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Barbara Lindsey

12 Tech Tools That Will Transform The Way You Teach! | Catlin Tucker, Honors English Te... - 0 views

catlintucker.com/...12

tools classroom internet web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 09 Nov 11
     
    As always, check to see if these are free, freemium or pay for apps and also what limitations they carry if free.
Barbara Lindsey

We can't let educators off the hook | Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views

dangerouslyirrelevant.org/...comment-page-1

educators technology

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Successful technology integration only produces amplified results when in its integration agency is given to the learner, when it becomes a tool to help learners learn, not teachers teach.
  • I would also like to add that that old belief about teaching and learning has been around for a very long time now and part of that belief, the part about the teacher possessing the knowledge and imparting it to kids, is in direct threat when faced with technology. A teacher who has been taught to believe that they are needed for the knowledge they have and that that knowledge gives them authority in the classroom is threatened by technology. That threat needs to be approached lightly. If one speaks the truth too harshly the faithful will simply label them a blasphemer and ignore the truth in their message.
  • et me start by saying that I consider teaching among the most important professions on earth, but just as doctors need to be current on medical technology, teachers MUST be current on information and communication technologies. Those are the tools of the trade.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • but why don’t teachers understand this? To figure this out we need to understand this philosophically and historically. Doctors, in the mid-19th Century resisted technologies as most teachers do now. Lister and Pasteur were “so far ahead of the curve they weren’t on the same road” when they suggested sterilization. Doctors of the time, seeing themselves as “healers” could not comprehend that they were killing half of their patients by resisting the technologies of the time – the belief system inherent in the identity model of the profession actually prevented them from being what they perceived themselves to be.
  • Part of this is because we teach neither history nor philosophy. We do not share with teachers why Socrates opposed literacy, or what Gutenberg destroyed. We do not allow them to understand the essential humanness of technology, or to understand technology in Heidegger’s terms – the art of manipulating the world for our benefit.
  • Now I don’t know what Glogster is, but I do know that every technology gives and takes. The book disabled hundreds of millions and wiped out hundreds of languages. It also spread learning and allowed both the novel and eventually journalism to appear. And I know that our students must have the philosophical grounding in what technology is, how to learn it, and how to use it, that so many of our current teachers lack. After all, the classroom is filled with technology – chairs and desks (1835 via William Alcott), chalkboards (1840 via William Alcott), Time schedules (1845 via Henry Barnard), Books (1840s, mostly Henry Barnard), testing (1910, the Carnegie Commission), even ballpoint pens – that highly controversial 1950s invention of Marcel Bich. And all of those technologies have benefits and real limits.
  • I’m not really focused on, nor do I think Scott is focused on, “administrative technologies” but on “educational technologies.” A gradebook – I might argue, is no more an “educational technology” than a file cabinet is.
  • What I think we are discussing is transformational technologies. Technologies whereuse alters the learning process.
  • I need to say two things: First, and I think this is a big part of Scott’s target here, every school administrator, every policy maker, and every tech director making “blocking decisions,” needs to wake up and take responsibility for keeping our current century away from education.
  • But – in the end – a big part of this remains “taking responsibility for your own learning.” The first free seminars in these systems which I offered were presented in 1998, and at that point there was already a massive research base for what Scott is saying here. The laws regarding technology access in terms of students with disabilities (and those with “504″ plans) were placed on the books in 1995. IBM was promoting speech recognition and text-to-speech in 1996, and Lynne Anderson-Inman was already proving the value of “digital texts” and “digital notebooks” and digitally linked note-taking in the mid-1990s.
  • Jerrid, Troy, and everyone… The issue is this - In order to be lifelong learners it is essential to understand and know how to function with the information and communications technologies of our world, and to know how to adapt when those technologies change. In order to be human successes we also must understand how to communicate what we know, how to collaborate, and how to distribute information. This is why Socrates drilled his students on memory. In pre-literate Greece, that was the essential tool. This is why we taught “reading” (meaning decoding ink-on-paper alphabetic texts) in school, and why we taught writing with pens and pencils, and why we introduced students to libraries. In the Gutenberg era these were the essential tools.
  • But, when kids are writing, I want them to (among other things) be able to communicate with Grandma even if Grandma lives thousands of miles away, even if Grandma is blind, even if Grandma speaks another language. And if they are reading, I don’t want them limited to the 2,000 “age appropriate” books and 1975 World Book Encyclopedia in the local public library.
  • Newspaper readership, yes a minority, but a rapidly changing environment http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news with (in 2009) only 25% of Americans getting news from print daily.
  • The change is occurring across the “print world” – Amazon, 19 July 2010: “Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.
  • The lack of real history of education courses is what leaves so many teachers completely unaware of why schools do what they do, and leaves them confused about what the tools of education are.
  • Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger. In fact, the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore. Most educators have never listened to a podcast, much less created one. They’ve never edited a wiki, much less started one of their own. So how on earth could they be expected to have a rational conversation about the impact new technologies are having on the skill sets our students need? Simply put, they can’t. The majority of the voices many of us listen to on a regular basis… actually represent just a tiny fraction of the educators out there. We’re the minority, the outsiders, the ones who talk using strange terms involving words with far too many missing vowels.
  • You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 15 Oct 10
     
