Education Week: Science Grows on Acquiring New Language - 0 views
-
For example, when babies born to native-English-speaking parents played three times a week during that window with a native-Mandarin-speaking tutor, at 12 months, they had progressed in their ability to recognize both English and Mandarin sounds, rather than starting to retrench in the non-native language. By contrast, children exposed only to audio or video recordings of native speakers showed no change in their language trajectory. Brain-imaging of the same children backed up the results of test-based measures of language specialization.
-
The research may not immediately translate into a new language arts curriculum, but it has already deepened the evidence for something most educators believe instinctively: Social engagement, particularly with speakers of multiple languages, is critical to language learning.
-
“The key to that series of studies is exposure and live interactions with native speakers,” Ms. Lebedeva said. “The interactions need to be naturalistic: eye contact, gestures, exaggerated phonemes.”
- ...2 more annotations...
-
researchers long thought the window for learning a new language shrinks rapidly after age 7 and closes almost entirely after puberty. Yet interdisciplinary research conducted over the past five years at the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, and other colleges suggest that the time frame may be more flexible than first thought and that students who learn additional languages become more adaptable in other types of learning, too.
Print: The Chronicle: 6/15/2007: The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority - 0 views
-
-
Web 2.0 is all about responding to abundance, which is a shift of profound significance.
-
Chefs simply couldn't exist in a world of universal scarcity
- ...33 more annotations...
-
When the system of scholarly communications was dependent on the physical movement of information goods, we did business in an era of information scarcity. As we become dependent on the digital movement of information goods, we find ourselves entering an era of information abundance. In the process, we are witnessing a radical shift in how we establish authority, significance, and even scholarly validity. That has major implications for, in particular, the humanities and social sciences.
Closed Captioning: Getting Your Lines Right -- Campus Technology - 0 views
UM System aims to close gaps between technology, academia | The Columbia Daily Tribune ... - 0 views
createthefuture - The Future of Learning 10 Years On - 0 views
-
The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment…
-
The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment – a game, a community, a profession – through the provision of the materials that will assist him or her to, in a sense, see the world in the same way as an accomplished expert; and this is accomplished not merely by presenting learning materials to the learner, but by facilitating the engagement of the learner in conversations with members of that community of experts.
-
In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities.
- ...9 more annotations...
gladwell dot com - designs for working - 0 views
-
The task of the office, then, is to invite a particular kind of social interaction--the casual, nonthreatening encounter that makes it easy for relative strangers to talk to each other. Offices need the sort of social milieu that Jane Jacobs found on the sidewalks of the West Village. "It is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships," Jacobs wrote. If you substitute "office" for "city street neighborhood," that sentence becomes the perfect statement of what the modern employer wants from the workplace.
-
In the war-room study, the company moved the client, the programmers, and a manager into a dedicated conference room, and made them stay there until the project was done. Using the war room cut the software-development time by two-thirds, in part because there was far less time wasted on formal meetings or calls outside the building: the people who ought to have been bumping into each other were now sitting next to each other.
-
The agency is in a huge old warehouse, three stories high and the size of three football fields. It is informally known as Advertising City, and that's what it is: a kind of artfully constructed urban neighborhood. The floor is bisected by a central corridor called Main Street, and in the center of the room is an open space, with café tables and a stand of ficus trees, called Central Park. There's a basketball court, a game room, and a bar. Most of the employees are in snug workstations known as nests, and the nests are grouped together in neighborhoods that radiate from Main Street like Paris arrondissements. The top executives are situated in the middle of the room. The desk belonging to the chairman and creative director of the company looks out on Central Park. The offices of the chief financial officer and the media director abut the basketball court. Sprinkled throughout the building are meeting rooms and project areas and plenty of nooks where employees can closet themselves when they need to.
- ...7 more annotations...
Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 2 views
-
A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that’s what a story used to be, and that’s how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow.
-
To further define the term, we should begin by explaining what we mean by its first part: Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly coined Web 2.0 in 2004,1 but the label remains difficult to acceptably define. For our present discussion, we will identify two essential features that are useful in distinguishing Web 2.0 projects and platforms from the rest of the web: microcontent and social media.2
-
creating a website through Web 2.0 tools is a radically different matter compared with the days of HTML hand-coding and of moving files with FTP clients.
- ...44 more annotations...
Open Resources - Transforming the Way Knowledge Is Spread - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
the five functions now performed by universities — teaching; providing a space for social interaction; testing students’ knowledge and offering feedback in the form of grades; cultivating a reputation as a good place to learn; and certifying what graduates know through accreditation — will inevitably change.
-
In October 2003, there were 511 courses available, all from M.I.T. According to Ms. Mulder, the current total is over 21,000 — with 9,903 in languages other than English, including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, Korean and Japanese.
-
The school’s Masters Series Madrid is a game — with soundtrack, 3-D graphics and interviews with executives — that allows students to manage an international tennis tournament. “It’s a great way for people to see our school,” said Matthew Constantine, a member of the IE staff.
- ...4 more annotations...
How to Outsmart Tracking Cookies on the Web - WSJ.com - 0 views
-
To have the most privacy options, upgrade to the latest version of the browser you use.
-
All popular browsers let users view and delete cookies installed on their computer.
