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Barbara Lindsey

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

www.edutopia.org/my-school-meet-myspace

21stcentury critical pedagogy education sla technology web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Jul 08 - Cached
  • 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."
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 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

Major New Study Shatter Stereotypes About Teens and Video Games - MacArthur Foundation - 0 views

www.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lkLXJ8MQKrH&b=4192109&content_id={CF9B933A-8261-4FE5-B9AD-AD751CDEEFC6}&notoc=1&tr=y&auid=4041075

civic gaming macarthur pewresearch social teens

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 08 - Cached
  • gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.
  • 99% of boys say they are gamers and 94% of girls report that they play games.
  • A typical teen plays at least five different categories of games and 40% of them play eight or more different game types.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 76% of gaming teens play games with others at least some of the time. 82% play games alone at least occasionally, though 71% of this group also plays games with others. 65% of gaming teens play with others in the same room.
  • 76% of youth report helping others while gaming. 44% report playing games where they learn about a problem in society.
  • 12-14 year olds are equally as likely to play Mature and Adults Only rated games as their 15-17 year old counterparts.
  • “Gaming is a ubiquitous part of life for both boys and girls. For most teens, gaming runs the spectrum from blow-‘em-up mayhem to building communities; from cute-and-simple to complex; from brief private sessions to hours’ long interactions with masses of others.”
  • A focus of the survey was the relationship between gaming and civic experiences among teens. The goal was to test concerns that gaming might be prompting teens to withdraw from their communities. It turns out there is clear evidence that gaming is not just an entertaining diversion for many teens; gaming can be tied to civic and political engagement. Indeed, youth have many experiences playing games that mirror aspects of civic and political life, such as thinking about moral and ethical issues and making decisions about city and/or community affairs. Not only do many teens help others or learn about a problem in society during their game playing, they also encounter other social and civic experiences:
  • Moreover, the survey indicates that youth who have these kinds of civic gaming experiences are more likely to be civically engaged in the offline world. They are more likely than others are to go online to get information about current events, to try to persuade others how to vote in an election, to say they are committed to civic participation, and to raise money for charity.
  • Youth, parents, teachers, and others who work with youth should know about the wide diversity of video games – so they can take full advantage of games and their civic potential.”
  • The study also found that these civic gaming experiences occurred equally among all kinds of game players regardless of family income, race, and ethnicity. These data stand in contrast to teens’ experiences in schools and others community situations, where white and higher-income youth typically have more opportunities for civic development.
  • “This study offers us a glimpse into the potential of these new tools to foster learning and civic engagement, yet the findings about mature content suggest that parents and other adults need to be involved in young people’s game play, helping to realize the potential benefits while moderating unintended consequences. We see these results as the beginning of an important discussion about the role of digital media in learning, community, and citizenship in the 21st century.”
  • virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.
  • A typical teen plays at least five different categories of games and 40% of them play eight or more different game types.
  • 76% of youth report helping others while gaming. 44% report playing games where they learn about a problem in society.
  • gaming can be tied to civic and political engagement. Indeed, youth have many experiences playing games that mirror aspects of civic and political life, such as thinking about moral and ethical issues and making decisions about city and/or community affairs. Not only do many teens help others or learn about a problem in society during their game playing, they also encounter other social and civic experiences:
  • “Games that simulate aspects of civic and political life may well promote civic skills and civic engagement. Youth, parents, teachers, and others who work with youth should know about the wide diversity of video games – so they can take full advantage of games and their civic potential.”
  • This study offers us a glimpse into the potential of these new tools to foster learning and civic engagement, yet the findings about mature content suggest that parents and other adults need to be involved in young people’s game play, helping to realize the potential benefits while moderating unintended consequences. We see these results as the beginning of an important discussion about the role of digital media in learning, community, and citizenship in the 21st century.”
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 08
     
    Game playing is universal, diverse, often involves social interaction, and can cultivate teen civic engagement
Barbara Lindsey

