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Barbara Lindsey

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

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

Open university: Joi Ito plans a radical reinvention of MIT's Media Lab (Wired UK) - 0 views

  • They have a maker space in a church, a place where the kids can learn how to build a computer, a bike shop where they can learn how to do repairs. The kid who runs this place, Jeff Sturges, is awesome.We're sending a bunch of Media Lab people to Detroit to work with local innovators already doing stuff on the ground."
  • in which any bright talent anywhere, academically qualified or not, can be part of the world's leading "antidisciplinary" research lab. "Opening up the lab is more about expanding our reach and creating our network," explains Ito, appointed director in April 2011.
  • as Ito sees it, the formal channels of academia today inhibit progress. "In the old days, being relevant was writing academic papers. Today, if people can't find you on the internet, if they're not talking about you in Rwanda, you're irrelevant. That's the worst thing in the world for any researcher. The people inventing things might be in Kenya, and they go to the internet and search. Funders do the same thing. The old, traditional academic channel is not a good channel for attracting attention, funding, people, or preventing other people from competing with you.
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  • You can't actually tell people to think for themselves, or be creative. You have to work with them and have them learn it themselves."
  • "Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."
  • It was, according to a 1984 briefing document by Negroponte, "designed to be a place where people of dramatically different backgrounds can simultaneously use and invent new media, and where the computer itself is seen as a medium -- part of a communications network of people and machines -- not just an object in front of which one sits."
  • As Ito sees it, the lab's mission "is to come up with ideas that would never be able to occur anywhere else because most places are incremental, directed and disciplinary".
  • There are lots of kids who are not happy with this massive consumerism, this unsustainable growth, but who have really smart science and technology values. That's a type of person we can draw into what I think will become a movement."
  • "We aim to capture serendipity. You don't get lucky if you plan everything -- and you don't get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.
  • Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It's like venture capital: we don't expect every experiment to succeed -- in fact, a lot are failures. But that's great -- failure is another word for discovery. We're very much against incrementalism -- we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project are uniqueness, impact and magic."
  • Ito set out some of his key principles. These included: "Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; " Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". "The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."
  • In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it's working even before they've raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges -- into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control -- the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they're not scholars. They don't care about disciplines. They're antidisciplinary."
  • So when Ito was appointed, Negroponte wanted the press release headlined: "University dropout named director of Media Lab". "But," he says with raised eyebrows, "the fact that he didn't have a degree was buried near the last paragraph. That's the good Peter Thiel -- if you do drop out and do something creative, more power to you."
Barbara Lindsey

2020 Forecast | KnowledgeWorks - 0 views

  • Over the next decade, the most vibrant innovations in education will take place outside traditional institutions.
  • The forecast does not predict what will happen, but rather serves as a guide to the as-yet-unwritten future. It is designed to help you see connections among things that once seemed unrelated and to help you consider the changes and challenges that you are facing today within the context of wider patterns of change.
  • a critical dilemma facing these institutions: how to reconcile bottom-up developments in education with the traditional top-down hierarchy that is currently in place.
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    Over the next decade, the most vibrant innovations in education will take place outside traditional institutions.
Barbara Lindsey

gladwell dot com - designs for working - 0 views

  • 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
       
      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.
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  • 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

Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology ... - 0 views

  • Research indicates that each of these media, when designed for education, fosters particular types of interactions that enable—and undercut—various learning styles.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How much do we know about our students' learning styles? How do we know this?
  • Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn
  • The familiar "world to the desktop." Provides access to distant experts and archives and enables collaborations, mentoring relationships, and virtual communities of practice. This interface is evolving through initiatives such as Internet2. "Alice in Wonderland" multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). Participants' avatars (self-created digital characters) interact with computer-based agents and digital artifacts in virtual contexts. The initial stages of studies on shared virtual environments are characterized by advances in Internet games and work in virtual reality. Ubiquitous computing. Mobile wireless devices infuse virtual resources as we move through the real world. The early stages of "augmented reality" interfaces are characterized by research on the role of "smart objects" and "intelligent contexts" in learning and doing.
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  • This immersion in virtual environments and augmented realities shapes participants' learning styles beyond what using sophisticated computers and telecommunications has fostered thus far, with multiple implications for higher education.
  • Beyond actional and symbolic immersion, advances in interface technology are now creating virtual environments and augmented realities that induce a psychological sense of sensory and physical immersion.
  • The research on virtual reality Salzman and I conducted on frames of reference found that the exocentric and the egocentric FORs have different strengths for learning. Our studies established that learning ideally involves a "bicentric" perspective alternating between egocentric and exocentric FORs.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Could we make the argument that this is one of the main goals of language programs?
  • But what is so special about the egocentric perspectives and situated learning now enabled by emerging media? After all, each of us lives with an egocentric perspective in the real world and has many opportunities for situated learning without using technology. One attribute that makes mediated immersion different and powerful is the ability to access information resources and psychosocial community distributed across distance and time, broadening and deepening experience. A second important attribute is the ability to create interactions and activities in mediated experience not possible in the real world, such as teleporting within a virtual environment, enabling a distant person to see a real-time image of your local environment, or interacting with a (simulated) chemical spill in a busy public setting. Both of these attributes are actualized in the Alice-in-Wonderland interface.
  • Notion of place is layered/blended/multiple; mobility and nomadicity prevalent among dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats (for example, coffeehouses near campus)
  • Guided social constructivism and situated learning as major forms of pedagogy
  • he defining quality of a learning community is that there is a culture of learning, in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding. There are four characteristics that such a culture must have: (1) diversity of expertise among its members, who are valued for their contributions and given support to develop, (2) a shared objective of continually advancing the collective knowledge and skills, (3) an emphasis on learning how to learn, and (4) mechanisms for sharing what is learned. If a learning community is presented with a problem, then the learning community can bring its collective knowledge to bear on the problem. It is not necessary that each member assimilate everything that the community knows, but each should know who within the community has relevant expertise to address any problem. This is a radical departure from the traditional view of schooling, with its emphasis on individual knowledge and performance, and the expectation that students will acquire the same body of knowledge at the same time.26
  • Peer-developed and peer-rated forms of assessment complement faculty grading, which is often based on individual accomplishment in a team performance context  Assessments provide formative feedback on instructional effectiveness
  • Multipurpose habitats—creating layered/blended/personalizable places rather than specialized locations (such as computer labs)
  • o the extent that some of these ideas about neomillennial learning styles are accurate, campuses that make strategic investments in physical plant, technical infrastructure, and professional development along the dimensions suggested will gain a considerable competitive advantage in both recruiting top students and teaching them effectively.
  • Net Generation learning styles stem primarily from the world-to-the-desktop interface; however, the growing prevalence of interfaces to virtual environments and augmented realities is beginning to foster so-called neomillennial learning styles in users of all ages.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What is the timeline?
  • Immersion is the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience.
  • Inducing a participant's symbolic immersion involves triggering powerful semantic associations via the content of an experience.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Felice's Utopian City
  • The capability of computer interfaces to foster psychological immersion enables technology-intensive educational experiences that draw on a powerful pedagogy: situated learning.
  • The major schools of thought cited are behaviorist theories of learning (presentational instruction), cognitivist theories of learning (tutoring and guided learning by doing), and situated theories of learning (mentoring and apprenticeships in communities of practice).
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What kinds of learning environments do you prefer and what kinds do you create for your students?
  • Situated learning requires authentic contexts, activities, and assessment coupled with guidance from expert modeling, mentoring, and "legitimate peripheral participation."8 As an example of legitimate peripheral participation, graduate students work within the laboratories of expert researchers, who model the practice of scholarship. These students interact with experts in research as well as with other members of the research team who understand the complex processes of scholarship to varying degrees. While in these laboratories, students gradually move from novice researchers to more advanced roles, with the skills and expectations for them evolving.
  • Potentially quite powerful, situated learning is much less used for instruction than behaviorist or cognitivist approaches. This is largely because creating tacit, relatively unstructured learning in complex real-world settings is difficult.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Not too far in the future!
  • However, virtual environments and ubiquitous computing can draw on the power of situated learning by creating immersive, extended experiences with problems and contexts similar to the real world.9 In particular, MUVEs and real-world settings augmented with virtual information provide the capability to create problem-solving communities in which participants can gain knowledge and skills through interacting with other participants who have varied levels of skills, enabling legitimate peripheral participation driven by intrinsic sociocultural forces.
  • Situated learning is important in part because of the crucial issue of transfer. Transfer is defined as the application of knowledge learned in one situation to another situation and is demonstrated if instruction on a learning task leads to improved performance on a transfer task, typically a skilled performance in a real-world setting
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      One of the most difficult skills to master.
  • Moreover, the evolution of an individual's or group's identity is an important type of learning for which simulated experiences situated in virtual environments or augmented realities are well suited. Reflecting on and refining an individual identity is often a significant issue for higher education students of all ages, and learning to evolve group and organizational identity is a crucial skill in enabling innovation and in adapting to shifting contexts.
  • Immersion is important in this process of identity exploration because virtual identity is unfettered by physical attributes such as gender, race, and disabilities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Don't agree with this. We come to any environment with our own baggage and we do not interact in a neutral social context.
  • Thanks to out-of-game trading of in-game items, Norrath, the virtual setting of the MMOG EverQuest, is the seventy-seventh largest economy in the real world, with a GNP per capita between that of Russia and Bulgaria. One platinum piece, the unit of currency in Norrath, trades on real world exchange markets higher than both the Yen and the Lira (Castronova, 2001).14
  • Multiple teams of students can access the MUVE simultaneously, each individual manipulating an avatar which is "sent back in time" to this virtual environment. Students must collaborate to share the data each team collects. Beyond textual conversation, students can project to each other "snapshots" of their current individual point of view (when someone has discovered an item of general interest) and also can "teleport" to join anyone on their team for joint investigation. Each time a team reenters the world, several months of time have passed in River City, so learners can track the dynamic evolution of local problems.
  • In our research on this educational MUVE based on situated learning, we are studying usability, student motivation, student learning, and classroom implementation issues. The results thus far are promising: All learners are highly motivated, including students typically unengaged in classroom settings. All students build fluency in distributed modes of communication and expression and value using multiple media because each empowers different types of communication, activities, experiences, and expressions. Even typically low-performing students can master complex inquiry skills and sophisticated content. Shifts in the pedagogy within the MUVE alter the pattern of student performance.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Would like to see research on this.
  • Research shows that many participants value this functionality and choose to access the Web page after leaving the museum.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      More could be done with this.
  • Participants in these distributed simulations use location-aware handheld computers (with GPS technology), allowing users to physically move throughout a real-world location while collecting place-dependent simulated field data, interviewing virtual characters, and collaboratively investigating simulated scenarios.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Much better
  • Initial research on Environmental Detectives and other AR-based educational simulations demonstrates that this type of immersive, situated learning can effectively engage students in critical thinking about authentic scenarios.
  • Students were most effective in learning and problem-solving when they collectively sought, sieved, and synthesized experiences rather than individually locating and absorbing information from some single best source.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How does this 'fit' learning goals and teaching styles in our program?
  • Rheingold's forecasts draw on lifestyles seen at present among young people who are high-end users of new media
  • Rather than having core identities defined through a primarily local set of roles and relationships, people would express varied aspects of their multifaceted identities through alternate extended experiences in distributed virtual environments and augmented realities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How is this different from current experiences for individuals working within/across different social groups and boundaries?
  • one-third of U.S. households now have broadband access to the Internet. In the past three years, 14 million U.S. families have linked their computers with wireless home networks. Some 55 percent of Americans now carry cell phones
  • Mitchell's forecasts25 are similar to Rheingold's in many respects. He too envisions largely tribal lifestyles distributed across dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats: electronic nomads wandering among virtual campfires. People's senses and physical agency are extended outward and into the intangible, at considerable cost to individual privacy. Individual identity is continuously reformed via an ever-shifting series of networking with others and with tools. People express themselves through nonlinear, associational webs of representations rather than linear "stories" and co-design services rather than selecting a precustomized variant from a menu of possibilities.
  • More and more, though, people of all ages will have lifestyles involving frequent immersion in both virtual and augmented reality. How might distributed, immersive media be designed specifically for education, and what neomillennial learning styles might they induce?
  • Mediated immersion creates distributed learning communities, which have different strengths and limits than location-bound learning communities confined to classroom settings and centered on the teacher and archival materials.27
  • Neomillenial Versus Millennial Learning Styles
  • Emphasis is placed on implications for strategic investments in physical plant, technology infrastructure, and professional development.
  • such as textbooks linked to course ratings by students)
  • Mirroring": Immersive virtual environments provide replicas of distant physical settings
  • Middleware, interoperability, open content, and open source
  • Finding information Sequential assimilation of linear information stream
  • Student products generally tests or papers Grading centers on individual performance
  • These ideas are admittedly speculative rather than based on detailed evidence and are presented to stimulate reaction and dialogue about these trends.
  • f we accept much of the analysis above
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      But have they made the case for its educational value?
  • students of all ages with increasingly neomillennial learning styles will be drawn to colleges and universities that have these capabilities. Four implications for investments in professional development also are apparent. Faculty will increasingly need capabilities in:
  • Some of these shifts are controversial for many faculty; all involve "unlearning" almost unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and values about the nature of teaching, learning, and the academy. Professional development that requires unlearning necessitates high levels of emotional/social support in addition to mastering the intellectual/technical dimensions involved. The ideal form for this type of professional development is distributed learning communities so that the learning process is consistent with the knowledge and culture to be acquired. In other words, faculty must themselves experience mediated immersion and develop neomillennial learning styles to continue teaching effectively as the nature of students alters.
  • Differences among individuals are greater than dissimilarities between groups, so students in any age cohort will present a mixture of neomillennial, millennial, and traditional learning styles
  • The technologies discussed are emerging rather than mature, so their final form and influences on users are not fully understood. A substantial number of faculty and administrators will likely dismiss and resist some of the ideas and recommendations presented here.
Chenwen Hong

