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Schools of the Future: Acquiring and Representing Knowledge

This year's Schools of the Future conference was an information-rich event.

When we think of the future, more than a few of us probably also think of technology. That association certainly carries over in the interpretation of the conference title Schools of the Future.

Indeed, many topics besides educational technology were covered; however, the technological advances were a strong highlight at the conference in my view. As mentioned in one of Cassie's previous posts, there are online classes everywhere.

The first few links on my list reference ways to learn on your own (i.e., ways to acquire knowledge). The second set of links refer to ways of representing knowledge.

**Note:  All icons link to the affiliated website. 




Academic Earth has hundreds of free online lectures from prominent university professors, including Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, The University of Houston, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Michigan State, Princeton, Rice, UCLA, UCSF, and the list goes on. The lectures are live course instruction videos. Academic Earth even offers online higher education degrees.



DIYU is a blog-like website. From what I can see, the website seems to have been created mainly as a promotion for the associated DIYU book. The book is about giving oneself their own higher education... basically, doing the education oneself! The book has mixed ratings on Amazon, and is about giving yourself a higher education. I'm not sure how I feel about that!



HippoCampus is not only an admirably witty and punny name (the hippocampus is the brain area responsible for encoding long term memories), but it is also the name of a fabulous website offering free and customizable online textbooks!








There are so many educational sites popping up all over the internet, it could take a very long time to list and explain all of them! Here are a few more that you might want to check out on your own, however:

Civitas
YouTube for Schools
Big Think
P2PU
Global Online Academy
OER Commons
Edupunks
DMLcentral
Competition
Florida Virtual School
School of One
Share My Lesson
GDC
Educational Downloads
GDC
lynda
Flirting w/ eLearning

As I mentioned above, the second segment of this blog post will cover ways of representing knowledge. My favorite talk was called Infographicmania. The speaker, Amy Burvall, put together a website for the conference and walked the audience through what seemed like hundreds of infographics  and videos during her talk. Below, I have pasted a few of my favorites. If you like these, I encourage you to visit her site, which contains many, many more. I look forward to using these in representing data in future ID projects here at KS.


























These last two weren't on the Infographic website, but I thought I'd go ahead and include them. Click on the image to engage the interactive features.


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