    Successful technology integration only produces amplified results when in its integration agency is given to the learner, when it becomes a tool to help learners learn, not teachers teach.
Barbara Lindsey

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

kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/...g-social-software-and-teaching

blog course hyperlink management

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 07 - Cached
  • With social networking and media-sharing practices rapidly assuming a central role in our professional and personal lives, teachers have a responsibility to bring these practices into the classroom.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 07
       
      Why responsibility? Even if it doesn't serve a pedagogical purpose? Advance the learning that is supposed to take place?
  • technology uber-fans gush over their embrace of every new gadget, technology and practice, affixing computer-driven activities onto factory-model teaching practices as shiny appendages, resulting in a ‘technology façade’
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 07
       
      Well, I would have a problem making a direct connection between über-fans and factory-model teaching proponents. I would like to think the über-fans lean more towards constructivist practices.
  • This does not mean that traditional literacies of critical reading, thinking and communication must make way for emerging literacies of collaboration, online communication and multimedia navigation. It does mean that we have to transform our teaching to accommodate them all effectively.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • a tension between their passions and interests and the Academy’s curricular obligations. When woven into the fabric of the classroom, blogs allow the participants to articulate their feelings as a way of addressing these tensions. As well, blogs provide a space where the participants’ interests and passions can bubble forth for the enrichment of the group.
  • By blogging effectively within classroom settings, we can mentor learner forays into public spaces.
  • We wish to emphasise the importance of distinguishing between using blogs as holders of factory-model teaching practices, and taking advantage of their connectivity and transparency to deepen and liberate learning from the confines of stagnant, teacher-centric models. Ignoring the transformative capabilities of connectivity, some teachers using blogs merely reproduce offline practices online. Limiting classroom blogging to one-way transactions of information and directives from teacher to learners may add convenience and efficiency to the classroom, but does nothing for learning itself. Nor does assigning and directing wooden, forced, framed discussions online, which result in little more than mind-numbing ‘busy work’. We belittle and infantalise our students, further rewarding docility and disengagement if we over-direct posts by giving minute instructions as to their content, number and direction.
  • classroom blogging,
  • focusing on emerging pedagogy rather than tools
  • We will examine hyperlinked slow-blogging as reflective learning; multimedia, interactive blogging as action-based learning; and connected, transparent blogging as social learning.
  • Reflection-through-writing is a powerful aid to information retention, which is poor unless the lesson is repeated in a variety of contexts
  • The learner, in the act of writing down what s/he has learned, solidifies understanding and reveals areas of confusion.
  • Traditionally this kind of reflective narrative, found in journals and portfolios, has helped learners gain skill at meta-discourse and take responsibility for learning in liberal arts contexts. Teachers follow progress and detect comprehension gaps while coming to know learners’ styles, contexts and preferences. Learner-teacher interactions through reflective writing can deepen important bonds, an important indicator of effective learning (Raider Roth 2005).
  • different kinds of learning contexts including vocational by inviting learners to contextualise the learning in their own way within personal experience, thereby making the learning their own (
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      An aspect of constructivist teaching and learning.
  • But if limited to the kinds of practices achieved offline, while efficient and convenient, and affording keyboarding practice, this use ignores new literacies of connectivity, collaboration, communication and multimedia expression. It also leaves out learners for whom written reflection is not always optimal or possible.
  • Although a blog organises itself, ordinarily and on first view, in reverse chronological order, the latest post being most prominent, tagging and hyperlinking allow for more associative, lateral ways of organising and connecting thoughts. Even the novice learner can transcend the limits of time and linearity in linking nascent ideas, discoveries and meta-discourse on the learning, replacing ‘…the essentially linear, fixed methods that had produced the triumphs of capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of human imagination’
  • Learners can link to practices other than written as they struggle to articulate and thus retain and apply what they have learned. For example, some learners will naturally link to audio rather than to text files of their reflections; others will link to images they have taken that are reflective of the learning process and outcomes.
  • thereby extending the reflective practice into synthesis and analysis and invention
  • If we know we are being read, that our explorations have value out in the world, we tend to take more care with our expression and our thinking as communiqués to the Other as well as to the self.
  • From learner posts, the teacher can point to models and questions, to moments of creative and critical success. Learning deepens, writing strengthens: these successes in turn pull the writer back to the blog again and again, to reflect and to improve thinking and expression skills.
