Group items tagged

At the end of the day, high school graduates need a clear sense of both the potentials and the pitfalls of interacting online. They should be able to create their own connections in safe, effective, and ethical ways. For schools, this means far more than just doing an information literacy unit. Rather, we must envision a K–12 curriculum that seamlessly integrates these new skills and literacies in age-appropriate ways and gradually moves students into more public interactions online. Not doing so would be akin to handing teenagers the keys to the car without having taught them to drive.

you write something really important, sign over your rights to a for-profit publisher and then that publisher charges YOUR university (and potentially other subscribers; individual or organizational) a fee to carry that journal. In other words, you are giving your knowledge to a company so they can sell it back to your university

Hypertext is the (not so) new endnote/footnote.

Most print journals STILL cannot handle color graphics. With incredible advances in data visualization technology, there must be a move to publishing to the Web directly.

As a result of her use of various forms of social media, Ravitch has (amazingly) positioned herself as the leading voice of the counter-narrative to the dominant educational policy agenda.

motivated by sharing with others, a blog allows scholars to disseminate content and express opinions to larger audiences than more traditional outlets. Second, needing room for creativity and self-reflection, the blog is a tool for practicing writing and for keeping up-to-date and remembering; it is a space to house early articulations of one’s ideas. Finally, valuing connections, the participants used their blogs for interacting and creating relationships with others.

A recent post about charter schools on Dr. Baker's blog includes 25 comments which, together, comprise a great argument between Bruce, Stuart Buck and Kevin Welner. That conversation happened "in public," not at some exclusive conference or behind some paywall. How can you read that conversation and not recognize the value of blogs as spaces for scholarly communication?

there is a real need for content-area experts who can serve as curators.

One could certainly argue that content curation is not a new kind of authorship. Editing books or journals is about content curation and has traditionally "counted" as authorship for tenure and promotion purposes. However, at the risk of sounding repetitive, our tools for content creation are new.

Social bookmarking tools are also incredibly simple to use and ideal for curating content. Diigo and Delicious are the two most widely adopted free social bookmarking services. Users can "bookmark" sites, aggregate them using tags, and then share their collections publicly.

unlike content curation in a print medium, that collection is dynamic (I can add or delete at any time) and interactive (visitors can comment on any of the items in the collection and start a conversation of sorts). I believe this to be a truly modern and increasingly important form of scholarly activity. 

There are other forms of modern scholarly activity that are well-worth considering, including webinars and podcasting.

Gideon Burton, Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University, who writes: I don't want to be complicit in sustaining a knowledge economy that rewards its participants when they invest in burying and restricting knowledge. This is why Open Access is more than a new model for scholarly publishing, it is the only ethical move available to scholars who take their own work seriously enough to believe its value lies in how well it engages many publics and not just a few peers (para. 7).

At the start of each session, Mr. Campbell gave the 11 students a strange kind of pop quiz. For one thing, it was anonymous, so no grades were given. And rather than ask questions about the content of the homework, he asked students to detail how much time and effort they spent preparing for class. Among the questions: Did you talk to a classmate about the assignment? And how many hours did you spend on the reading?

The scores started low—between 4 and 5, meaning the students did far less than the assigned homework. Something happened as the term progressed, though, as students bought into the concept

"The commenting and linking are crucial," he says, "as those activities are essential parts of being in the real blogosphere."

If the core activity at college shifts away from the classroom and into practical activities, do students even need to come to a campus?

"There is definitely a broader array of options available to students who wish to forgo the commute to class altogether in exchange for online classes that essentially provide the same content that professors regurgitate to students in lecture."

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

To Orange, I will show an actual example of a map in my next full post and explain more about the parameters that are given and what the students fill in themselves. You raise a much more important question though, about the necessity of simplifying in order for the simulation to work. This aspect of the simulation almost led me to abandon the whole thing as I started to think it through and plan for it. Instead I found two ways to deal with it: 1. I challenge my students to tell me where the simulation is oversimplified and make their own case for how the simulation should change for the next time it is performed. This way they are not simply accepting our imaginary world “as is” and are instead actively thinking about how the real world works and how we may have misrepresented it in our simulation. (Even if the simulation fails miserably, it has succeeded in getting students to think about how the world works!) 2. I encourage the students to use the simplification as a canvas on which they can build and/or interpret complexity. In a lecture format I only have so much time to cover the effects of colonization – perhaps 50 minutes – not enough to really explore all of the different facets. In the World Simulation I can encourage each student to think about how colonization would affect their culture in multiple ways and at multiple levels (e.g. infrastructure, social structure, superstructure). Sometimes this is to complex to be incorporated into the simulation, but they are asked to do a reflection paper immediately following the simulation in which they write their own “cultural history.” This written format allows them to explore some complexities they might not have had the time or means to express in the simulation.

Action Research Groups: Active research done by communities of practice focused on improvement around a possibility or problem in a classroom, school, district, or province.

Community of Practice (CoP): A CoP is group of professionals with shared interests and challenges who make a commitment to improve or get better at something over time by sharing ideas, finding solutions, and creating innovations. This requires new dispositions and values such as resisting the urge to quit prematurely.

Book Study Groups: PLPeeps, often in cross cohort groups, come together to read and discuss a book collectively in an online space

Connected Coaching: individuals on teams are assigned a connected coach who  discusses and shares teaching practices as a means of promoting collegiality and support and to help educators think about how the new literacies inform current teaching practices.

Instructional Rounds:

Curriculum Review or Mapping Groups:

Critical Friends Groups (CFG):

Professional Learning Communities (PLC):

Personal Learning Network (PLN):

These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.

Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.

“This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting,” Dr. Kuhl said. “They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way.”