Sean is a personal trainer and nutritionist. I have learned more about food and nutrition, and people in that industry from Sean than anyone else. I have used Sean as my nutritionist.
I was charged with explaining my "innovative approach to open social networks for learning"
Access. In 1996, Sir John Daniel estimated we would need to create a major university every week to educate the 100 million students qualified to enter a university who have no place to go. Fifteen years later, universities have simply not kept pace with the staggering demand for college education
2007 Silent Epidemic study funded by the Gates Foundation, I had what my students would call (pardon their French) a WTF moment. Eighty-eight percent of high school dropouts have passing grades. Huh?
Nearly half say they are bored and classes are not interesting.
Technology doesn't help either. They find video lectures and Powerpoints boring, and they read less with e-textbooks than with traditional textbooks. These kids aren't failing out of school; they are simply disengaging.
What, then, engages this generation? Social media, for one. They spend 10-15 hours a week on Facebook
Open Social Learning. Imagine a Facebook where the point is to study together, not trade pictures and jokes. Imagine a World of Warcraft where students earn levels and points by helping each other learn. Not a video game that teaches physics; instead, let's create an educational experience that is social and game-like.
we built a site called OpenStudy , the first large-scale social network that enables students to connect, get help, study together, and earn social capital through game-like rewards.
It is a vibrant community of students and teachers, teenagers and adults, people from more than 150 countries engaged in a single activity: learning.
OpenStudy is built on three core ideas: open, peer-to-peer, and community of learning.
I chose one of Eudora Welty's short stories for my course, and then I found this clip. Very interesting background, students in my course will love it.
cultural anthropologist studying new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. My research right now focuses on digital media use in the US and portable technologies in Japan.
Fook and +Askeland (2007) explore the benefits of critical reflections. They point out that reflection is an intentional practice of exploring underlying assumptions in thought processes, for the purpose of achieving growth. They explain that this practice is useful for an individual to be able to understand their own thinking, and gain better insight into what drives their behaviors.
It has taken nearly 2 years for the administration on our campus to support the request of one of our faculty members to provide infrastructure and equipment to use Elluminate. Elluminate (http://www.elluminate.com) is a web based tool that provides opportunities for distance learners to stay in their location and participate in synchronous, real time lectures, seminars, or presentations with other members in a different location.
Hi Francis,
I too am guilty here, and this course has taught me the importance of redundancy. I beleive it will cut down on the many emails I get by students who "forget" what is expected.
Yes, very good point - and as I'm learning week after week, there are many technologies out there to help with meeting the objectives. What I've realized in the past 2 weeks or so is that I didn't have very clear objectives. Once I clarified those, I found it easier to begin to build my course and visualize the modules.
This includes the feedback I so diligently write on their assignments.
I agree that perhaps these populations aren't benefiting from the technology yet, but the potential is huge. Imagine being able to reach out to poorer communities via online learning. Urban schools have a really difficult time recruiting and retaining quality teachers. It's not unheard of for an uncertified teacher to teach in an urban school, because they are so desperate for teachers to man the classrooms. If some of the learning can happen online, or if they could offer blended classes, it could have real potential to raise graduation rates. Online learning is still fairly new in the grand scheme, but it is spreading like wildfire. More people will come on board, great minds will (have) come together for Best Practices, and the proof will be in the student outcomes.
Hi Francia,
Sorry for spelling your name wrong in last sticky note. What you are trying to achieve is a paradigm shift....it takes time, but it can happen
Diane
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.
hi mike! i think it is a risk, but i am open to you trying. frankly, i don't see how it can work, but if you are passionate about it and believe it can work and will show and prove that it can, i would support your choice and be very interested to see that.
Bookmarked a book in diigo that someone pdf. Teaching as a subversive activity. Wouldn't it be great if you created such a wonderful course that your students CHOOSE to continue learning without credit!
education is one of the most fundamentally revolutionary acts.
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.
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?
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.
In my work with other faculty members on teaching and learning, many issues arise. One that is discussed repeatedly is the concern that students focus too much on grades and not enough on learning. In part, the issue here is one of extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation.
