Skip to main content

Home/ beyondwebct/ Group items tagged managing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Barbara Lindsey

An Interview with Angela Maiers | Information Xchange - The Learning Management System - 1 views

ixlms.com/...n-interview-with-angela-maiers

interview technology mindset pedagogy learning Maiers

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 10
     
    For Carsten!
Barbara Lindsey

Free as in Freedom: The Power of Pull - John Seely Brown - 0 views

www.learninggeneralist.com/...-of-pull-john-seely-brown.html

seelybrown gaming cop

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The 21st century has changed the game completely. The infrastructure is driven by the continual advances in computing, storage and bandwidth. There's no stability in sight.
  • In a world of increasingly rapid change, the half life of a given skill is constantly shrinking and the predictability of future needs is increasingly less certain. We're having to move from stocks to flows. This means we move from protecting knowledge assets to participating in knowledge flows. This means that our learning strategy moves to having a strong tacit component as against a hoarding mindset of stocking knowledge.
  • We're creating a lot of information everyday more in every two days than we did from the dawn of man to 2003.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • We need to rethink how we learn and deal with the tacit knowledge.
  • Dusty wanted to put Maui on the surfing map. Dusty found four peers in the same age group and decided to build a scheme of collaboration - the likes of which the world has never seen. Dusty was the first junior champion ever in Maui and came up with a new genre - aerial surfing
  • Here are some things they did in their learning community:They are willing to keep failing because they knew they could learn from failure.They collectively analysed each frame of videos of the best surfers across the world.The used video camera to capture and analyse their own moves. They deconstruct their own technique by watching each frame of their work on the beach.They pulled ideas from various sports - windsurfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, motorcross, etc. The cool stuff is they've taken ideas from different domains and applied them to their own domain. They've understood the idea of 'spikes', where they've travelled to the expertise hotspots for surfing across the world to learn their trade. Now they're a bit of a spike in themselves.
  • This is an example of deep collaborative learning with each other. They are people that are passionate about a trade and they chase extreme performance with a deep questing disposition. They learn themselves from the things that others are doing around them. They have a commitment to indwelling -- they soak up the world around them.
  • The second story JSB has is about WOW - The World of Warcraft. It's a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG). There's a reason we need to care. This is the first domain where we've discovered a place where we don't have diminishing returns, we have exponentially increasing returns. The sense of joint collective activity is pretty awesome as one of the TWU students pointed as well. The core of the game is really more the social life on the edge of the game. The edge is often called a knowledge economy. WOW is way too complicated to play without complex analysis tools and dashboards, but these dashboards are tailored to each player to measure their own performance and are a key to their mastery at the game. This is quite curious -- don't managers develop dashboards to look at their people? This is obviously a game changing way to self-reflect. The cool thing that goes is after action reviews -- this is very in tune with the Agile Retrospectives idea. This is an example of blending the tacit and the cognitive. This is collective indwelling and reflection. While they marinate and learn in a social context, they also reflect together when they're done, so they can learn from each other. This is the way grandmasters learn -- they practice with peers and then reflect on what they did. This is the way hackers practice their trade.
  • There's an incredibly rich knowledge economy around this game. On a typical night there are about 10-15000 new ideas coming up about the game. There are blizzard forums, databases, blogs, wikis, videos and what not. The way people absorb all of this is that guilds (player teams) self-organise into being a knowledge refining community to work together, curate content and then collectively learn amongst themselves. This is the idea of a personal learning network (PLN) IMO.
Barbara Lindsey

gladwell dot com - designs for working - 0 views

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

gladwell interaction cop office work street

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The task of the office, then, is to invite a particular kind of social interaction--the casual, nonthreatening encounter that makes it easy for relative strangers to talk to each other. Offices need the sort of social milieu that Jane Jacobs found on the sidewalks of the West Village. "It is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships," Jacobs wrote. If you substitute "office" for "city street neighborhood," that sentence becomes the perfect statement of what the modern employer wants from the workplace.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Nov 10
       
