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Barbara Lindsey

SearchReSearch: Internet search: What makes it simple, difficult or impossible? - 0 views

searchresearch1.blogspot.com/...arch-what-makes-it-simple.html

internet search tips findingfiltering

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 15 Aug 12
     
    "Internet search: What makes it simple, difficult or impossible?"
Barbara Lindsey

A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube - Technology - The Chronic... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...65793

youtube videos lecture learning disruptive education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.
  • Mr. Khan has a vision of turning his Web site into a kind of charter school for middle- and high-school students, by adding self-paced quizzes and ways for the site to certify that students have watched certain videos and passed related tests. "This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever," he said.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jun 10
     
    "Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model-often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia."
Barbara Lindsey

Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace | Epicenter | Wir... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...arabic-english-diplomacy

cross-cultural community translation online

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
  • People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.
  • Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The site is effectively bilingual, thanks to machine translations, and volunteer editors spruce up the translations afterward. Machine translation is quite good, Weyman says, on fairly standard text such as news stories, but still has difficulties handling comments, which tend to use more conversational language. The site also open-sources all its translation data to help the state of the art of translation to move forward.
  • “let someone in Nebraska see an event through the eyes of someone in Nablus.”
  • For instance, Meedan partnered with the United States Institute of Peace, which hosted an online webcast with U.S. Ambassador Christoper Hill last Wednesday. The webcast allowed Iraqis and others from the Middle East to ask questions in Arabic, have them translated immediately and get answers back in just seconds.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Feb 10
     
    A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic - and vice versa - will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
Barbara Lindsey

Do You Speak "Academia"? » Edurati Review - 0 views

eduratireview.com/...do-you-speak-academia

academia writing journals

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • the opening main clause, “Education is an all-encompassing institution,” makes little sense, and the rest of the sentence fails to clarify its meaning. The use of “each and every” is redundant; if each continent and culture, then, by default, it is every continent and culture. After the semicolon, good verbs become weak adjectives: functional and organizational. The entire paragraph could be restructured as an easily understood sentence: In every society, schools organize, function, and operate similarly.
  • Why pick on paragraphs pulled from their contexts? If you read (or try to read) educational journals, you’ll find that these examples are not isolated. They illustrate the “academic style” characterizing such periodicals. These periodicals, their supporters argue, provide the link between research and classroom practice. But the poor communication—the academic writing—requires the reader to add steps to the usually efficient cognition of comprehension. The reader is forced to pause and ask, “What does that mean in plain English?” It’s not that different from reading text in a second language, one in which the reader may be knowledgeable but not proficient.
  • This same gap often exists between students and their textbooks.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • This issue is so prevalent that some experts recommend we teach students “academic language.”
  • This additional distance between the writer and reader decreases the likelihood that the journals will actually be read. And if the journals are not read by teachers, the research will be slow to influence educational practice, if it does at all.
  • We are spending time, effort, and sometimes money on research doomed to remain idle because it’s not communicated well. The poor writing prevents worthwhile application.
  • If understanding depends on translating the language, students who struggle with this prerequisite may lack the motivation or inertia to think beyond, or even through, the interpretation. We’re making understanding more difficult—a seeming antithesis to our role as educators.
  • Why can’t “academic” journals and textbooks utilize common principles of good writing. Why do we insist on communication complexity when our goals would be better served by simple clarity?
  • Status? Are we insisting on “academic writing” because it separates journals from the “rags” intended for the masses or textbooks from the unlearned? If so, our goal must be to maintain some perceived elite readership—a readership probably not teaching or sitting in our classrooms.
  • Do we think that our research and subject matter is complicated, therefore our communicating should also be complex? This is so contrary to logic and sound teaching that it’s an oxymoron.
  • A complex topic requires simple writing, especially when the reader likely lacks the author’s background knowledge and experience. This is almost always the case when a researcher seeks to address individuals who were not part of the research team or involved in similar research themselves, or when experts in a field seek to articulate concepts for students.
  • Medina presents ideas simply and in ways known to foster learning. As the brain engages in elaboration, it overlays new data with known experiences, making connections that help construct understanding. Medina relates a new, complex topic to a familiar childhood activity—origami (even though he is not writing for children). By giving us a reference point for understanding DNA, he equips us with the tools needed to construct understanding. Isn’t this what we should be striving for, both in our textbooks and our journals?
Barbara Lindsey

Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07mind.html

research learning student2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10
     
    In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.
Barbara Lindsey

Save as WWF, Save a Tree : Home - 0 views

www.saveaswwf.com/en

pdf file format no printing

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 10
     
    The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It's a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here's your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don't need printing out - then simply save them as WWF.
Barbara Lindsey

Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix | EDUCAU... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...44592

educause mashup remix

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Nov 07 - Cached
  • A classroom portal that presents automatically updated syndicated resources from the campus library, news sources, student events, weblogs, and podcasts and that was built quickly using free tools.
  • Increasingly, it's not just works of art that are appropriated and remixed but the functionalities of online applications as well.
  • mashups involve the reuse, or remixing, of works of art, of content, and/or of data for purposes that usually were not intended or even imagined by the original creators.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • hat, exactly, constitutes a valid, original work? What are the implications for how we assess and reward creativity? Can a college or university tap the same sources of innovative talent and energy as Google or Flickr? What are the risks of permitting or opening up to this activity?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 23 Nov 07
       
      Good discussion point
  • Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications.
  • Harper's article "The Ecstasy of Influence," the novelist Jonathan Lethem imaginatively reviews the history of appropriation and recasts it as essential to the act of creation.3
  • Lethem's article is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, creativity, and intellectual property. It brilliantly synthesizes multiple disciplines and perspectives into a wonderfully readable and compelling argument. It is also, as the subtitle of his article acknowledges, "a plagiarism." Virtually every passage is a direct lift from another source, as the author explains in his "Key," which gives the source for every line he "stole, warped, and cobbled together." (He also revised "nearly every sentence" at least slightly.) Lethem's ideas noted in the paragraph above were appropriated from Siva Vaidhyanathan, Craig Baldwin, Richard Posner, and George L. Dillon.
  • Reading Walter Benjamin's highly influential 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"4 it's clear that the profound effects of reproductive technology were obvious at that time. As Gould argued in 1964 (influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan5), changes in how art is produced, distributed, and consumed in the electronic age have deep effects on the character of the art itself.
  • Yet the technology developments of the past century have clearly corresponded with a new attitude toward the "aura" associated with a work of invention and with more aggressive attitudes toward appropriation. It's no mere coincidence that the rise of modernist genres using collage techniques and more fragmented structures accompanied the emergence of photography and audio recording.
  • Educational technologists may wonder if "remix" or "content mashup" are just hipper-sounding versions of the learning objects vision that has absorbed so much energy from so many talented people—with mostly disappointing results.
  • The question is, why should a culture of remix take hold when the learning object economy never did?
  • when most learning object repositories were floundering, resource-sharing services such as del.icio.us and Flickr were enjoying phenomenal growth, with their user communities eagerly contributing heaps of useful metadata via simple folksonomy-oriented tagging systems.
  • the standards/practices relationship implicit in the learning objects model has been reversed. With only the noblest of intentions, proponents of learning objects (and I was one of them) went at the problem of promoting reuse by establishing an arduous and complex set of interoperability standards and then working to persuade others to adopt those standards. Educators were asked to take on complex and ill-defined tasks in exchange for an uncertain payoff. Not surprisingly, almost all of them passed.
  • Discoverable Resources
  • Educators might justifiably argue that their materials are more authoritative, reliable, and instructionally sound than those found on the wider Web, but those materials are effectively rendered invisible and inaccessible if they are locked inside course management systems.
  • It's a dirty but open secret that many courses in private environments use copyrighted third-party materials in a way that pushes the limits of fair use—third-party IP is a big reason why many courses cannot easily be made open.
  • The potential payoff for using open and discoverable resources, open and transparent licensing, and open and remixable formats is huge: more reuse means that more dynamic content is being produced more economically, even if the reuse happens only within an organization. And when remixing happens in a social context on the open web, people learn from each other's process.
  • Part of making a resource reusable involves making the right choices for file formats.
  • To facilitate the remixing of materials, educators may want to consider making the source files that were used to create a piece of multimedia available along with the finished result.
  • In addition to choosing the right file format and perhaps offering the original sources, another issue to consider when publishing content online is the critical question: "Is there an RSS feed available?" If so, conversion tools such as Feed2JS (http://www.feed2JS.org) allow for the republication of RSS-ified content in any HTML Web environment, including a course management system, simply by copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript code. When an original source syndicated with RSS is updated, that update is automatically rendered anywhere it has been republished.
  • Jack Schofield
  • Guardian Unlimited
  • "An API provides an interface and a set of rules that make it much easier to extract data from a website. It's a bit like a record company releasing the vocals, guitars and drums as separate tracks, so you would not have to use digital processing to extract the parts you wanted."1
  • What's new about mashed-up application development? In a sense, the factors that have promoted this approach are the same ones that have changed so much else about Web culture in recent years. Essential hardware and software has gotten more powerful and for the most part cheaper, while access to high-speed connectivity and the enhanced quality of online applications like Google Docs have improved to the point that Tim O'Reilly and others can talk of "the emergent Internet operating system."15 The growth of user-centered technologies such as blogs have fostered a DIY ("do it yourself") culture that increasingly sees online interaction as something that can be personalized and adapted on the individual level. As described earlier, light syndication and service models such as RSS have made it easier and faster than ever to create simple integrations of diverse media types. David Berlind, executive editor of ZDNet, explains: "With mashups, fewer technical skills are needed to become a developer than ever. Not only that, the simplest ones can be done in 10 or 15 minutes. Before, you had to be a pretty decent code jockey with languages like C++ or Visual Basic to turn your creativity into innovation. With mashups, much the same way blogging systems put Web publishing into the hands of millions of ordinary non-technical people, the barrier to developing applications and turning creativity into innovation is so low that there's a vacuum into which an entire new class of developers will be sucked."16
  • The ability to "clone" other users' mashups is especially exciting: a newcomer does not need to spend time learning how to structure the data flows but can simply copy an existing framework that looks useful and then make minor modifications to customize the result.19
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 23 Nov 07
       
