My experience in creating podcasts came through much nobler endeavors. It began with a research project in the working-class neighborhoods of North Belfast and a frustrated conversation over pints in a pub. I was on a research high after an interview with two women of very different political backgrounds. They were friends, brought together by the work of a local nonprofit, and their mutual admiration shone from the lightning-fast banter that they tossed back and forth throughout the interview. It was clear to me that they were a perfect example of a friendship from different sides of the political divide. But my friend at the pub just couldn't get it. He suggested that their friendship might be contrived, a mere show for my benefit, or that if real, it didn't mean as much as I thought. Exasperated, I pulled out my recorder and played the conversation back to him. As their Belfast accents filled up our corner booth, I could see his posture slacken and the battle turn my way. In that moment, I decided that only a podcast could finish telling my story. Over the next months, armed with just an MP3 player and some freeware suggested by a friend, I worked to piece together the story of North Belfast through interviews, conversations, and the sounds of the streets. The result was crude, elementary, and slightly difficult to listen to. But I was hooked.
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Confessions of a Podcast Junkie: A Student Perspective (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 3 views
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In fact, the iPod topped the list of the most "in" things on campus in 2006, according to Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study.
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I don't have any of them, but after studying and teaching in an American university , I feel it is one of the important things that I have to own!!
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I have a mp3 player, not an iPod and, anyway, I do not see why iPods are so popular...
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Mine doesn't really work since I put it in the laundry. But I never used it much anyway because it's not compatible with .flac files.
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"The good thing was that you could listen to a section over and over again if you wanted to review it," Clemen says. "There were a few podcasts that I had to review a couple of times. I could write out what he was saying and listen to what he was saying again." Reviewing came in handy, they all say, especially during project or exam times. "[With the podcasts], I've got more material to go back to if I wanted to review that module," Clemen says. "Whereas with the rest of the material, I just have some PowerPoint and my own notes."
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The trick, students say, is to make sure that there is something to gain by attending class and downloading the lecture.
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the material has to be relevant to the rest of the course. Otherwise, it's just a cool technology to have." Material should have a clear connection to the actual course, making a seamless transition between face time and the online realm.
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"There aren't any time constraints. Your podcast doesn't have to be an exact amount of time. You have carte blanche to change the format and grow your show." He also helps capture audio from guest speakers so that the programs can be
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n to the guest lectures while on the bus, at the gym, or in their dorm rooms. Still, Stein never felt the urge to skip class. "It was nice to know that if you missed class, you could record the lectures," she says. "But the iPod didn't encourage you to miss class. There's not a chalkboard that you can see or problems that you can see worked out. I think more people show up in a [podcasting] course because it encourages more interaction."
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"It's much better than writing a paper. It's more interesting, much more fun, and much more creative. You get a lot of time to work on it, and it's more collaborative because you're working with other people. You're creating the performance as you go and then continuously working on it." Creating a podcast didn't mean less work, he says.
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This seems to go on the idea of trying to make one's class accessible to everyone. So with podcasts students with strong oral skills might excell.
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Still, we don't want students to end up with poor writing skills. So I guess with the help of other uses of technolog like wikis we can make writing papers more fun and help stdents improve that as well.
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Though her goal was to increase learning for her peers in the anatomy course, she found that creating the material was a boon to her own learning. "As a student creating the podcasts, I had the chance to learn a lot more than I would have taking a course," she says. "It's about learning how to teach the material and how to make a narration out of it. You have this intimate knowledge of the material, and now you know how to show the different sides of an issue."
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Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject.
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I don't want [the podcasts] to overlap with lectures too much; I still want people to go to the lecture. This is a very relaxed way to get the information to them. They can do it on their own time and download it whenever."
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Though the podcasts arre a great idea for reviewing materials and catching up on things you missed in a class, still they will result in having less and less face-to-face interaction which is still needed especially when learning languages. I guess students will be tempted to miss classes more and more , even though the article suggested that using podcasts will encourage them not to do so!!
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Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—though it was now slightly rougher for the wear—I asked students at colleges and universities across North America about their iPod and MP3 use, their familiarity with podcasting, and just how they saw podcasting as part of the classroom.
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Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—th
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"Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject."
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We can't let educators off the hook | Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views
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Successful technology integration only produces amplified results when in its integration agency is given to the learner, when it becomes a tool to help learners learn, not teachers teach.