      This reminds me of the strength of weak ties argument.
  • In the war-room study, the company moved the client, the programmers, and a manager into a dedicated conference room, and made them stay there until the project was done. Using the war room cut the software-development time by two-thirds, in part because there was far less time wasted on formal meetings or calls outside the building: the people who ought to have been bumping into each other were now sitting next to each other.
  • The agency is in a huge old warehouse, three stories high and the size of three football fields. It is informally known as Advertising City, and that's what it is: a kind of artfully constructed urban neighborhood. The floor is bisected by a central corridor called Main Street, and in the center of the room is an open space, with café tables and a stand of ficus trees, called Central Park. There's a basketball court, a game room, and a bar. Most of the employees are in snug workstations known as nests, and the nests are grouped together in neighborhoods that radiate from Main Street like Paris arrondissements. The top executives are situated in the middle of the room. The desk belonging to the chairman and creative director of the company looks out on Central Park. The offices of the chief financial officer and the media director abut the basketball court. Sprinkled throughout the building are meeting rooms and project areas and plenty of nooks where employees can closet themselves when they need to.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • A vital community, in Jacobs's view, required more than the appropriate physical environment. It also required a certain kind of person, who could bind together the varied elements of street life.
  • What Stephenson's X-rays do best, though, is tell you who the public characters are. In every network, there are always one or two people who have connections to many more people than anyone else. Stephenson calls them "hubs," and on her charts lines radiate out from them like spokes on a wheel. (Bernie the candy-store owner, on Jacobs's Hudson Street, was a hub.) A few people are also what Stephenson calls "gatekeepers": they control access to critical people, and link together a strategic few disparate groups. Finally, if you analyze the graphs there are always people who seem to have lots of indirect links to other people--who are part of all sorts of networks without necessarily being in the center of them. Stephenson calls those people "pulsetakers." (In Silicon Valleyspeak, the person in a sea of cubicles who pops his or her head up over the partition every time something interesting is going on is called a prairie dog: prairie dogs are pulsetakers.)
  • she pointed to the lines connecting that department with other departments. "They're all coming into this one place," she said, and she showed how all the lines coming out of marketing converged on one senior executive. "There's very little path redundancy. In human systems, you need redundancy, you need communication across multiple paths."
  • What concerned Stephenson wasn't just the lack of redundancy but the fact that, in her lingo, many of the paths were "unconfirmed": they went only one way.
  • What you want to do is put people who don't trust each other near each other. Not necessarily next to each other, because they get too close. But close enough so that when you pop your head up, you get to see people, they are in your path, and all of a sudden you build an inviting space where they can hang out, kitchens and things like that. Maybe they need to take a hub in an innovation network and place the person with a pulsetaker in an expert network--to get that knowledge indirectly communicated to a lot of people."
  • it's clear that there are some very simple principles from the study of public characters which ought to drive the design process. "You want to place hubs at the center," Joyce Bromberg, the director of space planning, says. "These are the ones other people go to in order to get information. Give them an environment that allows access. But there are also going to be times that they need to have control--so give them a place where they can get away. Gatekeepers represent the fit between groups. They transmit ideas. They are brokers, so you might want to put them at the perimeter, and give them front porches"--areas adjoining the workspace where you might put little tables and chairs. "Maybe they could have swinging doors with white boards, to better transmit information. As for pulsetakers, they are the roamers. Rather than give them one fixed work location, you might give them a series of touchdown spots--where you want them to stop and talk. You want to enable their meandering."
  • The point of the new offices is to compel us to behave and socialize in ways that we otherwise would not--to overcome our initial inclination to be office suburbanites. But, in all the studies of the new workplaces, the reservations that employees have about a more social environment tend to diminish once they try it. Human behavior, after all, is shaped by context, but how it is shaped--and whether we'll be happy with the result--we can understand only with experience.
Barbara Lindsey

Information overload, the early years - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.boston.com/...ation_overload_the_early_years

overload information bostonglobe books libraries Gutenberg press printing

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century.
  • around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention.
  • To confront this new challenge, printers, scholars, and compilers began to develop novel ways to manage all these texts — tools that listed, sorted under subject headings, summarized, and selected from all those books that no one person could master. Note-taking was one solution, which the humanist pedagogues advocated alongside their teaching of ancient rhetoric. But not everyone followed their advice to take notes from everything they read throughout their lives, and for those who didn’t, new kinds of reference books offered a ready-made version — collections of best bits that could be consulted using sophisticated indexes and tables of contents.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 27 Nov 10
     