      This is the idea behind the MIT repository--remixing content to suit local needs.
  • As with content remixing, open access to materials is not just a matter of some charitable impulse to share knowledge with the world; it is a core requirement for participating in some of the most exciting and innovative activity on the Web.
  • "My Maps" functionality
  • For those still wondering what the value proposition is for offering an open API, Google's development process offers a compelling example of the potential rewards.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 23 Nov 07
       
      Wikinomics
  • Elsewhere, it is difficult to point to significant activity suggesting that the mashup ethos is taking hold in academia the way it is on the wider Web.
  • Yet for the most part, the notion of the data mashup and the required openness is not even a consideration in discussions of technology strategy in higher educational institutions. "Data integration" across campus systems is something that is handled by highly skilled professionals at highly skilled prices.
  • Revealing how a more adventurous and inclusive online development strategy might look on campus, Raymond Yee recently posted a comprehensive proposal for his university (UC Berkeley), in which he outlined a "technology platform" not unlike the one employed by Amazon.com (http://aws.amazon.com/)—resources and access that would be invaluable for the institution's programmers as well as for outside interests to build complementary services.
  • All too often, college and university administrators react to this type of innovation with suspicion and outright hostility rather than cooperation.
  • those of us in higher education who observe the successful practices in the wider Web world have an obligation to consider and discuss how we might apply these lessons in our own contexts. We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse. When choosing a content management system, we might consider how well it supports RSS syndication. In an excellent article in the March/April 2007 issue of EDUCAUSE Review, Joanne Berg, Lori Berquam, and Kathy Christoph listed a number of campus activities that could benefit from engaging social networking technologies.26
  • What might happen if we allow our campus innovators to integrate their practices in these areas in the same way that social networking application developers are already integrating theirs? What is the mission-critical data we cannot expose, and what can we expose with minimal risk? And if the notion of making data public seems too radical a step, can APIs be exposed to selected audiences, such as on-campus developers or consortia partners?
Barbara Lindsey

