Only 10% of rural Americans go online from home with high-speed connections, about one-third the rate for non-rural Americans.
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55% of adult internet users have broadband at home or work; Home broadband adoption has... - 0 views
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Overall, 48 million American adults had high-speed connections in the home in February 2004. This represents a growth of 60% since March 2003 when 30 million Americans had broadband connections at home. Fully half of this growth has taken place since November 2003, suggesting that it was a broadband holiday season for many Internet users in the winter of 2003/2004.
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As for the pool of dial-up users who may one day move to broadband, 40% say they would like to get it and 58% say they don’t plan to get it. Of the 40% who would like to get broadband at home, many are not interested in paying more for it: 22% say they would not pay an extra dime for broadband at home and on average this group said they would pay about $9.40 per month extra for broadband. Of the 58% of dial-up users who say that they are not interested in broadband at home, half say they would not pay anything extra for it. On average these users say they would pay only about $4.25 a month more for broadband.
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Situated Cognition - 0 views
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Miller and Gildea's (1987) work on vocabulary teaching has shown how the assumption that knowing and doing can be separated leads to a teaching method that ignores the way situations structure cognition. Their work has described how children are taught words from dictionary definitions and a few exemplary sentences, and they have compared this method with the way vocabulary is normally learned outside school. People generally learn words in the context of ordinary communication. This process is startlingly fast and successful. Miller and Gildea note that by listening, talking, and reading, the average 17-year-old has learned vocabulary at a rate of 5,000 words per year (13 per day) for over 16 years. By contrast, learning words from abstract definitions and sentences taken out of the context of normal use, the way vocabulary has often been taught, is slow and generally unsuccessful. There is barely enough classroom time to teach more than 100 to 200 words per year. Moreover, much of what is taught turns out to be almost useless in practice. They give the following examples of students' uses of vocabulary acquired this way:
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Leaving Children Behind. - 0 views
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The introduction to this legislation states that "In America, no child should be left behind. Every child should be educated to his or her full potential." Mandating standards and tests in and of itself cannot erase the fact that children from homes where parents have little education and minimal resources have many strikes against them.
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Evidence indicates that the "digital divide" gets larger each day. Children in homes with computers have huge advantages over those without such technology. While neurologists have extolled the virtues of high-protein diets for brain growth and development of young children, the economically disadvantaged continue to be plagued with high-carbohydrate diets, even in Head Start and public-school food service programs. Evidence indicates that more time on task helps to advance learning. The few efforts to increase the school year have mainly focused on poorly structured remedial summer programs doomed from their inception with the "punishment brand."
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Empirical research does not support the belief that all children can learn the same curriculum, in the same amount of time, and at the same level. The problem with such an unsubstantiated belief is that it may be used to deny differential financial support for those who come to school with environmental disadvantages. Not all children have high-quality nutrition, stimulating homes, and extensive learning opportunities prior to entering school.
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This concrete evidence should be enough to convince us that we should concentrate on improving the lives of children before they come to school. It is not enough simply to proclaim that "no child will be left behind" without enacting proper public policy to provide economic opportunity for families, healthcare for all children, and parenting education for young mothers.
A.Word.A.Day --au contraire - 0 views
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My New Adventure in Online Teaching - 1 views
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I also was reminded that in many cases, our students technical skills often far surpass our own and that our course development and approach to online teaching should be informed by that fact.
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I already recognize that this will require me to sacrifice spontaneity and creativity at times but I think on balance it is the right way to go.
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I’ve constantly considered and reconsidered the importance of my role as the teacher as I’ve laid out Module after Module.
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I am still not entirely sold on the need to have the entire course completed ahead of time – though who am I to argue with the experts?
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hey bill. our research findings support this assertion and i want you to know that there is a positive and significant correlation between the percentage of course completed prior to the first day of the course and student (and faculty) satisfation and reported learning. Seems like building the airplane whilst in flight is not a good idea - the faculty experience is negatively impacted and the students also notice...
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In other words, modifications can be done in a controlled setting.
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My emotions ran the spectrum from a little bit of anger at being asked to complete a task that I didn’t entirely think was realistic, to disappointment in myself that, even though I thought I had caught up, I obviously was still just treading water. I’ve settled somewhere in the middle but regardless I decided to just put and shut up and make my way through the remainder of the course development process.
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what I will take away from it is so much more than any all-nighter I might have put in. I now feel confident to teach my own online courses and hope to begin implementing a hybrid online program in the 2010-2011 school year. This class has given me that kind of confidence and I’m all the better for it.
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shared by James Ranni on 17 Jul 09
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Sitting Quietly, Doing Something - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views
happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/...itting-quietly-doing-something
cognitive alteration of mood meditation health
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One flavor of happiness at which Rinpoche seems to excel has been well-studied by scientists specializing in how emotions operate in our brains.
