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Barbara Lindsey

YouTube - AlArabiya's Channel - 0 views

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    With the drawdown of U.S. troops and a still-unformed government, the future of Iraq holds many question marks. What are your questions for Iraqi leaders about the future of the country?
Barbara Lindsey

Top 10 Internet Resources for School Leaders | LearnCentral - 0 views

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    Possible Thursday session for the 28th.
Barbara Lindsey

Unmasking the Digital Truth / FrontPage - 0 views

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    The goal of this collaborative wiki is to "unmask the digital truth" with respect to the reasons some leaders today are overfiltering and overblocking web 2.0 sites in schools and libraries, and provide reasonable alternatives which support broader student and teacher access to these sites.
Barbara Lindsey

Amazon Kindle: Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big R... - 0 views

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    An example of how the use of annotation of an online book could be used to support differentiated learning and promote in-class discussion, by looking at and discussing what was highlighted by members within and outside the group (class) number of highlights and ranking of highlights for a particular book.
Barbara Lindsey

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

  • Given this situation, it is clear that some of the following are needed to build a workplace that innovates—in other words—a learning organization:
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    Thx 2 Thomas Sauer for posting this link. (An absolutely critical means for me to find information about topics I am passionate about and that promote my deepening understanding of issues key to my ongoing professional development is allowing those with similar passions to curate findings for me and to likewise do the same for others.) "My understanding of today's workplace: Predictable, routine tasks are being either automated or outsourced, or soon will be. Knowledge workers are increasingly taking more responsibility for their work as well as personal growth. Hierarchy is being replaced by wirearchy. Managers are being replaced by leaders, coaches, and facilitators, or will be. The kinds of work being done are those that defy being codified into step-lists or guidelines. The problems are complex-often chaotic-and resist solving using best practices or yore. Ambiguity, complexity and chaos are replacing the predictable, known, and simple. The competitive edge is the ability to problem solve quickly and innovatively. The day of individual stars are past; it is time for collaborative team work. Routine expertise, based on set skills and crystallized intelligence, is being superseded by a need for more adaptive expertise and fluid intelligence." 
Barbara Lindsey

YouTube - Cute Girl Has A Catchy Dance - 0 views

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    A cute take on Derek Sivers 'how to start a movement' Ted Talk (http://bit.ly/a9x4Uh)
Barbara Lindsey

News: The Rise of the 'Edupunk' - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • said Mark David Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
  • So where are the bright spots? A continual refrain from panelists was the idea that “cutting to invest” is the only path forward. College leaders argue that the imperative to grow programs now invariably means the shedding of others.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      And what gets cut in the humanities?
Barbara Lindsey

Mobile Learning Environments (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • There are now more than 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)'s February 2010 press release. This means that mobile has taken the place of FM radio as the most ubiquitous communications technology on the planet.1
  • Mobile Phone Network model Centralized Peer-to-peer Content customization Uniform Personalized to context Information distribution Just-in-case Just-in-time Role of audience Consumer Equal p
  • articipant Reliability qualifier Authority Social capital Governance Institutional Relational
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  • I've seen that the introduction of new technology can provide a reason to rethink a course from the ground up and reassess its core educational goals. Often the greatest educational benefits seem to come from this process, not just the technology that encouraged it.
  • It might be safe to say that each time a new medium appears, no matter how different it is from the last, the normal reaction of first adopters is to use it as a new package for existing content.
  • I've seen that the introduction of new technology can provide a reason to rethink a course from the ground up and reassess its core educational goals.
  • It can be easy to forget that we human beings are more than brains connected to an apparatus that moves us around in space. Instead, we belong to communities, we live in neighborhoods, we have local culture and events. Inquiry into these real things led to many of the fields we now call science, literature, mathematics, and history. Why then do we isolate instruction in those fields to a classroom, instead of deriving instruction from the environment from which these subjects originated?
  • place-based learning.2 One such example, Dow Day, is a mobile documentary that relives the student protests of 1967 in Madison, Wisconsin, against the Dow Chemical Company. In this activity, location-aware handheld devices add an augmented layer of history to a walk through the campus, placing the student in the role of a news reporter. By monitoring the device's GPS, Dow Day creates the illusion of additional characters standing in physical space and facilitates simulated conversations with these historical entities. In addition, when players walk to predefined media locations, they trigger video footage showing the physical scene from 40 years ago, effectively superimposing the marchers and police onto the current landscape (see Figure 2).
  • Situated theories of cognition claim that knowing and doing are inherently linked.4
  • One such example is a mobile game called Mentira, produced at the University of New Mexico. The game is designed to teach an introductory college Spanish course in ways that are contextually sound for language learning. In the first unit, students play a mystery game on handheld devices in class, taking on a role and a goal within a story told completely in Spanish. In the second part, the class moves outside to a local Spanish-speaking neighborhood where they continue the story while interacting with physical and virtual Spanish speakers in real places (see Figure 3).
  • With Mentira, students learn Spanish outside the classroom through narrative and interaction with members of a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, re-situating language in practice.
  • Identifying the disconnect, a small team from the Animal Science and the Academic Technology departments at UW–Madison are working on a prototype for hobbyist birdwatchers. WeBIRD aims to crowdsource ornithology research by providing a tool for hobbyist practitioners. A birder will record the audio of a bird heard out in the field and have the system identify the species while logging the sighting's location, current weather, time of day, and date to a central database. This data can then be used for anything from formal research of migration patterns over time to individual questions such as, "Where am I most likely to see a cardinal this time of year?" The potential for location-aware, casual gaming structures such as birder achievement badges and leader boards are also being investigated in order to provide additional social play motives for participation.
  • Learning happens anywhere someone has questions and the means to explore answers. As ubiquitous access to information continues to shift toward personal mobile devices, more and more of the learning that takes place may be happening outside of the classroom and in the context of a backyard conversation, a walk through campus, or a Taquería in New Mexico.
Barbara Lindsey

