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Barbara Lindsey

gladwell dot com - designs for working - 0 views

www.gladwell.com/...2000_12_11_a_working.html

gladwell interaction cop office work street

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Nov 10
       
      This reminds me of the strength of weak ties argument.
  • 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...
  • A vital community, in Jacobs's view, required more than the appropriate physical environment. It also required a certain kind of person, who could bind together the varied elements of street life.
  • What Stephenson's X-rays do best, though, is tell you who the public characters are. In every network, there are always one or two people who have connections to many more people than anyone else. Stephenson calls them "hubs," and on her charts lines radiate out from them like spokes on a wheel. (Bernie the candy-store owner, on Jacobs's Hudson Street, was a hub.) A few people are also what Stephenson calls "gatekeepers": they control access to critical people, and link together a strategic few disparate groups. Finally, if you analyze the graphs there are always people who seem to have lots of indirect links to other people--who are part of all sorts of networks without necessarily being in the center of them. Stephenson calls those people "pulsetakers." (In Silicon Valleyspeak, the person in a sea of cubicles who pops his or her head up over the partition every time something interesting is going on is called a prairie dog: prairie dogs are pulsetakers.)
  • she pointed to the lines connecting that department with other departments. "They're all coming into this one place," she said, and she showed how all the lines coming out of marketing converged on one senior executive. "There's very little path redundancy. In human systems, you need redundancy, you need communication across multiple paths."
  • What concerned Stephenson wasn't just the lack of redundancy but the fact that, in her lingo, many of the paths were "unconfirmed": they went only one way.
  • What you want to do is put people who don't trust each other near each other. Not necessarily next to each other, because they get too close. But close enough so that when you pop your head up, you get to see people, they are in your path, and all of a sudden you build an inviting space where they can hang out, kitchens and things like that. Maybe they need to take a hub in an innovation network and place the person with a pulsetaker in an expert network--to get that knowledge indirectly communicated to a lot of people."
  • it's clear that there are some very simple principles from the study of public characters which ought to drive the design process. "You want to place hubs at the center," Joyce Bromberg, the director of space planning, says. "These are the ones other people go to in order to get information. Give them an environment that allows access. But there are also going to be times that they need to have control--so give them a place where they can get away. Gatekeepers represent the fit between groups. They transmit ideas. They are brokers, so you might want to put them at the perimeter, and give them front porches"--areas adjoining the workspace where you might put little tables and chairs. "Maybe they could have swinging doors with white boards, to better transmit information. As for pulsetakers, they are the roamers. Rather than give them one fixed work location, you might give them a series of touchdown spots--where you want them to stop and talk. You want to enable their meandering."
  • The point of the new offices is to compel us to behave and socialize in ways that we otherwise would not--to overcome our initial inclination to be office suburbanites. But, in all the studies of the new workplaces, the reservations that employees have about a more social environment tend to diminish once they try it. Human behavior, after all, is shaped by context, but how it is shaped--and whether we'll be happy with the result--we can understand only with experience.
Barbara Lindsey

Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks - 0 views

www.tesl-ej.org/...ej51int

socialmedia cop communitiesofpractice networking

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • the evolution of what was initially a group into a community of practice is illustrated, as well as how social media enables one CoP to interact with others to become part of a distributed learning network. Participants in the networked communities continually leverage each other’s professional development, and what is modeled and practiced in transactions there is applied later in their teaching practices
  • Teachers can be shown how to use social media, but unless they use it themselves they are unlikely to change their practices. There is evidence that teachers trained in programs where their instructors used social media (modeled it) are more comfortable with technology than if their instructors did not themselves use these tools. This article suggests how teachers can interact with numerous communities of practice and distributed learning networks where other participants are modeling to and learning from one another optimal ways of using social media in teaching. This strongly suggests that teachers must be trained not only in the use of social media, but through its use.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 10
       
