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.
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2010 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Open Content - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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schools like Tufts University (and many others) now consider making their course materials available to the public a social responsibility.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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Connexions http://cnx.org Connexions offers small modules of information and encourages users to piece together these chunks to meet their individual needs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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2010 Horizon Report » Electronic Books - 0 views
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Readers of electronic books may be reading more, as well. Kindle owners, according to Amazon, buy three times as many books as they did before they had Kindles; Sony reports that Reader owners download about eight books per month ⎯ as compared to fewer than seven books per year purchased by the average American book buyer in 2008, according to a New York Times article.
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The convenience of having an entire library of books, magazines, and newspapers — each remembering exactly where you left off the last time you looked at them — and all in a single, small device is one of the most compelling aspects driving electronic reader sales.
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a larger format version of the device expressly built for academic texts, newspapers, and journals, is being piloted at Arizona State University, Ball State University, Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Princeton, Reed College, Syracuse University, and the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Northwest Missouri State University and Penn State have embarked on pilots using the Sony Reader. Johns Hopkins is piloting the enTourage eDGe, which combines the functions of an e-reader, a netbook, a notepad, and an audio/video recorder and player in one handheld device.
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In a pilot program, Seton Hall University’s Teaching, Learning & Technology Center found that students appreciated the ability to store and review a semester’s worth of material in electronic form.
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2010 Horizon Report » Critical Challenges - 0 views
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In a 2007 report, the American Association of Colleges and Universities recommended strongly that emerging technologies be employed by students in order for them to gain experience in “research, experimentation, problem-based learning, and other forms of creative work,” particularly in their chosen fields of study.
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New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind. Citation-based metrics, to pick one example, are hard to apply to research based in social media. New forms of peer review and approval, such as reader ratings, inclusion in and mention by influential blogs, tagging, incoming links, and retweeting, are arising from the natural actions of the global community of educators, with increasingly relevant and interesting results. These forms of scholarly corroboration are not yet well understood by mainstream faculty and academic decision makers, creating a gap between what is possible and what is acceptable.
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despite the widespread agreement on its importance, training in digital literacy skills and techniques is rare in teacher education programs. In higher education, formal training is virtually non-existent.
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This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking, and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral.
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FRONTLINE: digital nation: watch the full program | PBS - 0 views
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
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Being told that a bunch of people are addicted is not all that helpful. Even worse is equating lots of time in and of itself to addiction. Why are they addicted? All for the same reasons? What else is going in their lives and cultures? What skills are they picking up if any? Is their massive time-on-task leading to anything or not? What percentage of players are addicted in any harmful sense?
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There is also an important issue missed by the show and that is the question of how people from different social and economic groups use and benefit (or not) from digital media. I guess it is not surprising that American TV does not much deal with class issues, but there is little doubt that digital media are leveraged by some families to great benefit for their children in school as part of a larger learning and literacy ecology that includes digital media and print. Other families use digital media in quite different ways. Indeed, there are many different uses with many different outcomes--my simple dichotomy really will not do, but it raises the issue of equity and outcomes for diverse people in our society (and, indeed, world).
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Books can make people smarter or dumber--they can expose them to the world or hide reality from them. So any real understanding of them would have to be nuanced and contextual. For books we have long learned to ignore their power for bad. For digital media we are predisposed--at least if we are Baby Boomers--to look for the dangers.
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The film is indeed thought provoking. Its power is in being by and large an "etic" (outside) view of other people's new cultures. It is less good at giving a real feel for what those new cultures and their concomitant practices mean to young people today from the inside.
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What works for me about the website is that it is multi-vocal, allowing many points of view to be expressed on more or less equal footing, encouraging reflection as people make their own decisions about what to watch and how to juxtapose the pieces. I doubt any two readers took the same path through this material or any two teachers used the resources the website provides in precisely the same ways.
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I frankly found the documentary itself mind-numbing and relentless. It rarely trusts the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what they are seeing and it deploys much of the material in ways which point towards a much less nuanced conclusion than any of the participants in the conversation might have advocated.