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...45823

collaboration educause learning2.0 pedagogy beyondwebct

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jul 08 - Cached
  • But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become “spikier”: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.2
  • various initiatives launched over the past few years have created a series of building blocks that could provide the means for transforming the ways in which we provide education and support learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by the growth and evolution of the Internet, which has created a global “platform” that has vastly expanded access to all sorts of resources, including formal and informal educational materials. The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.
  • the most visible impact of the Internet on education to date has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them. The movement began in 2001 when the William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which today provides open access to undergraduate- and graduate-level materials and modules from more than 1,700 courses (covering virtually all of MIT’s curriculum). MIT’s initiative has inspired hundreds of other colleges and universities in the United States and abroad to join the movement and contribute their own open educational resources.4 The Internet has also been used to provide students with direct access to high-quality (and therefore scarce and expensive) tools like telescopes, scanning electron microscopes, and supercomputer simulation models, allowing students to engage personally in research.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
  • This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated. This perspective also helps to explain the effectiveness of study groups. Students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding (one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others).
  • This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
  • ecoming a trusted contributor to Wikipedia involves a process of legitimate peripheral participation that is similar to the process in open source software communities. Any reader can modify the text of an entry or contribute new entries. But only more experienced and more trusted individuals are invited to become “administrators” who have access to higher-level editing tools.8
  • by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.
  • But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field.
  • Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice.
  • Another interesting experiment in Second Life was the Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School fall 2006 course called “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion.” The course was offered at three levels of participation. First, students enrolled in Harvard Law School were able to attend the class in person. Second, non–law school students could enroll in the class through the Harvard Extension School and could attend lectures, participate in discussions, and interact with faculty members during their office hours within Second Life. And at the third level, any participant in Second Life could review the lectures and other course materials online at no cost. This experiment suggests one way that the social life of Internet-based virtual education can coexist with and extend traditional education.
  • Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India. The project is described by its developers as “the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa.”11 Lectures from model teachers are recorded on video and are then physically distributed via DVD to schools that typically lack well-trained instructors (as well as Internet connections). While the lectures are being played on a monitor (which is often powered by a battery, since many participating schools also lack reliable electricity), a “mediator,” who could be a local teacher or simply a bright student, periodically pauses the video and encourages engagement among the students by asking questions or initiating discussions about the material they are watching.
  • John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan
  • For the past few years, he points out, incoming students have been bringing along their online social networks, allowing them to stay in touch with their old friends and former classmates through tools like SMS, IM, Facebook, and MySpace. Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.
  • The project’s website includes reports of how students, under the guidance of professional astronomers, are using the Faulkes telescopes to make small but meaningful contributions to astronomy.
  • “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists
  • The site is intended to serve as “an open forum for worldwide discussions on the Decameron and related topics.” Both scholars and students are invited to submit their own contributions as well as to access the existing resources on the site. The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.
  • I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another's writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other's writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community's discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.17
  • for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.
  • Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
  • The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20
  • The original World Wide Web—the “Web 1.0” that emerged in the mid-1990s—vastly expanded access to information. The Open Educational Resources movement is an example of the impact that the Web 1.0 has had on education.
  • But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.
  • In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focused on helping students to build stocks of knowledge and cognitive skills that could be deployed later in appropriate situations. This approach to education worked well in a relatively stable, slowly changing world in which careers typically lasted a lifetime. But the twenty-first century is quite different.
  • We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.
  • The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something. Often the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting. Learning occurs in part through a form of reflective practicum, but in this case the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars.
  • The building blocks provided by the OER movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems23 that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.
  • As a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in the late 1970s, Treisman worked on the poor performance of African-Americans and Latinos in undergraduate calculus classes. He discovered the problem was not these students’ lack of motivation or inadequate preparation but rather their approach to studying. In contrast to Asian students, who, Treisman found, naturally formed “academic communities” in which they studied and learned together, African-Americans tended to separate their academic and social lives and studied completely on their own. Treisman developed a program that engaged these students in workshop-style study groups in which they collaborated on solving particularly challenging calculus problems. The program was so successful that it was adopted by many other colleges. See Uri Treisman, “Studying Students Studying Calculus: A Look at the Lives of Minority Mathematics Students in College,” College Mathematics Journal, vol. 23, no. 5 (November 1992), pp. 362–72, http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu/workshops/treisman.html.
  • In the early 1970s, Stanford University Professor James Gibbons developed a similar technique, which he called Tutored Videotape Instruction (TVI). Like DSH, TVI was based on showing recorded classroom lectures to groups of students, accompanied by a “tutor” whose job was to stop the tape periodically and ask questions. Evaluations of TVI showed that students’ learning from TVI was as good as or better than in-classroom learning and that the weakest students academically learned more from participating in TVI instruction than from attending lectures in person. See J. F. Gibbons, W. R. Kincheloe, and S. K. Down, “Tutored Video-tape Instruction: A New Use of Electronics Media in Education,” Science, vol. 195 (1977), pp. 1136–49.
Barbara Lindsey

