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Confessions of a Podcast Junkie: A Student Perspective (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 3 views

  • My experience in creating podcasts came through much nobler endeavors. It began with a research project in the working-class neighborhoods of North Belfast and a frustrated conversation over pints in a pub. I was on a research high after an interview with two women of very different political backgrounds. They were friends, brought together by the work of a local nonprofit, and their mutual admiration shone from the lightning-fast banter that they tossed back and forth throughout the interview. It was clear to me that they were a perfect example of a friendship from different sides of the political divide. But my friend at the pub just couldn't get it. He suggested that their friendship might be contrived, a mere show for my benefit, or that if real, it didn't mean as much as I thought. Exasperated, I pulled out my recorder and played the conversation back to him. As their Belfast accents filled up our corner booth, I could see his posture slacken and the battle turn my way. In that moment, I decided that only a podcast could finish telling my story. Over the next months, armed with just an MP3 player and some freeware suggested by a friend, I worked to piece together the story of North Belfast through interviews, conversations, and the sounds of the streets. The result was crude, elementary, and slightly difficult to listen to. But I was hooked.
  • Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology
  • In fact, the iPod topped the list of the most "in" things on campus in 2006, according to Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How many in our class own an iPod? Other mp3 player?
    • Inas Ayyoub
       
      I don't have any of them, but after studying and teaching in an American university , I feel it is one of the important things that I have to own!!
    • Kemen Zabala
       
      I own an iPod touch and I believe my cellphone is also part mp3 player
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      I have 2
    • Blanca Garcia Valenzuela
       
      I have a mp3 player, not an iPod and, anyway, I do not see why iPods are so popular...
    • Catherine Ross
       
      I own an iPod but I never use it!
    • Celeste Arrieta
       
      I don't have an IPod
    • Celeste Arrieta
       
      You made very interesting comments, Inas! Congratulations!!
    • suzanne ondrus
       
      I own one but have yet to use it! :(
    • Christopher Laine
       
      Mine doesn't really work since I put it in the laundry. But I never used it much anyway because it's not compatible with .flac files.
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  • transfer lectures and course material
  • "The good thing was that you could listen to a section over and over again if you wanted to review it," Clemen says. "There were a few podcasts that I had to review a couple of times. I could write out what he was saying and listen to what he was saying again." Reviewing came in handy, they all say, especially during project or exam times. "[With the podcasts], I've got more material to go back to if I wanted to review that module," Clemen says. "Whereas with the rest of the material, I just have some PowerPoint and my own notes."
  • The trick, students say, is to make sure that there is something to gain by attending class and downloading the lecture.
  • the material has to be relevant to the rest of the course. Otherwise, it's just a cool technology to have." Material should have a clear connection to the actual course, making a seamless transition between face time and the online realm.
  • Students stress the need to keep audio and video concise and engaging.
  • ust because a student totes an iPod on campus doesn't mean that the student is podcast-savvy.
  • "There aren't any time constraints. Your podcast doesn't have to be an exact amount of time. You have carte blanche to change the format and grow your show." He also helps capture audio from guest speakers so that the programs can be
  • n to the guest lectures while on the bus, at the gym, or in their dorm rooms. Still, Stein never felt the urge to skip class. "It was nice to know that if you missed class, you could record the lectures," she says. "But the iPod didn't encourage you to miss class. There's not a chalkboard that you can see or problems that you can see worked out. I think more people show up in a [podcasting] course because it encourages more interaction."
  • "It's much better than writing a paper. It's more interesting, much more fun, and much more creative. You get a lot of time to work on it, and it's more collaborative because you're working with other people. You're creating the performance as you go and then continuously working on it." Creating a podcast didn't mean less work, he says.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Your thoughts?
    • suzanne ondrus
       
      This seems to go on the idea of trying to make one's class accessible to everyone. So with podcasts students with strong oral skills might excell.
    • Inas Ayyoub
       
      Still, we don't want students to end up with poor writing skills. So I guess with the help of other uses of technolog like wikis we can make writing papers more fun and help stdents improve that as well.
  • Though her goal was to increase learning for her peers in the anatomy course, she found that creating the material was a boon to her own learning. "As a student creating the podcasts, I had the chance to learn a lot more than I would have taking a course," she says. "It's about learning how to teach the material and how to make a narration out of it. You have this intimate knowledge of the material, and now you know how to show the different sides of an issue."
  • Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject.
  • I don't want [the podcasts] to overlap with lectures too much; I still want people to go to the lecture. This is a very relaxed way to get the information to them. They can do it on their own time and download it whenever."
    • Inas Ayyoub
       
