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In reality, what most teachers and students seem to lose sight of is the fact that ‘knowledge of the grammatical system of a language [grammatical competence] has to be complemented by understanding (sic) of culture-specific meanings [communicative or rather cultural competence]’ (Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 4).

Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them. (Kramsch, 1993: 1)

According to them, the teaching of culture has the following goals and is of and in itself a means of accomplishing them: To help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people exhibit culturally-conditioned behaviours. To help students to develop an understanding that social variables such as age, sex, social class, and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave. To help students to become more aware of conventional behaviour in common situations in the target culture. To help students to increase their awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in the target language. To help students to develop the ability to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture, in terms of supporting evidence. To help students to develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture. To stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people.

the communicative approach can leave students in suspense as to the outcome of a class exercise, which will vary according to their reactions and responses.

Students' motivation to learn comes from their desire to communicate in meaningful ways about meaningful topics.

Most likely they have an opinion of the topic, and a class discussion could follow, in the target language, about their experiences and viewpoints.

there is a valuable place for them. If results inform instruction and tell the teacher that a student does not have basic skills in some area deemed essential, isn't that important to know for intervention to be provided? The era of "passing the buck" is gone.

We have misused and abused standardized tests to a point where we've lost site of the purpose of testing.

Textbooks, curricula, and our educational system itself are the products of a mechanistic past.  School knowledge is pre-determined by a centralized authority, and delivered in a linear format to a mass audience. The system is standardized, mass produced, scheduled, etc. In the classroom, the emphasis has been on teaching - it is expected that the learning will simply follow. The act of teaching, then, is seen as transfering information in a controlled sequence, a process that eliminates context 

If there is a metpaphor for learning in the natural environment it may be the network rather than the line: our neural networks 

Age of Networks,

The professor is the central figure, the "sage on the stage

transmittal model, assumes that the student's brain is like an empty container into which the professor pours knowledge

Rather, knowledge is a state of under- standing and can only exist in the mind of the individual knower; as such, knowledge must be constructed--or re- constructed--by each individual knower through the process of trying to make sense of new information in terms of what that individual already knows

I am inspired to construct a customized curriculum unit combining years of teaching experience with research studies based in theories of philosophy of learning, educational psychology, and cognitive psychology that is intended to help students become self-regulated learners. Educational research lends relevant information useful to understanding why our middle school students show such a decline in performance and motivation, and how we can fix it.

This allows us to examine changes in difficulty and identify current strengths and weakness. Most students are pleased to see how well they can perform on both tests, even if their results on the grade-level test were below passing.

How do participants plan, implement and reflect upon their learning goals within Change MOOC?What strategies do they use to self-regulate their learning?What tools do they use to self-regulate their learning? How do participants draw upon collective knowledge – people and other environmental resources – when planning, implementing and reflecting upon their learning goals within Change MOOC? What are the environmental factors, in particular those related to the coherence of the information space and structure of the MOOC, that constrain or enable SRL? What are the similarities and differences in the use of SRL strategies between learners who have diverse self-regulatory profiles? For example, do learners who score higher on self-regulatory skill measures use significantly different goal planning, implementation and reflection strategies than participants who score lower on the SRL measures?

This may sound a little over the top, but a CareerBuilder.com survey found that 45 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates (more than double from the year before). Industries that specialize in technology and sensitive information are most likely to screen job candidates via social networking sites or online search engines. If you’re indiscreet on Facebook, who’s to say you can hold your tongue about Top-Secret government programs?

The Authentic Assessment Toolbox site is a tutorial for learning all about authentic assessment. It is presented with hypertext and features creating authentic tasks, rubrics and standards for measuring and improving student learning. What is authentic assessment? Why do we need it? How do you do it? Answers to these questions as well as information on Standards, Rubrics, Portfolios, and Examples can be found here. Educators at all levels will find this site useful.

Perhaps there’s a nicer way to put it. “The baby boomers seem to see technology as information and communication,” said Prof. Michael Bugeja, director of the journalism school at Iowa State University and the author of “Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.” “Their offspring and the emerging generation seem to see the same devices as entertainment and socializing.”

The fact is, we’re not here to entertain. We’re here to stimulate the life of the mind.”

Requirements: You need at least 1 peer to say that you consistently write informative, engaging and well presented blog posts while explain clearly and concisely concepts to various audiences.

One study explicitly examined the quality of the discourse environment in an online literacy course at the graduate level in a teacher education program (Many, Howrey, Race, Pottinger-bird, & Stern, 2001). The authors noted that with deliberate scaffolding by the instructor and teacher-leaders, students developed a strong support community, provided mentoring and advice, and collaborated with colleagues. In addition, research has focused specifically on the nature of scaffolding that occurred in an online reading assessment course (Many, Bates, & Coleman, 2002). In that study, bulletin board postings included support from both the instructor and the class members and focused on the use of technology; clarification of assignments; strategies for learning online; understanding, assessing, and teaching literacy concepts; and understanding general concepts in education. Online scaffolding processes included modeling, supplying information, clarifying, assisting, questioning, prompting, focusing attention, encouraging self-monitoring, and labeling/affirming.

Instructional scaffolding of course content in online conversations. Instructional scaffolding took place in the highly individualized and elaborative e-mail feedback given by the instructor for all course assignments. An analysis of all such correspondence between the instructor and the members of the focus group revealed the following four categories related to scaffolding: Affirming Probing Providing explicit instruction Clarifying

A massive open online course (MOOC) is a potential byproduct of open teaching and learnin

Although courses are under pressure in the "unbundling" or fragmentation of information in general, the learning process requires coherence in content and conversations. Learners need some sense of what they are choosing to do, a sense of eventedness.5 Even in traditional courses, learners must engage in a process of forming coherent views of a topic.

The community-as-curriculum model invert