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I would also like to add that that old belief about teaching and learning has been around for a very long time now and part of that belief, the part about the teacher possessing the knowledge and imparting it to kids, is in direct threat when faced with technology. A teacher who has been taught to believe that they are needed for the knowledge they have and that that knowledge gives them authority in the classroom is threatened by technology. That threat needs to be approached lightly. If one speaks the truth too harshly the faithful will simply label them a blasphemer and ignore the truth in their message.
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et me start by saying that I consider teaching among the most important professions on earth, but just as doctors need to be current on medical technology, teachers MUST be current on information and communication technologies. Those are the tools of the trade.
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but why don’t teachers understand this? To figure this out we need to understand this philosophically and historically. Doctors, in the mid-19th Century resisted technologies as most teachers do now. Lister and Pasteur were “so far ahead of the curve they weren’t on the same road” when they suggested sterilization. Doctors of the time, seeing themselves as “healers” could not comprehend that they were killing half of their patients by resisting the technologies of the time – the belief system inherent in the identity model of the profession actually prevented them from being what they perceived themselves to be.
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Part of this is because we teach neither history nor philosophy. We do not share with teachers why Socrates opposed literacy, or what Gutenberg destroyed. We do not allow them to understand the essential humanness of technology, or to understand technology in Heidegger’s terms – the art of manipulating the world for our benefit.
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Now I don’t know what Glogster is, but I do know that every technology gives and takes. The book disabled hundreds of millions and wiped out hundreds of languages. It also spread learning and allowed both the novel and eventually journalism to appear. And I know that our students must have the philosophical grounding in what technology is, how to learn it, and how to use it, that so many of our current teachers lack. After all, the classroom is filled with technology – chairs and desks (1835 via William Alcott), chalkboards (1840 via William Alcott), Time schedules (1845 via Henry Barnard), Books (1840s, mostly Henry Barnard), testing (1910, the Carnegie Commission), even ballpoint pens – that highly controversial 1950s invention of Marcel Bich. And all of those technologies have benefits and real limits.
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I’m not really focused on, nor do I think Scott is focused on, “administrative technologies” but on “educational technologies.” A gradebook – I might argue, is no more an “educational technology” than a file cabinet is.
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What I think we are discussing is transformational technologies. Technologies whereuse alters the learning process.
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I need to say two things: First, and I think this is a big part of Scott’s target here, every school administrator, every policy maker, and every tech director making “blocking decisions,” needs to wake up and take responsibility for keeping our current century away from education.
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But – in the end – a big part of this remains “taking responsibility for your own learning.” The first free seminars in these systems which I offered were presented in 1998, and at that point there was already a massive research base for what Scott is saying here. The laws regarding technology access in terms of students with disabilities (and those with “504″ plans) were placed on the books in 1995. IBM was promoting speech recognition and text-to-speech in 1996, and Lynne Anderson-Inman was already proving the value of “digital texts” and “digital notebooks” and digitally linked note-taking in the mid-1990s.
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Jerrid, Troy, and everyone… The issue is this - In order to be lifelong learners it is essential to understand and know how to function with the information and communications technologies of our world, and to know how to adapt when those technologies change. In order to be human successes we also must understand how to communicate what we know, how to collaborate, and how to distribute information. This is why Socrates drilled his students on memory. In pre-literate Greece, that was the essential tool. This is why we taught “reading” (meaning decoding ink-on-paper alphabetic texts) in school, and why we taught writing with pens and pencils, and why we introduced students to libraries. In the Gutenberg era these were the essential tools.
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But, when kids are writing, I want them to (among other things) be able to communicate with Grandma even if Grandma lives thousands of miles away, even if Grandma is blind, even if Grandma speaks another language. And if they are reading, I don’t want them limited to the 2,000 “age appropriate” books and 1975 World Book Encyclopedia in the local public library.
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Newspaper readership, yes a minority, but a rapidly changing environment http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news with (in 2009) only 25% of Americans getting news from print daily.
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The change is occurring across the “print world” – Amazon, 19 July 2010: “Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.
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The lack of real history of education courses is what leaves so many teachers completely unaware of why schools do what they do, and leaves them confused about what the tools of education are.