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Confessions of a Podcast Junkie: A Student Perspective (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 3 views
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My experience in creating podcasts came through much nobler endeavors. It began with a research project in the working-class neighborhoods of North Belfast and a frustrated conversation over pints in a pub. I was on a research high after an interview with two women of very different political backgrounds. They were friends, brought together by the work of a local nonprofit, and their mutual admiration shone from the lightning-fast banter that they tossed back and forth throughout the interview. It was clear to me that they were a perfect example of a friendship from different sides of the political divide. But my friend at the pub just couldn't get it. He suggested that their friendship might be contrived, a mere show for my benefit, or that if real, it didn't mean as much as I thought. Exasperated, I pulled out my recorder and played the conversation back to him. As their Belfast accents filled up our corner booth, I could see his posture slacken and the battle turn my way. In that moment, I decided that only a podcast could finish telling my story. Over the next months, armed with just an MP3 player and some freeware suggested by a friend, I worked to piece together the story of North Belfast through interviews, conversations, and the sounds of the streets. The result was crude, elementary, and slightly difficult to listen to. But I was hooked.
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In fact, the iPod topped the list of the most "in" things on campus in 2006, according to Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study.
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I don't have any of them, but after studying and teaching in an American university , I feel it is one of the important things that I have to own!!
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I have a mp3 player, not an iPod and, anyway, I do not see why iPods are so popular...
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Mine doesn't really work since I put it in the laundry. But I never used it much anyway because it's not compatible with .flac files.
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"The good thing was that you could listen to a section over and over again if you wanted to review it," Clemen says. "There were a few podcasts that I had to review a couple of times. I could write out what he was saying and listen to what he was saying again." Reviewing came in handy, they all say, especially during project or exam times. "[With the podcasts], I've got more material to go back to if I wanted to review that module," Clemen says. "Whereas with the rest of the material, I just have some PowerPoint and my own notes."
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The trick, students say, is to make sure that there is something to gain by attending class and downloading the lecture.
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the material has to be relevant to the rest of the course. Otherwise, it's just a cool technology to have." Material should have a clear connection to the actual course, making a seamless transition between face time and the online realm.
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"There aren't any time constraints. Your podcast doesn't have to be an exact amount of time. You have carte blanche to change the format and grow your show." He also helps capture audio from guest speakers so that the programs can be
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n to the guest lectures while on the bus, at the gym, or in their dorm rooms. Still, Stein never felt the urge to skip class. "It was nice to know that if you missed class, you could record the lectures," she says. "But the iPod didn't encourage you to miss class. There's not a chalkboard that you can see or problems that you can see worked out. I think more people show up in a [podcasting] course because it encourages more interaction."
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"It's much better than writing a paper. It's more interesting, much more fun, and much more creative. You get a lot of time to work on it, and it's more collaborative because you're working with other people. You're creating the performance as you go and then continuously working on it." Creating a podcast didn't mean less work, he says.
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This seems to go on the idea of trying to make one's class accessible to everyone. So with podcasts students with strong oral skills might excell.
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Still, we don't want students to end up with poor writing skills. So I guess with the help of other uses of technolog like wikis we can make writing papers more fun and help stdents improve that as well.
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Though her goal was to increase learning for her peers in the anatomy course, she found that creating the material was a boon to her own learning. "As a student creating the podcasts, I had the chance to learn a lot more than I would have taking a course," she says. "It's about learning how to teach the material and how to make a narration out of it. You have this intimate knowledge of the material, and now you know how to show the different sides of an issue."
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Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject.
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I don't want [the podcasts] to overlap with lectures too much; I still want people to go to the lecture. This is a very relaxed way to get the information to them. They can do it on their own time and download it whenever."
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Though the podcasts arre a great idea for reviewing materials and catching up on things you missed in a class, still they will result in having less and less face-to-face interaction which is still needed especially when learning languages. I guess students will be tempted to miss classes more and more , even though the article suggested that using podcasts will encourage them not to do so!!
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Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—though it was now slightly rougher for the wear—I asked students at colleges and universities across North America about their iPod and MP3 use, their familiarity with podcasting, and just how they saw podcasting as part of the classroom.
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Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—th
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"Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject."
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The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education -- Publications --... - 0 views
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Common instructional activities include comparison-contrast analysis, deconstruction (close analysis) of the form and content of a message, illustration of key points, and examination of the historical, economic, political, or social contexts in which a particular message was produced and is received.
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These materials may include samples of contemporary mass media and popular culture as well as older media texts that provide historical or cultural context.
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Educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be able to share effective examples of teaching about media and meaning with one another, including lessons and resource materials
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Students include excerpts from copyrighted material in their own creative work for many purposes, including for comment and criticism, for illustration, to stimulate public discussion, or in incidental or accidental ways (for example, when they make a video capturing a scene from everyday life where copyrighted music is playing).