  • That these messages to the self (and by extension, to the class and the world) are archived by date and category (or tag) allows them to take their place in an ongoing narrative of the learning.
  • Linking out connects us to more than ourselves. So, in this time of crumbling communities and the cult of the individual, our learners can, through active hyperlinking within a reflective learning practice, become more self-aware rather than more self-absorbed.
  • In selecting media, learners gain critical awareness of the grammar of image and sound as well as language. They learn to evaluate the impact of visual media on their discipline, on their society and on their lives as they develop skill at understanding structure, the arc of an argument, the use of transitions.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      But don't learners need structured guidance in order to be able to do this successfully?
  • Hendrik and Ornberg have asserted, that ‘…audio is more effective than text for creating a sense of co-presence’
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      Reactions to this statement?
  • Students learn the discipline by doing the discipline
  • Evie’s work on the web, and in turn catapulted one of our learners into the role of activist and advocate for a cause about which she cared deeply.
  • By the end of the semester, Evie was not only a committed and involved activist for women’s rights, but a published photographer.
  • And so, the apprentice became the master, the student became the teacher, and Sean’s blog is fulfilling by becoming a valued resource for a teacher in Argentina and for her students as well.
  • Her blogging world and her real world became forever ‘intertwingled’ when she started leaving comments on the blogs of some of the graffiti artists she was following, and they, in turn, left comments on her blog. What followed was a flurry of comments, Instant Messaging (IM) conversations, Skype (r) chats and blogposts each taking Claire ever closer to the very people she has studied and admired and analysed…from afar. After the class ended (and after Claire graduated) Claire’s interest in graffiti continued.
  • But just as in the case of Sean, Claire went from being the observer to participant and now to a creator of graffiti, thanks in part to the connections made via social software tools.
  • it is not difficult to see how a tool such as a blog can keep learners immersed in course content in a way that traditional, teacher and textbook-centric teaching simply cannot.
  • A third, and perhaps most significant, role for classroom blogs to play, then, is in social learning, in the forming of close bonds within the learning community itself and with the outside world. Blogs afford learners a strong sense of belonging to a dynamic learning collaborative, following the apprenticeship model of learning, in which everyone is expert and apprentice to one another
  • The job of the teacher using social software is to create an understanding in and amongst the participants that they need to work together as a social entity, as a collaborative group, that is linked to and communicating among themselves as well as with the world.
  • Student bloggers learn by collaborating with one another through online group projects and through discussions, both formal and informal, that spring up on a central course blog, what we call the ‘Motherblog’, and by linking to one another within their own blogs, and creating feedback loops through the commenting function. Students also learn from one another through the blog archives, which grow year by year. Although we still teach in a departmentalised, semesterised system, the archiving subverts the notion of isolated learning segments by carrying the blog’s accumulated wisdom from group to group, informing the new learners’ experiences by adding context, models and inspiration
  • And unlike a discussion board that might be hosted on a course management tool such as Blackboard, these multimedia posts and comments are archived, hyperlinked and are open and available to all and not just the class.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      Critical difference.
  • Learners and teachers bring into the community discussion their own expertise, prior learning, cultural perspectives. They can converse here about what interests them about what they are studying. This kind of informal discussion weaves the threads of collective intelligence, and it helps learners to think beyond the strict confines of the syllabus, seeing connections to themselves and the world.
  • The class uses Flickr to collect and share images to be used in image-only essays and reflections, and in multimedia texts.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      How interesting.
  • As Garrison and Anderson (2003) point out, ‘…a community of learners is an essential, core element of an educational experience when higher-order learning is the desired outcome’ (2003:22)
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      A good rationale for collaborative engagement.
  • Using blogs as a complement to the face-to-face classroom environment not only provides more time on task for the learners, but if left open to world (as opposed to behind a firewall or a password or contained within the shell of a Learning Management System) these tools allow the real world - those crucial informal learning networks - into our classrooms…and the remarkable connections that happen as a result.
  • We can invite the outside world into the course intentionally, by asking experts in our field to participate in time-limited blog-based discussions with our learners. In these ‘blogging invitationals’ our learners can interact with professionals, joining the conversation of the real-world discipline in a meaningful way.
  • Other powerful connections with the world outside the classroom can occur through inter-classroom or inter-school blogging exchanges, or in service-learning initiatives, in which university learners, for example, mentor younger learners via connected blogging and feedback through comments, classroom to classroom, as writing buddies.
Barbara Lindsey

