On the Language of Internet Memes

E-learning and Digital Cultures is aimed at teachers, learning technologists, and people with a general interest in education who want to deepen their understanding of what it means to teach and learn in the digital age. The course is about how digital cultures intersect with learning cultures online, and how our ideas about online education are shaped through “narratives”, or big stories, about the relationship between people and technology. We’ll explore some of the most engaging perspectives on digital culture in its popular and academic forms, and we’ll consider how our practices as teachers and learners are informed by the difference of the digital. We’ll look at how learning and literacy is represented in popular digital-, (or cyber-) culture. For example, how is ‘learning’ represented in the film The Matrix, and how does this representation influence our understanding of the nature of e-learning? 

E-learning and Digital Cultures | Coursera.

The founder of Khan Academy, a popular site that offers free online video lectures about a variety of subjects, lays out his thoughts on the future of education in his book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, released last month. Though most of the work describes Mr. Khan’s experiences with Khan Academy and his suggestions for changing elementary- and secondary-school systems, he does devote a few chapters to higher education.

[Read more:]

via Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

SCORM is a set of technical standards for e-learning software products. SCORM tells programmers how to write their code so that it can “play well” with other e-learning software. It is the de facto industry standard for e-learning interoperability. Specifically, SCORM governs how online learning content and Learning Management Systems (LMSs) communicate with each other. SCORM does not speak to instructional design or any other pedagogical concern, it is purely a technical standard.

via SCORM – SCORM Explained.

Publisher’s note: Since the early 1980s, the J. Paul Getty Trust has been a pioneer in applying computing to art history information. Recently these activities have been carried out by the Getty Information Institute, directed by Eleanor Fink. Following a change of leadership, the trust has decided to close the institute in June this year. To commemorate the end of its very successful initiatives and programs, D-Lib Magazine invited Eleanor Fink to write the following retrospective survey of the institute and its achievements.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march99/fink/03fink.html

A maternal nag familiar to the ears of many young gamers usually follows the lines of “you’re wasting your life in front of a console”. Browbeaten controller wielders rejoice — a new study from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) has proven that the superior hand-eye coordination skills honed from hours of joystick-based gaming are the same talents required to master the world’s most advanced robotic surgery tools.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-11/16/young-gamers-offer-surgery-training-insight#g

MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses. [Read on,,,] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all

The New York Times senior software architect would like the newest “mullets of the Internet” to go back from whence they came.

via Word clouds considered harmful » Nieman Journalism Lab.