Monica Anderson is CEO of Syntience Inc. and originator of a theory for learning called “Artificial Intuition” that may allow us to create computer based systems that can understand the meaning of language in the form of text. Here she discusses the ongoing paradigm shift – the “Holistic Shift” – which started in the life sciences and is spreading to the remaining disciplines. Model Free Methods (also known as Holistic Methods) are an increasingly common approach used on “the remaining hard problems”, including problems in the domain of “AI” – Problems that require intelligence. She illustrates this using a Model Free approach to the NetFlix Challenge. Her website provides some background information.
Coursera, of course, is one of the online providers offering free educational courses online. Textbooks are a logical next step. The have struck a partnership with several publishers to enable students to use certain textbooks for free while they take the courses. Publishers include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE and Wiley will be available through e-readers provided by Chegg.
The article states:
“Koller said the agreement will help instructors who felt restricted in what they could require students to read. She also said it will help publishers market full versions of their books to those interested in buying them. Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif., launched in April 2012, and the company has more than 3 million registered users. Along with edX and Udacity, it is one of the most prominent MOOC providers in a fast-emerging market. Cynthia L. Selfe, an English professor at Ohio State University, said the textbook agreement will benefit thousands who are taking a MOOC on Coursera that she teaches with a group of faculty.”
Does this article suggest that there are more challenges for traditional publishers or is this an opportunity for companies trying to grow and running out of options? The jump from $500 million to $1 billion is a big job.
If you are interested in taking curation onboard in your learning or teaching program, here is a collection of the best web curation tools and services specifically designed for the education world. Whether you need to pull together a collection of relevant books and reading resources for your next class, or want to push your students to collaborate on creating relevant information collections on specific topics, here are over the best tools that can be used for this task. *Curation Tools for Education and Learning* P.S.: Please, feel free to suggest new and additional relevant tools that should be added to this collection in the comments at the original post, “Curation Tools.”
Academicpub – Personalize and customize books and documents with this patented publishing and compilation platform.
Adobe Acrobat – Collect and organize different types of documents, presentations and video into a professional portfolio
Adobe Acrobat Professional XI – Collect and organize different types of documents, presentations and video into a professional portfolio.
Avoca – The Avoca Learning platform is a web service which facilitates the finding, collection and organizing of vetted learning resources from dozens of the leading educational sites. The platform already offers over 20,000 resources from over 35 leading education sites. In the near future new educational resources in the fields of of Language Arts/Reading, and History/Social Studies will be added.
Bindworx– revolutionary new service, potentially allowing anyone to assemble a truly personalized new book by mixing and matching other published works, is 100% the way it is being described. On paper, Bindworx offers you the opportunity to buy content from existing published books and eBooks, by specifically picking out a page, a chapter or an entire section and pulling it together into your own custom (e)book.
Curatr – Curatr builds online courses from any digital content, which we refer to as learning objects. Learning objects can be anything that works on the web – from a video to an interactive diagram, a PDF to a webpage.
Edcanvas – EdCanvas is a web service which allows you to search, find, clip and collect any kind of content, from text to video clips and to organize it into visual boards for educational and learning purposes. Differently than Pinterest, EdCanvas is specifically targeted at the education world and at schools and teachers, and it makes possible not just to collect “images” from web pages, but to collect and organize whichever content elements you want, including full web pages.
Educlipper – EduClipper is a new educational curation platform allowing both teachers and students to clip just about any type of content from the web and to organize it into topic-specific clipboards. Clipboards can be made “private” or public depending on your needs and both their individual content items as well as any full clipboard can be easily shared on all major social networks.
Learnist – Learnist is a new pinboard where users can organize their learning materials. It resembles Pinterest except that Learnist is just for sharing learning resources.
Libguides – Offers a perfect environment to create/curate collections of relevant resources on a specific learning topic. The link points to a good curated example page authored by Joyce Valenza and Deb Kachel focuses on showcasing an extended curated selection of content references, video clips, PDFs, tools lists on the topic of digital content curation in education. Lots of useful resources and references, and some good examples of curation at work in different educatonal projects.
Livebinders – Allows you to create folders containing collections of relevant resources and links on a specific topic.