Innovate - Backwards into the Future: Seven Principles for Educating the Ne(x)t Generation - 0 views

innovateonline.info/index.php

audience creative student

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07 - Cached
  • In contrast to traditional English courses, which are mostly paper-based, our reading materials can all be found on the Web, and the students present their work in the form of interactive Web pages that are accessible to everyone in the class, thereby forging a virtual learning community to parallel the physical community of the classroom.
  • Teaching to the future, we contend, involves forging pathways for our students that we do not necessarily intend to travel ourselves.
  • With each new iteration of Poetry off the Page, our students' expertise has driven the course design, rather than vice versa.
  • ...18 more annotations...
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07
       
      Comments?
  • We provide ample support and encouragement to "trailing edge" students whose online capabilities barely extend beyond e-mail, but at the same time, we leave the door open for those at the leading edge to suggest innovations that we ourselves would be incapable of imagining, much less of implementing.
  • By recasting students as researchers and teachers, we invite them to participate in what is arguably the most exciting and fulfilling aspect of university life: the production of new knowledge (Exhibit 2).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 08
       
      Brown and Adler's concept of 'learning to be'
  • We would be hard pressed to name a profession—including academe itself—that does not demand some ability to interact effectively with other human beings. Yet higher education remains, especially in the humanities, a highly individualistic enterprise. In a typical English course, students write their essays for an audience of one—namely, the instructor who does the grading—while "group discussions" frequently consist of individuals talking directly to the teacher with little regard for their peers. In a discipline built around the ideal of the lone genius, our epigraph to this section remains as wishfully subversive today as it was a century and a half ago.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07
       
      Response?
  • Teaching to the future involves harnessing the collaborative impulses already at large in digital culture and directing them toward educational ends, so that "group work" shifts in our students' perception from an eyeroll-inducing educational gimmick to a cutting-edge skill worthy of cultivation and scrutiny.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07
       
      Comments?
  • Later, they take part in a formative peer assessment exercise during which we project draft versions of their final projects onscreen while classmates ask questions and provide suggestions for improvement. The success of this "Live Crit" session (a concept borrowed from architecture and the fine arts) reflects the atmosphere of collaboration and trust that we have consciously cultivated among the students all semester
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 08
       
      Again, similar to what Brown and Adler talk of when they discussed the open critic of architecht students' work.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07
       
      Could you envision using this in your courses and how?
  • Exhibit 4).
  • Higher education is an aquifer, not a spigot.
  • "The Poem of the Contents of Everybody's Pockets"; on the second day, we send them off around campus to chalk poems on the ground in public places; on the third day, we engage them in a critical analysis of both events, prompting them to come up with inventive ways in which such multifaceted live performances might be recorded (photographed? taped? videoed? narrativized?) for posterity.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07
       
