Future Salon LA -MOOCs Education

More details here: http://futuresalon17.eventbrite.com/
Sign up in advance or $10 at the door.

Our events have been called a small version of TEDx. Come join our fun and useful discussions on key trends, innovations, problems, sustainability, and social responsibility. Work with and on new tools, practices, ideas and projects. See the future and seize the present. Grow your network of supportive, future-oriented friends.

Mini potluck & meet-and-greet starts at 6:30 PM - please bring snacks and drinks to share!

The presentation will start PROMPTLY at 7:30 PM. The presentation will last about an hour and then more networking.

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Presentation: Major mayhem or a marvelous match? An introduction to museums and MOOCs. MOOCs (massive open online courses) are one of the newest and most interesting learning initiatives taking place in global education today. They are also one of the most controversial. Originally developed by universities to make their courses free of charge to students around the globe, they started small (2300 students enrolled in a MOOC at the University of Manitoba in 2008), MOOCs expanded exponentially and by 2011, three Stanford University MOOCs had 100,000 students per course. The design and approach of these courses was based on collaboration and crowd-sourced interactions, and remixing content. But the model resembled a more formal educational model relying on automatic feedback, through objective, online assessments, quizzes and exams. Theoretically, this is a great idea to make higher education to anyone who wants to study. But the formal approach to education and the focus on evaluation may actually create obstacles to academic learning.

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Speaker: David Greenfield has over twenty years experience in new media, art and education. His experience in digital media spans the corporate (communication design, computer-based training), museum (new media development, education, curatorial, registration) and academic (teaching students as well as instructors). In addition to this, Mr. Greenfield has photographed and cataloged several private collections of art and crafts using state of the art digital collection management systems. Mr. Greenfield has presented at global education and museum conferences on the integration of social media for communication, commerce education and outreach. Mr. Greenfield received his MA in education technology from Pepperdine University and currently, is writing his doctoral dissertation there in learning technologies. His areas of interest are: MOOCs; free-choice (informal learning); integrating accessible technologies in to multi-institutional, trans-disciplinary learning environments; and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math).

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Future Salons are monthly educational, activist, and social events, focused on existing or emerging scientific, technological, entrepreneurial, or social change topics and projects worthy of your help and attention. We also cover critical-thinking, management, and personal change topics, and occasionally longer-term scientific and philosophical topics. Our goal is to make our rapidly changing world more fascinating, manageable, profitable, and positive-sum for all of us. We strive to be both doing-action-project oriented, and thinking-idea-prioritizing oriented. About the Future Salon Network initiated by John Smart: http://www.accelerating.org/futuresalon.html

Special thanks to our presenter and our venue sponsor:

New Roads School is committed to incubating and implementing effective means to enhance learning. Our educational research arm, The Center for Effective Learning (C4EL) spearheads our efforts in this regard, by:

Exploring and participating in current educational research, both on its own and in concert with other educational research entities
Adapting valid research findings to appropriate classroom practices
Developing innovative educational materials for use at New Roads School and throughout the larger educational community