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Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger. In fact, the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore. Most educators have never listened to a podcast, much less created one. They’ve never edited a wiki, much less started one of their own. So how on earth could they be expected to have a rational conversation about the impact new technologies are having on the skill sets our students need? Simply put, they can’t. The majority of the voices many of us listen to on a regular basis… actually represent just a tiny fraction of the educators out there. We’re the minority, the outsiders, the ones who talk using strange terms involving words with far too many missing vowels.
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You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.
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'absolutely intercultural!' - 0 views
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Welcome to the first ever intercultural podcast. 'absolutely intercultural!' is its name and, as far as we know, this is the first podcast in the world to deal with intercultural issues. We'll be releasing a new episode every second Friday evening, looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we'll be hearing from students on foreign work placements, asking how teachers can make use of intercultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with you any intercultural gossip we come across. 'absolutely intercultural!' won't be so much about passing on information but more about starting an intercultural dialogue between the makers, and you, the contributors and listeners.
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ACTFL Guidelines 2012 - 0 views
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The Guidelines are not based on any particular theory, pedagogical method, or educational curriculum. They neither describe how an individual learns a language nor prescribe how an individual should learn a language, and they should not be used for such purposes. They are an instrument for the evaluation of functional language abilityfunctional language abilityA language user's ability to accomplish real world communicative tasks such as handling a simple social transaction or resolving a situation with a complication..
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what individuals can do with language in terms of speaking, writing, listening, and reading in real-world situations in a spontaneous and non-rehearsed context.
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These Guidelines present the levels of proficiency as ranges, and describe what an individual can and cannot do with language at each level, regardless of where, when, or how the language was acquired.
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five major levels of proficiencyproficiencyOne's functional language ability.: Distinguished, Superior, Advanced, Intermediate, and Novice.
Ethan Zuckerman: Listening to global voices | Video on TED.com - 0 views
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shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Oct 10
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High Tech Ideas for Low Tech Classrooms: VoiceThread - Teaching Village - 0 views
www.teachingvillage.org/...ow-tech-classrooms-voicethread
voicethread elementary esl Glastonbury sakamoto beyondpowerpoint
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This year, I’ve taken pictures in class and then uploaded the pictures to VoiceThread. I record their words for each letter sound using Audacity (another free tool that allows you to record and edit audio on your computer) and a microphone attached to my laptop. At home, I add their recorded voices to the alphabet book.
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students’ book. I can export a video of our book, with comments, to bring back into class so we can listen to the additions and see how the book has grown. When we reach the letter Z, I’ll burn the book onto CDs for each of my students, so they’ll have a personal copy of their project.
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1-Because of a generous network of teachers on Twitter, my students have a chance to hear English spoken in a lot of different accents, by people who speak English as a first language and by people for whom English is an additional language.
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2-They’re learning about countries as we see where our comments come from. 3-They have an invaluable connection with a group of students in New Jersey, who are also learning their letters and sounds, thanks to the efforts of Kim George. My students are mighty impressed with how many words Kim’s students know for each letter! (In fact, you may want to fast forward through a few of the alphabet letters when you check out the project–it has really grown since our first letters!)
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4-Since the book is web-based, other classes around the world can “read” our book and it can continue to grow.
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1-It gave my students a clear, real reason to use English. It also gave them a real audience to write for. They had something to show for their hard work, something they could share with their friends and grandchildren. 2-My students have a chance to interact with other students through comments. I embedded their project on My Corner of the World (my student blog). While they haven’t yet mastered the art of responding to comments (a few are still figuring out where they might find their email addresses ), they do enjoy reading comments from others. 3-Since it’s web-based, I can share a link with the parents of my young learners class, and they can read the book at home. In fact, anyone around the world can read the book.
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Japanese Teenagers Teach Us Something About Being In Two Places At Once : 13.7: Cosmos ... - 0 views
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First, face-to-face conversation is a dynamic interaction between two people. Talking is a kind of turn-taking, and turn-taking is a rhythm that organizes how and when things unfold. When people talk, they modify their postures and tempos so that they correspond. (There is fascinating research on this sort of "coordination dynamics" by, among others, J.A. Scott Kelso and colleagues.) And moreover, they tend jointly to pay attention to what is going on around them. One upshot of this is that when you are talking with someone, you actually experience that they are listening. Talking, in this sense, is like dancing. You can tell whether someone is dancing with you or whether they have detached and lost interest.