Wikipedia Pushes for Users to Add Videos - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 0 views

  • For some institutions, the biggest roadblock to posting video to Web sites is the worry that the videos can be taken by other people, Mr. Moskowitz said. Because information posted on Wikipedia is free and unlicensed, someone can use a posted video for a profit-making venture. Mr. Moskowitz said the best strategy for protecting your videos is to keep the HD version of a video for your own use and post the standard-definition version to Wikipedia. Institutions could brand videos as well, although other users could crop out the institutional seal or post a new video in its place.
  • For some institutions, the biggest roadblock to posting video to Web sites is the worry that the videos can be taken by other people, Mr. Moskowitz said. Because information posted on Wikipedia is free and unlicensed, someone can use a posted video for a profit-making venture. Mr. Moskowitz said the best strategy for protecting your videos is to keep the HD version of a video for your own use and post the standard-definition version to Wikipedia. Institutions could brand videos as well, although other users could crop out the institutional seal or post a new video in its place.
  •  
    "For some institutions, the biggest roadblock to posting video to Web sites is the worry that the videos can be taken by other people, Mr. Moskowitz said. Because information posted on Wikipedia is free and unlicensed, someone can use a posted video for a profit-making venture. Mr. Moskowitz said the best strategy for protecting your videos is to keep the HD version of a video for your own use and post the standard-definition version to Wikipedia. Institutions could brand videos as well, although other users could crop out the institutional seal or post a new video in its place."
  •  
    Can Creative Commons be a good alternative to these troubling issues?
Barbara Lindsey

Technology: The Wrong Questions and the Right Questions | Education | Change.org - 0 views

  • we have to create engagement which works educationally for more than 25% of students, precisely because we have to work against the dominant culture - "math is hard," "history is stupid," "languages are un-necessary." And we need to do that using the efficiencies of contemporary technologies.
  • So tech, in my view, increases factual knowledge. It also allows a constant check of that knowledge. Math facts may stay fairly stable, but not the nations of Europe. Biological knowledge, chemical knowledge, changes constantly. We obviously need both, but a memorizer is not a person with a trustable education. A "finder" may be.
  • the best thing we will have done for our children (and future generations) is to have fully engaged them in empowered learning, building relationships and thinking creatively - and right now technology is one of the tools that facilitates that kind of education, so we need to use it! http://www.iwasthinking.ca/2008/10/09/its-not-about-the-technology/
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  • i.e. I remember it only until I've finished the test) transforms to internalized (and useful) memorization only when the information is RELEVANT to my life! That's why kids can remember Pokemon points and Blues Clues songs yet struggle with their times tables or history dates! Yes, we need to agree on what content is foundational - AND we need to learn to teach it to (or learn it with) our children in ways that are meaningful to THEM, not just to us!
  • I used to teach in an urban alternative school where many of my students were gang members.  These students were not successful in school though they did get an education.  I am sorry to say that the majority of their education did not come from school teachers nor was it an education sanctioned by the school district.  I also through the years have been involved in many online communities of interest.  Learning occurs there all the time.  Not all members of these communities were successful in school but within these communities were successful in becoming educated about certain things.  There is high quality education occurring in many places that we don't consider school:  boy and girl scouts, workplaces, church youth groups, 4H, Little League, gangs, internet chat rooms, YouTube, blogs, libraries, family interaction, etc.  In fact, the most relevant learnin for most people happens in one of hese other places of education and not in schools. 
  • If the goal for schools is to become the most relevant and useful place for education we need to harness the rhetorical draw of the gang, the personal significance of the family, the intrinsic nature of clubs and organizations like the Scouts and 4H, the relevance and applicability of the work place, and the openness of social media.  The only way to do this is to personalize the learning experience for each student.  This means that content will be as different from person to person as is the approach to teaching that content.
  • Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me." And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.
  • Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which earlier media forms disabled.
  • Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency." But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it. This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable previously.
  • We must abandon the one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the "clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher, or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where it leads us.
Barbara Lindsey

