Recent Participation in Formal Learning Among Working-Age Adults with Different Levels of Education
This report, released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), uses data from the 2001 and 2005 adult education surveys of the National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES) to examine the participation of adults in formal learning activities during the 12 months preceding the survey, focusing on the participation of adults who at the end of the survey had the lowest levels of education (no high school diploma, or a GED). These adults with low levels of education were found to have participated at relatively high rates in adult basic education, ESL, and GED classes. However, for the most common types of formal learning activities—work-related courses and personal interest courses—adults with low levels of education participated at lower rates and for shorter periods of time than did adults with higher levels of education. Among the adults who did participate in these activities, those with lower levels of education at the end of the survey were less likely than those with higher levels of education to pay at least some course expenses themselves.
View, download, and print the full report as a PDF file:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2008041
Teaching with Blackboard Episode 17
In this latest episode of the Teaching with Blackboard podcast, Olga Urban and I discuss the Blackboard Content Collection. | Content Collection Documentation | SafeAssign Documentation | Scholar Documentation | Kaltura
Kaltura: Collaborative Video Editing Online
I just stumbled across Kaltura, a free collaborative online video editing tool. Similar to other online media editors like Jumpcut, Kaltura “…is a free online site for group video making. For the first time, users are given the ability to CREATE RICH MEDIA TOGETHER. Like the Wiki platform that enables users to collaborate on the creation of texts from any browser, Kaltura enables a group of users to collaborate on the creation of a video.”
Here’s a video introduction to Kaltura.
Check out the tour and give Kaltura a try. I’m looking forward to trying out Kaltura myself and would love to hear from others regarding your experiences with this or any other online video editing tool. This technology and others involving media mashups open the door to some considerable new pedagogical options for active learning and collaborative group work. How might you use this technology in your learning environment?
Online Photo Sharing in Plain English
As I’ve mentioned before, CommonCraft does a fabulous job of explaining many different concepts in “Plain English.” If you take digital pictures, you need to watch this 3 minute video that explains the value of posting photos on a service like Flickr for sharing or safe keeping.
You can visit my personal online album at Flickr here.
Blackboard Scholar & SafeAssign
Blackboard has recently released two new web services as part of its “Blackboard Beyond” initiative…Scholar and SafeAssign. Scholar is basically an academic resource sharing (aka: “social bookmarking”) service that is integrated within Blackboard. SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention service that again is incorporated into Blackboard.NIU has recently just rolled out both Scholar and SafeAssign. As part of this process, I’ve just developed online resource pages for both Scholar and SafeAssign with a considerable amount of the textual documentation provided by the Scholar Wiki and SafeAssign Wiki.These new documentation pages are available at
- http://www.blackboard.niu.edu/blackboard/resources/safeassign.shtml
- http://www.blackboard.niu.edu/blackboard/resources/scholar.shtml
In the future, our office is planning to develop several “Quick Tips” presentations highlighting these new tools as well as devote future episodes of the Teaching with Blackboard Podcast to addressing best practices in further depth. Anyone else already implemented Scholar and SafeAssign at your campus? What has been your experience thus far?