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It is often very difficult to establish this sort dynamic engagement or coupling to someone over a cell phone. The connection is often just not good enough for that. One has the experience of speaking, but one lacks the corresponding experience of being heard. You literally lack the feedback — the coordinated breathing, the modulations of tones of voice, etc — that signals the other’s focus on you. And so you shout.
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When a cell-phone connection is excellent, you and your remote partner to start up a dance together. But crucially, you dance to music that only you and your partner hear. That is, you succeed in establishing the kind of dynamic integration and entrainment that is typical of face-to-face conversation. And that has the effect of transporting you right out of your physical environment into one that you share with your conversation partner. And this in turn has the effect of guaranteeing that your tone of voice and volume will be inappropriate for your actual physical conditions
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This use of language to signal presence is important. In particular, it sheds light on the transformations that are occurring as new technological practices such as cell phone use and social networking sites, etc, get embedded in our lives.
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Anthropologists looking at the matter were surprised to discover that the kids rarely send informative or detailed messages. As a general rule, they are not telling each other anything. Rather, they are just letting each other know that they are “there,” that they are online, in reach. Texting for the kids is a way of “pinging” each other. They bounce pings back and forth and so signal their presence for each other.
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shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Dec 10
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Ok You Luddites, Time To Chill Out On Facebook Over Privacy - 0 views
techcrunch.com/...chill-on-facebook-over-privacy
privacy online onlineprivacy onlinerights onlinesafety
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The fact is that privacy is already really, really dead. Howard Lindzon nailed it the other day when he said “Equifax, Transunion, Capital One, American Express and their cousins raped our privacy,” Everything we do, everything we buy, everywhere we go is tracked and sitting in a database somewhere. Our location via our phone, or our car GPS. Our credit card transactions. Everything.
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Supposedly many people were apprehensive about using telephones in the early 1900s because they knew the phone companies could listen in on their phone calls. There are people who won’t use phones today because of the ease in which calls can be tapped.
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New BBC Director Mandates Journalists Use Social Media - Rob's posterous - 0 views
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On the social media front, Horrocks appears to take the stance that Twitter, RSS readers and other social media tools are extremely valuable news-gathering resources essential to the output of journalists working in these digital times.
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Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback
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Consensus: Podcasting Has No 'Inherent' Pedagogic Value -- Campus Technology - 1 views
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"Podcasting does not contain any inherent value. It is only valuable inasmuch as it helps the instructor and students reach their educational goals, by facilitating thoughtful, engaging learning activities that are designed to work in support of those goals."
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You are on a job interview. You've been asked if and how you would use podcasting with your students. How would you respond?
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As a language teacher , I would highly be interested in using podcasting with my students. The point here comes to not only ask students to download certain podcasts to repeat words and have an all time accessable materials to improve pronunciation and study vocabs. The ability to link what students listen to on the podcasts with post activities to be performed in the classroom that help them even go beyond what that podcast has to offer, is one key to do that. So, using podcasting hould be highly planned and integrated in a way that serves our desired outcomes that will lead at the end to empower students to create or add podcasts that serve that as well.
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Inas-this is a wonderful example of extending the learning outside the classroom and then bringing it back into the classroom to reinforce and advance students' competencies. If you were on an interview, you might want to give a specific example. Could you think of one?
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"The answer to that question depends entirely on the educational context, including goals and appropriate learning activities, and on how the tool is implemented,"
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Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 2 views
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A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that’s what a story used to be, and that’s how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow.
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To further define the term, we should begin by explaining what we mean by its first part: Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly coined Web 2.0 in 2004,1 but the label remains difficult to acceptably define. For our present discussion, we will identify two essential features that are useful in distinguishing Web 2.0 projects and platforms from the rest of the web: microcontent and social media.2
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creating a website through Web 2.0 tools is a radically different matter compared with the days of HTML hand-coding and of moving files with FTP clients.
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Web 2.0 platforms are often structured to be organized around people rather than the traditional computer hierarchies of directory trees.
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Websites designed in the 1990s and later offered few connecting points for individuals, generally speaking, other than perhaps a guestbook or a link to an e-mail address. But Web 2.0 tools are built to combine microcontent from different users with a shared interest:
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If readers closely examine a Web 2.0 project, they will find that it is often touched by multiple people, whether in the content creation or via associated comments or discussion areas. If they participate actively, by contributing content, we have what many call social media.
