Networking The Learner

A "Learning Network" is a community of people who help each other to better understand and handle certain events and concepts in work or life. As a result – and sometimes also as an aim – participating in learning networks stimulates personal development, a better understanding of concepts and events, career development, and employability. "Learning Network Services" are Web services that are designed to facilitate the creation of distributed Learning Networks and to support the participants with various functions for knowledge exchange, social interaction, assessment and competence development in an effective way. The book presents state-of-the-art insights into the field of Learning Networks and Web-based services which can facilitate all kinds of processes within these networks.

The field; Learning networks: an introduction; Networks for schools: exemplars and experiences; Networks for higher education, training, and informal learning: exemplares and experiences; The guide; Designs for learning networks; Getting started: the implementation process; Teaching online; Learning online; Problems in paradise: expect the best, prepare for the worst; The future; New directions; Network learning: a paradign for the twenty-first century; Epilogue: email from the future; Appendixes; Indice.

How ed tech was born: Twentieth-century teaching machines--from Sidney Pressey's mechanized test-giver to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Contrary to popular belief, ed tech did not begin with videos on the internet. The idea of technology that would allow students to "go at their own pace" did not originate in Silicon Valley. In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas--bite-sized content, individualized instruction--that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning. Watters pays particular attention to the role of the media--newspapers, magazines, television, and film--in shaping people's perceptions of teaching machines as well as the psychological theories underpinning them. She considers these machines in the context of education reform, the political reverberations of Sputnik, and the rise of the testing and textbook industries. She chronicles Skinner's attempts to bring his teaching machines to market, culminating in the famous behaviorist's efforts to launch Didak 101, the "pre-verbal" machine that taught spelling. (Alternate names proposed by Skinner include "Autodidak," "Instructomat," and "Autostructor.") Telling these somewhat cautionary tales, Watters challenges what she calls "the teleology of ed tech"--the idea that not only is computerized education inevitable, but technological progress is the sole driver of events.

Digital resources—from games to blogs to social networking—are strong forces in education today, but how can those tools be effectively utilized by educators and course designers in higher education? Filled with practical advice, the e-Learning and Social Networking Handbook, Second Edition provides a comprehensive overview of online learning tools and offers strategies for using these resources in course design, highlighting some of the most relevant and challenging topics in e-learning today, including: • using social networking for educational purposes • designing for a distributed environment • strengths and weaknesses of delivering content in various formats (text, audio, and video) • potential constraints on course design • implementation, evaluation, induction, and training Illustrated by short, descriptive case studies, the e-Learning and Social Networking Handbook, Second Edition also directs the reader to useful resources that will enhance their course design. This helpful guide will be invaluable to all those involved in the design and delivery of online learning in higher education.

Educational researchers, policy-makers and practitioners are increasingly focusing their attention on Professional Learning Networks in order to facilitate teacher development and encourage school and school system improvement. However, despite the understanding that PLNs can contribute significantly to improving teaching practice and student achievement, there are key challenges regarding their use. These challenges include: ensuring PLNs can provide opportunities for generating and sharing knowledge within schools enabling teachers and professionals to direct their own development helping individuals change their practices through inquiry-led approaches facilitating partnerships which work across a variety of stakeholders In this new edited volume, Brown and Poortman evaluate these challenges from both a theoretical and practical approach. A multitude of perspectives from a team of international contributors covers: the importance of Professional Learning Networks the use of evidence within PLNs the impact of inter-school networks international cases of networks and communities the promotion and sustainability of PLNs Also featuring case studies and exemplars to contextualise sustainable learning networks, Networks For Learning is an accessible and thoroughly-researched book, which will be essential reading and a valuable resource for researchers, teachers and school leaders who are interested in developing professional learning networks.

Using the tools of complexity theory, Stephen Judd develops a formal description of associative learning in connectionist networks. He rigorously exposes the computational difficulties in training neural networks and explores how certain design principles will or will not make the problems easier.Judd looks beyond the scope of any one particular learning rule, at a level above the details of neurons. There he finds new issues that arise when great numbers of neurons are employed and he offers fresh insights into design principles that could guide the construction of artificial and biological neural networks.The first part of the book describes the motivations and goals of the study and relates them to current scientific theory. It provides an overview of the major ideas, formulates the general learning problem with an eye to the computational complexity of the task, reviews current theory on learning, relates the book's model of learning to other models outside the connectionist paradigm, and sets out to examine scale-up issues in connectionist learning.Later chapters prove the intractability of the general case of memorizing in networks, elaborate on implications of this intractability and point out several corollaries applying to various special subcases. Judd refines the distinctive characteristics of the difficulties with families of shallow networks, addresses concerns about the ability of neural networks to generalize, and summarizes the results, implications, and possible extensions of the work. Neural Network Design and the Complexity of Learning is included in the Network Modeling and Connectionism series edited by Jeffrey Elman.

An ever-widening gap exists between how students and schools use communication technology. Using Network and Mobile Technology to Bridge Formal and Informal Learning introduces new methods (inspired by ‘pedagogy 2.0’) of harnessing the potential of communication technologies for teaching and learning. This book considers how attitudes towards network and mobile technology (NMT) gained outside the school can be shunted into new educational paradigms combining formal and informal learning processes. It begins with an overview of these paradigms, and their sustainability. It then considers the pedagogical dimension of formal/informal integration through NMT, moving on to teachers’ professional development. Next, the organizational development of schools in the context of formal and informal learning is detailed. Finally, the book covers the role of technologies supporting formal/informal integration into subject-oriented education. Includes a framework for the sustainability of new educational paradigms based on the combination of formal and informal learning processes supported by network and mobile technology (NMT) Provides a series of recommendations on how to use attitudes towards NMT gained outside the school to integrate formal and informal learning Gives a teacher training approach on how to use network and mobile technology-based informal learning to enhance formal learning pathways

Hatala demystifies the networking process to help people network more effectively, more strategically, and more successfully than they may have ever realized was possible.