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who heads the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, has found one distinct brain profile for happiness. As Davidson’s laboratory has reported, when we are in distress, the brain shows high activation levels in the right prefrontal area and the amygdala. But when we are in an upbeat mood, the right side quiets and the left prefrontal area stirs. When showing this brain pattern, people report feeling, as Davidson put it to me, “positively engaged, goal-directed, enthusiastic, and energetic.”
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One of the first findings from the research showed that when these adepts meditated on compassion, their left prefrontal areas jumped in activity an average 100 percent — by contrast a control group who were taught the same meditation practice showed an increase of just 10 percent. Two of the adepts had spectacular increases, in the 700-to-800-percent range, in key neural zones for good feeling. The more lifetime hours of practice, the greater the increases tended to be. All this seems to confirm the idea that in the realm of positive moods, as in nearly every endeavor, worldly or spiritual, practice matters.
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Jim's viewable streams of thought - 2 views
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What I’m really coming to grips with is how much the students might not be actually understanding when I communicate orally. How much of this information is not remembered?
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It’s not about being the “sage” but about being in a room full of people and interacting on issues I love.
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I LOVE how you put this Jim!! For me my room is here with you and the others in our class, and i feel the exact same way. My fondest wish for all of you is that you get to experience your love of teaching- - that same feeling of love and satisfaction you get f2f -- in an online teaching and learning environment too.
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jim: breathe.... i am so sorry. i know how very frustrating this can be.... just a week ago i lost one of my blog posts ... i was crushed and frantic after spending a whole day writing the post... if you follow me on twitter you may have seen my frantic panic expressed in my appeals for help to the the twitterverse for assistance/suggestions on how to recover the post ... i just spent so much time on it....and i have no idea how i deleted it. I am not sure if this will help, but unbelievable after doing all kinds of things to try to recover my post, i actually found it by hitting the back button on my browser. I am on a mac and using firefox, so i don't know if it would work in other browsers or on a PC. there may also be other factors. I never shut down my computer and i use millions of tabs. I think my copy was still in the cache of the computer on the tab that i had used to create the post... anyway. i hope you are ok now. and i look forward to this post. me
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How do I prove this? Just take a look at the course I’ve built and there is evidence of learning.
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Marc Prensky: The Reformers Are Leaving Our Schools in the 20th Century - 0 views
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Despite the many educational projects and programs now being funded and offered, practically no effort is being made to create and implement a better, more future-oriented education for all our kids.
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This distinction is critical because one can change almost everything about the "system" -- the schools, the leaders, the teachers, the number of hours and days of instruction and so forth -- and still not provide an education that interests our students and gets them deeply engaged in their own learning,
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If I'm talking, you should be taking notes. - 0 views
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, mad
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However, I also have learned that we cannot assume that everyone of a certain age is a digital native. Working at a community college, I have students with a large variety of academic and technological experiences. Some students have very limited access to technology.
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it is concrete, born before me with a structure and a real plan
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I am fully committed to the idea of self-discovery and peer-teaching within my online course, but I also feel that I have a lot to add and I can’t keep all of this information to myself
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The a
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not necessarily because it meets a learning objective
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. The first time I implement something I cannot always anticipate all of the issues, but after a run through I can plan for those problems and be proactive in preventing them.
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. Students will need to find a community setting for 15 hours of either observation of a child, or volunteering in working directly with children
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I am going to give up more control and expect more self-directed learning from my students, not only online, but in my f2f courses too! I am going to put more emphasis on discussion boards than I had previously anticipated.
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I am thinking about what I feel is working for me as a student and what is not, so I can include or not include those things in my course.
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Now my perspective had drastically changed—I am instead asking myself how do I get the students to the information? How will I devise learning activities that will assist them in their search for knowledge and understanding? It is not my responsibility to spoon feed them, but to teach them how to spoon feed themselves.
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conceptualizing some of the activities for my course
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I struggled with this as well. Still not sure if I have enough substantial learning activities for my course. It wasn't until I actually started creating the learning activities that I realized I was rather naive about the entire process. Like you, I had this vague idea. I finally had to sit down and figure out what I wanted my students to be doing and then creating activities that met those objectives.
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Giving up control and trusting students to learn. I don’t need to give them the information, just provide the opportunity for them to discover it for themselves, and trust that they will do it. Everyone says this works, I can’t wait to see it happen!
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Not only has my expectation for online teaching changed, but I also am trying to apply some of these ideas to my f2f courses. I want students to take more responsibility for their learning. I want them to learn from each other, and to discover knowledge instead of waiting for it to be fed to them. I want to build more community into my courses, so students feel that they can share and learn from others and take risks in class. I also want students to learn what they are interested in learning, or what they need to learn depending on where they are in their understanding of the content.