      "Through its use" is key here!
  • “To teach is to model and demonstrate. To learn is to practice and reflect.”
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Networks are ideal as enhancements for all four of these essential activities of lifelong learners, and they enable us to model, demonstrate, practice, and reflect constantly and effectively.
  • “teachers who practice autonomy in their own professional development formulate heuristics for harvesting knowledge within their personal learning spaces, and thus stand a better chance of inculcating the desired behaviors in their students, thus increasing the likelihood of producing potentially autonomous and lifelong learners. But it is a percolative process.
  • The wiki allowed anyone (anyone could write on it, not just Webheads) to leave an email address if they needed an invitation, and those who had spare invitations would give one to someone in need. The system worked to organize a quick and robust Webheads Wave, a sandbox for teachers to try out the tool and to model and demonstrate and practice with one another.
  • Networks provide the framework for this to happen.
  • Pedagogy
  • Networking
  • Literacy
  • Paradigm shift results when many people in a community or network follow the same process of seeing things modeled and demonstrated for one another in such a way that after considered reflection and weighing of the old and new ways of addressing a problem, they gradually alter their practice.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 10
       
      ACOT showed this in the late 80's with their ten year study.  http://imet.csus.edu/imet1/baeza/PDF%20Files/Upload/10yr.pdf
  • Heuristics
  • hose with knowledge and those seeking it treat each other equally, often reversing roles frequently as seekers and providers of knowledge and content.
  • multiliteracies approaches
  • When the Writing for Webheads group of students and teachers formed in 1998, participants were distrustful of sending their pictures to strangers on the Internet, and even to reveal their real names.
  • Photographs and voice/webcam communications enable group members to see the human behind the text message and enhance bonds leading to a sense of community
  • Scaffolding one another’s practice by modeling to one another and answering each other’s questions
  • the evolution of social media has enabled the Webheads CoP to interact with others to become part of a much wider distributed learning network.
  • Siemens has long espoused the notion of connectivism, famously summarized as “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.” (Siemens, 2004, n.p.). Here, Siemens means that it is more important to nurture a system of connections between knowledgeable people (the pipe) than to be concerned with what these knowledgeable people know (the content within the pipe) since this content can be directed as needed to anyone with appropriate connections within the pipe.
  • Communities and networks help us to aggregate, filter, and assimilate this information into some kind of knowledge structure and then disseminate it throughout the community or network.
  • distributed learning networks (DLN’s), or personal or professional learning networks (PLNs), or personal learning environments (PLE’s)–all provide direct (and indirect) contact with many people in one’s network, each possessing a reservoir of knowledge which contributes to the entire pool of knowledge residing in the network. This can be accessed through listservs or sometimes almost instantaneously through Twitter or RSS feeds, or Skype, or instant messaging. Therefore the knowledge possessed by any individual, or node in the network, is the sum total of all aggregated knowledge within that network. It is to this that we ascribe the incredible power inherent in distributed learning networks which often comprise to some extent communities of practice.
  • Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002, p. 6) promote the CoP model as an anecdote to the fact, as he puts it, that “increasing complexity of knowledge requires greater … collaboration; whereas … the half life of knowledge is getting shorter.”
  • the skill of leveraging networks is increasingly important in the 21st century in plumbing and aggregating knowledge when that knowledge base is forever changing at an increasingly accelerated pace.
  • or appropriate use of online social networks to be taught in schools, teachers themselves must be familiar with their impact on learning. One problem is that teacher-trainers without sufficient experience with technology and who are rooted in old-school methodologies are simply not modeling new age learning behaviors for their trainees by showing them how to reach out to networks.
  • research indicates that teachers don’t necessarily activate the knowledge they are exposed to in training curricula. The example he gave was on reverting to traditional methods rather than utilizing knowledge about communicative language teaching (Richards, 2009: 4), but the same applies to knowledge of technology.
  • In order for training in pedagogical affordances of networking to take hold it is crucial that teachers be trained not only in social media, but through its use. Those who use social media in their professional networking find this self-evident, but there is at least annecdotal evidence for the need for modeling by mentors.
  • teachers need to be shown the connections between their use of social media in their personal and professional lives. Glogowski and Sessums pointed out in their presentation at the WiAOC 2007 conference their surprise that student teachers who were already using technology with online acquaintances in their after-hours social networking were not carrying this over into their professional teaching practices.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 10
       