      How about for a language or lit course?
  • (Exhibit 7).
  • with the students' enthusiastic permission—as permanent exhibits in the Archives section of our course Web site
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 08
       
      What about a permanent archive of exemplary work for all to benefit from?
  • Exhibit 3
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 08
       
      Very important note here.
  • "In the coming decades," warns hypertext theorist Jerome McGann, "the entirety of our cultural inheritance will be transformed and re-edited in digital forms," a monumental task for which both we and our students remain, by and large, seriously underprepared (2005, 181).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Sep 08
       
      the entirety--transformed and re-edited!
  • to teach our students not to follow in our footsteps but to outstrip us.
suzanne ondrus

Beyond Campus Boundaries ePortfolio Transforms into 'Cultural Application' -- Campus Te... - 1 views

campustechnology.com/...into-Cultural-Application.aspx

eportfolio campustech higher ed

shared by suzanne ondrus on 16 Feb 10 - Cached
  • The point is that people will be using ePortfolios for their own purposes.
  • student ownership is an important point about ePortfolios
  • The more engaged, the more time on task, the more that a person puts into something, the more they learn—this g'es along with all the data I’ve seen over the years. The challenge has always been, how do you engage students?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      What do you think about this comment about student engagement?
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 21 Feb 10
       
      So are these eportfolios a "lifelong" document?
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  • So, there’s got to be something else to engage them. And that’s ownership.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
     
    Page 2 (I hate when they do this-so unnecessary on the web) of ePortfolio conversation with Trent Bateson.
  • suzanne ondrus on 21 Feb 10
     
    Page 2 (I hate when they do this-so unnecessary on the web) of ePortfolio conversation with Trent Batson.
Barbara Lindsey

Beyond Campus Boundaries ePortfolio Transforms into 'Cultural Application' -- Campus Te... - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...into-cultural-application.aspx

eportfolio portfolio higher ed campustech

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10 - Cached
  • 08/09/05
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      It's five years hence--do you see any evidence of large-scale portfolio adoption at your institution?
  • It’s a cultural application
  • ePortfolios
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • What’s happening with universities in this knowledge age is that the boundaries between the university and the rest of the world have pretty much dissolved. We are now a learning culture, or a knowledge culture.
  • It’s something that whole countries are offering to their citizens to store things related to their work, over a career or over the time when they are developing their career.
  • what’s driving the market in the US is assessment management.
  • universities—especially schools of education around the country—are rushing to implement ePortfolio systems so that they can do the kind of reporting the accrediting agencies are asking for.
  • The big market is going to be everyone having an ePortfolio, whether they are in college or not in college
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
     
    2005 interview w/Trent Batson, who talks about ePortfolio use in U.S. institutions of higher ed.
Barbara Lindsey

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and ... - Google Books - 0 views

books.google.com/books

higher ed critique book

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 17 Feb 10
     
    Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge. At a time when competition to get into and succeed in college has never been more intense, universities are providing a less-useful education. Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, The Marketplace of Ideas examines what professors and students--and all the rest of us--might be better off without, while assessing what it is worth saving in our traditional university institutions.
Barbara Lindsey

