https://creativecommons.net/superheroes/neeru-khosla/
Covering Maths, Science and Engineering curricula. Remixing of works to create a custom text book for your class is encouraged.
The group identified people, groups, projects and ideas to address the challenges we faced. Then we voted on them, and came up with the top 8. NMC will write it up and email us the next steps. A productive day.
20 leaders in the take-up of emerging technologies by tertiary education vote on where 6 technologies on the “Horizon” sit on the Gartner adoption curve. Gesture-based computing being highly experimental, augmented reality being still very experimental, digital data analysis, electronic books and open content getting some more mature usage, and mobiles hitting the majority.
The Edge in Brisbane is the location of the Emerging Technology Summit, organized by the New Media Consortium. I was pleased to be invited to attend on behalf on ACODE exec as well as Uni of Wollongong, to discuss the trends and opportunities focussed on the tertiary education sector. And get a sneak preview at the Horizon Reports forecasts for 2011.
This pilot project over in the new Digital Media Centre labs at iC is going very well. Ably supported by lab support technician Glenn Alexander, research into tweaking the lab setup is underway to ensure that when students logoff in the labs their software is re-set to an appropriate “clean-slate settings” state on the shared lab machines, and their data is saved on their USB or portable hard-drives.
I visited the class yesterday in person, and saw the colour animated graphics that the students were creating in the Ubuntu/Linux operating system using the Scala programming language. Look forward to seeing how the student projects develop.
I was watching a TED Talk Talk by Randy Pausch. He based his talk on his childhood dreams, but by about 40mins it in turns into a discussion about ETC. A great University course he helped develop after being a Disney Imagineer. It is so great and he speaks so enthusiastically about it. The course brings together Design, arts and engineering students initially, then opens up to a broader audience.
This guys has had some amazing opportunities, but I really like that someone else has picked up the ball for the ‘Masters Degree’. I really wish we could have something similar to offer students here at UOW.
There is more information about ETC here.
Saw the full potential of the NoteBook software that authors and presents lessons on the SmartBoards. Thankyou Hannah Russell for taking the time to show me how it works. I particularly liked the split screen display of 2 sources, the URL link, the on-screen touch keyboard (like iPad) and the screen capture and paste functions.
Looking forward to hearing how it goes with using Bridgit software to share those lessons in real time with remote students.
Generally, we seem to have ironed out most of the hiccups (mainly linked to people having problems copying the system to Mac formatted disks or by locking the VM system by not shutting it down properly (have to throw out the lock file to restart in those circumstances). Other issues are mainly about the overall technical complexity of having to load up another operating system and then engage with complex set of programming APIs – a real challenge for many of the students.