The Magic of Going Mobile: Augmented Reality, Design Thinking and the Power of Place | ... - 0 views

  • Game designers say that as a narrative tool, ARIS is especially primed for helping educators create structures that allow students to go out into new environments, collect information, and then to aggregate, find patterns, and make meaning of that information.
  • Alice Leung, a teacher at Merrylands High School in Sydney, Australia, recently used ARIS with a group of students to design a tour of the school’s main landmarks for student orientation day.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What I suggested to the Global Curriculum Committee over 5 years ago...
  • “The rich area for kids is really designing,” he says. “Being part of community, play testing, learning about content, science, civics, social studies. It’s a really rich space where people move from players to designers and back. People are rallying around them and commenting on each other’s work.”
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    fall 2012 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

Cell Phones in the (Language) Classroom: Recasting the Debate (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | ED... - 0 views

  • New Internet SMS and messaging services are proving especially useful to language teachers, turning the focus away from the particulars of language and writing and toward whole language oral output and pronunciation, even at the beginner level.
  • is the time to revisit and recast the debate over cell phones in education and to consider their relevance as engagement and assessment tools for foreign language teachers in particular.
  • And it is no longer only what takes place inside the classroom that needs debating. Paradigm shift also means embracing the notion that learning takes place in more collaborative, interactive ways and also — at least potentially — everywhere and (nearly) all the time.
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  • The launch this year of Google Voice — representing as it does a free alternative or complement to costly language laboratory recording hardware and software — has profound and exciting implications for student engagement in general and the confluence of language instruction and cell phone technology in particular. The proliferation of cell phones among today’s students combined with the development of such new computer-mediated communication tools allows teachers to engage students in new ways in and out of the classroom.
  • My Google Voice number has served primarily as a messaging service students call (sometimes spontaneously during the instructional period, more often outside of the classroom) to record dialogues, poetry, even song, either individually or in pairs. These recordings are stored on Google servers, but can be downloaded and posted on course management pages (Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, etc.) or podcasting, blogging, or social networking sites (I post particularly good recordings on my Spanish Facebook page).
  • maximizing student engagement during the class period is essential, as many students work and do not practice outside the classroom setting. Without getting into the debate over the front-end need for considerable comprehensible input, as a practical matter many students see paired work time (particularly in larger classes) as social time, which can lead to student-teacher conflict (no explanation needed).
  • for lower level classes I can instruct my students to form small groups and, within a given time frame, call my Google Voice number and record a narration of an illustration or picture sequence. In the higher level classes, I can ask groups to come up with a succinct recorded comparison/contrast analysis of two different perspectives (textual and/or auditory) on a given subject. Either way, embracing whole language oral output turns the focus from the particulars of language and writing to whole language and pronunciation. It also allows for efficient instructor identification of common problem points.
  • It is generally accepted that students work harder and become more engaged and invested in activities and assignments that might be publicly posted (on the Internet or otherwise). My own experience shows that students required to record speech of any kind in a computer laboratory setting spend considerable time preparing prior to recording. The very act of recording their voices — creating a permanent record of their speech — instilled a strong desire to perform well. In short, the act of recording increased students’ investment and engagement in the learning process.
  • on a post-recording survey of a Spanish 3 class of 21 students, I asked students to respond anonymously to the following survey question:“I practice my Spanish pronunciation before calling Google Voice… not at all once more than once repeatedly”A total of 89 percent of the 21 respondents answered either “b,” “c,” or “d,” with 26 percent responding “repeatedly.” Among the more entertaining and pertinent written comments offered on the anonymous survey were the following: “AHH!! I feel smart because I actually practice a lot before I call.” “It makes me nervous having to record, but I practice a lot to help me get over that.” “I do not do the Google Voice because I don’t want the whole class to hear me.”The final comment clearly referred to my tendency to play recordings for full class feedback — food for thought. Is that a motivating or inhibiting factor? It probably depends on the student.
  • A student who was frustrated at his performance in Spanish and was beginning to exhibit some anger management issues received the following Spanish translation of a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote via text message through Google Voice: Por cada minuto que estás enojado, pierdes sesenta segundos de felicidad. I did not supply a translation
  • The access that I had to that student combined with the ease and speed of communication presented by Google Voice solved more than a pronunciation problem; it likely helped me head off a building class management issue by engaging that student on his terms outside of the classroom setting.
  • “I have a student who hasn’t done any homework this quarter, and out of the blue he sent me a goofy text message to my Google Voice number — completely unrelated to Spanish — something like “I hate this rain”— and, being the nerdy teacher, I texted him immediately back in Spanish: “No me gusta la lluvia tampoco.” One day later, he walks in for the first time with his homework and makes a big production about turning it in. I can’t help but feel that the personal connection of texting helped him remember — and actually want to do — the work for my class.”
  • Surprisingly, these “irredeemably unreachable” students have proven highly receptive to the notion that their cell phones can and should be used for educational purposes. Figure 2, for example, shows a fairly typical SMS exchange on an oral homework assignment for intermediate level students. While not all students will text back when I supply SMS feedback, those that do, like this one, tend to be looking for specifics and positive reinforcement. How is this additional engagement and interaction bad?
  • Elite schools have spent vast sums of money on expensive language laboratory hardware and software as an approach to active engagement in the language learning process. They have provided their students with the latest and greatest in computer-assisted (language) learning and computer-mediated communication tools, at considerable cost.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Why would you place students in an artificial environment with artificial activities instead of using technologies that are flexible and allow for authentic exchanges?
Barbara Lindsey