    Page 2 of article
Barbara Lindsey

Comparing Social Networking to Online Communities | Common Craft - Explanations In Plai... - 0 views

www.commoncraft.com/...000834.html

collaboration community lefever networking socialnetworking

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Oct 07 - Cached
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Oct 07
       
      Important aspect of social networking
  • In most traditional online communities, members have profiles that may display a picture, location, recent posts and membership tenure at most. These profiles can provide valuable context to the community, but they are often peripheral to the discussions and remain somewhat hidden.
  • In contrast, social networking communities have elevated the user profile to become more like a user homepage that displays a very rich and contextual set of information. The member home pages are not peripheral to the discussions or a subset of the community; they are at the very core of the system.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In traditional online communities, discussion is the center of the interaction and identity building. Members create relationships (and their own community identities) based on information they post in online discussions
  • identities can be built based on the display of the member’s choices of memberships in forums and connections to other people (among other things) on their home page.
  • Relationships in traditional communities are rarely made explicit.
  • Social networking, on the other hand, enables individual members to share explicit relationships with people and forums. Members use their home pages as rich representations of their preferences- which enable them to express their identity through explicitly shared forum membership and connections to other members.
  • Often, traditional online communities are managed so that new forums are built within a specific structure
  • An example of bucketed forums may be Technology-->Internet-->Online Communities-->Moderation Techniques-->Dealing with Spammers.
  • In social networking, the creation of new forums is done in a more emergent way and within a flatter hierarchy. A single member is free to create a new forum without placing it into a preset hierarchy.
  • New forums are a child of the whole system instead of being a child of a more general branch of the system. As new forums gain membership/popularity, they have equal opportunity to gain visibility in the system, similar to the weblog community.
  • Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation. Members
  • Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation.
  • The connections are held together by explicit relationships (people links) and interests (forum links) and do not depend on discussion content.
Barbara Lindsey

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

connect.educause.edu/...46576

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

Fishing / Fish Nuggets » CogDogBlog - 0 views

cogdogblog.com/...fishing-fish-nuggets

faculty pedagogy technology

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 30 Mar 08 - Cached
  • Course Management Systems are huge fish nugget factories. And we spend a lot of time, effort, money keeping the assembly lines moving. Fishing? Most things web 2.0.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 30 Mar 08
       
      How can we swim against the stream when university administration pays millions in initial and on-going costs (renewal fees, support staff, 'training sessions') for these lock-step CMSs and actively promote their use and discourage or prevent the use of flexible, interactive and user-defined social networking environments?
  • Most of the faculty that reach out to me are really just asking for tech support. They want to know how to perform certain tasks in Blackboard. They want to know how to edit a web site. They don’t tend to ask the bigger questions: what is appropriate technology for me to use to achieve my goals, how should I use x to help my students learn.
  • I had tremendous latitude to explore and try new technologies
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Do we foster an environment of “learned helplessness” among the faculty we support by most of our work being workshops on the tools rather than the craft?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 30 Mar 08
       
      Why is it that so many educators don't get this?
  • And along these lines, I was part of some technology conversations with UBC faculty and I just relished watching my colleague Brian’s face contort when someone says, “how do I use twitter in my class?” He’d say in his sweet flip matter, “I am not going to answer that” — not because he doesn’t want to help, but because he wants to teach fishing, not toss them nuggets. You don’t find a freaking “job aid” that gives you a 8 step recipe to use twitter in your economics class– you spend some time in the environment, and let the affordances linger with your content area, and then maybe, you develop an idea that makes sense.
  • My thought is you do a lot of small things.
  • Toss ‘em something that might help on a personal level- be it flickr or doodle or diigo or heck, Blabberize.
  • it means less formal training, less workshops, and more learning by doing. It means using these tools a much as possible in our processes, so they become part of a fabric, not something strange and exotic.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 30 Mar 08
       
