Canvas Grants program winners are announced! The program goal was to encourage technological innovation in higher education and K-12.

There were about 400 proposals. Among the winners there are 5 from higher education:

• Carnegie Mellon University’s  for “Facilitating Competency-Based Learning” aiming to create a dashboard for students to track their progress against their career and educational goals;
• Alamo Colleges  for  problem-based learning and a cloud-based, open source ePortfolio solution as part of an interdisciplinary core curriculum program;
• Texas Woman’s University and North Central Texas College for the plan to create a blended learning MOOC;
• University of Southern Indiana for an idea to develop a tool that makes it possible to conduct robust data collection, analysis and collaboration to support active inquiry;
•  University of Central Florida for ideas to create a tool that helps instructors check their course material for compliance with universal design and accessibility guidelines.

We are getting ready to graduate our first student cohort next year. Apart from graduate attributes and subject matter skills, we would like them to have IT skills which will make them more marketable, professionally successful, and productive. What are they in your particular disciples? How do we embed these skills into existing curriculum?

I suggest we start with fundamental computing skills and productivity tools to make sure our students can succeed academically, expand to subject matter specific IT skills, and enable students with IT skills for employability.

Ideas?

I just came across this post and I find it fascinated on how visionary people could predict the future of technology. Pretty amazing!

And you can see an interactive timeline of learning machines at posted by NY Times. We certainly came a long way! Unfortunately their timeline ends in 2010 with the invention of the iPad… So, what’s on the horizon of education technology devices and concepts for years to come? Well, Horizon of HE 2014 says: flipped instruction, learning analytics, 3D printing, games and gamification, and more! And in the heart of any education technology is innovative pedagogy!