McGraw-Hill Create – Allows you to curate customized textbooks on any topic by selecting and picking individual chapters, pages or excerpts from already published books.
Mentormob – Allows you to create annotated playlists of websites on a specific topic/theme
The existing social and financial order is crumbling because it is unsustainable on multiple levels. The central state is not the Millennials' friend, it is their oppressor.No generation of young people is ever politicized by hunger in distant lands or issues of the elderly. It's no rap on youth that self-interest defines what issues have the potential to radically transform their political consciousness; the transformative cause must reveal the system is broken for them and that it intends on sacrificing their generation to uphold the Status Quo.
The Millennial generation, also known as Gen-Y (Gen-Y comes after Gen-X), is generally defined as those born between 1982 and 2004.
The oldest Millennials were children during the first Iraq War in 1991 (Desert Storm) and just coming of age in 2001 (9/11 and the war in Afghanistan) and the start of the second Iraq War (2003).
Click on Image to Enlarge
The Millennials have entered adulthood in a era characterized by permanent low-intensity wars and central-bank/state managed financial bubbles–2001 to the present. In other words, the only experience they have is of centralized state mismanagement on a global scale.
The gross incompetence of the government and central bank–not to mention the endless power grabs by these centralized authorities–has not yet aroused a political consciousness that the system is irrevocably broken, not just for older generations but most especially for them.
Anecdotally, it appears the Millennial generation is still operating on the fantasy that all they need to do to get a secure, good-paying job and a happy life is go to college and enter the Status Quo machine of government/corporate America.
There are two fatal flaws in this fantasy: the $1+ trillion student loan industry and a transforming economy. The higher education industry in the U.S. operates as a central state-enabled and funded cartel, limiting supply while demand (based on the fantasy that a college degree has critical value) soars. This enables the cartel to keep raising prices even as the value of its product (a diploma) sinks to near-zero.
1The steady rise of Wikipedia.org and the Open Source software movement has been one of the big surprises of the 21st century, threatening stalwarts such as Microsoft and Britannica, while simultaneously offering insights into the emergence of large-scale peer production and the growth of gift economies.
2Many questions arise when confronted with the streamlined efficacy and apparent lack of organisation and motivation of these new global enterprises, not least “how does this work?” Stigmergic collaboration provides a hypothesis as to how the collaborative process could jump from being untenable with numbers above 25 people, towards becoming a new driver in global society with numbers well over 25,000.
In a production economy, value creation depends on land, labor and capital. In a knowledge economy, value creation depends mainly on the ideas and innovations to be found in people’s heads.
Those ideas cannot be forcibly extracted.
All one can do is mobilize collective intelligence and knowledge. If knowing how to produce and sell has become a basic necessity, it no longer constitutes a sufficiently differentiating factor in international competition. In the past, enterprises were industrial and commercial; in the future, they will increasingly have to be intelligent.
The intelligent enterprise stands on three pillars: collective intelligence, knowledge management and information and collaboration technologies and needs the vital energy of intellectual cooperation.
Managing collective intelligence implies a radical change that will naturally elicit a lot of resistance. But we’re talking about a social innovation. Once it is in place, once the resistance has subsided, no one will want to go back to the way it was! As always, the problem lies “not in developing new ideas but in escaping from the old ones.” Keynes.
Ericsson put together an inspiring 20-minute video promoting its “Networked Society” and “Future of Learning” movements. It’s worth watching whether or not you work in education because it makes some poignant statements about issues that affect our society as a whole.
Here are 5 quick take-aways:
1) Instead of molding students to fit into the educational system, we should be adapting systems to address the different needs of students.
2) The concept of school used to be synonymous with access to information, now they are no longer the same thing.
3) Answers are everywhere, especially online. So, a teacher’s job is to point growing minds towards the right questions. We should teach people to solve interesting problems, not to memorize answers to problems we’ve already solved.
4) Nobody takes standardized tests for a living. Learning should prepare you to cope with life’s surprises, but traditional education prepares you to cope with certainty. There is no certainty.
5) There is no virtual substitute for universities. They provide an essential space in which teachers and students learn to solve problems, debate issues, and develop passions together. However, online learning and technology are not only improving the traditional university experience, they are providing high quality education to those who did not have access to it before. On a global level.