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ETAP640 Summer 2011 Blog - 2 views
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So far I am enjoying the experience
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What are the most effective instructional technology tools available to me to help me meet my instructional objectives?
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challenge!
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I have been much more aware of the idea that today’s younger generations (those who are 30 and younger) are much more technologically savvy.
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I want to challange you, just like i challanged Ian (who is currently smitten with Prensky : ) to challenge the notion of natives vs. immigrants. Read this (http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2011/05/natives-are-revolting.html), find other articles (and there are many) that unpack the problems with this notion, and come back and tell us all about it.
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I have been spending quite a bit of time and energy learning the Moodle system,
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I think I spent the entire weekend last week playing around in Moodle, learning how things worked, and trying to set up my basic module outline. Once I got the hang of it, I kinda like it. I find with technology that it just takes time and patience (not my forte) to really grasp it. I don't think computer skills of any kind can be learned from a book alone; it needs to be hands on learning.
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I completely agree! I am a very hands on and visual person, I need to INTERACT with the material in real life or else it's just text on a page.
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It is ENGAGING
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Blackboard
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I’m really starting to get the hang of the expectations for posts
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I had the same thought. I only hope that the computer lab is open during my class time.
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Your sticky notes are usually "floating" so I never know what you're commenting on. Can you make them stationery?
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I wonder the same thing...this applies to several blogs ago. I guess we need to add a date or title.
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I was teetering between dropping the class
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punishment
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I am still under the impression that the interactions required of us in the discussion space are too numerous.
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I LOVE LOVE LOVED that Bill Pelz commented on our posts! I felt like a celebrity walked into the room and his comments could be equated to getting an autograph.
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I have learned a lot this module, especially: NEVER give up (this has been especially resonant with me) Passion for teaching and learning go hand in hand, and are a must-have for online educators The best training tool for an online teacher is to be an online learner BE ORGANIZED MANAGE YOUR TIME Support your students and your faculty (whatever your role is) And last, but not least (yes, this was intentional) don’t procrastinate.
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half of the requirement for this class.
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There was absolutely nothing about my course learning activities that was learner-centered, or, one could argue, learning-centered! I was being extremely teacher-centered in my approach!
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Because of that, I need to embrace these tools, explore new ideas, and for goodness sake- think about the STUDENT.
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It took me almost two and a half hours just to set up a voicethread that didn’t crunch all of my text and pictures together! Or get the right size and color font. I realize that these are all things that cannot be explained to anyone, or if you did try and tell them, they wouldn’t understand how much work it is until they tried it themselves.
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I think that embedding a youtube video or loading a podcast are in my future and I can’t wait!
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I made all of my assignments turned in to me, privately,
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This week, as we are supposed to have the course “done done” I am doubting myself. Every time I log in to my course I change something, add wording, create new links to rubrics where there weren’t any, etc. It just seems like I’m never satisfied.
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So glad I'm not alone. I keep logging in as well, looking to change something. Over the past 3-4 days I've definitely made changes, but I'm getting to the point now that I'm wondering if I should just leave it alone. I'm the same way about large writing project...always looking to edit. Thinking it might be time for me to step back from the computer.
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I thought done, done, done is at the end...aren't we going to have peer feedback next module?
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I’ll have my master’s in December and I couldn’t be more proud.
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#1- I’m scared of the idea of real live students actually taking my course #2- I’m really disappointed that real live students will never take my course
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I'm glad you said this, because I've been thinking it for several weeks now. I really want a chance to teach it, but I'm afraid of getting a chance to teach it. I'm not a teacher by profession, so I think I have more fear than most that I won't be able to facilitate my course properly. For instance, how do I open modules, are grades recorded automatically or do I manually put them in, how do I get them to show for each individual student, etc. I've put so much time and effort into building this course, I want a chance to teach it, but having never taught at the college level, I don't know that I'll get the opportunity. I will still give it my best shot as soon as I graduate in December. If SUNY isn't interested, I'll try other avenues.
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"live students" when you do teach live students you will discover kinks you never saw...this semester I had a great activity that 18 of 19 students loved! The discussions were full of every presence. The I discovered that my student from China was so lost and overwhelmed. Now I am rethinking cultural sensitivity in my activities...how do I balance a activity that engages 99% of my students 110%, but looses one student because of a cultural difference...still thinking on this.
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feedback
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I don't know if I should have done this, but I actually have 2 evaluation/feedback areas. One is the generic resource right in Moodle. I tried to write my own questions, but when I "viewed" the forum, my questions were replaced with the generic questions. So, I created a document with my own questions and I am having students download the document into a word processor, add their answers and then post to a forum.
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o there will likely never be online courses at Mildred Elley.
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Can you teach it elsewhere? As we have learned in this class, online learning is up and coming. It might be worth looking into.