Are Schools Inhibiting 21st Century Learning? : April 2008 : THE Journal - 0 views

  • 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,"
  • Here are the top-3 technologies teachers and administrators chose to equip the "ultimate school for 21st century learners."
  • 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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  • he lowest for administrators were "unlimited student access to the Internet" (12%) and "games/virtual simulations" (15%). The lowest for teachers were Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs and wikis (10%) and unlimited student access to the Internet (11%).
  • The Speak Up survey is conducted annually to assess views on current issues in education, and results are shared with state and federal policy leaders.
  • for the first time this year, administrators have participated in the survey. The group had expected about 325,000 individuals to participate in Speak Up 2007, a goal that was exceeded by some 42,000 participants, which included 319,223 students, 25,544 teachers, 19,726 parents, and 3,263 administrators.
Barbara Lindsey

Are Schools Inhibiting 21st Century Learning? : April 2008 : THE Journal - 0 views

  • both district leaders and parents are open to believing that social networking could be such a tool--as long as there are reasonable parameters of use in place. Moreover, social networking is increasingly used as a communications and collaboration tool of choice in businesses and higher education. As such, it would be wise for schools, whose responsibility it is to prepare students to transition to adult life with the skills they need to succeed in both arenas, to reckon with it."
  • he majority of middle and high school students (51 percent of students in grades 6 through 12) indicated that "games make it easier to understand difficult concepts.
  • Teachers
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  • 65 percent indicated that they thought educational gaming would be an effective tool for students with different learning styles and would help engage students in coursework.
  • some 46 percent said they would "like to receive specific professional development on how to effectively integrate gaming technologies into curriculum
Barbara Lindsey

Bill Ferriter | Teacher Leaders Network - 0 views

  • Doesn’t Pink talk about this in A Whole New Mind?  Here’s a quote: “While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak in different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting, and nowadays more effective.” (Kindle Location 1692)
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      This is where we should shine!
  • Recently, I've tinkered with a system to assess my students' participation in Voicethread conversations.  Essentially mirroring the reflective aspects of Konrad's blogging handouts, I've decided to ask my students the following four questions while we're working with a new Voicethread: Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking.   Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with.  If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas.  What about the new comment was challenging?  What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged?  Will you change yoru mind?  Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?
  • The cool part about assessing Voicethread presentations this way is that each question essenitally forces my students to interact with our conversation in a really meaningful way.  To craft careful answers, they must truly consider the comments of others---an essential skill for promoting collaborative versus competitive dialogue---and compare those comments against their own beliefs and preconceived notions.  That's metacognition at its best! What's even better is that when students know that these questions form the basis of our Voicethread assessment from the beginning of a conversation, participation level rise remarkably.  While students are looking for project reflection comments, they often end up highly motivated to share their thinking with peers. 
Barbara Lindsey

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

  • 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
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  • 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

News: Hitting Pause on Class Videos - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • if the profit margin that commercial publishers obtain from institutions that support the faculty in their research, and then, ironically, buy it back at exorbitant expense were revealed and better understood as a significant and unnecessary drain on our meager resources, higher education leaders might be able to use the opportunities that technology now offers to by-pass these publishers, perhaps manage our own scholarly publications and certainly avoid this extraordinary expense in the name of the common good that education offers society.
  • They are clearly intending to argue that ripping DVDs to put them online for a course involves defeating a technological protection measure (CSS, to be exact), and that is illegal under the DMCA and trumps any claim of fair use (even for libraries making preservation copies under section 108). If this goes to court, expect AIME to claim that UCLA violated the DMCA the second they moved content from a DVD to a hard drive.
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    Copyright is not slavery, to be sure, but it is among many things: a property right of sorts although NOT just like physical property or its concomitant legal regime; shaped -- and disrupted -- by technology repeatedly over time; and, finally, given its relationship to research, learning and free speech, most definitely a civil rights issue of our time.
Barbara Lindsey

2010 Horizon Report » The Horizon Project - 0 views

  • ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations from more than two dozen countries. In each of the past six years, these conversations have resulted in the publication each January of a report focused on emerging technologies relevant to higher education.
  • When the cycle starts, little is known, or even can be known, about the appropriateness or efficacy of many of the emerging technologies for these purposes, as the Horizon Project expressly focuses on technologies not currently in widespread use in academe. In a typical year, 75 or more of these technologies may be identified for further investigation; for the 2010 report, more than 110 were considered
  • By engaging a wide community of interested parties, and diligently searching the Internet and other sources, enough information is gathered early in the process to allow the members of the Advisory Board to form an understanding of how each of the discovered technologies might be in use in settings outside of academe, to develop a sense of the potential the technology may have for higher education settings, and to envision applications of the technology for teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. The findings are discussed in a variety of settings — with faculty, industry experts, campus technologists, and of course, the Horizon Advisory Board. Of particular interest to the Advisory Board every year is finding educational applications for these technologies that may not be intuitive or obvious.
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  • ncreasingly the Horizon Project is a global effort. Each year at least a third of the members of the advisory board represent countries outside of North America.
  • Each Horizon Report is produced over a period of just a few months so that the information is timely and relevant.
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