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Because media literacy education cannot thrive unless learners themselves have the opportunity to learn about how media functions at the most practical level, educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be free to enable learners to incorporate, modify, and re-present existing media objects in their own classroom work. Media production can foster and deepen awareness of the constructed nature of all media, one of the key concepts of media literacy. The basis for fair use here is embedded in good pedagogy.
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Students who are expected to behave responsibly as media creators and who are encouraged to reach other people outside the classroom with their work learn most deeply.
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In some cases, widespread distribution of students’ work (via the Internet, for example) is appropriate. If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existing media content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wide audiences under the doctrine of fair use.
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educators should take the opportunity to model the real-world permissions process, with explicit emphasis not only on how that process works, but also on how it affects media making.
Part 2: Gadget ownership and wireless connectivity | Pew Internet & American Life Project - 0 views
Teens and Mobile Phones Over the Past Five Years: Pew Internet Looks Back | Pew Interne... - 0 views
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Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE - 0 views
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Net Gen students are facile at multitasking
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Workers anticipated having a single profession for the duration of their working lives. Education was based on a factory-like, "one size fits all" model. Talent was developed by weeding out those who could not do well in a monochromatic learning environment.
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Knowing now means using a well-organized set of facts to find new information and to solve novel problems. In 1900, learning consisted largely of memorization; today it relies chiefly on understanding.
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learners construct knowledge by understanding new information building on their current understanding and expertise. Constructivism contradicts the idea that learning is the transmission of content to a passive receiver. Instead, it views learning as an active process, always based on the learner's current understanding or intellectual paradigm. Knowledge is constructed by assimilating new information into the learner's knowledge paradigm. A learner does not come to a classroom or a course Web site with a mind that is a tabula rasa, a blank slate. Each learner arrives at a learning "site" with some preexisting level of understanding.
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Learning science research also highlights the importance of learner engagement, or as the American Psychological Association describes it, intentional learning.1 This means that learners must have a "metaperspective" from which to view and assess their own learning, which is often referred to as metacognition.2 An active learning environment provides the opportunity to assess one's own learning, enabling learners to make decisions about the course, as well as reflect on and assess their progress. In the past, the measure of learning was the final grade (a summative measure). But a final grade is merely a measure of the student's performance on tests. It does not measure the learning that did—or did not—take place. To encourage learning, summative testing or assessments must be combined with formative assessments. Formative assessment is not directly associated with the final grade; it helps learners understand their learning and make decisions about next steps based on that understanding.
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research indicating that learning is encouraged when it includes social components such as debate or direct engagement with peers and experts. Learning is strengthened through social interactions, interpersonal relations, and communication with others.
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Research indicates that learners need to be active with respect to their own learning process and assessment. Net Gen students' goal and achievement orientation comes into play here: that achievement focus can be directed toward quizzes and exercises that assist learners in evaluating their progress toward learning goals.
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Obviously not all forms of learning must be social or team-based. In a variety of learning contexts, individual work is important. It may well be that Net Gen students' strengths are also their weaknesses. The expectation for fast-paced, rapidly shifting interaction coupled with a relatively short attention span may be counterproductive in many learning contexts. Repetition and steady, patient practice—key to some forms of mastery—may prove difficult for Net Gen students. Designing courses for them necessitates balancing these strengths and weaknesses.
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We should not neglect the informal for the formal, or assume that Net Gen students somehow will figure out the virtual space on their own. We should connect what happens in the classroom with what happens in informal and virtual spaces.
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Simply installing wireless access points and fresh carpeting isn't enough if done in isolation; such improvements pay real dividends only if they are in concert with the institution's overall teaching and learning objectives. It is the vision that generates the design principles that will, in turn, be used to make key decisions about how learning spaces are configured.
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The vision and design principles should emphasize the options students have as active participants in the learning process. Design principles should include terms such as analyze, create, criticize, debate, present, and classify—all directed at what the space enables the students to do. For example, students should be able to present materials to the class. Outside class, they should have access to applications and materials that directly support analysis of data, text, and other media. Forums for discussion and critical debate, both real and virtual, are key to encouraging learning and will be looked for by Net Gen students.
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Learning spaces should accommodate the use of as many kinds of materials as possible and enable the display of and access to those materials by all participants. Learning space needs to provide the participants—instructors and students alike—with interactive tools that enable exploration, probing, and examination. This might include a robust set of applications installed on the computer that controls the room's displays, as well as a set of communication tools. Since the process of examination and debate leads to discovery and the construction of new knowledge, it could be important to equip spaces with devices that can capture classroom discussion and debate, which can be distributed to all participants for future reference and study.
