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Barbara Lindsey

Wiggio - Makes it easy to work in groups. - 1 views

wiggio.com

collaboration tools group web2.0 learning2.0 cop communitiesofpractice

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 11 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 11
     
    Wiggio.com is a free, online toolkit that makes it easy to work in groups.
Barbara Lindsey

Toolbox or Trap? Course Management Systems and Pedagogy (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...46576

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Campuses have adopted these programs on a wide scale, yet few studies have looked at how the design and use of a CMS affects pedagogy, and instructors rarely discuss how a CMS affects their teaching.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08
       
      Discuss in class.
  • Decisions about which learning software to use on campus are often made by campus technologists and administrators rather than faculty.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08
       
      Not surprisingly, this also is the case at UCONN.
  • The construction of the course syllabus, a natural beginning point for most instructors, is a good example of how the software imposes limitations. When they first enter a CMS, new instructors see the default buttons of the course menu, which are based on type rather than purpose: Announcements, Course Content, Discussion, even Syllabus.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The default organization of the CMS forces them to think in terms of content types instead, breaking the natural structure of the semester.
  • In addition to a counterintuitive organizational scheme, integrated commercial systems have a built-in pedagogy, evident in the easiest-to-use, most accessible features. The focus on presentation (written documents to read), complemented by basic "discussion" input from students, is based on traditional lecture, review, and test pedagogy. This orientation is very different from the development of knowledge through a constructivist, learner-centered, or inquiry-based approach, which a number of faculty use successfully in the classroom.
  • But at the novice level, the system simply does not encourage such customization. To be able to modify the CMS to employ alternative teaching methods, instructors must have a well-developed sense of what is possible in the online environment before approaching the course design process—a perspective many do not have when they first start teaching online. When presented with a list of options, most people typically choose one option rather than question the list itself.
  • Most faculty do not use the web either extensively or intensively in their own work, and those who aren't "into technology" will quickly find themselves overwhelmed by a CMS.
  • Even after several years of working with a CMS, faculty requests for help tend to focus on what the technology can do rather than how their teaching and learning goals can be achieved.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08
       
      Important distinction.
  • An instructor seeking an easy way to post word-processed documents, enter grades, receive papers and assignments through a digital dropbox, and run a traditional threaded discussion board will tend to show great satisfaction with using a CMS.4 Those who tax the system more, and use the most complex features, show lower levels of satisfaction. In addition, after spending months creating material and quizzes in a proprietary system, faculty rightly panic at the idea of "moving everything" to another system. The big systems simply do not allow for easy export, and no one wants to do all that work over again. It is much easier to simply declare satisfaction with things the way they are.
  • There are, of course, alternatives to these hampering systems, and you don't have to be a programmer or Internet expert to use them.
  • Web 2.0 applications that encourage social construction of knowledge (Wikispaces, BubbleShare, Ning) are freely available and may provide more creative instructors with better options than any LMS currently available. Such programs make possible the creation of one's own mini-CMS, cobbled together out of programs that fit with the instructor's methodology. In these cases, pedagogy comes first—the tools can be used to build the courses we want to teach.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08
     
    Discuss this in class
Barbara Lindsey

2008 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Collaboration Webs - 0 views

wp.nmc.org/...collaboration-webs

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08 - Cached
  • A wide variety of webware applications exist to manage the creation and workflow of rich media projects
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08
       
      How can this change the way your students learn and collaborate?
  • In contrast to productivity applications, which enable users to perform a specific task or create a particular product, collaborative workspaces are “places” where groups of people gather resources or information related to their personal or professional lives.
  • highly flexible
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • these spaces conveniently lend themselves to almost seamless integration of content from other online resources, often quite transparently
  • They are easy to create, and they allow people to jointly collaborate on complex projects using low-cost, simple tools.
  • The essential attribute of the technologies in this set is that they make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, work on joint projects, and easily monitor collective progress. All of these are needs common to student work, research, collaborative teaching, writing and authoring, development of grant proposals, and more. Using them, groups can collaborate on projects online, anywhere there is Internet access; interim results of research can be shared among a team, supporting illustrations and tables created, and all changes and iterations tracked, documented, and archived. In class situations, faculty can evaluate student work as it progresses, leaving detailed comments right in the documents if desired in almost real time. Students can work with other students in distant locations, or with faculty as they engage in fieldwork.
  • Support needs are greatly reduced as nothing needs to be installed or upgraded.
  • A virtual collaborative workspace for a course or study group can be assembled quickly using tools, or widgets, that can pull information from a variety of sources
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08
       
      This is the difference between a social network like Ning, and a CMS like HuskyCT
  • The same tools can be used to set up a personal portfolio where a student can display his or her work in any form—photos, blog posts, shared videos, and more can be pulled to the page by widgets that grab the student’s contributions on other sites.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08
       
      No proprietary, expensive, inflexible software 'solution' like our university's portfolio system...
  • Using similar approaches, online conferences and symposia can offer session archives that persist over time; simply request that participants use a particular tag when they post related content, and the widgets will continue to update the conference page as new content appears.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08
       