For me, I’d say that I got about 1/3 of the value of HBS from the actual classroom learning, 1/3 from networking, and 1/3 from the alumni network (I didn’t bother doing any recruiting, since I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and didn’t want to waste my time interviewing for jobs I’d never accept).
For me, I’d say that I got about 1/3 of the value of HBS from the actual classroom learning, 1/3 from networking, and 1/3 from the alumni network (I didn’t bother doing any recruiting, since I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and didn’t want to waste my time
click the video above to play. The video shows a (brief) demonstration of that colors that different metals burn...beautiful...Relating this to teaching and learning: students (and teachers!) are much more engaged with proper and frequent use of attention-grabbing media. I am a visual person and I know that my classroom also has visual learners. I can describe things in text or verbally until I am blue in the face, but SEEING these things in photos or on videos is what sets it apart and commits them to memory. Above is a picture of sodium in its natural state as a metal...I try to emphasize this to my students since often the examples we use in class is sodium chloride, or table salt. A silver metal bonded to a noxious green gas combines to make table salt. That's a hard thing to imagine for anyone, so I show them using this resource. I LOVE webelements.
Service-learning is a pedagogy that links academic
study and civic engagement through thoughtfully organized service
that meets the needs of the community
Service learning courses provide rigorous and
enhanced academic learning by interconnecting community action
and critical reflection
Service learning courses provide relevant and
meaningful service by placing students in projects that are tailored
to address community and societal needs.
Service learning courses provide purposeful civic
learning by creating a learning environment where students can
acquire the knowledge, skills, and values to make an explicitly
direct contribution to themselves and their communities, both
local and global, through civic participation.
Course options ensure that no student is required
to participate in a service placement that creates a religious,
political, and/or moral conflict for the student.
One activity in my online course will be service learning. I called this activity Social Justice Project. I believe that part of online learning is to get our students away from the computer!
How do I know who is right (though this has not been the issue for me, the issue has been understanding) if I don't know what criteria they felt I missed.
This feedback is intended to help you improve your posts.
I know it took me some time to find myself around. Some of my activity problems was reflection of problems of "getting aroung" What was intuitive to some was not for me. I wonder if the difference of linear thinking (most adults) and global thinking (me).
I wonder if this statement can be translated to social (emotional), teacher (behavioral), and cognitive presence?
Experience is a way
in which the self relates or connects emotionally to the world. Experiencing
something involves a complex set of psychophysical processes: sensation, perception,
apperception, cognition, affection, and sometimes conation. Added to this,
is the interplay of psychosocial factors like expectations, attitudes, needs,
desires, etc.
sheer absences of structural orientation cues
For elearning to be successful, it needs to
be crafted for experience at all the above three levels
Psychologist Alice
Isen and her colleagues have shown that positive experiences are critical
to learning, curiosity, and creative thought.
She discovered that people
who felt good were more curious, better at learning, and were able to come
up with creative solutions (Isen, A. M. 1993). The scope of design therefore,
should extend beyond functionality to fulfill the need for experience.
a designer cannot control the development of expectations in the
learners' minds
The designer can only control the product
Creating
experience is the art of emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement with
the consumer.
dded to this, is the confusing maze of open and closed spaces and a gloomy and rugged floor to traverse while finding your way out of the confusion.
ease and intuitive
way of getting in, moving around and exiting are the experience factors.
How do we bridge this gap between layout and experience? Four possible guidelines,
which can help a designer ensure outcomes are experienced in an elearning
product, are:
Embrace experience as an outcome
Create a shared language
Narrow the gap from idea to outcome
Drive constituent parts towards total
experience
One needs to cultivate a method
of detachment by distancing oneself from the idea in order to evaluate its
validity.
contribution as creating spaces that evoke
desired experiences.
Establishing geography lets the viewer get
the bearings on the topography of the event.
In my f2f General Psychology class I plan on having students submit a draft of their paper, everyone exchange in class, and then together we go through the rubric. my self-regulation professor, Dr. Heidi Andrade suggested going through the rubric with student in class and having them use different colored pencils to underline sections in the paper that meet or do not meet specific rubric requirements.