Inspiring Teachers - Tips - How to Involve and Engage Students - Empowering Educators A... - 1 views

  • Give students "clues" to look for items in the classroom that relate to your topic of study. Put students on a "scavenger hunt". Once they find the item, they must explain why it is on the scavenger hunt. Let students go on a road trip. Place different stop signs around the school or classroom with an activity or reading passage. Students must "travel" to each place and complete the activity (idea courtesy of Beaver Elementary). Give students a "passport" that must be stamped at each "stop" on their trip.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Do as a qr code, too.
Barbara Lindsey

C. M. Rubin: The Global Search for Education: More Technology, Please! - 0 views

  • One of the best examples I have seen of the flex model was in Morgan Hill, California. This is a district south of San Jose where about a third of its students are Hispanic and I believe over a third of its students are on free-and-reduced price lunch. The school is called the Silicon Valley Flex Academy - Grades 6 through 12. As you walk into the school there are a couple of huge open spaces on either side where every student has his/her own office. In this space, each student has his/her own computer. The students are encouraged to decorate their own space with things they like (in the same way an adult might decorate an office at work). There are break out classrooms around the perimeter of the building. Here teachers are getting the data on how the kids are doing. Teachers can pull students into these break-out classrooms in very small groups. The teacher is then able to focus on a student's individual issues. The teacher's job is totally different in this arrangement. The fascinating thing was how much ownership the students have over their learning. They all knew exactly what was expected of them the entire year. They knew exactly how they were doing at any point. Their job was to learn the material. If they could get the work done during the school day there was no homework. So it was up to the individual students to make those decisions.
  • The teachers I spoke to explained that they had been trained to do lesson planning, lectures to large groups of students and classroom management -- none of which they were now doing. They explained that the adjustment was difficult. Training has not been built into the formal teacher training system for programs like this, and few are really thinking about it at the moment. Now, the teacher is still doing teaching or tutoring when pulling students out into small groups for project-based work, but instead of this being determined by a pacing guide, this is now being determined by where the students are in their learning. What was so interesting was that in this model, teachers were able to do the tutoring and value enrichment work that teachers really like to do but don't always get time to do in a classroom. One of the challenges the teachers mentioned was staying on top of scheduling. How do you keep track when you have students at different places in the curriculum? Those were tough decisions for teachers to make and they were, as you say, learning on the job.
  • When students own their learning, they feel responsible for it and motivated to do it. What they also appreciated was that the teacher was no longer there to "punish them" or "grade them down". Instead the teacher was there to help them reach their goal. This is much more of an environment built around success and motivation versus failure.
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  • I also think the assessment system that we have in place in schools is a problem for this learning system going forward. Assessment needs to be based on where each individual child started and then grew to and finally ended up in a particular year, versus a snapshot once a year view of an entire school.
  •  
    fall 2012 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

How big is history? - 0 views

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    allows you to overlay the geographies of historical events and significant places onto more familiar locales.
Barbara Lindsey

Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice - 1 views

  • Supposing learning is social and comes largely from of our experience of participating in daily life? It was this thought that formed the basis of a significant rethinking of learning theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s by two researchers from very different disciplines - Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Their model of situated learning proposed that learning involved a process of engagement in a 'community of practice'. 
  • When looking closely at everyday activity, she has argued, it is clear that 'learning is ubiquitous in ongoing activity, though often unrecognized as such' (Lave 1993: 5).
  • Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. (Wenger circa 2007)
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How many courses have you yourself taken that incorporate this definition of CoP as one of its goals? 
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  • Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore to call these kinds of communities communities of practice. (Wenger 1998: 45)
  • Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have tried to place it in social relationships – situations of co-participation.
  • The fact that they are organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community.
  • The interactions involved, and the ability to undertake larger or more complex activities and projects though cooperation, bind people together and help to facilitate relationship and trust
  • The characteristics of communities of practice According to Etienne Wenger (c 2007), three elements are crucial in distinguishing a community of practice from other groups and communities: The domain. A community of practice is is something more than a club of friends or a network of connections between people. 'It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people' (op. cit.). The community. 'In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other' (op. cit.). The practice. 'Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction' (op. cit.).
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What are your thoughts on the importance of these three domains? Are they important in a course? In a degree program? As part of your professional practice?
  • Initially people have to join communities and learn at the periphery. The things they are involved in, the tasks they do may be less key to the community than others.
  • One of the implications for schools, as Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues suggest is that they must prioritize 'instruction that builds on children's interests in a collaborative way'. Such schools need also to be places where 'learning activities are planned by children as well as adults, and where parents and teachers not only foster children's learning but also learn from their own involvement with children' (2001: 3). Their example in this area have particular force as they are derived from actual school practice.
  • It not so much that learners acquire structures or models to understand the world, but they participate in frameworks that that have structure. Learning involves participation in a community of practice. And that participation 'refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities' (Wenger 1999: 4).
  • What is more, and in contrast with learning as internalization, ‘learning as increasing participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person acting in the world’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 49). The focus is on the ways in which learning is ‘an evolving, continuously renewed set of relations’ (ibid.: 50). In other words, this is a relational view of the person and learning (see the discussion of selfhood).
  • 'the purpose is not to learn from talk as a substitute for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation'. This orientation has the definite advantage of drawing attention to the need to understand knowledge and learning in context. However, situated learning depends on two claims: It makes no sense to talk of knowledge that is decontextualized, abstract or general. New knowledge and learning are properly conceived as being located in communities of practice (Tennant 1997: 77).
  • There is a risk, as Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger acknowledge, of romanticizing communities of practice.
  • 'In their eagerness to debunk testing, formal education and formal accreditation, they do not analyse how their omission [of a range of questions and issues] affects power relations, access, public knowledge and public accountability' (Tennant 1997: 79).
  • Perhaps the most helpful of these explorations is that of Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues (2001). They examine the work of an innovative school in Salt Lake City and how teachers, students and parents were able to work together to develop an approach to schooling based around the principle that learning 'occurs through interested participation with other learners'.
  • Learning is in the relationships between people. As McDermott (in Murphy 1999:17) puts it: Learning traditionally gets measured as on the assumption that it is a possession of individuals that can be found inside their heads… [Here] learning is in the relationships between people. Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on a relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part.
  • Learning is, thus, not seen as the acquisition of knowledge by individuals so much as a process of social participation. The nature of the situation impacts significantly on the process.
  • learning involves a deepening process of participation in a community of practice
  • Acknowledging that communities of practice affect performance is important in part because of their potential to overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a fast-moving virtual economy. Communities also appear to be an effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems and to share knowledge outside of the traditional structural boundaries. In addition, the community concept is acknowledged to be a means of developing and maintaining long-term organizational memory. These outcomes are an important, yet often unrecognized, supplement to the value that individual members of a community obtain in the form of enriched learning and higher motivation to apply what they learn. (Lesser and Storck 2001)
  • Educators need to reflect on their understanding of what constitutes knowledge and practice. Perhaps one of the most important things to grasp here is the extent to which education involves informed and committed action.
Barbara Lindsey