      What can this contribute to your conferences?
  • Instead of the campus LMS, the courses use Facebook as their primary interaction and information tool.
  • A course in Digital Entrepreneurship at Rochester Institute of Technology created a Ning network on the topic, bringing undergrads enrolled in the course into contact with over a hundred graduate students, venture capitalists, faculty, practitioners, and business owners around the world.
  • An educational technology course at George Mason University uses Pageflakes as the hub of a learning community. Content is dynamically assembled from a variety of timely sources, integrating it with student work from Flickr and other sources, all via RSS.
  • The Flat Classroom Project (flatclassroomproject.ning.com) uses a Ning workspace to create a sense of space that is shared by students located in the U.S. and in Qatar.
  • to allow faculty to collaborate on course materials and leverage one another’s work.
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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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

Time to Get Scared, People? « OUseful.Info, the blog… - 0 views

ouseful.wordpress.com/...time-to-get-scared-people

onlinesafety google search identity

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 13 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 13 Feb 10
     
    Discusses how easy it has become for anyone to uncover anything about anyone who has a web presence.
Barbara Lindsey

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and ... - Google Books - 0 views

books.google.com/books

higher ed critique book

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 17 Feb 10
     
    Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge. At a time when competition to get into and succeed in college has never been more intense, universities are providing a less-useful education. Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, The Marketplace of Ideas examines what professors and students--and all the rest of us--might be better off without, while assessing what it is worth saving in our traditional university institutions.
Barbara Lindsey

Please Rob Me - 0 views

pleaserobme.com

twitter search safety privacy

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10
     
    A site that just uses twitter search info. to show how easy it is to find location information on people.
Barbara Lindsey

A way to link to a specific part of a youtube video - 0 views

youtubetime.com

youtube edit starttime

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 06 Mar 10
     
    Thx 2 @FelipeMorales. A super easy way to cut to the exact point in YouTube Vid you want to show.
Barbara Lindsey

Visualize your GPS tracks with Breadcrumbs | Google Earth Blog - 0 views

www.gearthblog.com/...your_gps_tracks_with_brea.html

gps socialannotation 3d trail video googleearth googelmaps

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Our users can log their ski trip, hiking trip or sightseeing trip, upload it to Breadcrumbs with their photos and videos, and send it to all their friends, who can relive the adventure in 3D. And this is only the start, as we plan to provide our users with a platform to not only edit and maintain tracks, but also to find new places to explore and interact within a social network.
  • Breadcrumbs is the first web application of its kind, where users can manage GPS tracks, photos and videos in one place - it can be thought of as 'Flickr for GPS tracks'.
  • The key features of Breadcrumbs include:Relive your adventure: Breadcrumbs brings together photos, videos and GPS tracks in one quick and easy process and our 3D playback function brings the track alive. Edit and manage: Breadcrumbs comes with a suite of tools which let users edit and manage their GPS tracks, photos and videos. These include:- Automated geotagging of photos.- Track editing tool to correct GPS points.- Add information to your adventure to help tell the story, such as show where you ate your lunch or spotted some wildlife.- Organize: Breadcrumbs offers a rich set of tools to help users to manage adventures.- Share: Breadcrumbs makes it easy to share adventures, with options including a public page for each track and direct integration with Facebook.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Our utilization and heavy integration with the Google Earth plugin is also a big bonus for the user. Garmin allows you to look at your data in Google Maps and indeed Google Earth. However, Breadcrumbs builds on this as we have built a track playback feature on top of the plugin which allows you to hit play and replay your trip step by step. It's like watching a movie of your day out! This really does bring the users' GPS data to life especially when sharing with friends and family.
  • We are already integrated with one smartphone application allowing the user to push their tracks directly to Breadcrumbs from their phone.
Barbara Lindsey

YouTube launches support for CC BY and a CC library featuring 10,000 videos - 0 views

creativecommons.org/...27533

cc ccllicense youtube mashup

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 09 Jun 11
     
    Key is how they have improved the video editor function to allow for easy search, integration and mashup of cc-licensed videos.
Barbara Lindsey

ASCD Inservice: Seven Ways to Go from On-Task to Engaged - 0 views

ascd.typepad.com/...-task-doesnt-mean-engaged.html

engaged ontask students howto

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 15 Sep 11
     
    how do we ramp up both on-task behavior and real, meaningful engagement for our students? Here are seven easy ways to increase the likelihood that students are both engaged and on-task:
Barbara Lindsey

The easiest way to write your life story | OhLife - 0 views

ohlife.com

journal online free easy

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 31 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 31 Jul 10
     
    Could use this with language students.
Barbara Lindsey

Justice with Michael Sandel - Home - 1 views

www.justiceharvard.org

Harvard Philosophy lectures openaccess

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
  • ustice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. Now it’s your turn to take the same journey in moral reflection that has captivated more than 14,000 students, as Harvard opens its classroom to the world.
  • - Voice your opinion in the polls- Take the pop quiz to test your knowledge - Dig deeper with in-depth readings- Hone arguments with the Discussion Guides And continue the classroom discussion—online—with other viewers from around the world.
  • Or you can start your own Discussion Circle, if your school, church, club, or organization wants to take the course as a group. It’s easy.
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