-
Once you've deleted cookies, you can limit the installation of new ones.
- ...6 more annotations...
Curriculum21 - Annotexting - 0 views
-
Students are asked to read closely, cite evidence, and make evidence based inferences when they read. They are expected to deepen their learning by valuing textual evidence and reading critically. Annotating text is one way students can cite textual evidence, infer and deepen meaning as they read..
-
Annotations make thinking visible for teachers and students. We can use the words and features of a text to better comprehend it, ask questions, and note our thoughts while reading. One goal of comprehension is that students will be proficient annotators of texts to understand more deeply by interacting and making thinking transparent while they read.
-
There are many reasons to ask students to annotate text: for basic comprehension, to show evidence of conceptual understanding, to show what is implied, to identify the claims in an argument, to read like a writer and identify characteristics of genre, to notice the nuance of language…and many other reasons. Giving guidance as to what we want students to annotate for will be beneficial for the reader. Otherwise, they will annotate everything that comes to mind, and the work may not be helpful to the reader or the teacher.
- ...2 more annotations...
Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice - 1 views
-
Supposing learning is social and comes largely from of our experience of participating in daily life? It was this thought that formed the basis of a significant rethinking of learning theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s by two researchers from very different disciplines - Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Their model of situated learning proposed that learning involved a process of engagement in a 'community of practice'.
-
When looking closely at everyday activity, she has argued, it is clear that 'learning is ubiquitous in ongoing activity, though often unrecognized as such' (Lave 1993: 5).
-
Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. (Wenger circa 2007)
- ...18 more annotations...
I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”
-
“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you.
-
Or, as Leisa Reichelt, a consultant in London who writes regularly about ambient tools, put it to me: “Can you imagine a Facebook for children in kindergarten, and they never lose touch with those kids for the rest of their lives? What’s that going to do to them?” Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching — but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.
- ...2 more annotations...
I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
“Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”
-
Is this perhaps the same concern educators have and thus why they hesitate to adopt these social networks for teaching and research? Are they concerned about opening up their research and teaching and if so, is that, at times, justified?
-
I would answer with a yes. The emergence of technology, or "new" technology, has always presented threats to what people are accustomed to. Educators are no exceptions. They hesitate to adopt social networks because they know they can never think like before or follow the traditions they feel "safe" with, once they decide to give it a try. They would have to re-define their philosophy and revise teaching approaches. It means "great change" to open up teaching possibilities, and it follows that they are insecure because these networks push them out of their comfort zone. Yet, I would disagree that fear justifies the reluctance to try out new possibilities to teach. Insecurity originates from lack of knowledge. I believe more practical knowledge and training sessions would help a lot to relieve the discomfort. They would know how the networks function and how to benefit from them.
-
-
when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
-
Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online.
- ...4 more annotations...
I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely.
-
He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends.
-
Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. “A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,” as Zuckerberg put it.
- ...5 more annotations...
Lead article: How did a couple of veteran classroom teachers end up in a space like thi... - 0 views
-
With social networking and media-sharing practices rapidly assuming a central role in our professional and personal lives, teachers have a responsibility to bring these practices into the classroom.
-
technology uber-fans gush over their embrace of every new gadget, technology and practice, affixing computer-driven activities onto factory-model teaching practices as shiny appendages, resulting in a ‘technology façade’
-
This does not mean that traditional literacies of critical reading, thinking and communication must make way for emerging literacies of collaboration, online communication and multimedia navigation. It does mean that we have to transform our teaching to accommodate them all effectively.
- ...37 more annotations...
Bill Ferriter | Teacher Leaders Network - 0 views
-
Doesn’t Pink talk about this in A Whole New Mind? Here’s a quote: “While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak in different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting, and nowadays more effective.” (Kindle Location 1692)
-
Recently, I've tinkered with a system to assess my students' participation in Voicethread conversations. Essentially mirroring the reflective aspects of Konrad's blogging handouts, I've decided to ask my students the following four questions while we're working with a new Voicethread: Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking. Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with. If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas. What about the new comment was challenging? What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged? Will you change yoru mind? Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?
-
The cool part about assessing Voicethread presentations this way is that each question essenitally forces my students to interact with our conversation in a really meaningful way. To craft careful answers, they must truly consider the comments of others---an essential skill for promoting collaborative versus competitive dialogue---and compare those comments against their own beliefs and preconceived notions. That's metacognition at its best! What's even better is that when students know that these questions form the basis of our Voicethread assessment from the beginning of a conversation, participation level rise remarkably. While students are looking for project reflection comments, they often end up highly motivated to share their thinking with peers.
2010 Horizon Report » Executive Summary - 0 views
-
The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years.
-
six emerging technologies or practices are described that are likely to enter mainstream use on campuses within three adoption horizons spread over the next one to five years.
-
In the seven years that the Horizon Project has been underway, more than 400 leaders in the fields of business, industry, technology, and education have contributed to this long-running primary research effort. They have drawn on a comprehensive body of published resources, current research and practice, their own considerable expertise, and the expertise of the NMC and ELI communities to identify technologies and practices that are beginning to appear on campuses or are likely to be adopted in the next few years.
- ...1 more annotation...
-
The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years.
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.
- ...4 more annotations...