced on regional San Francisco Bay Area television as a new Silicon Valley (California) start-up organization in November, 2012, is to be a Clearing House (one-stop-shopping or a Consumer Reports service) for news and information about emerging educational technology. The start-up operation was funded by the Bill and Lynda Gates Foundation, the xxxx, and the xxxx. However this appears to be a for-profit operation, the business model for which is not evident at this writing, 12.12.24. For an overview of EdSurge and its new CEO, see also the KNTV video reports, report #3 of 4+ 5-8 minute long reports elsewhere on this WLTRes web site.
Hits: 299
LearnToBe.org Free Tutors for Kids Online
Coincidentally the Hulu.com video stream site reminded me (JGW) New Years Eve, 2012, (12.12.31) that "Hulu is proud to support Learn To Be" and I found the LearnToBe.org web site. LTB offers free tutoring, possibly by college students, for children. 37 US Universities are "involved." 47 US states are using this service. More information about LTB's operations needs to be discovered and reported here a.s.a.p. Defining, prototyping and deploying good to best-case examples of "computer assisted tutoring" (online or as advice to home school instructors) is one major goal for this web site and its supporters. jgw130101
Hits: 338
Three (3) World Affairs Council Radio Programs about BRAC
This link will present a query-results web page at the worldaffairs.org web site. The query if for "BRAC." Quoting and paraphrasing from that web page, "BRAC is the Bangaladesh Rurual Advancement Committee founded in 1972 as a limited relief operations. As of the end of 2012 it is the largest development in the world serving over 126 million people in eleven (11) countries throughout Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. BRAC’s diverse program portfolio focuses on income generation, health care, education and agriculture." As of November 2012 BRAC had 30 people creating educational content based on free open course materials available from Harvard and M.I.T. BRAC will almost certainly be attempting to duplicate and re-purpose other free open course-ware that appears on the Internet in coming years to help better educate the poor in the countries it serves.
Hits: 358
The Education Week web site. (13.04.04)
Education Week, edweek.org, features interesting stories of ed practices, pedagogical and technical developments in education. I (JGW) am not sure yet if it is a site to subscribe to "pull over" RSS fed stories to show on WLTRes. You comments in a Forum category might persuade me one way or the other. Thank you.
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