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Barbara Lindsey

Making mistakes while learning has memory benefits for older brains - 0 views

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    fall 2011 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

Calhoun School: Steve's Blog Is it Learning or Training? - 0 views

  • proponents claim, the methods “work,” as represented by higher test scores.   Because, they add, the methods are efficient, meaning you can produce results with brutal economic efficiency and large classes.  And, in ed policy-speak, the systematized, highly structured methodologies are “scaleable,” easily replicated and exported to other schools. 
  • Anyone intensely “drilled” in facts or simple algorithms will demonstrate superior performance when tested on short-term retention.   The students in programs like that at Williamsburg Collegiate are being trained to give the “right” answers, but they are learning little or nothing.   Other evidence exposes the folly of these practices, as test score gains among younger students are not holding as the same students move into older grades. But the policy response in most places is reflexive, not reflective.   Drill them more and test ‘em again! 
  • Perhaps the greatest tragedy of this approach to education is that it disregards, often punishes, the qualities that most characterize real learning.  Children are discouraged from expressing a point of view – no time for that and it isn’t on the test.  Creativity is irrelevant.  Children who are sensitive and poetic are devalued, forced into quick, aggressive responses by a drill sergeant teacher.   Critical thinking is not welcome.  Where is the space for empathy and imagination?  What about the child whose unique intelligence is the ability to visualize something beautiful, to see another possible way to solve a problem, to turn a history assignment into a song?
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  • Most highly regimented urban charter schools are largely for the “other” –the underclass children of color whom powerful people talk about but seldom meet.    I wonder if Mssrs. Gates, Broad, Dell, Walton or Bloomberg would subject their own children to such a school environment, where they would march in tight formation and eagerly parrot the “right” answers required by the training manual?    I would guess not.  Of course I didn’t see many of those guys at Fort Benning either.         
  • There is little evidence outside of the short term, self-fulfilling cycle of call and response, that these schools are educating students at all
Barbara Lindsey

My Mom's on Facebook? / Flowtown (@flowtown) - 0 views

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    Visual representation of various stats related to social media participants
Barbara Lindsey

Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 2 views

  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Do you agree with this statement?
    • loisramirez
       
      I also agree with the statement. A story in this age can take a life of it's own (or many, depending one the variations created), it allows a constant input by others and consequently the evolution of the text and the author as well.
  • 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
  • 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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  • out of those manifold ways of writing and showing have emerged new practices for telling stories.
  • Web 2.0 platforms are often structured to be organized around people rather than the traditional computer hierarchies of directory trees.
    • loisramirez
       
      I think this is a very important feature, since the web is not as static anymore and more people friendly, we as users feel more encourage to collaborate and create our own content.
  • 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:
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Does the definition of Web 2.0 given in this article help you to better understand your experiences thus far in this course?
  • 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.
  • Social bookmarking and content tagging
  • 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
    • loisramirez
       
      I also agree with this comment, something as simple as a keyword can trigger a memory and bring back information that we have learned.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • While HTML narratives continued to be produced, digital storytelling by video also began, drawing on groundbreaking video projects from the 1970s.
  • 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.
  • Starting from our definitions, we should expect Web 2.0 storytelling to consist of Web 2.0 practices.
  • In each of these cases, the relative ease of creating web content enabled social connections around and to story materials.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Consider how these new media create rich dissertation and research opportunities.
  • 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.
  • At times, this distributed art form can range beyond the immediate control of a creator.
  • Creators can stage content from different sites.
  • 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.
  • The Twitter content form (140-character microstories) permits stories to be told in serialized portions spread over time.
    • loisramirez
       
      It is also a great way to practice not only creative writing but due to the 140 character limitation; this is a new challenge for a writer, how to say a lot in a just a few words.
  • 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?"
  • Facebook application that remixes photos drawn from Flickr (based on tags) with a set of texts that generate a dynamic graphic novel.
  • movie trailer recuts
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • instead of telling a story, we would present the evidence of that story, and let the players tell it to themselves.”15
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How might your students who come to your courses with these kinds of experiences impact the way you present your content?
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How might we address this conundrum?
  • web video storytelling, primarily through YouTube
  • Web 2.0 storytelling offers two main applications for colleges and universities: as composition platform and as curricular object.
  • Students can use blogs as character studies.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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!).
  • 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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    By Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine
Barbara Lindsey

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education -- Publications --... - 0 views

  • PRINCIPLES
  • EMPLOYING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN MEDIA LITERACY LESSONS
  • Common instructional activities include comparison-contrast analysis, deconstruction (close analysis) of the form and content of a message, illustration of key points, and examination of the historical, economic, political, or social contexts in which a particular message was produced and is received.
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  • EMPLOYING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN PREPARING CURRICULUM MATERIALS
  • These materials may include samples of contemporary mass media and popular culture as well as older media texts that provide historical or cultural context.
  • SHARING MEDIA LITERACY CURRICULUM MATERIALS
  • Educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be able to share effective examples of teaching about media and meaning with one another, including lessons and resource materials
  • STUDENT USE OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN THEIR OWN ACADEMIC AND CREATIVE WORK
  • Students include excerpts from copyrighted material in their own creative work for many purposes, including for comment and criticism, for illustration, to stimulate public discussion, or in incidental or accidental ways (for example, when they make a video capturing a scene from everyday life where copyrighted music is playing).
  • Because media literacy education cannot thrive unless learners themselves have the opportunity to learn about how media functions at the most practical level, educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be free to enable learners to incorporate, modify, and re-present existing media objects in their own classroom work. Media production can foster and deepen awareness of the constructed nature of all media, one of the key concepts of media literacy. The basis for fair use here is embedded in good pedagogy.
  • DEVELOPING AUDIENCES FOR STUDENT WORK
  • Students who are expected to behave responsibly as media creators and who are encouraged to reach other people outside the classroom with their work learn most deeply.
  • In some cases, widespread distribution of students’ work (via the Internet, for example) is appropriate. If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existing media content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wide audiences under the doctrine of fair use.
  • educators should take the opportunity to model the real-world permissions process, with explicit emphasis not only on how that process works, but also on how it affects media making.
Barbara Lindsey