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This lecture hall is of relatively recent vintage; its seats and paired tables make it much easier to deploy and use her "tools," which include printouts of the day's reading, as well as a small laptop computer. Her fellow students are doing likewise. Each of them is using some device to access the course's Web site—some with laptops, others with tablet computers, still others with handheld computers. Using wireless connections, they all access the course's Web site and navigate to the site's "voting" page.
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a "magic wand," a radio-frequency controller that enables her to operate her computer—as well as many of the classroom's functions—wirelessly, from any point in the room. She can capture anything she writes on the blackboard and make it available to her students on the course Web site. Freed from needing to take extensive notes, the students are able to participate more fully in the class discussion. Finally, the professor is carrying a small recorder that captures her lecture, digitizes the audio, and uploads it to the course Web site for the students to review when they prepare for finals.
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Sandra launches the classroom's screen sharing application. Within a few seconds, her computer's screen is projected on the room's main screen. The class discussion focuses on this diagram, and the professor, using a virtual pencil, is able to make notes on the diagram. The diagram and notes are captured and placed on the class Web site for review.
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Soon the debate gets stuck; the students can't resolve the issue. The professor goes to the podium, types briefly, and then asks the students to go to a URL to see a question and to choose the answer they feel is correct. The students access the Web page from laptops, handhelds, or wireless IP-based phones. In two minutes they have completed the poll and submitted their responses. The results are quickly tabulated and displayed. The wide diversity of opinion surprises everyone. The professor reframes the issue, without giving the answer, and the students continue to discuss it. She repeats the poll; this time there is more agreement among the students, enabling her to move the discussion forward.
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She goes to the podium computer and clicks on a few links, and soon a videoconferencing session is displayed on the right-hand screen. She has arranged to have a colleague of hers "drop in" on the class to discuss a point that is in the colleague's particular area of expertise. The class has a conversation with the expert, who is at large research institution more than 500 miles away. Students listen to the expert's comments and are able to pose questions using one of the three cordless microphones available to the class. On the left-hand screen, the visiting professor shows some images and charts that help explain the concepts under discussion.
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the other students in her class have signed up for most of the slots, conferring with friends using chat programs to ensure that they sign up for the same lab slots.
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The discussion pocket is the college's term for a small, curved space with a table and bench to accommodate a meeting of four or five people. Found outside the newer classrooms, they are handy for informal, spontaneous discussions. Sandra's group moves into the pocket and for the next 15 minutes continue their "spill over" discussion of the class.
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hey are able to have an audio chat; Sandra's friend is in her dorm room, and Sandra is in a remote corner of the library where conversation will not disturb others. As their discussion progresses, they go to the course's Web site and launch the virtual whiteboard to diagram some concepts. They develop a conceptual diagram—drawing, erasing, and revising it until they agree the diagram is correct. They both download a copy. Sandra volunteers to work on polishing the diagram and will leave a copy of the final diagram in her share folder in her online portfolio "locker
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The underlying theme remains the same, however: cultivating learning practices consistent with learning theory and aligned with the habits and expectations of Net Gen students
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For most higher education institutions, the lecture hall will not disappear; the challenge is to develop a new generation of lecture hall, one that enables Net Gen students and faculty to engage in enlivened, more interactive experiences. If the lecture hall is integrated with other spaces—physically as well as virtually—it will enable participants to sustain the momentum from the class session into other learning contexts. The goal is not to do away with the traditional classroom, but rather to reinvent and to integrate it with the other learning spaces, moving toward a single learning environment.
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Learning theory is central to any consideration of learning spaces; colleges and universities cannot afford to invest in "fads" tailored to the Net Gen student that might not meet the needs of the next generation.
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For example, start with the Net Gen students' focus on goals and achievement. That achievement orientation ties to learning theory's emphasis on metacognition, where learners assess their progress and make active decisions to achieve learning goals. Learning space design could support this by providing contact with people who can provide feedback: tutors, consultants, and faculty. This could, in turn, be supported in the IT environment by making formative self-tests available, as well as an online portfolio, which would afford students the opportunity to assess their overall academic progress.