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But Web 2.0's lowered bar to content creation, combined with increased social connectivity, ramps up the ease and number of such conversations, which are able to extend outside the bounds of a single environment.
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Another influential factor of Web 2.0 is findability: the use of comprehensive search tools that help story creators (and readers) quickly locate related micocontent with just a few keywords typed into a search field.
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the "art of conveying events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment."4 Annette Simmons sees the storyteller’s empathy and sensory detail as crucial to "the unique capability to tap into a complex situation we have all experienced and which we all recognize."5
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Web 2.0 stories are often broader: they can represent history, fantasy, a presentation, a puzzle, a message, or something that blurs the boundaries of reality and fiction.
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On one level, web users experienced a great deal of digital narratives created in non-web venues but published in HTML, such as embedded audio clips, streaming video, and animation through the Flash plug-in. On another level, they experienced stories using web pages as hypertext lexia, chunks of content connected by hyperlinks.
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While HTML narratives continued to be produced, digital storytelling by video also began, drawing on groundbreaking video projects from the 1970s.
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By the time of the emergence of blogs and YouTube as cultural media outlets, Tim O'Reilly's naming of Web 2.0, and the advent of social media, storytelling with digital tools had been at work for nearly a generation.
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Starting from our definitions, we should expect Web 2.0 storytelling to consist of Web 2.0 practices.
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In each of these cases, the relative ease of creating web content enabled social connections around and to story materials.
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Web 2.0 creators have many options about the paths to set before their users. Web 2.0 storytelling can be fully hypertextual in its multilinearity. At any time, the audience can go out of the bounds of the story to research information (e.g., checking names in Google searches or looking for background information in Wikipedia).
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User-generated content is a key element of Web 2.0 and can often enter into these stories. A reader can add content into story platforms directly: editing a wiki page, commenting on a post, replying in a Twitter feed, posting a video response in YouTube. Those interactions fold into the experience of the overall story from the perspective of subsequent readers.
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On a less complex level, consider the 9th Btn Y & L War Diaries blog project, which posts diary entries from a World War I veteran. A June 2008 post (http://yldiaries.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html) contains a full wartime document, but the set of comments from others (seven, as of this writing) offer foreshadowing, explication of terms, and context.
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As with the rest of Web 2.0, it is up to readers and viewers to analyze and interpret such content and usually to do so collaboratively.
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Other forms leverage the Web 2.0 strategies of aggregating large amounts of microcontent and creatively selecting patterns out of an almost unfathomable volume of information.
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The Twitter content form (140-character microstories) permits stories to be told in serialized portions spread over time.
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It also poses several challenges: to what extent can we fragment (or ‘microchunk,’ in the latest parlance) literature before it becomes incoherent? How many media can literature be forced into—if, indeed, there is any limit?"
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Facebook application that remixes photos drawn from Flickr (based on tags) with a set of texts that generate a dynamic graphic novel.
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At a different—perhaps meta—level, the boundaries of Web 2.0 stories are not necessarily clear. A story's boundaries are clear when it is self-contained, say in a DVD or XBox360 game. But can we know for sure that all the followers of a story's Twitter feed, for example, are people who are not involved directly in the project? Turning this question around, how do we know that we've taken the right measure of just how far a story goes, when we could be missing one character's blog or a setting description carefully maintained by the author on Wikipedia?
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The Beast was described by its developer, Sean Stewart: “We would tell a story that was not bound by communication platform: it would come at you over the web, by email, via fax and phone and billboard and TV and newspaper, SMS and skywriting and smoke signals too if we could figure out how.
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instead of telling a story, we would present the evidence of that story, and let the players tell it to themselves.”15
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In addition, the project served as an illustrative example of the fact that no one can know about all of the possible web tools that are available.
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Web 2.0 storytelling offers two main applications for colleges and universities: as composition platform and as curricular object.
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The reader is driven to read more, not only within the rest of that post but also across the other sites of the story: the archive of posts so far, the MySpace page, the resources copied and pointed to. Perhaps the reader ranges beyond the site, to the rest of the research world—maybe he or she even composes a response in some Web 2.0 venue.