The iPad and Information's Third Age | Open Culture - 1 views

www.openculture.com/...nd_informations_third_age.html

ipad openculture abilene

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Though the university initially fought its introduction, the printed textbook provided broad access to information that, for the first time, promised the possibility of universal education.
  • A barrier of symbolic complexity emerged between people and information for one of the first times in history. And the superabundance of information created a world that by necessity had to be divided into smaller and smaller subsections for organizational reasons. As people began to feel increasingly disconnected from information and as its relational and contextual aspects began to fade, we saw a transformation in teaching and learning. Hands-on apprenticeships and small teacher/student cohorts began to disappear, replaced by teachers delivering carefully parsed and categorized information to “standardized” students, all while trapped in classrooms isolated from the world in order to limit “distraction.”
  • It has become virtually impossible for a person to assess the quality, relevance, and usefulness of more information than she can process in a lifetime. And this is a problem that will only get worse as information continues to proliferate. But a quick look at popular technologies shows some of the ways people are working to address it. Social networking leverages selected communities to recommend books, restaurants, and movies. Context- and location-aware applications help focus search results and eliminate extraneous complexity. And customization and personalization allow people to create informational spaces that limit the intrusion of informational chaos.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Any genuine solution will have to address the problems of the current informational age — and it will need to continue answering the problems of the previous informational ages. From what I’ve seen, Apple’s new iPad is the first device to promise this (even if that promise isn’t yet fully realized). That is what makes it such a compelling candidate to be the first platform that serves true digital books.
  • Books that are static, don’t allow customization, don’t connect with other information on the device, and don’t leverage social connectivity aren’t the future, no matter how sophisticated the device that serves them. They’re simply the past repackaged.
  • Given what I’ve seen of its features and approaches, the iPad shows the promise to engender such a change, though much development will have to take place for it to realize its potential. Nonetheless, the innovation it offers in three critical areas is especially compelling: accessibility, participation, and customization. Central to all three of these is the fact that the iPad is not a single-use, standalone device; it’s a powerful, converged platform with robust development tools and capabilities.
  • I would argue that the key accessibility feature of the iPad is its apparent “lack” of an interface (a feature Apple’s marketing is working hard to underscore). Unlike all of the other similar devices (including those running Apple’s standard OS), which require users to learn to negotiate complex symbolic interfaces — files, folders, hierarchies, toolbars, navigational buttons — the iPad limits or even eliminates these in favor of touch, an approach intuitive even to those too young to read.
  • The collapsing of symbolic complexity into the simplicity of touch enables participation by new groups of people — even relative technophobes — and this mirrors the increased accessibility offered by Gutenberg’s revolution while lowering the barrier characteristic of most recent technologies.
  • For those interested in culture and creativity, this is an exciting prospect.
  • In Gutenberg’s case, the increase in accessibility led to a dramatic increase in cultural participation, and this is another way the iPad differentiates itself from many of its peer devices.
  • Put in the hands of readers and students, the robust capabilities of its new version of iWork, combined with access to the complete range of apps on the App Store and an entirely new generation of native apps, the iPad could provide access to professional-quality creative tools that empower a new set of participants
  • the iPad’s blend of social and contextual technologies and its ease of customization offer useful ways for the device to help users sort, focus, and control the information around them. The iPad’s networking capabilities, linked to a new generation of digital books, could help people discover both new texts and the members of a discussion group who could help them process what they’re reading. Combined with a portable format that allows readers to carry their books into various contexts, this could be incredibly powerful. One imagines, for example, a field-guide to forests linked to live discussion partners, allowing a reader to discover the forest in a new and engaging way that offers the advantages of both the first and second informational ages. Yet this sort of capability also reveals an area where the iPad falls surprisingly short: its lack of a camera (let alone two, one forward and one backward facing) means the device has limited capabilities for interesting emerging technologies like augmented reality — a staple of recently-developed apps. In terms of future eBooks, a volume of Hemingway that could alert readers that they were only two blocks from the café Les Deux Magots, for example, and offer an augmented tour of the place or that could direct the reader of Brontë to a moor would be transformational indeed. Perhaps we’ll see such capabilities on iPad 2.0.
Barbara Lindsey

Elev8ed - 0 views

elev8ed.org

education students hargadon learning2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 28 Mar 11
     
    Your Voice. Changing Education! A site for students to submit videos that offer new ideas for what education could be and/or inspire others to transform education or propose specific actions to take to improve education in one's community.
Barbara Lindsey

Open Resources - Transforming the Way Knowledge Is Spread - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...19iht-educlede19.html

resources oer openuniversity education2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • the five functions now performed by universities — teaching; providing a space for social interaction; testing students’ knowledge and offering feedback in the form of grades; cultivating a reputation as a good place to learn; and certifying what graduates know through accreditation — will inevitably change.
  • In October 2003, there were 511 courses available, all from M.I.T. According to Ms. Mulder, the current total is over 21,000 — with 9,903 in languages other than English, including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, Korean and Japanese.
  • The school’s Masters Series Madrid is a game — with soundtrack, 3-D graphics and interviews with executives — that allows students to manage an international tennis tournament. “It’s a great way for people to see our school,” said Matthew Constantine, a member of the IE staff.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Although all of the material on IE’s Web site is free for individual use, he said, the school “avoided developing material for self-learning” because “we think class discussion is essential.”
  • “If you don’t ‘close’ education in certain ways then you are out of business.”
  • “The completion rates for students in purely online programs are very low,” he said. “If a program is too open, too flexible, too ‘on demand,’ students won’t ever finish.”
  • Mr. Mulder also warned against viewing O.E.R. as a panacea. “O.E.R. is not education,” he said. “It’s only content. It becomes learning when you have good teaching.”
Barbara Lindsey