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As institutions create an anywhere, anytime IT infrastructure, opportunities arise to tear down silos and replace them with a more ubiquitous learning environment. Using laptops and other networked devices, students and faculty are increasingly able to carry their entire working environment with them. To capitalize on this, campus organizations must work collaboratively to create a more integrated work environment for the students and faculty, one that better serves the mobile Net Gen students as well as a faculty faced with the initial influx of these students into their ranks
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One of the key variables is the institution itself. Learning spaces are institutional in scope—their implementation involves the institution's culture, tradition, and mission.
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The starting point for rethinking learning spaces to support Net Gen students begins with an underlying vision for the learning activities these spaces should support. This vision should be informed by learning theory, as well as by recognition of the characteristics of the students and faculty who use these spaces.
The Fate of the Semantic Web | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project - 0 views
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How Social Media is Changing Government Agencies - 0 views
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Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Twitter Earthquake Detector (@USGSTed) is a prototype that gathers real-time Twitter updates during seismic activities faster than scientific equipment can be tapped for more precise measurements and alerts. It examines earthquakes at an anecdotal level, and complements scientific analysis, according to the project’s overseer, Paul Earle.
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At the most basic level, social media is about community building. Government agencies have adopted this mindset to varying degrees as a way to foster trust and dialogue with people. “It is truly a national town hall that has never been attempted during a disaster,” said Commander James Hoeft of the U.S. Navy, who oversees the cleanup effort’s social media team.
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Language Log » What bilinguals tell us about Mind and Brain - 0 views
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It's a darn shame, in my opinion, that the AAAS doesn't put videos of these symposiums on the web, along the lines of TED lectures and the like. If they did that, I feel that many of the presentations would deserve (and get) tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. I've made this suggestion to several people within AAAS, but since the cultural conservatism of American intellectuals is perhaps rivaled only by that of the Saudi religious authorities, I suspect that a few decades will pass before any such thing happens.
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danah boyd | apophenia » "Real Names" Policies Are an Abuse of Power - 0 views
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The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. T
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what many folks failed to notice is that countless black and Latino youth signed up to Facebook using handles. Most people don’t notice what black and Latino youth do online. Likewise, people from outside of the US started signing up to Facebook and using alternate names. Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers. Real names are by no means universal on Facebook, but it’s the importance of real names is a myth that Facebook likes to shill out. And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.
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If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously. Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name. Quite the opposite; many people are far LESS safe when they are identifiable. And those who are least safe are often those who are most vulnerable.
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Likewise, the issue of reputation must be turned on its head when thinking about marginalized people. Folks point to the issue of people using pseudonyms to obscure their identity and, in theory, “protect” their reputation.
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The assumption baked into this is that the observer is qualified to actually assess someone’s reputation. All too often, and especially with marginalized people, the observer takes someone out of context and judges them inappropriately based on what they get online.
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There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.
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How to Save the Traditional University, From the Inside Out - Commentary - The Chronicl... - 1 views
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They serve as conservators and promulgators of our cultural memories
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The value of what happens on a campus is hard to quantify, but it can be life-changing. That's true for most of us who have chosen to work in higher education, as it is for many former students who pursued work in "the real world."
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No one has created a better mechanism for discovery, memory, and mentoring than the one devised by innovative American academics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Undergraduate students who prepare for face-to-face classes via online lectures, problem sets, and discussion boards can take Socratic discovery to levels like those of the best graduate business and law schools.
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Online degrees are steadily getting better, and the cost of providing them is a small fraction of what traditional institutions spend per graduate. Faced with an either-or choice, many young college students will follow the lead of adult learners: They'll take the affordable online option over the socially preferable but financially inaccessible traditional college experience.
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In addition to adopting online learning as what we call a sustaining innovation, avoiding disruption will require incumbent institutions to effectively change their DNA. Most will need to become more focused on undergraduate students, cutting back on graduate programs that serve relatively few students while consuming much faculty time and generating little of the prestige hoped for when they were created. Programmatic offerings need to be more focused: Some majors should be dropped, and many should be shortened, making it more feasible for students to complete a degree in four years. The number of departments and centers at most institutions needs strategic shrinking.
The social media landscape | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project - 0 views
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Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn: Scientific American - 0 views
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The team found that students remembered the pairs much better when they first tried to retrieve the answer before it was shown to them. In a way this pretesting effect is counterintuitive:
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Participants were tested on pairs of "weak associates," words that are loosely related such as star-night or factory-plant. (If students are given the first word and asked to generate an associate, the probability of generating the target word is only 5 percent.) In the pretest condition, students were given the first word of the pair (star- ???) and told to try to generate the second member that they would have to later remember.
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Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.
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This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall. Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own.
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Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.
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