ID and Other Reflections: 21st Century Workplace Challenges - 0 views

idreflections.blogspot.com/...tury-workplace-challenges.html

learning 21stcenturylearning collaboration cop communitiesofpractice

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Given this situation, it is clear that some of the following are needed to build a workplace that innovates—in other words—a learning organization:
  • Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 10
     
    Thx 2 Thomas Sauer for posting this link. (An absolutely critical means for me to find information about topics I am passionate about and that promote my deepening understanding of issues key to my ongoing professional development is allowing those with similar passions to curate findings for me and to likewise do the same for others.) "My understanding of today's workplace: Predictable, routine tasks are being either automated or outsourced, or soon will be. Knowledge workers are increasingly taking more responsibility for their work as well as personal growth. Hierarchy is being replaced by wirearchy. Managers are being replaced by leaders, coaches, and facilitators, or will be. The kinds of work being done are those that defy being codified into step-lists or guidelines. The problems are complex-often chaotic-and resist solving using best practices or yore. Ambiguity, complexity and chaos are replacing the predictable, known, and simple. The competitive edge is the ability to problem solve quickly and innovatively. The day of individual stars are past; it is time for collaborative team work. Routine expertise, based on set skills and crystallized intelligence, is being superseded by a need for more adaptive expertise and fluid intelligence." 
Barbara Lindsey

What we learned from 5 million books | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...rned_from_5_million_books.html

digitalhumanities lcl TED Google ngram tedtalks

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Apr 12 - No Cached
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 12 Apr 12
       
      From YouTube version of this talk: "[Google's digtized books] are very practical and extremely awesome." Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel from Harvard University use the 15 million books scanned and digitized by Google to show how a visual and quantitative analysis of text can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.
  • ELA: There are more sobering notes among the n-grams. For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall, an artist born in 1887. And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person. He gets more and more and more famous, except if you look in German. If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre, something you pretty much never see, which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets, going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945, before rebounding afterward. And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany. Now these signals are actually so strong that we don't need to know that someone was censored. We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing. Here's a simple way to do it. Well, a reasonable expectation is that somebody's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after. So that's sort of what we expect. And we compare that to the fame that we observe. And we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index. If the suppression index is very, very, very small, then you very well might be being suppressed. If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda.
  • Now when Google digitizes a book, they put it into a really nice format. Now we've got the data, plus we have metadata. We have information about things like where was it published, who was the author, when was it published. And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that's not the highest quality data. What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome -- a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over -- a veritable shard of our cultural genome.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • we're going to release statistics about the books. So take for instance "A gleam of happiness." It's four words; we call that a four-gram. We're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801, 1802, 1803, all the way up to 2008. That gives us a time series of how frequently this particular sentence was used over time. We do that for all the words and phrases that appear in those books, and that gives us a big table of two billion lines that tell us about the way culture has been changing.
  • You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram, and that's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead, although you might agree that he might need a better publicist.
  • JM: Now you can actually look at the distribution of suppression indexes over whole populations. So for instance, here -- this suppression index is for 5,000 people picked in English books where there's no known suppression -- it would be like this, basically tightly centered on one. What you expect is basically what you observe. This is distribution as seen in Germany -- very different, it's shifted to the left. People talked about it twice less as it should have been. But much more importantly, the distribution is much wider. There are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been. But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda. This picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record.
  • ELA: So culturomics is what we call this method. It's kind of like genomics. Except genomics is a lens on biology through the window of the sequence of bases in the human genome. Culturomics is similar. It's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture. Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record. The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it. Why can everyone do it? Everyone can do it because three guys, Jon Orwant, Matt Gray and Will Brockman over at Google, saw the prototype of the Ngram Viewer, and they said, "This is so fun. We have to make this available for people." So in two weeks flat -- the two weeks before our paper came out -- they coded up a version of the Ngram Viewer for the general public. And so you too can type in any word or phrase that you're interested in and see its n-gram immediately -- also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Apr 12
     