Overview (Powerful Ingredients for Blended Learning) - 0 views

wiki.powerfulingredients.com/...overview

privacy online rights educators fryer

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Before selecting, creating and using online accounts for this course, students are encouraged to consider the benefits of establishing and maintaining a professional digital footprint.
  • By using an alias or screename unrelated to their actual name, students can maintain public anonymity on the websites and in the web content created to fulfill course requirements.
  • Students are encouraged, but not required, to create a consistent, professional digital footprint through the completion of these course requirements. For more thoughts along these lines, see: Darren Kuropatwa's post, "Google Never Forgets"Jen Wagner's post, "If You Lead….Are You Ready For Them To Follow" Clarence Fisher's post, "Losing Your Footprint Sucks" Wesley Fryer's post, "Google Profiles, Online Reputation Management, and Digital Footprints" Notes from Robyn Treyvaud's presentation, "Our 21st Century Challenge: Developing Responsible, Ethical and Resilient Digital Citizens"Yahoo's Safety website: FAQs about your Digital Reputation The YouTube video, "Digital Footprints – Digital Dossier"
  • Barbara Lindsey on 28 Feb 10
     
    Wesley Fryer's course overview. Includes a terrific section on thoughts about student digital footprints, privacy and information disclosure.
Barbara Lindsey

The Tech Curve: RSU #19 Google Apps for Education Plan - 0 views

thetechcurve.blogspot.com/...e-apps-for-education-plan.html

googleapps education gmail brown appl grant glastonbury portfolio

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 May 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 May 10
     
    Great description of how one school district is using Google Apps for lifelong learning and teaching. Wonderful embedded video on advantages to migrating over to Google Email for educational institutions. Terrific description of how this school district in Maine is creating a scaffolded portfolio system that gives students increasing responsibility over their portfolio as they move from one grade level to the next, culminating in providing each graduating senior with his/her own domain name to use as their '21st century business card'.
Barbara Lindsey

ID and Other Reflections: 21st Century Workplace Challenges - 0 views

idreflections.blogspot.com/...tury-workplace-challenges.html

learning 21stcenturylearning collaboration cop communitiesofpractice

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Given this situation, it is clear that some of the following are needed to build a workplace that innovates—in other words—a learning organization:
  • Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 10
     
    Thx 2 Thomas Sauer for posting this link. (An absolutely critical means for me to find information about topics I am passionate about and that promote my deepening understanding of issues key to my ongoing professional development is allowing those with similar passions to curate findings for me and to likewise do the same for others.) "My understanding of today's workplace: Predictable, routine tasks are being either automated or outsourced, or soon will be. Knowledge workers are increasingly taking more responsibility for their work as well as personal growth. Hierarchy is being replaced by wirearchy. Managers are being replaced by leaders, coaches, and facilitators, or will be. The kinds of work being done are those that defy being codified into step-lists or guidelines. The problems are complex-often chaotic-and resist solving using best practices or yore. Ambiguity, complexity and chaos are replacing the predictable, known, and simple. The competitive edge is the ability to problem solve quickly and innovatively. The day of individual stars are past; it is time for collaborative team work. Routine expertise, based on set skills and crystallized intelligence, is being superseded by a need for more adaptive expertise and fluid intelligence." 
Barbara Lindsey