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Yet the blog form, which accentuates this narrative, is accessible to anyone with a browser. Examples like Project 1968 offer ready models for aspiring writers to learn from. Even though the purpose of Project 1968 is not immediately tied to a class, it is a fine example for all sorts of curricular instances, from history to political science, creative writing to gender studies, sociology to economics.
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it’s worth remembering that using Web 2.0 storytelling is partly a matter of scale. Some projects can be Web 2.0 stories, while others integrate Web 2.0 storytelling practices.
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Lecturers are familiar with telling stories as examples, as a way to get a subject across. They end discussions with a challenging question and create characters to embody parts of content (political actors, scientists, composite types). Imagine applying those habits to a class Twitter feed or Facebook group.
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For narrative studies, Web 2.0 stories offer an unusual blend of formal features, from the blurry boundaries around each story to questions of chronology.
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An epistolary novel, trial documents, a lab experiment, or a soldier's diaries—for example, WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier (http://wwar1.blogspot.com/)—come to life in this new format.
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epigrams are well suited to being republished or published by microblogging tools, which focus the reader’s attention on these compressed phases. An example is the posting of Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894), on Twitter (http://twitter.com/oscarwilde). Other compressed forms of writing can be microblogged also, such as Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (1906), also on Twitter (http://twitter.com/novelsin3lines). As Dan Visel observed of the latter project: “Fénéon . . . was secretly a master of miniaturized text. . . . Fénéon's hypercompression lends itself to Twitter. In a book, these pieces don't quite have space to breathe; they're crowded by each other, and it's more difficult for the reader to savor them individually. As Twitter posts, they're perfectly self-contained, as they would have been when they appeared as feuilleton.”21
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A publicly shared Web 2.0 story, created by students for a class, afterward becomes something that other students can explore. Put another way, this learning tool can produce materials that subsequently will be available as learning objects.
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We expect to see new forms develop from older ones as this narrative world grows—even e-mail might become a new storytelling tool.22 Moreover, these storytelling strategies could be supplanted completely by some semantic platform currently under development. Large-scale gaming might become a more popular engine for content creation. And mobile devices could make microcontent the preferred way to experience digital stories.
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perhaps the best approach for educators is simply to give Web 2.0 storytelling a try and see what happens. We invite you to jump down the rabbit hole. Add a photo to Flickr and use that as a writing prompt. Flesh out a character in Twitter. Follow a drama unfolding on YouTube. See how a wiki supports the gradual development of a setting. Then share with all of us what you have learned about this new way of telling, and listening to, stories.
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The interwoven characters, relationships, settings, and scenes that result are the stuff of stories, regardless of how closely mapped onto reality they might be; this also distinguishes a Web 2.0 story from other blogging forms, such as political or project sites (except as satire or criticism!).
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in sharp contrast to the singular flow of digital storytelling. In the latter form, authors create linear narratives, bound to the clear, unitary, and unidirectional timeline of the video format and the traditional story arc. Web 2.0 narratives can follow that timeline, and podcasts in particular must do so. But they can also link in multiple directions.
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Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE - 0 views
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Net Gen students are facile at multitasking
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Conference Humiliation: They're Tweeting Behind Your Back - Technology - The Chronicle ... - 0 views
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Higher Education Reimagined With Online Courseware - Education Life - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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M.I.T. officials like to tell about an unsolicited comment they received one day about the online course “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.” “I learned a LOT from these lectures and the other course material,” the comment said. “Thank you for having it online.” The officials did a double take. It was from Bill Gates. (Really.)
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But just 9 percent of those who use M.I.T. OpenCourseWare are educators. Forty-two percent are students enrolled at other institutions, while another 43 percent are independent learners like Mr. Gates. Yale, which began putting free courses online just four years ago, is seeing similar proportions: 25 percent are students, a majority of them enrolled at Yale or prospective students; just 6 percent are educators; and 69 percent are independent learners.
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Professor Shankar is working on his second semester of recorded videos, and says that the experience has improved his teaching.
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So Professor Shankar has begun inserting links to specific portions of Professor Lewin’s course, and, “since any mistake would affect larger numbers of students listening online,” he says, he thinks harder about every topic he teaches in the classroom.
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His intense, animated ruminations — the title of his course is “Death” — have brought fan mail from Mexico, Iraq, Korea and China. Several months ago, he got a response from somebody suffering from a brain injury and who was using the lectures to exercise his mind. “I don’t think anyone knows what this will do to education 15 years from now,” Professor Kagan says. “But even if it does nothing more than that, that’s enough.”