    fall 2012 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

ACTFL Guidelines 2012 - 0 views

actflproficiencyguidelines2012.org

guidelines proficiency actfl methods

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • The Guidelines are not based on any particular theory, pedagogical method, or educational curriculum. They neither describe how an individual learns a language nor prescribe how an individual should learn a language, and they should not be used for such purposes. They are an instrument for the evaluation of functional language abilityfunctional language abilityA language user's ability to accomplish real world communicative tasks such as handling a simple social transaction or resolving a situation with a complication..
  • what individuals can do with language in terms of speaking, writing, listening, and reading in real-world situations in a spontaneous and non-rehearsed context.
  • These Guidelines present the levels of proficiency as ranges, and describe what an individual can and cannot do with language at each level, regardless of where, when, or how the language was acquired.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • five major levels of proficiencyproficiencyOne's functional language ability.: Distinguished, Superior, Advanced, Intermediate, and Novice.
Barbara Lindsey

Kwiqpoll - Simple Web Polls - 0 views

kwiqpoll.com

poll survey free

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 27 Feb 12
     
    Unique URL to share. Online only for 3 or 7 days.
Barbara Lindsey

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

www.calhoun.org/page.cfm

progressive education calhoun NYC blog

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 May 10 - Cached
  • proponents claim, the methods “work,” as represented by higher test scores.   Because, they add, the methods are efficient, meaning you can produce results with brutal economic efficiency and large classes.  And, in ed policy-speak, the systematized, highly structured methodologies are “scaleable,” easily replicated and exported to other schools. 
  • Anyone intensely “drilled” in facts or simple algorithms will demonstrate superior performance when tested on short-term retention.   The students in programs like that at Williamsburg Collegiate are being trained to give the “right” answers, but they are learning little or nothing.   Other evidence exposes the folly of these practices, as test score gains among younger students are not holding as the same students move into older grades. But the policy response in most places is reflexive, not reflective.   Drill them more and test ‘em again! 
  • Perhaps the greatest tragedy of this approach to education is that it disregards, often punishes, the qualities that most characterize real learning.  Children are discouraged from expressing a point of view – no time for that and it isn’t on the test.  Creativity is irrelevant.  Children who are sensitive and poetic are devalued, forced into quick, aggressive responses by a drill sergeant teacher.   Critical thinking is not welcome.  Where is the space for empathy and imagination?  What about the child whose unique intelligence is the ability to visualize something beautiful, to see another possible way to solve a problem, to turn a history assignment into a song?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Most highly regimented urban charter schools are largely for the “other” –the underclass children of color whom powerful people talk about but seldom meet.    I wonder if Mssrs. Gates, Broad, Dell, Walton or Bloomberg would subject their own children to such a school environment, where they would march in tight formation and eagerly parrot the “right” answers required by the training manual?    I would guess not.  Of course I didn’t see many of those guys at Fort Benning either.         
  • There is little evidence outside of the short term, self-fulfilling cycle of call and response, that these schools are educating students at all
Celeste Arrieta

The Web IS the Platform | Stick in the Sand - 1 views

www.ovenell-carter.com/...the-web-is-the-platform

digital natives myth

shared by Celeste Arrieta on 20 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The idea that students are digital natives is a myth
  • they need to be taught to see the web as a learning tool
  • helping student and teachers make sense out of an ever-growing, ever-diversifying web.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Aug 10
     
    how to sort web tools by function-research, production, publication, discussion and management-to create a simple, solid framework for helping student and teachers make sense out of an ever-growing, ever-diversifying web.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Celeste Arrieta on 22 Aug 10
     
