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Barbara Lindsey

UC Berkeley orientation: UC Berkeley asks incoming students to say more than 'hello' - ... - 0 views

  • In addition to exploring their diverse backgrounds, students will discuss the language challenges graduates face as many work overseas, Hampton said. "They're going to be living in a multilingual context, and that's a really interesting thing for them to think about," he said.
  • The voice samples will be attached anonymously to an interactive world map so other participants can hear them, and each student will be matched through a voice recognition program with five others who have similar pronunciations, Johnson said.
  • With about 30% of incoming UC Berkeley students reporting that English was not their first language, exploring that linguistic diversity is a good way to help students feel comfortable at such a large school, faculty organizers said.
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  • This summer, UC Berkeley is asking new students to submit a less controversial part of themselves: Their voices and accents
  • One result will be an analysis of California accents, as researchers try to get beyond such stereotypes as the Surfer Dude, Valley Girl and Central Valley Farmer to study participants' vowel sounds, along with their locations, ethnicity and socioeconomic backgrounds.
  • After two years and perhaps again after four, students will be asked to make new recordings to determine whether being at UC homogenized their accents or pushed them into distinctive speech subgroups, Johnson said. (For example, he said, because of his Oklahoma upbringing, he pronounced "Don" and "dawn" identically in one of the experiment's exercises.)
  • Among those embracing the project was Chloe Hunt, 18, a freshman from Santa Barbara who said the voice map made her even more curious to meet students from many cultural backgrounds. "It made me think about who I'm going to be sitting next to in class," said Hunt, who learned Farsi from Iranian relatives.
  • Leah Grant, 41, who is transferring to UC Berkeley from Long Beach City College, said listening to the voice samples made her feel like part of the university already. The varying approaches also were amusing, she said.
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    fall 2011 syllabus
Chenwen Hong

YouTube Launches Auto-Captioning for Videos - 0 views

  • ouTube, Google, Stanford, Berkeley, and the California School for the Deaf (CSD) are about to speak on YouTube and accessibility.
  • Now the Google Speech Technology team is speaking about the challenges they faced to get auto-captioning operational. Their vision was to create accurate captions for all videos in all languages, but had to deal with huge vocabularies, background noise, poor recordings, accent variability, and distinguishing between song and speech.- Google’s approach is to deliver captions from the cloud, given them the ability to rapidly iterate and model at a large scale.
  • You can only caption your own videos — you can’t just caption someone else’s videos.
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  • You can see the full caption file with timestamps and even download them as a text document. You can also upload your own captions as its own track — useful if auto-captioning isn’t doing the job or to make edits to the auto-captioned text.
  • With auto-captioning, these people can simply use text-based search to find what they need.
    • Chenwen Hong
       
      This means auto-captioning works well as an index for videos. One of its strengths, particularly for us instructors, can be that it helps us effeciently locate relevant clips of videos. This function should also be helpful to our students because we can add notes into the clips at specific frames. Well, the downside is that one might misinterpret videos or misunderstand creators' intentions when using only parts of the videos to suit one's own purposes.
  • You can specify search only brings up videos with closed captioning (it shows the cc icon in search). In the past, when he was at MIT, he couldn’t understand lectures because he had no sign interpreter. Now he can use the captioning to watch lectures he missed.
  • Now students of the California School for the Deaf are speaking (sign language) on how they feel not excluded anymore from the major phenomenon of web video and are grateful to Google for building this technology.
Barbara Lindsey

UC Cybercampus?: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA - 0 views

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    As the University of California regents meet this week to grapple with the system's ongoing fiscal crisis, a proposal to create a degree-granting "cybercampus" is attracting attention. Proponents argue that an online campus could raise funds and increase access for underserved communities. But some faculty members fear the plan could undermine educational quality for little financial return.
Barbara Lindsey