      Though the podcasts arre a great idea for reviewing materials and catching up on things you missed in a class, still they will result in having less and less face-to-face interaction which is still needed especially when learning languages. I guess students will be tempted to miss classes more and more , even though the article suggested that using podcasts will encourage them not to do so!!
  • Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—though it was now slightly rougher for the wear—I asked students at colleges and universities across North America about their iPod and MP3 use, their familiarity with podcasting, and just how they saw podcasting as part of the classroom.
  • Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—th
  •  
    "Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject."
Barbara Lindsey

Podcasts: what it is and how it works - 0 views

    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What important role do RSS and feed readers play in podcasting?
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How do podcasts differ from audio or video content found on the Internet?
  •  
    A brief overview of what podcasts are and how they are made.
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

Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • Net Gen students are facile at multitasking
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      The research shows that no one can multitask effectively... See John Medina and Brain Rules, for example.
  • Workers anticipated having a single profession for the duration of their working lives. Education was based on a factory-like, "one size fits all" model. Talent was developed by weeding out those who could not do well in a monochromatic learning environment.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Also part and parcel of hegemonic educational practices which served to reinforce the existing social and economic paradigm.
  • Knowing now means using a well-organized set of facts to find new information and to solve novel problems. In 1900, learning consisted largely of memorization; today it relies chiefly on understanding.
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  • learners construct knowledge by understanding new information building on their current understanding and expertise. Constructivism contradicts the idea that learning is the transmission of content to a passive receiver. Instead, it views learning as an active process, always based on the learner's current understanding or intellectual paradigm. Knowledge is constructed by assimilating new information into the learner's knowledge paradigm. A learner does not come to a classroom or a course Web site with a mind that is a tabula rasa, a blank slate. Each learner arrives at a learning "site" with some preexisting level of understanding.
  • Learning science research also highlights the importance of learner engagement, or as the American Psychological Association describes it, intentional learning.1 This means that learners must have a "metaperspective" from which to view and assess their own learning, which is often referred to as metacognition.2 An active learning environment provides the opportunity to assess one's own learning, enabling learners to make decisions about the course, as well as reflect on and assess their progress. In the past, the measure of learning was the final grade (a summative measure). But a final grade is merely a measure of the student's performance on tests. It does not measure the learning that did—or did not—take place. To encourage learning, summative testing or assessments must be combined with formative assessments. Formative assessment is not directly associated with the final grade; it helps learners understand their learning and make decisions about next steps based on that understanding.
  • research indicating that learning is encouraged when it includes social components such as debate or direct engagement with peers and experts. Learning is strengthened through social interactions, interpersonal relations, and communication with others.
  • Research indicates that learners need to be active with respect to their own learning process and assessment. Net Gen students' goal and achievement orientation comes into play here: that achievement focus can be directed toward quizzes and exercises that assist learners in evaluating their progress toward learning goals.
  • Obviously not all forms of learning must be social or team-based. In a variety of learning contexts, individual work is important. It may well be that Net Gen students' strengths are also their weaknesses. The expectation for fast-paced, rapidly shifting interaction coupled with a relatively short attention span may be counterproductive in many learning contexts. Repetition and steady, patient practice—key to some forms of mastery—may prove difficult for Net Gen students. Designing courses for them necessitates balancing these strengths and weaknesses.
  • We should not neglect the informal for the formal, or assume that Net Gen students somehow will figure out the virtual space on their own. We should connect what happens in the classroom with what happens in informal and virtual spaces.
  • Simply installing wireless access points and fresh carpeting isn't enough if done in isolation; such improvements pay real dividends only if they are in concert with the institution's overall teaching and learning objectives. It is the vision that generates the design principles that will, in turn, be used to make key decisions about how learning spaces are configured.
  • The vision and design principles should emphasize the options students have as active participants in the learning process. Design principles should include terms such as analyze, create, criticize, debate, present, and classify—all directed at what the space enables the students to do. For example, students should be able to present materials to the class. Outside class, they should have access to applications and materials that directly support analysis of data, text, and other media. Forums for discussion and critical debate, both real and virtual, are key to encouraging learning and will be looked for by Net Gen students.
  • Learning spaces should accommodate the use of as many kinds of materials as possible and enable the display of and access to those materials by all participants. Learning space needs to provide the participants—instructors and students alike—with interactive tools that enable exploration, probing, and examination. This might include a robust set of applications installed on the computer that controls the room's displays, as well as a set of communication tools. Since the process of examination and debate leads to discovery and the construction of new knowledge, it could be important to equip spaces with devices that can capture classroom discussion and debate, which can be distributed to all participants for future reference and study.