Video: Voices From the Front Lines of Online Learning - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of... - 0 views

  • As a first time student enrolled in an online course, I am dismayed by the total lack of the instructor's input. She merely feeds us the publisher's materials, has a teaching assistant grade the homework and pulls her tests from the publisher's test bank. I could teach this course, easily, myself.
  • There is no "teaching" or explanation, just self study. Silly things are graded like participation in discussions, and homework is often graded despite the fact the solutions manuals are all available online for students. Many online courses are taught by for-profit schools whose key motivation is to never fail students and to keep their tuition dollars flowing in. Even traditional schools' online courses are silly. The teacher has no way to know who is taking the exams. Exams are open book. Let's all start calling it the sham that it really is.
  • I have to say, from my experience as a student in an Ivy League school on the ground I had experiences like that. You can't judge an entire way of teaching and learning from these experiences.I have been teaching graduate school online since 1999. I engage actively with learners one on one, in small groups and in the class. I use meeting technologies as well as the Blackboard discussion. Learners work independently or collaboratively, depending on the assignment. I review and make detailed comments on their writing in assignments that require them to reasearch and draw on multiple scholarly sources. There is typically not one textbook, so "publisher's materials" or "open book exams" are non-existent. Even discussion assignments are submitted in full APA style and require references to the assigned and other scholarly readings. Higher order critical and creative thinking, original analysis, are required.
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  • When these learners complete the program, they have competencies relevant to 21c life-- they can communicate, collaborate, access and integrate information from diverse sources using electronic libraries. It is an exciting way to teach and learn and it is the wave of the future so we need to gain the skills needed to make these educational experiences consistently meaningful.
  • Working with online instruction requires different techniques. An instructor online cannot usually look at a student's face and see that she isn't grasping the point, for example, or when she has fallen asleep. I can see why instructors would miss this type of face-to-face communication; online feedback is both less immediate and in some cases more direct. But a lecture can be truly engaging or enormously incomprehensible even for the student who moves to the front row to try to understand it all. Online learning can also reap huge results or can suffer from another set of equally mind-numbing problems.
  • I have to agree with jsalmons and bghansel. It's not the fact that a school is online or on-ground that matters. It's the quality of the educator that matters. I, too, have gone to and taught in Ivy League schools and found them to be a mixed bag, just as I've found online schools to be a mixed bag.
  • Yes, softshellcrab, discussion questions are the backbone of online courses. Are you telling me they don't play a role in on-ground education? Are you telling me that only talking-head lectures educate? Is there something wrong with students doing self-studying? Haven't you seen lecture content in online courses? I'm puzzled as to why you think critical thinking, Socratic reasoning/questioning, and constructivism are bad or can't be done online, but can on-ground.
  • The most (Stress THE MOST)primary issue with distance education is the degree of affective education taught.
  • We can use SKYPE, WIMBA or other "video" based education, but what we lose is the subtle differences of students and their interactions with others that makes it difficult to determine their level of character (highest level of affect).
  • Bill Gates may think we will have less seated instruction in the future (see another Chronicle issue elsewhere), but the backlash against online will be in the form of those who cannot interact and thus not obtain jobs (except in the places where it wont matter because none have any affect in that place).The bottom line is that we are losing a major portion of our education system in a pure online education format. Until we recognize how to better teach affective education with online, and more importantly assess that type of education, we will have major issues not only in higher education, but also in industry/business.And this is an open invitation for Bill Gates to discuss this issue.
  • "Quality on-line teaching is harder than regular classroom teaching, but poor on-line teaching is easier than regular classroom teaching."
  • But can I make it more specific - "Quality on-line teaching is harder (taking more time, e.g.)than regular classroom teaching of the same quality (in achieving the same extent of satisfaction in students, e.g.)?"
  • However, no one has mentioned the preparation required for quality online instruction. Some building blocks of good online programs are high quality/targeted content, flexible tools for development and delivery, engaging and interactive design, attentive and responsive instructors during the class, self motivated learners, and as always outcomes-based curriculum.
Barbara Lindsey

Microsoft, Google eye Arabic web growth potential | Reuters - 0 views

  • "One of our biggest missions is to enable Arabic users to find the right tools to enrich Arabic content," Ghonim said. "It would be great to see more e-commerce in the region, more publishers, more news sites. We are committed to help them."
  • Ghonim said Arabic speakers have historically engaged in poorly organized and difficult to archive forums, citing a message board used by 400,000 teachers in Saudi Arabia.Both Google and Microsoft place Arabic in their top ten languages in need of prioritized attention.
  • "The next few million Egyptian internet users will be people who don't really speak English," Ghonim said.
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  • "Think of the guy running a very small one-stop shop in (Nile delta industrial city) Mahalla," Ghonim said. "You should facilitate for him a complete experience in Arabic, from the way he registers his domain to finding a hosting company to communicating to his customers."
  • Mundie said the Arab world was well-placed to skip PC-dominated use and go straight to mobile internet.
Barbara Lindsey