C. M. Rubin: The Global Search for Education: More Technology, Please! - 0 views

  • One of the best examples I have seen of the flex model was in Morgan Hill, California. This is a district south of San Jose where about a third of its students are Hispanic and I believe over a third of its students are on free-and-reduced price lunch. The school is called the Silicon Valley Flex Academy - Grades 6 through 12. As you walk into the school there are a couple of huge open spaces on either side where every student has his/her own office. In this space, each student has his/her own computer. The students are encouraged to decorate their own space with things they like (in the same way an adult might decorate an office at work). There are break out classrooms around the perimeter of the building. Here teachers are getting the data on how the kids are doing. Teachers can pull students into these break-out classrooms in very small groups. The teacher is then able to focus on a student's individual issues. The teacher's job is totally different in this arrangement. The fascinating thing was how much ownership the students have over their learning. They all knew exactly what was expected of them the entire year. They knew exactly how they were doing at any point. Their job was to learn the material. If they could get the work done during the school day there was no homework. So it was up to the individual students to make those decisions.
  • The teachers I spoke to explained that they had been trained to do lesson planning, lectures to large groups of students and classroom management -- none of which they were now doing. They explained that the adjustment was difficult. Training has not been built into the formal teacher training system for programs like this, and few are really thinking about it at the moment. Now, the teacher is still doing teaching or tutoring when pulling students out into small groups for project-based work, but instead of this being determined by a pacing guide, this is now being determined by where the students are in their learning. What was so interesting was that in this model, teachers were able to do the tutoring and value enrichment work that teachers really like to do but don't always get time to do in a classroom. One of the challenges the teachers mentioned was staying on top of scheduling. How do you keep track when you have students at different places in the curriculum? Those were tough decisions for teachers to make and they were, as you say, learning on the job.
  • When students own their learning, they feel responsible for it and motivated to do it. What they also appreciated was that the teacher was no longer there to "punish them" or "grade them down". Instead the teacher was there to help them reach their goal. This is much more of an environment built around success and motivation versus failure.
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  • I also think the assessment system that we have in place in schools is a problem for this learning system going forward. Assessment needs to be based on where each individual child started and then grew to and finally ended up in a particular year, versus a snapshot once a year view of an entire school.
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    fall 2012 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

Are Schools Inhibiting 21st Century Learning? : April 2008 : THE Journal - 0 views

  • The results of this year's survey were unveiled in a Congressional briefing Tuesday morning sponsored by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard of California, an advocate of technology in education.
Barbara Lindsey

My School, Meet MySpace: Social Networking at School | Edutopia - 0 views

  • Months before the newly hired teachers at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) started their jobs, they began the consuming work of creating the high school of their dreams -- without meeting face to face. They articulated a vision, planned curriculum, designed assessment rubrics, debated discipline policies, and even hammered out daily schedules using the sort of networking tools -- messaging, file swapping, idea sharing, and blogging -- kids love on sites such as MySpace.
  • hen, weeks before the first day of school, the incoming students jumped onboard -- or, more precisely, onto the Science Leadership Academy Web site -- to meet, talk with their teachers, and share their hopes for their education. So began a conversation that still perks along 24/7 in SLA classrooms and cyberspace. It's a bold experiment to redefine learning spaces, the roles and relationships of teachers and students, and the mission of the modern high school.
  • When I hear people say it's our job to create the twenty-first-century workforce, it scares the hell out of me," says Chris Lehmann, SLA's founding principal. "Our job is to create twenty-first-century citizens. We need workers, yes, but we also need scholars, activists, parents -- compassionate, engaged people. We're not reinventing schools to create a new version of a trade school. We're reinventing schools to help kids be adaptable in a world that is changing at a blinding rate."
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  • It's the spirit of science rather than hardcore curriculum that permeates SLA. "In science education, inquiry-based learning is the foothold," Lehmann says. "We asked, 'What does it mean to build a school where everything is based on the core values of science: inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection?'"
  • It means the first-year curriculum is built around essential questions: Who am I? What influences my identity? How do I interact with my world? In addition to science, math, and engineering, core courses include African American history, Spanish, English, and a basic how-to class in technology that also covers Internet safety and the ethical use of information and software. Classes focus less on facts to be memorized and more on skills and knowledge for students to master independently and incorporate into their lives. Students rarely take tests; they write reflections and do "culminating" projects. Learning doesn't merely cross disciplines -- it shatters outdated departmental divisions. Recently, for instance, kids studied atomic weights in biochemistry (itself a homegrown interdisciplinary course), did mole calculations in algebra, and created Dalton models (diagrams that illustrate molecular structures) in art.
  • This is Dewey for the digital age, old-fashioned progressive education with a technological twist.
  • computers and networking are central to learning at, and shaping the culture of, SLA. "
  • he zest to experiment -- and the determination to use technology to run a school not better, but altogether differently -- began with Lehmann and the teachers last spring when they planned SLA online. Their use of Moodle, an open source course-management system, proved so easy and inspired such productive collaboration that Lehmann adopted it as the school's platform. It's rare to see a dog-eared textbook or pad of paper at SLA; everybody works on iBooks. Students do research on the Internet, post assignments on class Moodle sites, and share information through forums, chat, bookmarks, and new software they seem to discover every day.
  • Teachers continue to use Moodle to plan, dream, and learn, to log attendance and student performance, and to talk about everything -- from the student who shows up each morning without a winter coat to cool new software for tagging research sources. There's also a schoolwide forum called SLA Talk, a combination bulletin board, assembly, PA system, and rap session.
  • Web technology, of course, can do more than get people talking with those they see every day; people can communicate with anyone anywhere. Students at SLA are learning how to use social-networking tools to forge intellectual connections.
  • In October, Lehmann noticed that students were sorting themselves by race in the lunchroom and some clubs. He felt disturbed and started a passionate thread on self-segregation.
  • "Having the conversation changed the way kids looked at themselves," he says.
  • "What I like best about this school is the sense of community," says student Hannah Feldman. "You're not just here to learn, even though you do learn a lot. It's more like a second home."
  • As part of the study of memoirs, for example, Alexa Dunn's English class read Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas's account of growing up Iranian in the United States -- yes, the students do read books -- and talked with the author in California via Skype. The students also wrote their own memoirs and uploaded them to SLA's network for the teacher and class to read and edit. Then, digital arts teacher Marcie Hull showed the students GarageBand, which they used to turn their memoirs into podcasts. These they posted on the education social-networking site EduSpaces (formerly Elgg); they also posted blogs about the memoirs.
Barbara Lindsey