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The backers of free courseware acknowledge the benefit of self-enrichment. Still, they say they expect open education not only to expand access to information but also to lead to success in higher education, particularly among low-income students and those who are first in their family to go to college.
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Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative is working with teams of faculty members, researchers on learning and software engineers to develop e-courses designed to improve the educational experience.
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Carnegie Mellon is working with community colleges to build four more courses, with the three-year goal of 25 percent more students passing when the class is bolstered by the online instruction.
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The intended user is the beginning college student, whom Dr. Smith describes as “someone with limited prior knowledge in a college subject and with little or no experience in successfully directing his or her own learning.”
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. “We now have the technology that enables us to go back to what we all know is the best educational experience: personalized, interactive engagement,” Dr. Smith says.
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That won’t happen, and in the terms-of-use section of Open Yale Courses, the university makes that clear. Besides not granting degrees or certificates, open courses do not offer direct access to faculty. They, in other words, are strictly “for those who wish to learn,” as the Web site says. “Its purpose is not to duplicate a Yale education.”
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Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.
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Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?
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P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.
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David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions. Dr. Wiley says that models like P2PU address an important component missing from open courseware: human support. That is, when you have a question, whom can you ask? “No one gets all the way through a textbook without a dozen questions,” he says. “Who’s the T.A.? Where’s your study group?” “If you go to M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, there’s no way to find out who else is studying the same material and ask them for help,” he says. At P2PU, a “course organizer” leads the discussion but “you are working together with others, so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers. The core idea of P2PU is putting people together around these open courses.”
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Mr. Reshef’s plan is to “take anyone, anyone whatsoever,” as long as they can pass an English orientation course and a course in basic computer skills, and have a high school diploma or equivalent. The nonprofit venture has accepted, and enrolled, 380 of 3,000 applicants, and is trying to raise funds through microphilanthropy — “$80 will send one student to UoPeople for a term” — through social networking.
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Mr. Reshef has used $1 million of his own money to start the University of the People, which taps open courses that other universities have put online and relies on student interaction to guide learning; students even grade one another’s papers.
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shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 10
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The New Gold Mine: Your Personal Information & Tracking Data Online - WSJ.com - 0 views
online.wsj.com/...3940904575395073512989404.html
privacy online rights onlinerights onlineprivacy tracking datamining
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the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. • The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
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the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. • These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
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Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.
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"It is a sea change in the way the industry works," says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. "Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages."
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The Journal found that Microsoft Corp.'s popular Web portal, MSN.com, planted a tracking file packed with data: It had a prediction of a surfer's age, ZIP Code and gender, plus a code containing estimates of income, marital status, presence of children and home ownership, according to the tracking company that created the file, Targus Information Corp.
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Tracking is done by tiny files and programs known as "cookies," "Flash cookies" and "beacons." They are placed on a computer when a user visits a website. U.S. courts have ruled that it is legal to deploy the simplest type, cookies, just as someone using a telephone might allow a friend to listen in on a conversation. Courts haven't ruled on the more complex trackers.
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tracking companies sometimes hide their files within free software offered to websites, or hide them within other tracking files or ads. When this happens, websites aren't always aware that they're installing the files on visitors' computers.
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Often staffed by "quants," or math gurus with expertise in quantitative analysis, some tracking companies use probability algorithms to try to pair what they know about a person's online behavior with data from offline sources about household income, geography and education, among other things. The goal is to make sophisticated assumptions in real time—plans for a summer vacation, the likelihood of repaying a loan—and sell those conclusions.
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Consumer tracking is the foundation of an online advertising economy that racked up $23 billion in ad spending last year. Tracking activity is exploding. Researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute last fall found tracking technology on 80% of 1,000 popular sites, up from 40% of those sites in 2005.
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The Journal found tracking files that collect sensitive health and financial data. On Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.'s dictionary website Merriam-Webster.com, one tracking file from Healthline Networks Inc., an ad network, scans the page a user is viewing and targets ads related to what it sees there.
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Beacons, also known as "Web bugs" and "pixels," are small pieces of software that run on a Web page. They can track what a user is doing on the page, including what is being typed or where the mouse is moving.