      Yes--again, why is this such a difficult concept for educators?
  • They get so hung up on the basic that they can’t get into the cool stuff like expanding and applying their knowledge to more challenging problems. The same situation occurs with faculty. There are lots of folks out there…really…who don’t understand the Internet or servers or how web pages or email works or what the difference. For many folks, uploading links and icons and documents to Blackboard is a major accomplishment given their complete and total lack of understanding of the technological world. I am not even talking about understanding at the level of a techie but more an intuitive sense of how and why things work the way they do with technology.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 30 Mar 08
     
    Save Bookmark
Barbara Lindsey

My School, Meet MySpace: Social Networking at School | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/my-school-meet-myspace

21stcentury critical pedagogy education sla technology web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Months before the newly hired teachers at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) started their jobs, they began the consuming work of creating the high school of their dreams -- without meeting face to face. They articulated a vision, planned curriculum, designed assessment rubrics, debated discipline policies, and even hammered out daily schedules using the sort of networking tools -- messaging, file swapping, idea sharing, and blogging -- kids love on sites such as MySpace.
  • hen, weeks before the first day of school, the incoming students jumped onboard -- or, more precisely, onto the Science Leadership Academy Web site -- to meet, talk with their teachers, and share their hopes for their education. So began a conversation that still perks along 24/7 in SLA classrooms and cyberspace. It's a bold experiment to redefine learning spaces, the roles and relationships of teachers and students, and the mission of the modern high school.
  • When I hear people say it's our job to create the twenty-first-century workforce, it scares the hell out of me," says Chris Lehmann, SLA's founding principal. "Our job is to create twenty-first-century citizens. We need workers, yes, but we also need scholars, activists, parents -- compassionate, engaged people. We're not reinventing schools to create a new version of a trade school. We're reinventing schools to help kids be adaptable in a world that is changing at a blinding rate."
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It's the spirit of science rather than hardcore curriculum that permeates SLA. "In science education, inquiry-based learning is the foothold," Lehmann says. "We asked, 'What does it mean to build a school where everything is based on the core values of science: inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection?'"
  • It means the first-year curriculum is built around essential questions: Who am I? What influences my identity? How do I interact with my world? In addition to science, math, and engineering, core courses include African American history, Spanish, English, and a basic how-to class in technology that also covers Internet safety and the ethical use of information and software. Classes focus less on facts to be memorized and more on skills and knowledge for students to master independently and incorporate into their lives. Students rarely take tests; they write reflections and do "culminating" projects. Learning doesn't merely cross disciplines -- it shatters outdated departmental divisions. Recently, for instance, kids studied atomic weights in biochemistry (itself a homegrown interdisciplinary course), did mole calculations in algebra, and created Dalton models (diagrams that illustrate molecular structures) in art.
  • This is Dewey for the digital age, old-fashioned progressive education with a technological twist.
  • computers and networking are central to learning at, and shaping the culture of, SLA. "
  • he zest to experiment -- and the determination to use technology to run a school not better, but altogether differently -- began with Lehmann and the teachers last spring when they planned SLA online. Their use of Moodle, an open source course-management system, proved so easy and inspired such productive collaboration that Lehmann adopted it as the school's platform. It's rare to see a dog-eared textbook or pad of paper at SLA; everybody works on iBooks. Students do research on the Internet, post assignments on class Moodle sites, and share information through forums, chat, bookmarks, and new software they seem to discover every day.
  • Teachers continue to use Moodle to plan, dream, and learn, to log attendance and student performance, and to talk about everything -- from the student who shows up each morning without a winter coat to cool new software for tagging research sources. There's also a schoolwide forum called SLA Talk, a combination bulletin board, assembly, PA system, and rap session.
  • Web technology, of course, can do more than get people talking with those they see every day; people can communicate with anyone anywhere. Students at SLA are learning how to use social-networking tools to forge intellectual connections.
  • In October, Lehmann noticed that students were sorting themselves by race in the lunchroom and some clubs. He felt disturbed and started a passionate thread on self-segregation.
  • "Having the conversation changed the way kids looked at themselves," he says.
  • "What I like best about this school is the sense of community," says student Hannah Feldman. "You're not just here to learn, even though you do learn a lot. It's more like a second home."
  • As part of the study of memoirs, for example, Alexa Dunn's English class read Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas's account of growing up Iranian in the United States -- yes, the students do read books -- and talked with the author in California via Skype. The students also wrote their own memoirs and uploaded them to SLA's network for the teacher and class to read and edit. Then, digital arts teacher Marcie Hull showed the students GarageBand, which they used to turn their memoirs into podcasts. These they posted on the education social-networking site EduSpaces (formerly Elgg); they also posted blogs about the memoirs.
Barbara Lindsey