  • the end of the class meeting marks a transition from one learning mode to another.
  • This lecture hall is of relatively recent vintage; its seats and paired tables make it much easier to deploy and use her "tools," which include printouts of the day's reading, as well as a small laptop computer. Her fellow students are doing likewise. Each of them is using some device to access the course's Web site—some with laptops, others with tablet computers, still others with handheld computers. Using wireless connections, they all access the course's Web site and navigate to the site's "voting" page.
  • a "magic wand," a radio-frequency controller that enables her to operate her computer—as well as many of the classroom's functions—wirelessly, from any point in the room. She can capture anything she writes on the blackboard and make it available to her students on the course Web site. Freed from needing to take extensive notes, the students are able to participate more fully in the class discussion. Finally, the professor is carrying a small recorder that captures her lecture, digitizes the audio, and uploads it to the course Web site for the students to review when they prepare for finals.
  • Sandra launches the classroom's screen sharing application. Within a few seconds, her computer's screen is projected on the room's main screen. The class discussion focuses on this diagram, and the professor, using a virtual pencil, is able to make notes on the diagram. The diagram and notes are captured and placed on the class Web site for review.
  • Soon the debate gets stuck; the students can't resolve the issue. The professor goes to the podium, types briefly, and then asks the students to go to a URL to see a question and to choose the answer they feel is correct. The students access the Web page from laptops, handhelds, or wireless IP-based phones. In two minutes they have completed the poll and submitted their responses. The results are quickly tabulated and displayed. The wide diversity of opinion surprises everyone. The professor reframes the issue, without giving the answer, and the students continue to discuss it. She repeats the poll; this time there is more agreement among the students, enabling her to move the discussion forward.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Could you see being able to do this? Would this work for you?
  • She goes to the podium computer and clicks on a few links, and soon a videoconferencing session is displayed on the right-hand screen. She has arranged to have a colleague of hers "drop in" on the class to discuss a point that is in the colleague's particular area of expertise. The class has a conversation with the expert, who is at large research institution more than 500 miles away. Students listen to the expert's comments and are able to pose questions using one of the three cordless microphones available to the class. On the left-hand screen, the visiting professor shows some images and charts that help explain the concepts under discussion.
  • the other students in her class have signed up for most of the slots, conferring with friends using chat programs to ensure that they sign up for the same lab slots.
  • The discussion pocket is the college's term for a small, curved space with a table and bench to accommodate a meeting of four or five people. Found outside the newer classrooms, they are handy for informal, spontaneous discussions. Sandra's group moves into the pocket and for the next 15 minutes continue their "spill over" discussion of the class.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How does this change perceptions of when and where learning begins and ends?
  • hey are able to have an audio chat; Sandra's friend is in her dorm room, and Sandra is in a remote corner of the library where conversation will not disturb others. As their discussion progresses, they go to the course's Web site and launch the virtual whiteboard to diagram some concepts. They develop a conceptual diagram—drawing, erasing, and revising it until they agree the diagram is correct. They both download a copy. Sandra volunteers to work on polishing the diagram and will leave a copy of the final diagram in her share folder in her online portfolio "locker
  • The underlying theme remains the same, however: cultivating learning practices consistent with learning theory and aligned with the habits and expectations of Net Gen students
  • For most higher education institutions, the lecture hall will not disappear; the challenge is to develop a new generation of lecture hall, one that enables Net Gen students and faculty to engage in enlivened, more interactive experiences. If the lecture hall is integrated with other spaces—physically as well as virtually—it will enable participants to sustain the momentum from the class session into other learning contexts. The goal is not to do away with the traditional classroom, but rather to reinvent and to integrate it with the other learning spaces, moving toward a single learning environment.
  • Learning theory is central to any consideration of learning spaces; colleges and universities cannot afford to invest in "fads" tailored to the Net Gen student that might not meet the needs of the next generation.
  • For example, start with the Net Gen students' focus on goals and achievement. That achievement orientation ties to learning theory's emphasis on metacognition, where learners assess their progress and make active decisions to achieve learning goals. Learning space design could support this by providing contact with people who can provide feedback: tutors, consultants, and faculty. This could, in turn, be supported in the IT environment by making formative self-tests available, as well as an online portfolio, which would afford students the opportunity to assess their overall academic progress.
  • As institutions create an anywhere, anytime IT infrastructure, opportunities arise to tear down silos and replace them with a more ubiquitous learning environment. Using laptops and other networked devices, students and faculty are increasingly able to carry their entire working environment with them. To capitalize on this, campus organizations must work collaboratively to create a more integrated work environment for the students and faculty, one that better serves the mobile Net Gen students as well as a faculty faced with the initial influx of these students into their ranks
  • One of the key variables is the institution itself. Learning spaces are institutional in scope—their implementation involves the institution's culture, tradition, and mission.
  • The starting point for rethinking learning spaces to support Net Gen students begins with an underlying vision for the learning activities these spaces should support. This vision should be informed by learning theory, as well as by recognition of the characteristics of the students and faculty who use these spaces.
Chenwen Hong