Google Reader - !ECI831-Fall2010 - Student Blogs - 0 views

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    Description: For-Credit Student Blogs of eci831 - Fall 2010 A bundle is a collection of blogs and websites hand-selected by your friend on a particular topic or interest. You can keep up to date with them all in one place by subscribing in Google Reader.
Barbara Lindsey

The Future of Education is Here » Blog Archive » Place-based Education - 0 views

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    Bill Gates talks about current and future ed trends as he sees it.
Barbara Lindsey

createthefuture - The Future of Learning 10 Years On - 0 views

  • The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment…
  • The purpose of educational institutions, therefore, is not merely to create and distribute learning opportunities and resources, but also to facilitate a student’s participation in a learning environment – a game, a community, a profession – through the provision of the materials that will assist him or her to, in a sense, see the world in the same way as an accomplished expert; and this is accomplished not merely by presenting learning materials to the learner, but by facilitating the engagement of the learner in conversations with members of that community of experts.
  • In the end, what will be evaluated is a complex portfolio of a student’s online activities.
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  • … it is important to understand that place independence means that real learning will occur in real environments, with the contributions of the students not being some artifice designed strictly for practice, but an actual contribution to the business or enterprise in question.
  • Current online learning efforts are based on the idea that learning will occur in a certain online place – a learning management system, say – or will be conducted using certain software tools.
  • … a field trip to a local stream or forest would be seen as a once-a-semester activity, because it would otherwise consume too much class time, it could now become (for some students) a once-a-day activity, with what used to be classroom activities designed around the field trips.
  • as Wenger says, “... the school is not the privileged locus of learning. It is not a self-contained, closed world in which students acquire knowledge to be applied outside, but a part of a broader learning system. The class is not the primary learning event. It is life itself that is the main learning event.”
  • education is fundamentally a process of communication; learning, by contrast, is fundamentally a process of growth
  • Traditional learning composed of classes and cohorts operates more as a group than as a network … Classes are closed; there is a clear barrier between members and non-members. … In the case of informal learning, however, the structure is much looser. People pursue their own objectives in their own way, while at the same time initiating and sustaining an ongoing dialogue with others pursuing similar objectives.
  • In traditional learning, success is achieved not merely by passing the test but in some way being recognized as having achieved expertise. A test-only system is a coarse system of measurement for a complex achievement. (NOTE: See Frank Smith's The Book of Learning and Forgetting)
  • Despite the efforts of educators and individuals to create (often lavish and complex) learning environments for students, this will in the long run not be necessary. Learners will create their own communities, their own environments. At most, the educator needs to ensure that the tools are there for students to use, and that the channels of communication, from student to student, from community to community, are open.
  • … it is probably inevitable that the domains of ‘learning’ and ‘testing’ will separate. In the future it may even be thought of as quaint that those responsible for the fostering of learning were also those responsible for evaluating whether or not learning actually happened. People who are in some way able to demonstrate their ability – through a portfolio system, for example, are able to circumvent the need for testing altogether.
Barbara Lindsey

Lead article: How did a couple of veteran classroom teachers end up in a space like thi... - 0 views