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

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

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

The Tempered Radical: New Opportunities to Connect and Create. . . - 1 views

teacherleaders.typepad.com/...new-opportuniti.html

beyondwebct

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Our students will buy and sell from countries across the world and work for international companies. They will manage employees from other cultures, work with people from different continents in joint ventures and solve global problems such as AIDS and avian flu together.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 30 Aug 08
       
      As language educators, if we don't make use of thes networked environments we are guilty of malfeasance.
  • But what I've grown to realize is that very few people have really embraced the changing nature of a tomorrow that remains poorly defined. We know that the Internet today is far more powerful than ever before---and have heard about companies that are capitalizing on these changes---but we haven't figured out what that means for us. We're jazzed to have access to information and geeked by interactive content providers, but our digital experiences remain somewhat self-centered.
  • the new National Educational Technology Standards for Students being developed by the International Society for Technology in Education. These standards reflect an increased need to teach children how to use the Internet in new and different ways. Perhaps the most challenging---and important standard---for educators to embrace will this one:Communication and Collaboration: Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students: A. Interact, collaborate and publish with peers, experts or others employing a variety of digital environments and media. B. Communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats. C. Develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures. D. Contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems.Does that sound like the digital work being done in your classroom, school, district or state?!
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Together with the Center for International Understanding, North Carolina in the World is developing partnerships based on digital collaboration between schools in North Carolina and nations ranging from China to Mexico. Teachers and students in partnering schools are learning to use Web 2.0 tools like web-conferencing and wikis to connect kids across continents. Not only do these efforts help to build a general knowledge of other countries in our children, they are providing concrete opportunities to use technology in new ways.
Barbara Lindsey

Beyond Campus Boundaries ePortfolio Transforms into 'Cultural Application' -- Campus Te... - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...into-cultural-application.aspx

eportfolio portfolio higher ed campustech

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10 - Cached
  • 08/09/05
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      It's five years hence--do you see any evidence of large-scale portfolio adoption at your institution?
  • It’s a cultural application
  • ePortfolios
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • What’s happening with universities in this knowledge age is that the boundaries between the university and the rest of the world have pretty much dissolved. We are now a learning culture, or a knowledge culture.
  • It’s something that whole countries are offering to their citizens to store things related to their work, over a career or over the time when they are developing their career.
  • what’s driving the market in the US is assessment management.
  • universities—especially schools of education around the country—are rushing to implement ePortfolio systems so that they can do the kind of reporting the accrediting agencies are asking for.
  • The big market is going to be everyone having an ePortfolio, whether they are in college or not in college
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
     
    2005 interview w/Trent Batson, who talks about ePortfolio use in U.S. institutions of higher ed.
Barbara Lindsey

Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 0 views

digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/ial-Bookmarking-and-Annotating