      The same holds true for our students.
Barbara Lindsey

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - 1 views

www.shirky.com/...group_enemy.html

social networking

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Apr 08 - Cached
  • April 24, 2003
  • I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups.
  • definition of social software
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • It's software that supports group interaction
  • how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.
  • Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.
  • We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.
  • If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
  • So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast.
  • So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.
  • You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else.
  • The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave.
  • That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
  • Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
  • This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups.
  • what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group.
  • there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.
  • The first is sex talk,
  • second basic pattern
  • The identification and vilification of external enemies.
  • So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
  • third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration
  • The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique.
  • So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
  • He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
  • technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.
  • Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
  • What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters.
  • This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
  • nd the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
  • As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.
  • The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.
  • So the first answer to Why Now? is simply "Because it's time." I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.
  • It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern. We got the weblog pattern in around '96 with Drudge. We got weblog platforms starting in '98. The thing really was taking off in 2000. By last year, everyone realized: Omigod, this thing is going mainstream, and it's going to change everything.
  • Why was there an eight-year gap between a forms-capable browser and the Pepys diaries? I don't know. It just takes a while for people to get used to these ideas. So, first of all, this is a revolution in part because it is a revolution. We've internalized the ideas and people are now working with them. Second, the things that people are now building are web-native.
  • A weblog is web-native. It's the web all the way in. A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration. It's lightweight, it's loosely coupled, it's easy to extend, it's easy to break down. And it's not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a form. It assumes http is transport. It assumes markup in the coding. RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication. So we're taking all of these tools and we're extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.
  • Third, in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern.
  • You can say, in the conference call or the chat: "Go over to the wiki and look at this."
  • It's just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It's different from: Let's take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.
  • And finally, and this is the thing that I think is the real freakout, is ubiquity.
  • In many situations, all people have access to the network. And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted.
  • But for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices, knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online. Everyone they're friends with is online. Everyone in their family is online.
  • And this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted.
  • There's a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we're enjoying here thanks to Wifi. If you assume whenever a group of people are gathered together, that they can be both face to face and online at the same time, you can start to do different kinds of things. I now don't run a meeting without either having a chat room or a wiki up and running. Three weeks ago I ran a meeting for the Library of Congress. We had a wiki, set up by Socialtext, to capture a large and very dense amount of technical information on long-term digital preservation.
  • The people who organized the meeting had never used a wiki before, and now the Library of Congress is talking as if they always had a wiki for their meetings, and are assuming it's going to be at the next meeting as well -- the wiki went from novel to normal in a couple of days.
  • It really quickly becomes an assumption that a group can do things like "Oh, I took my PowerPoint slides, I showed them, and then I dumped them into the wiki. So now you can get at them." It becomes a sort of shared repository for group memory. This is new. These kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who's in a room can be online together at the same time, can lead to new patterns.
  • "What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends."
  • The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There's a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category. So it's not like a cake recipe. There's nothing you can do to make it come out right every time.
  • Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
  • So the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can't be ignored, and it can't be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.
  • Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
  • But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
  • The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations
  • And absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can log in, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the tyranny of the majority. So the core group needs ways to defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts.
  • All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal. A
  • If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
  • Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity.
  • Three, you need barriers to participation.
  • It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.
  • The user of social software is the group, not the individual.
  • Reputation is not necessarily portable from one situation to another
  • If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are. And if you do me a favor, I'll remember it. And I won't store it in the front of my brain, I'll store it here, in the back. I'll just get a good feeling next time I get email from you; I won't even remember why. And if you do me a disservice and I get email from you, my temples will start to throb, and I won't even remember why. If you give users a way of remembering one another, reputation will happen,
Barbara Lindsey

Doodle: Easy Scheduling - 0 views

www.doodle.com/main.html

schedule doodle poll calendar conference

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10
     
    We used this to schedule a time for our course meetings.
Barbara Lindsey

TEDxNYED: Independently organized TED event - 0 views

tedxnyed.com/where

live streaming ted nyc march conference

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 27 Feb 10
     
    Live streamed event March 6 10 am to 6 p.m. EST. Michael Wesch, David Wiley, Chris Lehman some of participants.
Barbara Lindsey

Online Forms &; Surveys: Can You Digg It? Web Applications for Research | LearnCentral - 1 views

www.learncentral.org/...52290

Elluminate conference research students rubric

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10
     
    An Elluminate session (Feb 23 from 5-6 p.m. EST) on how to structure research assignments for students and the kinds of online tools you could use to facilitate those projects for students. Provides a six-step scaffolded research assignment to use with students.
Barbara Lindsey

Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6072

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Net Gen students are facile at multitasking
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Apr 10
       
      The research shows that no one can multitask effectively... See John Medina and Brain Rules, for example.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Apr 10
       