A Brief Interview with Michael Wesch (The Creator of That Wonderful Video...) - John Ba... - 0 views

battellemedia.com/...reator_of_that_wonderful_video

interview wesch machineusingus

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10 - Cached
  • The Web speeds up the process of rebuttal, reply, and revision and calls forth a different approach. The radically collaborative technologies emerging on the Web create the possibility for doing scholarship in the mode of conversation rather than argument, or to transform the argument as war metaphor into something that suggests collaboration rather than combat. Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the dance and that we are all here in this webscape dancing and playing around with ideas. The best dancers are those that find a way to “lose themselves” in the music – pushing the limits of the dance without fear of tripping or falling because they know that it is all part of the dance.
  • On the next 10-20 years and social networking ... I think this will greatly depend on the structure of those social networking tools and what kinds of communication are made possible with these tools. For example, on Facebook there are “walls” and “discussion groups.” Both of these sections are for human communication, but they are structured differently and therefore elicit different kinds of conversations. Furthermore, they are used in ways beyond how they were intended. Even now, as I am answering multiple questions with one long comment at the bottom of a blog post, the structure of the medium is in some way affecting how I am responding. On a forum I would address each question individually in separate threads. These seemingly minor differences are important because all human relationships are mediated by communication.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10
       
      "All human relationships are mediated by communication."
  • if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself.
  • wanted to show people how digital technology has evolved and give them a sense of where it might be going and to give some momentum to the all-important conversation about the consequences of that on our global society.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Sep 10
     
    Michael Wesch explains the purpose of his video, The Machine is Us/ing Us
Barbara Lindsey

Japanese Teenagers Teach Us Something About Being In Two Places At Once : 13.7: Cosmos ... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-but-oh-so-far&sc=tw&cc=share

japanese teenagers digital conversations mobile

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • First, face-to-face conversation is a dynamic interaction between two people. Talking is a kind of turn-taking, and turn-taking is a rhythm that organizes how and when things unfold. When people talk, they modify their postures and tempos so that they correspond. (There is fascinating research on this sort of "coordination dynamics" by, among others, J.A. Scott Kelso and colleagues.) And moreover, they tend jointly to pay attention to what is going on around them. One upshot of this is that when you are talking with someone, you actually experience that they are listening. Talking, in this sense, is like dancing. You can tell whether someone is dancing with you or whether they have detached and lost interest.
  • It is often very difficult to establish this sort dynamic engagement or coupling to someone over a cell phone. The connection is often just not good enough for that. One has the experience of speaking, but one lacks the corresponding experience of being heard. You literally lack the feedback — the coordinated breathing, the modulations of tones of voice, etc — that signals the other’s focus on you. And so you shout.
  • When a cell-phone connection is excellent, you and your remote partner to start up a dance together. But crucially, you dance to music that only you and your partner hear. That is, you succeed in establishing the kind of dynamic integration and entrainment that is typical of face-to-face conversation. And that has the effect of transporting you right out of your physical environment into one that you share with your conversation partner. And this in turn has the effect of guaranteeing that your tone of voice and volume will be inappropriate for your actual physical conditions
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This use of language to signal presence is important. In particular, it sheds light on the transformations that are occurring as new technological practices such as cell phone use and social networking sites, etc, get embedded in our lives.
  • Anthropologists looking at the matter were surprised to discover that the kids rarely send informative or detailed messages. As a general rule, they are not telling each other anything. Rather, they are just letting each other know that they are “there,” that they are online, in reach. Texting for the kids is a way of “pinging” each other. They bounce pings back and forth and so signal their presence for each other.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Oct 10
     
    This is especially for Carsten!
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