    The idea that students are digital natives is a myth they need to be taught to see the web as a learning tool
  • Celeste Arrieta on 22 Aug 10
     
    This is a very good resource. Thanks, Barbara!
  • Barbara Lindsey on 30 Aug 10
     
    Glad you find our Diigo group useful, Celeste! Hope all is well with you.
Barbara Lindsey

Steve Hargadon: Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education - 0 views

www.stevehargadon.com/...20-is-future-of-education.html

for:gaugler web2.0 socialnetworking learning education blog beyondwebct nectfl08 actfl07 iallt07 grants ctcolt08

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 31 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The new Web, or Web 2.0, is a two-way medium, based on contribution, creation, and collaboration--often requiring only access to the Web and a browser.
  • when people ask me the answer to content overload, I tell them (counter-intuitively) that it is to produce more content. Because it is in the act of our becoming a creator that our relationship with content changes, and we become more engaged and more capable at the same time.
  • Imagine an electronic book that allows you to comment on a sentence, paragraph, or section of the book, and see the comments from other readers... to then actually be in an electronic dialog with those other readers. It's coming.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • There is no question that historical eras favor certain personalities and types, and the age of the collaborator is here or coming, depending on where you sit. The era of trusted authority (Time magazine, for instance, when I was young) is giving way to an era of transparent and collaborative scholarship (Wikipedia). The expert is giving way to the collaborator, since 1 + 1 truly equals 3 in this realm.
  • The combination of 1) an increased ability to work on specialized topics by gathering teams from around the globe, and 2) the diversity of those collaborators, should bring with it an incredible amount of innovation.
  • That anyone, anywhere in the world, can study using over the material from over 1800 open courses at MIT is astounding, and it's only the start.
  • I believe that the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press
  • a study that showed that one of the strongest determinants of success in higher education is the ability to form or participate in study groups. In the video of his lecture he makes the point that study groups using electronic methods have almost the exact same results as physical study groups. The conclusion is somewhat stunning--electronic collaborative study technologies = success? Maybe not that simple, but the real-life conclusions here may dramatically alter how we view the structure of our educational institutions. JSB says that we move from thinking of knowledge as a "substance" that we transfer from student to teacher, to a social view of learning. Not "I think, therefore I am," but "We participate, therefore we are." From "access to information" to "access to people" (I find this stunning). From "learning about" to "learning to be." His discussions of the "apprenticeship" model of learning and how it's naturally being manifested on the front lines of the Internet (Open Source Software) are not to be missed.
  • "differentiated instruction" a reality that both parents and students will demand.
  • sites that combined several Web 2.0 tools together created the phenomenon of "social networking."
  • From consuming to producing * From authority to transparency * From the expert to the facilitator * From the lecture to the hallway * From "access to information" to "access to people" * From "learning about" to "learning to be" * From passive to passionate learning * From presentation to participation * From publication to conversation * From formal schooling to lifelong learning * From supply-push to demand-pull
  • The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.
  • Participate
  • Learn About Web 2.0. I
  • * Lurk.
  • Teach Content Production.
  • * Make Education a Public Discussion.
  • * Help Build the New Playbook.
  • We've spent the last ten years teaching students how to protect themselves from inappropriate content – now we have to teach them to create appropriate content. They may be "digital natives," but their knowledge is surface level, and they desperately need training in real thinking skills. More than any other generation, they live lives that are largely separated from the adults around them, talking and texting on cell phones, and connecting online.
  • Those of you with suggestions of other resources, please post comments linking to them
Barbara Lindsey

gladwell dot com - designs for working - 0 views

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

gladwell interaction cop office work street

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

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » Getting Started with Web 2.0 - 0 views

mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg

2.0 web

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Web 2.0 refers to new websites that are more dynamic, user-driven, and interlinked (and interlinked in new and interesting ways).
  • An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a way for news organizations, academic journals, book publishers, and virtually anybody who distributes information to distribute that information without any markup or formatting, so that your own browser or website can format it and make it look nice on your own page. You can add any RSS feed to a website like Netvibes. This allows you to have all of your favorite sites that are frequently updated viewable on one single page.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 08
     