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

shared by Chenwen Hong on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • One major advantage of egocentric perspectives is that they enable participants' actional immersion and motivation more strongly than exocentric FORs, which are better suited for dispassionate observer roles.
    • Chenwen Hong
       
      Can we say teaching through gaming is proving an egocentric FOR to course content?
    • Chenwen Hong
       
      I think teaching through gaming is proving an egocentric FOR to course content.
  • While the content of these games and activities often does not lead to knowledge useful in the real world, rich types of learning and identity formation do take place in these environments, fostering neomillennial learning styles based on characteristics of immersive mediated interaction.
    • Chenwen Hong
       
      Therefore, if we are to integrating gaming into the course, the content and activities then will have meanings and can be made useful in the real world.
  • Virtual identity unfettered by physical attributes such as gender, race, disabilities
    • Chenwen Hong
       
      I have doubts on this "unfettered" virtual identity, which has been mentioned earlier in this article. If avatars are created in terms of how we defines identities in real world, how come those physical attributes will disappear?
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  • Multitasking among disparate experiences and information sources
    • Chenwen Hong
       
      Is this not proved to be less efficient and result in less successul acedmic performances?
  • These virtual worlds are persistent social and material worlds, loosely structured by open-ended (fantasy) narratives, where players are largely free to do as they please—slay ogres, siege castles, barter goods in town, or shake the fruit out of trees
    • Chenwen Hong
       
      While it is easy to confuse virtual life with real life, do we instructors play a role of teaching them to tell their differences as we are blending their real life into the virtual world in teaching? Or is there such a role?
Barbara Lindsey

Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution | Magazine - 0 views

  • Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It’s what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.
  • Shirky:
  • Pink: A surplus that post-TV media—blogs, wikis, and Twitter—can tap for other, often more valuable, uses.
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  • he very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.
  • All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.
  • Our third drive—our intrinsic motivation—can be even more powerful.
  • Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.
  • When we lacked the ability to efficiently connect and collaborate with each other, that intrinsic motivation often didn’t surface. So we assumed that productive, public activities revolved around extrinsic motivation and external rewards. And we assumed that all rewards were substitutable for all other rewards. So I can pay you more or I can praise you or I can put a Lucite brick on your desk and it all works the same way.
  • When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.
  • Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well. Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you’ll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.
  • Shirky: Well, organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems. So Trentway-Wagar, an Ontario-based bus company, sues PickupPal, an online ride-sharing service, because T-W isn’t committed to solving transportation problems. It’s committed to solving transportation problems with buses. In the media world, Britannica is now committed to making reference works that can’t easily be referred to, and the music industry is now distributing music that can’t easily be shared because new ways of distributing music undermine the old business model.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Does the same hold true for education?
  •  
    Pink and Shirky talk about the shift in technology-enabled human interaction.
Barbara Lindsey