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Failures maybe because the facilitators did not "know" and "do" what "you" know...convince him to try your course as an experiment...because this is the future of education...This summer I taught one online course and had a student from China, several from the west coast, and only two within driving distance in a class of 20!
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ETAP 680 (research seminar).
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quality with the traditional classroom in the public eye?
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I think you're probably right, but I think it's turning a corner. At a time when institutions are scrambling for money, online learning costs them very little. They pay an instructor and that's about it. We don't need a classroom or any campus resources other than student access to the library for research if they need it.
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prettying up
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One thought I had, as I look forward to getting a PhD, is that theories come from practice which means that theories about online learning come from individuals creating courses, teaching courses, and collecting feedback from courses over and over and then after all of that work is finished, turning right around and working at analyzing the data, and attempting to answer research questions. In order to have credible research, the questions must be relevant, the measures must be valid and thorough, and the analyses of results must be comprehensive.
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Reflective Writing: I have to admit, at the beginning of the course I thought the blogging activities were just busy work. I viewed the assignments as busy work, and treated my entries as such. As time ticked on, I started getting into the blogs and realizing that it was my personal space in which I could reflect on my work on my course and my learning throughout the week/module. So much of life and learning in school is sort of thrown at you, and if you don’t take the time to intentionally deconstruct the events and make sense of them, then you’ll never grow and improve. I’d rather grow.
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If I don’t place intentional emphasis on something (like making it worth a portion of their grade) then I am sending a message that it’s not important.
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Communication in Online Courses: Strategies for Providing Feedback - 0 views
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Be prepared to use a variety of delivery systems for feedback in case the technological system fails
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Take note of students who don’t participate during the first session, and contact them individually after class. They may have technological difficulties
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Provide substantive critique, comment, and/or evaluation for work submitted by individual students or groups, referring to additional sources for supplementary information where appropriate.
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Thank students publicly for comments submitted to the Virtual Classroom showing insight or depth. This will serve to model the types of responses and critical thinking skills you expect from other participants as well as give positive reinforcement to the student who contributed the message.
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the instructor should recognize quality work and intervene as the work is being developed to steer students in the right direction
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Do not comment on every student posting. Much like in face-to-face class discussions let the conversation develop and give students a chance to participate before jumping in with in depth comments/feedback or analysis.
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Use your students' feedback regarding course content, relevancy, pace, delivery problems, and instructional concerns to improve your course for the next time you teach it.
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Reflections on Online Learning - 1 views
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Age problem, an overload of information to the point where in heavy doses it begins to resemble garbage is the problem of our day.
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How will I balance these issues? How can you have non-hierarchical education within the confines of traditional educational pedagogy especially in an online environment? I feel like I’m taking a big risk here with this topic.
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Not just another Edublogs.org weblog. :D
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So what does this mean for education? How is this different online? And why do I believe that I only understand the stick?
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Time to finish strong.
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he power or the perceived power of education and it’s threat even in relation to the most influential and powerful in all of the land.
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I still am holding on to Alex telling us to challenge our assumptions about online learning and what it means. I think that should spill over to everything if we really want to affect change in this world and in the field of education. What are we assuming? What can be changed? What seems like it’s either a precursor or indispensable even if this may not be the case at all?
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Understanding history and using it is cheating in a way. A good type of cheating. We can stand on the work of those before us and take the best or the most appropriate for our time. We can use a historical perspective to give a voice to the voiceless of history.
edumooc2011 day 3 - 0 views
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shared by alexandra m. pickett on 16 Jul 11
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Cell Phone Etiquette: 15 Rules To Follow (PICTURE) - 0 views
www.huffingtonpost.com/...e-etiquette-15-r_n_514927.html
cellphones etiquette cellphone cell phone cellphone-etiquette
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Kristen Della liked it
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ONLINE TEACHING AS A CATALYST FOR CLASSROOM-BASED INSTRUCTIONAL ... - 0 views
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ETAP640amp2011: how do you do it f2f? - 0 views
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the one who will determine your grade
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The teacher is not the sole source of a grade; the student is very much a part of the process.
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Hi Donna What I was implying is the students' view. After a whole semester of self-evaluation, peer evaluation, with me only grading one test worth 10% of their grade, a student thanked me for giving her an "A" I smiled and said "Did I give you an A or did you earn a A? She said "Ok I get it, I earned an A, but thanks anyway." To shift students' paradigm/perception of "the teacher" takes work!
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Hi Nicole, Thanks for the resource. I too have been thinking about my F2F these weeks also. I have a intro course up to 45 students...getting everyone to participate every class, even in small groups has been challenging. What I would like to do (but can't) is split the class in two,,,one day in class (while the other half is working online in discussion forums) and the other online (while the other group comes to class for a f2f.
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