    Web 2.0 refers to new websites that are more dynamic, user-driven, and interlinked (and interlinked in new and interesting ways).
Barbara Lindsey

Major New Study Shatter Stereotypes About Teens and Video Games - MacArthur Foundation - 0 views

www.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lkLXJ8MQKrH&b=4192109&content_id={CF9B933A-8261-4FE5-B9AD-AD751CDEEFC6}&notoc=1&tr=y&auid=4041075

civic gaming macarthur pewresearch social teens

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 08 - Cached
  • gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.
  • 99% of boys say they are gamers and 94% of girls report that they play games.
  • A typical teen plays at least five different categories of games and 40% of them play eight or more different game types.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 76% of gaming teens play games with others at least some of the time. 82% play games alone at least occasionally, though 71% of this group also plays games with others. 65% of gaming teens play with others in the same room.
  • 76% of youth report helping others while gaming. 44% report playing games where they learn about a problem in society.
  • 12-14 year olds are equally as likely to play Mature and Adults Only rated games as their 15-17 year old counterparts.
  • “Gaming is a ubiquitous part of life for both boys and girls. For most teens, gaming runs the spectrum from blow-‘em-up mayhem to building communities; from cute-and-simple to complex; from brief private sessions to hours’ long interactions with masses of others.”
  • A focus of the survey was the relationship between gaming and civic experiences among teens. The goal was to test concerns that gaming might be prompting teens to withdraw from their communities. It turns out there is clear evidence that gaming is not just an entertaining diversion for many teens; gaming can be tied to civic and political engagement. Indeed, youth have many experiences playing games that mirror aspects of civic and political life, such as thinking about moral and ethical issues and making decisions about city and/or community affairs. Not only do many teens help others or learn about a problem in society during their game playing, they also encounter other social and civic experiences:
  • Moreover, the survey indicates that youth who have these kinds of civic gaming experiences are more likely to be civically engaged in the offline world. They are more likely than others are to go online to get information about current events, to try to persuade others how to vote in an election, to say they are committed to civic participation, and to raise money for charity.
  • Youth, parents, teachers, and others who work with youth should know about the wide diversity of video games – so they can take full advantage of games and their civic potential.”
  • The study also found that these civic gaming experiences occurred equally among all kinds of game players regardless of family income, race, and ethnicity. These data stand in contrast to teens’ experiences in schools and others community situations, where white and higher-income youth typically have more opportunities for civic development.
  • “This study offers us a glimpse into the potential of these new tools to foster learning and civic engagement, yet the findings about mature content suggest that parents and other adults need to be involved in young people’s game play, helping to realize the potential benefits while moderating unintended consequences. We see these results as the beginning of an important discussion about the role of digital media in learning, community, and citizenship in the 21st century.”
  • virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.
  • A typical teen plays at least five different categories of games and 40% of them play eight or more different game types.
  • 76% of youth report helping others while gaming. 44% report playing games where they learn about a problem in society.
  • gaming can be tied to civic and political engagement. Indeed, youth have many experiences playing games that mirror aspects of civic and political life, such as thinking about moral and ethical issues and making decisions about city and/or community affairs. Not only do many teens help others or learn about a problem in society during their game playing, they also encounter other social and civic experiences:
  • “Games that simulate aspects of civic and political life may well promote civic skills and civic engagement. Youth, parents, teachers, and others who work with youth should know about the wide diversity of video games – so they can take full advantage of games and their civic potential.”
  • This study offers us a glimpse into the potential of these new tools to foster learning and civic engagement, yet the findings about mature content suggest that parents and other adults need to be involved in young people’s game play, helping to realize the potential benefits while moderating unintended consequences. We see these results as the beginning of an important discussion about the role of digital media in learning, community, and citizenship in the 21st century.”
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 08
     
    Game playing is universal, diverse, often involves social interaction, and can cultivate teen civic engagement
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