ACTFL Submission Guidelines 2011 - 0 views

convention2.allacademic.com/...lines_and_Recommendations.html

actfl actfl11 submission guidelines

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • A focus of ACTFL 2011 will be on how language educators can prepare students for living, working, and learning in a global environment.
  • While technology is embedded in all 21st century classroom activities, this strand focuses on specific cutting edge technologies that promote language development and cultural understanding including social networking and global communities.
  • Building the language capacity of the U.S. is an ongoing challenge that requires effective policies, local and national advocacy efforts, and matching U.S. student performance against international benchmarks. Developing effective teachers and effective teacher leaders and mentors is also a critical component of our profession.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Effective instructional practice leads to increased language development and cultural understanding and meets the needs of all students in the language classroom. Integrating technology innovations into instruction is vital to a 21st century learning environment. Various program models and curriculum designs are featured in this category from elementary program dual language, immersion, and FLES, to higher education programs that focus on advanced language proficiency.
  • If you are a presenter as well as the person submitting the proposal, you must still list yourself as a presenter. As the submitter your name will be included as the “session organizer”, but you must also add your name as a presenter. This is very important otherwise your name will not show as being a presenter on the submission and your proposal may not be considered. Be sure that your presenter information is current – email address, affiliation (school/company), address, etc – in the database.
Barbara Lindsey

SpeEdChange: Considering Universal Design - 0 views

speedchange.blogspot.com/...sidering-universal-design.html

UDL universal design socol

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • UDL means many things, depending on which group of researchers and advocates you are speaking to, but the general idea is to create learning environment which can be individually adapted to learner needs. In other words, the environment adapts rather than forcing the learner to.
  • educational institutions, content delivery systems, assessment systems, and ICT should be flexible enough to meet the diverse needs of the learner population.
  • And school ends in graduate school with them telling you that you are making your citations wrong - not that they can't tell where you got your information from, you're just not conforming absolutely to whichever nonsensical citation system your particular department has chosen to embrace."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      Do you see any problems with either conforming to or not conforming to an agreed upon citation system? What is Socol's argument here? Is this a good example for his argument? 
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • A decade ago the Centre for Applied Special Technology (CAST) proposed 3 principles that could be applied to the curriculum and set an agenda for inclusion, as follows:1. Provide multiple representations of content.2. Provide multiple options for expression and control.3. Provide multiple options for engagement and motivation.and these remain essential, but I want to add a fourth which must apply to them all:4. That these representations and options be available to all students on the basis of understood needs and/or informed preference, without the need for diagnosis.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      To what extent have you experienced this in the courses you've taken? Would offering this to your students be helpful to them? Would it change the way you assess? Would this change the way a course is taught? How a program is structured? Do you see any problems with this?
  • This is not just privileging one media form over another, this is elevating the "how" over the "what" to an extreme extent. It not only humiliates those labelled with "disabilities," it refuses to accommodate the very legitimate choices of all students. Choices which might significantly improve the comfort, attention capabilities, and learning opportunities for that 60%-65% who currently fall far behind, and might even help those already doing well to achieve their full potential.
  • Under UDL content would be fully flexible in delivery.
  • UDL should really go further - especially in recognizing that not all students benefit from following the same path to skills and knowledge. Any system which applies the same pedagogy to all students is clearly not a universal design (in my mind it is not even moral). Insisting on everyone using the same textbook, or doing the exact same assignments, or following the same schedule - those are all industrial practices which are based in the belief that students are a raw material which can be shaped by repeated stampings. Any claims to some kind of rational meritocracy within that "same requirements" argument are simply a mask for the essential anti-humaness of the system.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      Would love to hear your thought on this assertion by Socol. If you agree with what he says, how would/could you structure the courses you teach? How could the courses you are taking as a student change? Would that help you? Could these courses then attract more diverse students? What would the learning look like? The assessments?
  • "Create something," he told us, "which demonstrates your in-depth knowledge of at least one critical moment in that century."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      How would you design an assessment around this?
  • I am not imparting malice to their position, simply suggesting that there is little incentive - emotionally, psychologically, or economically - for them to change.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Oct 11
       
      Do you think this is true?
  • I think that teacher training institutions should be required to have at least a third of their teaching and research faculty consist of individuals who have special needs, or who needed alternative educations, or who simply did badly in school.
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