      Also part and parcel of hegemonic educational practices which served to reinforce the existing social and economic paradigm.
  • 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.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • the end of the class meeting marks a transition from one learning mode to another.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Apr 10
       
      Could you see being able to do this? Would this work for you?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Apr 10
       
      How does this change perceptions of when and where learning begins and ends?
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
Barbara Lindsey

K12 Online Conference 2009 | KICKING IT UP A NOTCH KEYNOTEBRINGing it OUT a notch - 0 views

k12onlineconference.org/?p=488

criticalpedagogy learning global education presentation

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Apr 10
     
    Thought-provoking discussion on how the pedagogical approaches and economical limitations impact the impact of technology on curricula. Terrific critical lens used.
Barbara Lindsey

Scholar 2.0: Public Intellectualism Meets the Open Web - 1 views

www.ucea.org/...ualism-meets-the-open-web.html

education2.0 scholarship highered

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • for the most part, knowledge created by academics is placed mostly in outlets that can be accessed only by “the knowledge elite.”
  • I have become so used to publishing directly to the Web that I felt shackled by the constraints of the print medium.
  • open access and peer-review are NOT mutually exclusive
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • you write something really important, sign over your rights to a for-profit publisher and then that publisher charges YOUR university (and potentially other subscribers; individual or organizational) a fee to carry that journal. In other words, you are giving your knowledge to a company so they can sell it back to your university
  • Hypertext is the (not so) new endnote/footnote.
  • Most print journals STILL cannot handle color graphics. With incredible advances in data visualization technology, there must be a move to publishing to the Web directly.
  • As a result of her use of various forms of social media, Ravitch has (amazingly) positioned herself as the leading voice of the counter-narrative to the dominant educational policy agenda.
  • motivated by sharing with others, a blog allows scholars to disseminate content and express opinions to larger audiences than more traditional outlets. Second, needing room for creativity and self-reflection, the blog is a tool for practicing writing and for keeping up-to-date and remembering; it is a space to house early articulations of one’s ideas. Finally, valuing connections, the participants used their blogs for interacting and creating relationships with others.
  • A recent post about charter schools on Dr. Baker's blog includes 25 comments which, together, comprise a great argument between Bruce, Stuart Buck and Kevin Welner. That conversation happened "in public," not at some exclusive conference or behind some paywall. How can you read that conversation and not recognize the value of blogs as spaces for scholarly communication?
  • there is a real need for content-area experts who can serve as curators.
  • One could certainly argue that content curation is not a new kind of authorship. Editing books or journals is about content curation and has traditionally "counted" as authorship for tenure and promotion purposes. However, at the risk of sounding repetitive, our tools for content creation are new.
  • Social bookmarking tools are also incredibly simple to use and ideal for curating content. Diigo and Delicious are the two most widely adopted free social bookmarking services. Users can "bookmark" sites, aggregate them using tags, and then share their collections publicly.
  • unlike content curation in a print medium, that collection is dynamic (I can add or delete at any time) and interactive (visitors can comment on any of the items in the collection and start a conversation of sorts). I believe this to be a truly modern and increasingly important form of scholarly activity. 
  • There are other forms of modern scholarly activity that are well-worth considering, including webinars and podcasting.
  • Gideon Burton, Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University, who writes: I don't want to be complicit in sustaining a knowledge economy that rewards its participants when they invest in burying and restricting knowledge. This is why Open Access is more than a new model for scholarly publishing, it is the only ethical move available to scholars who take their own work seriously enough to believe its value lies in how well it engages many publics and not just a few peers (para. 7).
  • Barbara Lindsey on 18 Jun 11
     
    For BWCT 2011 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

Networking on the Network - 0 views

www.cs.washington.edu/...g-on-the-network-20050814.html

networking gradstudent

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Many students ask themselves, "which network should I join?", and they worry that they will make the wrong choice. After all, your social network defines your career in a profound way, and if you choose an unfriendly network then you can make your life miserable. But this is the wrong way to think about it. You are not choosing which network to join; rather, you are creating a new network of your own. Your network is made out of individuals -- the individuals whose research and outlook are related to your own. These individuals' own networks will overlap to some extent, but they will not be identical. Most of them will attend several different conferences, publish in several different journals, and so on. You should do the same. Don't spread yourself too thin by trying to cultivate everyone who could possibly be relevant. But don't confine yourself to existing boundaries either.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 11
     
    A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students
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