Visualize your GPS tracks with Breadcrumbs | Google Earth Blog - 0 views

  • Our users can log their ski trip, hiking trip or sightseeing trip, upload it to Breadcrumbs with their photos and videos, and send it to all their friends, who can relive the adventure in 3D. And this is only the start, as we plan to provide our users with a platform to not only edit and maintain tracks, but also to find new places to explore and interact within a social network.
  • Breadcrumbs is the first web application of its kind, where users can manage GPS tracks, photos and videos in one place - it can be thought of as 'Flickr for GPS tracks'.
  • The key features of Breadcrumbs include:Relive your adventure: Breadcrumbs brings together photos, videos and GPS tracks in one quick and easy process and our 3D playback function brings the track alive. Edit and manage: Breadcrumbs comes with a suite of tools which let users edit and manage their GPS tracks, photos and videos. These include:- Automated geotagging of photos.- Track editing tool to correct GPS points.- Add information to your adventure to help tell the story, such as show where you ate your lunch or spotted some wildlife.- Organize: Breadcrumbs offers a rich set of tools to help users to manage adventures.- Share: Breadcrumbs makes it easy to share adventures, with options including a public page for each track and direct integration with Facebook.
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  • Our utilization and heavy integration with the Google Earth plugin is also a big bonus for the user. Garmin allows you to look at your data in Google Maps and indeed Google Earth. However, Breadcrumbs builds on this as we have built a track playback feature on top of the plugin which allows you to hit play and replay your trip step by step. It's like watching a movie of your day out! This really does bring the users' GPS data to life especially when sharing with friends and family.
  • We are already integrated with one smartphone application allowing the user to push their tracks directly to Breadcrumbs from their phone.
Barbara Lindsey

Audio - Playing with Media - 0 views

  •  
    Can record audio eval and then download and share with students! (iPadio)
Barbara Lindsey

News: The Promise of Digital Humanities - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Amid financial crises, humanities departments at many public universities have been razed. But even amid cuts, there has been a surge in interest in the digital humanities -- a branch of scholarship that takes the computational rigor that has long undergirded the sciences and applies it the study of history, language, and culture.
  • The NEH held a symposium on Tuesday for 60 recipients of its 2011 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, most of whom were given between $25,000 and $50,000. They were allowed two minutes each to describe their projects.
  • “While we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them,”
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  • role-playing games
  • enabling learners to “experience” historical events or places instead of reading off a page.
  • visual representations
  • of data
  • One recurring theme in the presentations was the need for “linked open data” — types of research data that are tagged and stored in such a way that they can integrate with other research.
  • If one researcher had architectural data about New York City, and another had demographic data about the city, and each were able to cross-reference the other’s data with her own, it would deepen the context and understanding for both.
  • With linked open data on the rise, the same could soon happen with research data
  • “Linked open data is a very technical infrastructure, but the result of that is information that’s shared widely for free. A lot of scholarly data over the last hundred years or so is locked up in expensive journals that the public could never afford to subscribe to.
  • That could be the key to winning back support for the humanities
  •  
    Could the creative use of technology help humanities scholars win back public support?
Barbara Lindsey

When college students reinvent the world - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

  • He saw students pouring energy into memorizing bits of information that he knew they’d later forget. So he structured the rest of the syllabus around creating the simulation. Now he gets rid of about 40 percent of the rules of the game each semester so that students have to come up with new rules to determine how the interactions will play out. “The most learning happens there,” he says.
  • World Sim materials go up on a class “wiki,” a collection of Web pages that professor and students edit. Building new-media literacy is one of Wesch’s goals. Very few students arrive at his class knowing how to use digital tools such as wikis.
  • “There’s nothing more important than loving your students,” Wesch says, his office full of props from the simulation. “Before I lecture I start getting nervous ... so I meditate on this idea of ‘Love your students.’“It completely displaces all of that anxiety, because you recognize, it’s not about me, it’s about them.”
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

Learning 2.0 « Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Into Languag... - 0 views

  • While I was reading this article I was very critical and was wondering whether this course was going to be just lecturing by simply recording and showing the lesson and how these two professors could assess so many students in terms of time and in terms to have an assessment which would not make them cheat as this is an online environment. Well, in the last part of the article the answer is clearly expressed they do show a recording but on the online lesson they actually use the lesson to discuss project in smaller groups. Do not personally know how many smaller groups they would create and of how many members however the idea is excellent to me.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What role should communities and collaboration play in a course of this size? Do you have the same concerns that Rosario has about individualization? What about Eda's suggestions for best use of technology?
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