Education Week: Science Grows on Acquiring New Language - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
The Eight-Year Study Project - 0 views
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The Eight Year Study, considered by many educational researchers to be one of the best program evaluation studies ever conducted, followed the students from more than 30 experimental high schools during the 1930's. Although the students from the experimental schools only did as well or slightly better on standardized test scores than students from their traditional counterparts, the students from the experimental schools showed many improvements in other areas.
Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology | Resources | EDU... - 0 views
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They are characterized as preferring teamwork, experiential activities, and the use of technology
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Doing is more important than knowing, and learning is accomplished through trial and error as opposed to a logical and rule-based approach.2 Similarly, Paul Hagner found that these students not only possess the skills necessary to use these new communication forms, but there is an ever increasing expectation on their part that these new communication paths be used
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Much of the work to date, while interesting and compelling, is intuitive and largely based on qualitative data and observation.
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Deliberate Engagement of Laptops in Large Lecture Classes to Improve Attentiveness and ... - 0 views
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The value of in-class Internet technologies to student attentiveness, engagement, and learning remains both controversial and filled with promising potential. In this study, students were given the option to use LectureTools, an interactive suite of tools designed specifically for larger classes. The availability of these tools dramatically changed the mechanics of the course as over 90% of students attending lecture voluntarily brought their laptops to class. On one hand, surveys over multiple semesters show that students believe the availability of a laptop is more likely to increase their time on tasks unrelated to the conduct of the course. On the other hand, the surveys also ascertained that students felt more attentive with the technology, significantly more engaged, and able to learn more with the technology than in similar classes without it. LectureTools also led to a dramatic increase in the number of students posing questions during class time, with more than half posing at least one question during class over the course of a semester, a percentage far higher than achieved in semesters prior to the use of this technology. These results suggest that while having laptops in the classroom can be a distraction to students, students of today show confidence that they are capable of productive multitasking, showing that they not only can handle this technology when applied through "deliberate engagement" using tools like LectureTools, but thrive with it, as seen through improved attentiveness, learning, and overall engagement even in larger classes.
digitalresearchtools / FrontPage - 0 views
News: The Evidence on Online Education - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views
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The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took "blended" courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.
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While the new study provides a strong endorsement of online learning, it also notes findings about the relative success (or lack thereof) of various teaching techniques used in online courses. The use of video or online quizzes -- frequently encouraged for online education -- "does not appear to enhance learning," the report says.
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But noting the caveats in the report about factors other than medium of instruction, he said that "we should not take the report as saying it is simply better to move to online learning. These results demonstrate why more research is needed -- broadly based research that moves well beyond case studies conducted by distance education practitioners, research focused on student retention in online environments and especially research that looks behind the instructional medium to isolate the characteristics of instruction that produce positive results. Successful education has always been about engaging students whether it is in an online environment, face to face or in a blended setting. And fundamental to that is having faculty who are fully supported and engaged in that process as well."
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createthefuture - The Future of Learning 10 Years On - 0 views
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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…
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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.
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In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities.
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Powerhouse Museum to launch open access image repository - powerhouse museum, Gov 2.0 -... - 0 views
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“Since then we have had two million views on 1700 images but for us it goes beyond the views; it is the connection we have made with this audience.”
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According to Bray, the connection with audience has paid off with the Powerhouse’s community now volunteering to conduct research work that now adds to the museum’s knowledge of its own collection.
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“They have been tagging, commenting, researching, identifying locations, doing incredible images because they are allowed to use them for free and with no restrictions,” Bray says. “It allows the audience to do citizen curation.”
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Are Schools Inhibiting 21st Century Learning? : April 2008 : THE Journal - 0 views
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Among students, more than half said they would "use technology more easily at school if they could use their own laptop, cell phone or mobile device to work on projects, access related software applications and the Internet, and communicate with classmates,"
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Here are the top-3 technologies teachers and administrators chose to equip the "ultimate school for 21st century learners."
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Most high school students (67 percent) and middle school students (52 percent) have cell phones. And 75 percent of middle and high school students have a digital media player.
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Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views
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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
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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.
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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.
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Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology ... - 0 views
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Research indicates that each of these media, when designed for education, fosters particular types of interactions that enable—and undercut—various learning styles.
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Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn
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The familiar "world to the desktop." Provides access to distant experts and archives and enables collaborations, mentoring relationships, and virtual communities of practice. This interface is evolving through initiatives such as Internet2. "Alice in Wonderland" multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). Participants' avatars (self-created digital characters) interact with computer-based agents and digital artifacts in virtual contexts. The initial stages of studies on shared virtual environments are characterized by advances in Internet games and work in virtual reality. Ubiquitous computing. Mobile wireless devices infuse virtual resources as we move through the real world. The early stages of "augmented reality" interfaces are characterized by research on the role of "smart objects" and "intelligent contexts" in learning and doing.
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Connectivism & Connective Knowledge » Narratives of coherence - 0 views
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Grand narratives – such as provide us with a large umbrella that we can use to make sense of the world – have been besieged over the last several decades. Grand narratives in the form of newspapers, newscasts, and books are now augmented by blogs and YouTube videos.
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an attempt to provide or create some type of a narrative – namely, a narrative of coherence.
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In a traditional course, the educator hacks the trails to complex information landscapes. The educator’s bias influences what is included and excluded.
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Grand narratives - such as provide us with a large umbrella that we can use to make sense of the world - have been besieged over the last several decades. Grand narratives in the form of newspapers, newscasts, and books are now augmented by blogs and YouTube videos. As discussed in a previous post, one of our key challenges in this course is to find a way to bring together the numerous ideas and viewpoints in a way that makes sense for participants.
Teaching in Social and Technological Networks « Connectivism - 0 views
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Students are not confined to interacting with only the ideas of a researcher or theorist. Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.
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Traditional courses provide a coherent view of a subject. This view is shaped by “learning outcomes” (or objectives).
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This cozy comfortable world of outcomes-instruction-assessment alignment exists only in education. In all other areas of life, ambiguity, uncertainty, and unkowns reign.
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Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations | EDUCAUSE - 1 views
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Faculty concerns perhaps center less on being "replaceable" and more on worrying that the teaching and learning enterprise will be reduced to students gathering information that can be easily downloaded, causing them to rely too heavily on technology instead of intellect.
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First, traditional age students overwhelmingly prefer face-to-face contact with faculty to mediated communication. Second, technology used in the service of learning will require more—not less—sophistication on the part of students as they engage in processes of integration, translation, audience analysis, and critical judgment.
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With such specific applications of technology and the limited use of other forms (for example, multimedia), students' low expectations for the use of technology in the curriculum is not surprising. Such constrained use of technology by the faculty in the curriculum and low student expectations may serve to limit innovation and creativity as well as the faculty's capacity to engage students more deeply in their subject matter.
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Your thoughts on this?
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I completely agree. As a student, I don't think a text-based PowerPoint slide presentation would interest me too much, partcularly when there are too many words squeezed into just one slide. If a PowerPoint slide presentation is just a copy of texts, the use of technology makes nothing different from teaching with a blackboard and chalks. The use of technology must have, and then can serve, a pedagogical purpose.
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This remindes me of the first time stuents at my school started using powerpoints to make presentations and how exciting it was for them to see thier classmates ideas presented in front of them this way. Over using this and without really integraing sth new than their words written, showed boredom and disinterest later! So teachers should think here of using technology in a different way like turning the lesson into a digital story or using technology differently ! Being unexpected in the way you use technology in the classrooom, would make them always eager to learn and excited about it!!!
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