if:book: this progress - 0 views

  • My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.
  • The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other. (p. 299)
  • Already our ideas about privacy are radically different than they were a decade ago.
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  • Lévi-Strauss invites us to consider literary freedom (or, more generally, "book culture") as a spandrel in the sense that Stephen Jay Gould employed the term: something that evolves not towards its own end, but because it doesn't impede (and may in fact support) other forces. I think Lévi-Strauss's hypothesis is interesting to consider because it posits our present book culture as an exception, rather than something that naturally happens because of the flow of economic or historical forces.
  • For a piece entitled "This Progress," Sehgal emptied the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim of its art: the visitor ascending the ramp was met by a small child, who asks you to explain what you think progress is. You do this as best you can; there's a back and forth, and this conversation carries on up the spiral. At a certain point, you're met by a high school student, who continues the conversation; then a young adult; and finally an older adult, who walks with you to the top-most point in the Guggenheim. There's a great deal of careful choreography going on, so the conversation breaks and remakes itself across your offerent interlocutors – but what's centrally interesting about the piece is that the visitor is engaged in a sustained conversation with strangers about the idea of progress. There's something deeply strange about this: post-college, we so rarely engage in conversations about abstract ideas. It's equally odd to be engaging with people who aren't your age: the way on talks to a six-year-old is necessarily different from the way one talks to a sixty-year-old. This can be deeply engrossing: on a visit a few Mondays ago, my friend Nik and I went up (with others) and down (together) five times in four hours.
  • Going up the spiral with a friend doesn't work as well as you might expect: the dynamics of a conversation with a stranger are very different from a converstion with a stranger and a friend.
  • One quickly discovers that what happens when one ascends the spiral is different every time, though the structure is constant. Some conversations are interesting; some are less so. Some are over quickly; some carry on so long that you worry that you've fallen out of the piece entirely. While some of the rules can be easily understood
  • some aren't so obvious.
  • One quickly discovers the limitations of language: progress, we think, is the idea that things move forward, but that doesn't explain why something in front of something is naturally better: it's simply a structure of our thought that we construe things in front of us (or above us) as things we aspire to in some way. It's hard not to think in this way when ascending a ramp, though weirdly the ramp as metaphor doesn't seem to arise.
  • k wanted to know, were we essentially different from the Greeks?
  • Greek professor
  • The difference, the man finally confided, was that the Greeks didn't have our idea of progress. He thought they were probably happier because of that.
  • why was there the this in the piece's title "This Progress"? Perhaps it's because progress only exists as an idea when we lend credence to it: our own personal idea of progress rather than something that exists naturally. Awareness of this is important. We need to interrogate the idea of progress, both in terms of what we believe and what society around us believes. Too often we're simply swept along by the flow of time. The power of the idea – the power of the thought experiment, whether Lévi-Strauss's questioning of the goal of writing or Sehgal's questioning of progress – is that it allows reclamation of agency.
Barbara Lindsey

Talk:Richard Feynman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • It's just one thing he did, 33 years ago. I was there. But it doesn't need to be in the lead. Dicklyon 22:48, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
  • The main article states pronunciation as fɑɪnmən, but the IPA page does not list ɑɪ as a vowel combination. I believe it should be faɪnmən instead. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Chris Purves (talk • contribs) 15:32:46, August 19, 2007 (UTC).
  • Richard Feynman is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.
Barbara Lindsey

The Case for the Virtual Classroom - 0 views

  • “If you take a class, in our case, you’re very likely to meet 20 students from 20 countries,” Reshef says about University of the People. “We believe, by the way, that being exposed to 20 people from 20 cultures — the way they think, the way they function in the class — is as important, if not more, than the subject area itself.”
  • “We re-teach the same concepts again and again,” he said. “The teacher has no sense of who in his classroom is getting it, not getting it…and when you look at all of the successful innovations, it’s where you let the student assess his knowledge, understand where they are, and proceed at a pace where they’re actually seeing that they know something before they move on.”The Department of Education’s meta-analysis, which focused on older learners, supports this. Online learners who self-monitored understanding — by, for example, deciding when to move on to the next lesson — performed better.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Is this a skill we need to be explicitly teaching?
  • The modest difference in performance between online and physical classroom learners in the meta-analysis, for instance, was larger for those students who learned through a blend of online and physical classroom conditions.
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  • The report warned that the results might not be caused by the medium itself because the students in blended learning conditions often had extra learning time and instructional elements.
  • Right now class time is typically used by a lecture. But if teachers move the lecture online for students to watch on their own time, they can use the class time to work on activities and interact with students.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Bingo!
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