  • With social networking and media-sharing practices rapidly assuming a central role in our professional and personal lives, teachers have a responsibility to bring these practices into the classroom.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Why responsibility? Even if it doesn't serve a pedagogical purpose? Advance the learning that is supposed to take place?
  • technology uber-fans gush over their embrace of every new gadget, technology and practice, affixing computer-driven activities onto factory-model teaching practices as shiny appendages, resulting in a ‘technology façade’
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Well, I would have a problem making a direct connection between über-fans and factory-model teaching proponents. I would like to think the über-fans lean more towards constructivist practices.
  • This does not mean that traditional literacies of critical reading, thinking and communication must make way for emerging literacies of collaboration, online communication and multimedia navigation. It does mean that we have to transform our teaching to accommodate them all effectively.
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  • a tension between their passions and interests and the Academy’s curricular obligations. When woven into the fabric of the classroom, blogs allow the participants to articulate their feelings as a way of addressing these tensions. As well, blogs provide a space where the participants’ interests and passions can bubble forth for the enrichment of the group.
  • By blogging effectively within classroom settings, we can mentor learner forays into public spaces.
  • We wish to emphasise the importance of distinguishing between using blogs as holders of factory-model teaching practices, and taking advantage of their connectivity and transparency to deepen and liberate learning from the confines of stagnant, teacher-centric models. Ignoring the transformative capabilities of connectivity, some teachers using blogs merely reproduce offline practices online. Limiting classroom blogging to one-way transactions of information and directives from teacher to learners may add convenience and efficiency to the classroom, but does nothing for learning itself. Nor does assigning and directing wooden, forced, framed discussions online, which result in little more than mind-numbing ‘busy work’. We belittle and infantalise our students, further rewarding docility and disengagement if we over-direct posts by giving minute instructions as to their content, number and direction.
  • classroom blogging,
  • focusing on emerging pedagogy rather than tools
  • We will examine hyperlinked slow-blogging as reflective learning; multimedia, interactive blogging as action-based learning; and connected, transparent blogging as social learning.
  • Reflection-through-writing is a powerful aid to information retention, which is poor unless the lesson is repeated in a variety of contexts
  • The learner, in the act of writing down what s/he has learned, solidifies understanding and reveals areas of confusion.
  • Traditionally this kind of reflective narrative, found in journals and portfolios, has helped learners gain skill at meta-discourse and take responsibility for learning in liberal arts contexts. Teachers follow progress and detect comprehension gaps while coming to know learners’ styles, contexts and preferences. Learner-teacher interactions through reflective writing can deepen important bonds, an important indicator of effective learning (Raider Roth 2005).
  • different kinds of learning contexts including vocational by inviting learners to contextualise the learning in their own way within personal experience, thereby making the learning their own (
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      An aspect of constructivist teaching and learning.
  • But if limited to the kinds of practices achieved offline, while efficient and convenient, and affording keyboarding practice, this use ignores new literacies of connectivity, collaboration, communication and multimedia expression. It also leaves out learners for whom written reflection is not always optimal or possible.
  • Although a blog organises itself, ordinarily and on first view, in reverse chronological order, the latest post being most prominent, tagging and hyperlinking allow for more associative, lateral ways of organising and connecting thoughts. Even the novice learner can transcend the limits of time and linearity in linking nascent ideas, discoveries and meta-discourse on the learning, replacing ‘…the essentially linear, fixed methods that had produced the triumphs of capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of human imagination’
  • Learners can link to practices other than written as they struggle to articulate and thus retain and apply what they have learned. For example, some learners will naturally link to audio rather than to text files of their reflections; others will link to images they have taken that are reflective of the learning process and outcomes.
  • thereby extending the reflective practice into synthesis and analysis and invention
  • If we know we are being read, that our explorations have value out in the world, we tend to take more care with our expression and our thinking as communiqués to the Other as well as to the self.
  • From learner posts, the teacher can point to models and questions, to moments of creative and critical success. Learning deepens, writing strengthens: these successes in turn pull the writer back to the blog again and again, to reflect and to improve thinking and expression skills.
  • That these messages to the self (and by extension, to the class and the world) are archived by date and category (or tag) allows them to take their place in an ongoing narrative of the learning.
  • Linking out connects us to more than ourselves. So, in this time of crumbling communities and the cult of the individual, our learners can, through active hyperlinking within a reflective learning practice, become more self-aware rather than more self-absorbed.
  • In selecting media, learners gain critical awareness of the grammar of image and sound as well as language. They learn to evaluate the impact of visual media on their discipline, on their society and on their lives as they develop skill at understanding structure, the arc of an argument, the use of transitions.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      But don't learners need structured guidance in order to be able to do this successfully?
  • Hendrik and Ornberg have asserted, that ‘…audio is more effective than text for creating a sense of co-presence’
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Reactions to this statement?
  • Students learn the discipline by doing the discipline
  • Evie’s work on the web, and in turn catapulted one of our learners into the role of activist and advocate for a cause about which she cared deeply.
  • By the end of the semester, Evie was not only a committed and involved activist for women’s rights, but a published photographer.
  • And so, the apprentice became the master, the student became the teacher, and Sean’s blog is fulfilling by becoming a valued resource for a teacher in Argentina and for her students as well.
  • Her blogging world and her real world became forever ‘intertwingled’ when she started leaving comments on the blogs of some of the graffiti artists she was following, and they, in turn, left comments on her blog. What followed was a flurry of comments, Instant Messaging (IM) conversations, Skype (r) chats and blogposts each taking Claire ever closer to the very people she has studied and admired and analysed…from afar. After the class ended (and after Claire graduated) Claire’s interest in graffiti continued.
  • But just as in the case of Sean, Claire went from being the observer to participant and now to a creator of graffiti, thanks in part to the connections made via social software tools.
  • it is not difficult to see how a tool such as a blog can keep learners immersed in course content in a way that traditional, teacher and textbook-centric teaching simply cannot.
  • A third, and perhaps most significant, role for classroom blogs to play, then, is in social learning, in the forming of close bonds within the learning community itself and with the outside world. Blogs afford learners a strong sense of belonging to a dynamic learning collaborative, following the apprenticeship model of learning, in which everyone is expert and apprentice to one another
  • The job of the teacher using social software is to create an understanding in and amongst the participants that they need to work together as a social entity, as a collaborative group, that is linked to and communicating among themselves as well as with the world.
  • Student bloggers learn by collaborating with one another through online group projects and through discussions, both formal and informal, that spring up on a central course blog, what we call the ‘Motherblog’, and by linking to one another within their own blogs, and creating feedback loops through the commenting function. Students also learn from one another through the blog archives, which grow year by year. Although we still teach in a departmentalised, semesterised system, the archiving subverts the notion of isolated learning segments by carrying the blog’s accumulated wisdom from group to group, informing the new learners’ experiences by adding context, models and inspiration
  • And unlike a discussion board that might be hosted on a course management tool such as Blackboard, these multimedia posts and comments are archived, hyperlinked and are open and available to all and not just the class.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Critical difference.
  • Learners and teachers bring into the community discussion their own expertise, prior learning, cultural perspectives. They can converse here about what interests them about what they are studying. This kind of informal discussion weaves the threads of collective intelligence, and it helps learners to think beyond the strict confines of the syllabus, seeing connections to themselves and the world.
  • The class uses Flickr to collect and share images to be used in image-only essays and reflections, and in multimedia texts.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How interesting.
  • As Garrison and Anderson (2003) point out, ‘…a community of learners is an essential, core element of an educational experience when higher-order learning is the desired outcome’ (2003:22)
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      A good rationale for collaborative engagement.
  • Using blogs as a complement to the face-to-face classroom environment not only provides more time on task for the learners, but if left open to world (as opposed to behind a firewall or a password or contained within the shell of a Learning Management System) these tools allow the real world - those crucial informal learning networks - into our classrooms…and the remarkable connections that happen as a result.
  • We can invite the outside world into the course intentionally, by asking experts in our field to participate in time-limited blog-based discussions with our learners. In these ‘blogging invitationals’ our learners can interact with professionals, joining the conversation of the real-world discipline in a meaningful way.
  • Other powerful connections with the world outside the classroom can occur through inter-classroom or inter-school blogging exchanges, or in service-learning initiatives, in which university learners, for example, mentor younger learners via connected blogging and feedback through comments, classroom to classroom, as writing buddies.
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