Group items tagged

Rhetoric is more than just learning a standard structure for an argument. Students should be asking themselves: “How does what we write and what we think change when we know that in ten minutes we can create a blog and broadcast to the world? How does this change how we see and portray ourselves?” These are the deeper rhetorical questions students need to grapple with. It is this focus that will make them stronger readers, writers, and citizens.

We tell students that pictures are a viable means of persuasion, and then we as them to write about it. This hardly reinforces the message. So I thought: “Why not have the students work with the mediums they study, including film?”

I think the class was a success. It taught the students to work with a variety of mediums and to always consider their work as something to share. It is this final point that the entire course hinged on: community. The blog, the group film – everything the students – did was about engaging the world, establishing a presence, and utilizing the tools that the rest of the world is operating with, rather than limiting them to traditional print-based technology.

She was given a course with a group of students who she was told, were struggling with writing and needed, “more structure.” As a response Barbara did the smart thing, and actually gave the students more freedom and control over their education.

led by researchers at Duke University

Any college with a spare server and some staff time can use the OpenSimulator software and play God to a virtual world.

The main request is the ability to limit access to students in a course, which the group can do.

To counter these new options, Linden Lab is testing a product that would let colleges install a world on their own servers and limit access to students and professors. Case Western is among those trying it out for its virtual campus.

Maybe 3-D online environments are just one of those technologies that sound cool but never fully materialize, like personal jetpacks. Trying to make the World Wide Web look like the real world misses the new kinds of things the Internet can do.

"We don't ­really understand what we can do and what we can't do with this tool for education yet, so it's more exploratory now," said Peter J. Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University who studies virtual worlds. "We know there's something here, but we don't know what yet."

Each topic is introduced with an overview that describes what it is, followed by a discussion of the particular relevance of the topic to education, creativity, or research. Examples of how the technology is being, or could be applied to those activities are given. Finally, each section closes with an annotated list of suggested readings and additional examples that expand on the discussion in the report and a link to the tagged resources collected during the research process

I also think that they should report the diverse range of cultural practices which emerged from the Digital Youth team's large scale ethnography of teen's on-line lives and the kinds of practices which seem to support robust informal learning outside the classroom. Unfortunately, this research ended up on the cutting room floor. Some of it is on the web. None of it is in the program.

All three require talented faculty members with scholarly training.  These things are (1) discovering and disseminating new knowledge, (2) preserving the discoveries of the past, and (3) personally mentoring students in ways that allow them to participate in (1) and (2).  Doing these things well takes special training.  It is inherently expensive, because the processes involved are hard to automate or even systematize very much. 

Harvard and BYU-Idaho involve their students in teaching one another.  They also have general education courses, created in the last five years, that cut across academic disciplines and engage students in applying principles and theories to real-world problems.  These instructional approaches challenge students to frame inquiries, rather than merely respond to questions posed by their professors.

Harvard and other elite institutions are in a paradoxical position.  Their students and alumni are satisfied with their current offerings; in fact, they have a huge surplus of qualified applicants.

We’re likely to significant change in the next decade, the net effect of which will be more students served at a lower average cost.  However, the nature of the evolution will differ among institutions.  The elite schools will hybridize their courses not primarily to reduce cost or grow enrollments, but to better serve the rising generation of “digital natives” and to make the most of learning-enhancing computer-adaptive technology.  By contrast, schools without the benefit of high prestige and large endowments will hybridize and offer fully online courses mainly so that they can keep tuition affordable, admit more students, and use the incremental revenues to plug the hole left by rising operating costs and declining state support.  In all cases, students will benefit.

Most professors will need to spend the majority of their time teaching.  A school that generates the bulk of its revenues via tuition will be able to afford some time for faculty research.  However, that research will need to have relevance to the student learning experience, and it won’t be the driving factor in tenure decisions; teaching quality will be.  Tenure based primarily on publications isn’t a sustainable model for most institutions.

“If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.”

John Hennessy, Stanford’s president, gave the university’s blessing to Thrun’s experiment, which he calls “an initial demonstration,” but he is cautious about the grander dream of a digitized university. He can imagine a virtual campus for some specialized programs and continuing education, and thinks the power of distributed learning can be incorporated in undergraduate education — for example, supplanting the large lecture that is often filled with students paying more attention to their laptops. He endorses online teaching as a way to educate students, in the developing world or our own, who cannot hope for the full campus experience.

As The Times’s Matt Richtel recently reported, there is remarkably little data showing that technology-centric schooling improves basic learning. It is quite possible that the infatuation with technology has diverted money from things known to work — training better teachers, giving kids more time in school.

“When is the infrastructure of the university particularly valuable — as it is, I believe, for an undergraduate residential experience — and when is it secondary to the learning process?”

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.