diigo del.icio.us social bookmarking Ferriter actfl09

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence
  • While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences.
  • A tagging language is nothing more than a set of categories that all members of a group agree to use when bookmarking websites for shared projects.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In Shirky's terms, teams that embrace social bookmarking decrease the "cost" of  group transactions.  No longer do members resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning, groups can make sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.
  • Imagine the collective power of an army of readers engaged in ongoing conversation about provocative ideas, challenging one another's thought, publicly debating, and polishing personal beliefs.  Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.  Imagine the potential for brainstorming global solutions, for holding government agencies accountable, or for gathering feedback from disparate stakeholder groups when reading moves from a "fundamentally private activity" to a "community event."
  • Understanding that there are times when users want their shared reading experiences to be more focused, however, Diigo makes it possible to keep highlights and annotations private or available to members of predetermined and self-selected groups.  For professional learning teams exploring instructional practices or for student research groups exploring content for classroom projects, this provides a measure of targeted exploration between likeminded thinkers.
  • Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums
  • Many of today's teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.  The results can be disastrous.  Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.  "Why did I bother to plug my students in for this project?" teachers wonder.  "They could have done better work with a piece of paper and a pencil!"
  • With shared annotation services like Diigo, powerful learning depends on much more than understanding the technical details behind adding highlights and comments for other members of a group to see.  Instead, powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together.  That means teachers must systematically introduce students to a set of collaborative dialogue behaviors that can be easily implemented online.
suzanne ondrus

Ending the semester, Lessons Learned (Part 4: Assessment) | Language Lab Unleashed! - 0 views

www.languagelabunleashed.org/...sons-learned-part-4-assessment

assessment student-centered student-created sawhill

shared by suzanne ondrus on 09 Feb 10 - Cached
  • I see teaching as constantly re-tooling, tweaking, re-evaluating, scrapping, starting over.
  • One of my goals for this class (and for me) was to see what student-centered assessment would look like in a conversation class. I took a big leap and gave the reigns over to them. The content of the class and flow of the class was based on their interested and idea. They were there because they had personal goals that needed to be acknowledged and realized… or at least approximated.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      What do you think about this?
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 21 Feb 10
       
      This is a really cool idea! It resonates with Vance's approach.
  • What would happen if I felt they didn’t merit the grade they said they did? what if they all wanted an A+?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This is what I asked each student to do: 1) create a series of three goals or metas, one progressively more complex than the other, and each building upon the other, that were to be accomplished his term. The first goal was to be done by the end of March, the second by the end of April, the third maybe by the end of the term…but probably not. 2) create a series of tasks that s/he felt would lead to realizing those goals. 3) blog about about his or her progress at least 2 times per week 4) At the end of the term: write up a final self assessment (in English or in Spanish), reflecting upon the progress completed, including the work done in class that would contribute to these goals, and assign a grade for the term. The students needed to evidence of their progress as a way of justifying their chosen grade. CAVEAT: If the grade s/he chose was lower than one than I would have selected, they would get my grade and an explanation. If the grade was higher, we would continue the conversation and try to see what it was that I was missing. I was willing to be (and wanted to be!) swayed, given that this was the student’s assessment of his/her personal learning goals in Spanish.
  • Some (but very few indeed) met ALL of their goals. Almost all acknowledged that they had set up unrealistic expectations for themselves (in terms of how much they could get done in a semester) and many used their self assessment as a way to set up future goals for their language growth. (Exactly the kinda thing you hope to see happen…learning extending beyond the limits imposed by the classroom).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      If I understand correctly, Barbara Sawhill then did not tell them to revise their metagoals?
  • A shy, timid young man, he did not mention in his evaluation the class discussion he led, and managed, and blogged about at the end of the term… nor did he see how any of this was helping him move towards his most lofty goal…to be able to travel with friends in Spain and to be able to communicate with ease and without anxiety.
  • It pains me to read this, but not because of the critiques she makes about me, the tools, or the class. It pains me because Edie passed on an opportunity to try something new, experiment, take a calculated risk…all things she will eventually have to do when she travels in another culture. It’s sad because she was the only student who did not “let go” of something during the semester and instead just held on tight to how she wanted this class to be, vs how it really, truly was. Unstructured to her meant undirected. Allowing the group to decide the flow of the class frustrated her, because the cadence of the class was not one that was controlled by the teacher and therefore predictable
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      Do you think this is a fair critique?
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 21 Feb 10
       
      I don't see how this problem situation happened. The teachr said that each individual student had to make individual goals and tasks!
  • In the end, she presented me with a chart that logged over 40 hours of Skype conversations with a native speaker she eventually found, and 110 pages (!) of chat transcripts with others with whom she tried to make regular contact. In class, as a result of her out of class experiences, she became more involved and engaged, eventually leading a class discussion about her interests in music, but doing so such that it wove itself in with the topic the class was discussing that week.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      Is there anything in Batson's interview, "Beyond Campus Boundaries", that you see reflected here? Could you picture using similar assessments with your students?
Barbara Lindsey