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The majority of sites examined by the Journal placed at least seven beacons from outside companies. Dictionary.com had the most, 41, including several from companies that track health conditions and one that says it can target consumers by dozens of factors, including zip code and race.
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After the Journal contacted the company, it cut the number of networks it uses and beefed up its privacy policy to more fully disclose its practices.
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Flash cookies can also be used by data collectors to re-install regular cookies that a user has deleted. This can circumvent a user's attempt to avoid being tracked online. Adobe condemns the practice.
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Wittingly or not, people pay a price in reduced privacy for the information and services they receive online. Dictionary.com, the site with the most tracking files, is a case study.
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Think about how these technologies and the associated analytics can be used in other industries and social settings (e.g. education) for real beneficial impacts. This is nothing new for the web, the now that it has matured, it can be a positive game-changer.
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Media6Degrees Inc., whose technology was found on three sites by the Journal, is pitching banks to use its data to size up consumers based on their social connections. The idea is that the creditworthy tend to hang out with the creditworthy, and deadbeats with deadbeats.
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"There are applications of this technology that can be very powerful," says Tom Phillips, CEO of Media6Degrees. "Who knows how far we'd take it?"
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Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty's computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.
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"We can segment it all the way down to one person," says Eric Porres, Lotame's chief marketing officer.
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One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.
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"Every time I go on the Internet," she says, she sees weight-loss ads. "I'm self-conscious about my weight," says Ms. Reid, whose father asked that her hometown not be given. "I try not to think about it…. Then [the ads] make me start thinking about it."
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Information about people's moment-to-moment thoughts and actions, as revealed by their online activity, can change hands quickly. Within seconds of visiting eBay.com or Expedia.com, information detailing a Web surfer's activity there is likely to be auctioned on the data exchange run by BlueKai, the Seattle startup.
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Educational Leadership:Promoting Respectful Schools:Respecting Students - 0 views
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Teachers who respect students Understand the power of beliefs in shaping their practice. They rid themselves of any covert persuasion they may have that kids who are like them in race, economic status, language, beliefs, or motivation are somehow better or smarter than those who are unlike them. Believe their work can make previously unimpressive students shine—and can raise the ceilings of possibility for impressive students. Teach students how to grow academically and personally. Enlist students' partnership in creating a classroom that dignifies each person within it.
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Teachers who respect students choose their words and tone carefully. They consciously Listen to students—and hear them. Use positive humor, not sarcasm. Provide corrective feedback in ways that foster student effort. Acknowledge student growth. Use their words to defuse difficult situations.
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shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Jul 11
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UC Berkeley orientation: UC Berkeley asks incoming students to say more than 'hello' - ... - 0 views
www.latimes.com/...cents-20110717,0,2416575.story
berkeley orientation students speech samples map mapping
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In addition to exploring their diverse backgrounds, students will discuss the language challenges graduates face as many work overseas, Hampton said. "They're going to be living in a multilingual context, and that's a really interesting thing for them to think about," he said.
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The voice samples will be attached anonymously to an interactive world map so other participants can hear them, and each student will be matched through a voice recognition program with five others who have similar pronunciations, Johnson said.
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With about 30% of incoming UC Berkeley students reporting that English was not their first language, exploring that linguistic diversity is a good way to help students feel comfortable at such a large school, faculty organizers said.
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This summer, UC Berkeley is asking new students to submit a less controversial part of themselves: Their voices and accents
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One result will be an analysis of California accents, as researchers try to get beyond such stereotypes as the Surfer Dude, Valley Girl and Central Valley Farmer to study participants' vowel sounds, along with their locations, ethnicity and socioeconomic backgrounds.
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After two years and perhaps again after four, students will be asked to make new recordings to determine whether being at UC homogenized their accents or pushed them into distinctive speech subgroups, Johnson said. (For example, he said, because of his Oklahoma upbringing, he pronounced "Don" and "dawn" identically in one of the experiment's exercises.)
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Among those embracing the project was Chloe Hunt, 18, a freshman from Santa Barbara who said the voice map made her even more curious to meet students from many cultural backgrounds. "It made me think about who I'm going to be sitting next to in class," said Hunt, who learned Farsi from Iranian relatives.
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Leah Grant, 41, who is transferring to UC Berkeley from Long Beach City College, said listening to the voice samples made her feel like part of the university already. The varying approaches also were amusing, she said.