2010 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Open Content - 0 views

  • The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it.
  • As customizable educational content is made increasingly available for free over the Internet, students are learning not only the material, but also skills related to finding, evaluating, interpreting, and repurposing the resources they are studying in partnership with their teachers.
  • collective knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning and scholarly content,
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  • the notion of open content is to take advantage of the Internet as a global dissemination platform for collective knowledge and wisdom, and to design learning experiences that maximize the use of it.
  • The role of open content producers has evolved as well, away from the idea of authoritative repositories of content and towards the broader notion of content being both free and ubiquitous.
  • schools like Tufts University (and many others) now consider making their course materials available to the public a social responsibility.
  • Many believe that reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and a broad view of what constitutes scholarly publication are key challenges that institutions need to solve.
  • learning to find useful resources within a given discipline, assess the quality of content available, and repurpose them in support of a learning or research objective are in and of themselves valuable skills for any emerging scholar, and many adherents of open content list that aspect among the reasons they support the use of shareable materials.
  • Open content shifts the learning equation in a number of interesting ways; the most important is that its use promotes a set of skills that are critical in maintaining currency in any discipline — the ability to find, evaluate, and put new information to use.
  • Communities of practice and learning communities have formed around open content in a great many disciplines, and provide practitioners and independent learners alike an avenue for continuing education.
  • Art History. Smarthistory, an open educational resource dedicated to the study of art, seeks to replace traditional art history textbooks with an interactive, well-organized website. Search by time period, style, or artist (http://smarthistory.org).
  • American Literature before 1860 http://enh241.wetpaint.com Students in this course, held at Mesa Community College, contribute to the open course material as part of their research. MCC also features a number of lectures on YouTube (see http://www.youtube.com/user/mesacc#p/p).
  • Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/ The Open Learning Initiative offers instructor-led and self-paced courses; any instructor may teach with the materials, regardless of affiliation. In addition, the courses include student assessment and intelligent tutoring capability.
  • Connexions http://cnx.org Connexions offers small modules of information and encourages users to piece together these chunks to meet their individual needs.
  • eScholarship: University of California http://escholarship.org/about_escholarship.html eScholarship provides peer review and publishing for scholarly articles, books, and papers, using an open content model. The service also includes tools for dissemination and research.
  • MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu The Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes lectures and materials from most of its undergraduate and graduate courses online, where they are freely available for self-study.
  • Open.Michigan’s dScribe Project https://open.umich.edu/projects/oer.php The University of Michigan’s Open.Michigan initiative houses several open content projects. One, dScribe, is a student-centered approach to creating open content. Students work with faculty to select and vet resources, easing the staffing and cost burden of content creation while involving the students in developing materials for themselves and their peers.
  • Center for Social Media Publishes New Code of Best Practices in OCW http://criticalcommons.org/blog/content/center-for-social-media-publishes-new-code-of-best-practices-in-ocw (Critical Commons, 25 October 2009.) The advocacy group Critical Commons seeks to promote the use of media in open educational resources. Their Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare is a guide for content developers who want to include fair-use material in their offerings.
  • Flat World Knowledge: A Disruptive Business Model http://industry.bnet.com/media/10003790/flat-world-knowledge-a-disruptive-business-model/ (David Weir, BNET, 20 August 2009.) Flat World Knowledge is enjoying rapid growth, from 1,000 students in the spring of 2009 to 40,000 in the fall semester using their materials. The company’s business model pays a higher royalty percentage to textbook authors and charges students a great deal less than traditional publishers.
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