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

www.insidehighered.com/...copyright

copyright teachact

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Jan 10 - Cached
  • 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.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 27 Jan 10
     
    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

FRONTLINE: digital nation: henry jenkins response to mark bauerlein | PBS - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...esponse-to-mark-bauerlein.html

bauerlein digitalnation pbs discussion henry_jenkins

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Feb 10 - Cached
  • let me say another word or two about our friend, the student who thinks he can read Romeo and Juliet in 10 minutes. It seems to me that he has a lot in common with educational policy makers who think that the experience of reading the book can be reduced to a small number of items on a standardized test. Both have an instrumental understanding of reading and learning which sees learning as a product and has not respect for the process of really engaging deeply with the literary experience. In many ways, the student's attitude is a byproduct of the current structure of education as much as it is a byproduct of the instant gratification promised by digital culture. As someone who has been involved in the last year with a project which seeks to model ways we can teach Moby-Dick in contemporary schools, I can tell you the resistance we've gotten from some teachers comes at both levels. Yes, some teachers don't think their students have the attention span to deal with a novel of this length and complexity but many more simply say that they don't think they have time to teach a novel of such richness if they are going to stay on track and review all of the content they are supposed to cover under the new national standards. Both push back against a depth of experience and the student may simply trying to act efficiently to give the teachers what they want on the test. As someone who loves literature, both sides of this equation break my heart.
  • what the gamers are doing in the Korean Bong is better described as intense concentration, entering a state of flow, rather than multitasking per se. A growing body of work has stressed the kinds of active problem solving which surrounds the play of certain kinds of games, the collaboration which occurs through certain forms of participatory culture, etc. as other ways of engaging with the online world. To me, there's something reductive about continuing to return to issues of multitasking when depicting Katie Salen's game school for example. Katie's approach is not about turning students lose on the computer; it is about teaching them to look at the world as a complex system and developing skills as designers. In my White Paper for MacArthur, I identify multitasking as a skill -- but I don't mean by this what young people think they are doing when they talk about multitasking. I mean the ability to manage attention -- sometimes concentrating on a single text or problem, sometimes scanning the environment to form a hazier understanding of the bigger picture, much as a driver needs to keep their eyes on the road in front of them but also needs to scan the rear view mirror. I think schools have a role to play in helping young people sharpen their understanding of which mode of engagement is appropriate for different tasks and contexts.
  • The goal shouldn't be to decide if computers are good or bad. Our goal should be to identify what a more constructive relationship to this technology might look like and to insure that those skills and practices get transmitted to a broader segment of the population.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I also think that they should report the diverse range of cultural practices which emerged from the Digital Youth team's large scale ethnography of teen's on-line lives and the kinds of practices which seem to support robust informal learning outside the classroom. Unfortunately, this research ended up on the cutting room floor. Some of it is on the web. None of it is in the program.
Barbara Lindsey

Will Your College Be Covered in Virtual Graffiti? - Technology - The Chronicle of Highe... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...64617

tagging geotagging universities virtual graffiti

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Mar 10 - Cached
  • It's a lot easier to get ahead of the curve and to guide people into some of these technologies, as opposed to after the fact going back and trying to correct" their behavior, says the interactive-media manager.
  • Universities are still figuring out how to deal with Facebook and Twitter and other interactive programs which, like much of what's called Web 2.0, are largely out of their control. Now they'll have to wrestle with the power and pitfalls of an even more in-your-face social-media tool.
  • The University of Texas at Dallas is taking a different approach. Lately the 16,000-student state university has become a laboratory for what happens when students and professors go wild with unofficial tagging.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If you're scratching your head wondering what this has to do with education, here's Mr. Terry's answer: The technology will, he says, transform disciplines.
  • Perry Hewitt, digital-communications director at Harvard, says privacy is a serious issue. She also points out that similar sky-is-falling predictions were raised when the answering machine was introduced.
  • Mr. Terry's students will present a smartphone application they have built, called Placethings, which lets you tie pictures, video, and audio to locations and map that multimedia trail into a narrative.
  • Gartner, a technology-research company, forecasts that by 2013 mobile phones will pass personal computers as the most common way people worldwide get access to the Internet. But the practice of cellphone users' tying content to place is so new that you can really believe only one prediction with much confidence. Which is this: As location tagging goes more mainstream in the next few years, today's efforts will look trivial.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 14 Mar 10
     
    Thx to @academicdave
Celeste Arrieta

Welcome to Wesley Fryer's Website: Moving at the Speed of Creativity - 5 views

www.wesfryer.com/default.htm

digital story telling

shared by Celeste Arrieta on 15 Mar 10 - Cached
  • This is a guest blog post by Sherman Nicodemus. I've agreed to share a series of blog posts here on "Moving at the Speed of Creativity" this week. Hope you find this series helpful! If you have
    • Kemen Zabala
      Kemen Zabala on 15 Mar 10
       
      I didn't read it, but it is probably very interesting :)
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 15 Mar 10
       
      I'm sure it is, I agree
  • a web-based learning management system (LMS)
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 15 Mar 10
       
      the comparison of LMS and Open Source Lerning
  • Wesley Fryer
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 15 Mar 10
       
      Not to confuse with Paolo Freire
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 21st century
  • Thanks to the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and, ironically, the successful development of an iPhone application by NASA (bound by the Freedom of Information Act) the secret iPhone Developer agreement is now public. (PDF) EFF summarizes the key highlights of the agreement: Ban on Public Statements [by developers] App Store Only [for distribution] Ban on Reverse [...]
    • Christopher Laine
      Christopher Laine on 15 Mar 10
       
      These abbreviations are confusing.
  • [by developers]
    • Emmanuel Buzay
      Emmanuel Buzay on 15 Mar 10
       
      Who are they ?
  • live in the most exciting age of earth history for anyone with ideas they want to share with a global audience!
    • Catherine Ross
      Catherine Ross on 15 Mar 10
       
      It's scary too!
  • Technology in Education.
  • This is a guest blog post by Sherman Nicodemus. This is my second post in a series I'm sharing on "Moving at the Speed of Creativity" this week. If you have questions about this post I'll be glad to answer them via comments here. The advent of digital encoding technologies has brought a revolution to the [...]
    • Inas Ayyoub
      Inas Ayyoub on 15 Mar 10
       
      seems like it is about copyright issues!
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 15 Mar 10
       
      and there's a change going on...
Barbara Lindsey

Apple's iPhone OS 4.0: What Will It Mean for Mobile Learning? by Bill Brandon : Learni... - 0 views

www.learningsolutionsmag.com/...ll-it-mean-for-mobile-learning

mobile iphone multi-tasking skype

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Apr 10 - Cached
  • This has pretty exciting possibilities for Webinar/virtual classroom applications. The demo this morning was Skype. Until now, if you weren’t running Skype in the foreground on your iPhone, you couldn’t receive calls, and if you left the Skype app during a call, the call would disconnect. Now even when the phone is locked, you will still be able to receive Skype calls. When the phone is asleep or when the user is running other apps, VoIP apps can receive calls. When you send Skype to the background, incoming call invites will appear as the standard iPhone/iPod notification. Clicking the answer button brings the Skype app back. One question in the backchat during the presentation was whether there might be a new iPhone coming with a front-facing camera for such calls, but this went unanswered.
  • The new OS, in the background, will use cell towers to detect the phone’s location, in order to minimize power demands. The primary use of this service will be for turn-by-turn navigation. The secondary use will be to support social networking apps, such as Loopt. The OS has privacy protection for this service. An indicator on the status bar lets the user know when an app is using his or her location. The user can enable and disable location use by individual apps. This service could be useful for “location-based learning.”
  • Users can read books on any device (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad). The books sync between devices, so that a user can stop reading a book on one device, then open it on another, and at the same place. This could be extremely handy for textbook use.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Mobile device management Wireless application distribution (iTunes sync not required)
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 62 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page