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Barbara Lindsey

The Newest Media and a Principled Approach for Integrating Technology Into Instruction ... - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...chnology-into-instruction.aspx

assessmentforlearning assessment technology

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Given the evolution of new media, how can educators determine what to use, when, and why? Hence, our guiding question is, how should educators assess the effectiveness of new media using performance-based measures—not relying only on the often-used survey of student satisfaction?
  • One strategy we employ applies equally to any new approach in teaching, whether it employs “new media” or not. That strategy is to apply some of the best current knowledge from cognitive and learning sciences to assess proposed teaching innovation.
  • What is the educational need, problem, or gap for which use of new media might potentially enhance learning?
Barbara Lindsey

Mobile Learning Environments (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...213690

mobile learning educause

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • There are now more than 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)'s February 2010 press release. This means that mobile has taken the place of FM radio as the most ubiquitous communications technology on the planet.1
  • Mobile Phone Network model Centralized Peer-to-peer Content customization Uniform Personalized to context Information distribution Just-in-case Just-in-time Role of audience Consumer Equal p
  • articipant Reliability qualifier Authority Social capital Governance Institutional Relational
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • I've seen that the introduction of new technology can provide a reason to rethink a course from the ground up and reassess its core educational goals. Often the greatest educational benefits seem to come from this process, not just the technology that encouraged it.
  • It might be safe to say that each time a new medium appears, no matter how different it is from the last, the normal reaction of first adopters is to use it as a new package for existing content.
  • I've seen that the introduction of new technology can provide a reason to rethink a course from the ground up and reassess its core educational goals.
  • It can be easy to forget that we human beings are more than brains connected to an apparatus that moves us around in space. Instead, we belong to communities, we live in neighborhoods, we have local culture and events. Inquiry into these real things led to many of the fields we now call science, literature, mathematics, and history. Why then do we isolate instruction in those fields to a classroom, instead of deriving instruction from the environment from which these subjects originated?
  • place-based learning.2 One such example, Dow Day, is a mobile documentary that relives the student protests of 1967 in Madison, Wisconsin, against the Dow Chemical Company. In this activity, location-aware handheld devices add an augmented layer of history to a walk through the campus, placing the student in the role of a news reporter. By monitoring the device's GPS, Dow Day creates the illusion of additional characters standing in physical space and facilitates simulated conversations with these historical entities. In addition, when players walk to predefined media locations, they trigger video footage showing the physical scene from 40 years ago, effectively superimposing the marchers and police onto the current landscape (see Figure 2).
  • Situated theories of cognition claim that knowing and doing are inherently linked.4
  • One such example is a mobile game called Mentira, produced at the University of New Mexico. The game is designed to teach an introductory college Spanish course in ways that are contextually sound for language learning. In the first unit, students play a mystery game on handheld devices in class, taking on a role and a goal within a story told completely in Spanish. In the second part, the class moves outside to a local Spanish-speaking neighborhood where they continue the story while interacting with physical and virtual Spanish speakers in real places (see Figure 3).
  • With Mentira, students learn Spanish outside the classroom through narrative and interaction with members of a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, re-situating language in practice.
  • Identifying the disconnect, a small team from the Animal Science and the Academic Technology departments at UW–Madison are working on a prototype for hobbyist birdwatchers. WeBIRD aims to crowdsource ornithology research by providing a tool for hobbyist practitioners. A birder will record the audio of a bird heard out in the field and have the system identify the species while logging the sighting's location, current weather, time of day, and date to a central database. This data can then be used for anything from formal research of migration patterns over time to individual questions such as, "Where am I most likely to see a cardinal this time of year?" The potential for location-aware, casual gaming structures such as birder achievement badges and leader boards are also being investigated in order to provide additional social play motives for participation.
  • Learning happens anywhere someone has questions and the means to explore answers. As ubiquitous access to information continues to shift toward personal mobile devices, more and more of the learning that takes place may be happening outside of the classroom and in the context of a backyard conversation, a walk through campus, or a Taquería in New Mexico.
Barbara Lindsey

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07awareness-t.html

facebook networking social

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Sep 08 - Cached
  • unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely.
  • He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends.
  • Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. “A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,” as Zuckerberg put it.
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  • When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic.
  • He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options.
  • Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they’d like it.He was right. Within days, the tide reversed.
  • he bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about — Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? — when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. When one student joined a group — proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for Greenpeace — all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends.
  • It catalyzed a massive boom in the site’s growth.
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.
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  • 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

Bill Ferriter | Teacher Leaders Network - 0 views

www.teacherleaders.org/...140

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Doesn’t Pink talk about this in A Whole New Mind?  Here’s a quote: “While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak in different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting, and nowadays more effective.” (Kindle Location 1692)
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 30 Aug 08
       
      This is where we should shine!
  • Recently, I've tinkered with a system to assess my students' participation in Voicethread conversations.  Essentially mirroring the reflective aspects of Konrad's blogging handouts, I've decided to ask my students the following four questions while we're working with a new Voicethread: Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking.   Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with.  If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas.  What about the new comment was challenging?  What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged?  Will you change yoru mind?  Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?
  • The cool part about assessing Voicethread presentations this way is that each question essenitally forces my students to interact with our conversation in a really meaningful way.  To craft careful answers, they must truly consider the comments of others---an essential skill for promoting collaborative versus competitive dialogue---and compare those comments against their own beliefs and preconceived notions.  That's metacognition at its best! What's even better is that when students know that these questions form the basis of our Voicethread assessment from the beginning of a conversation, participation level rise remarkably.  While students are looking for project reflection comments, they often end up highly motivated to share their thinking with peers. 
Barbara Lindsey

2008 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Grassroots Video - 0 views

wp.nmc.org/...grassroots-video

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Rather than investing in expensive infrastructure, universities are beginning to turn to services like YouTube and iTunes U to host their video content for them. As a result, students—whether on campus or across the globe—have access to an unprecedented and growing range of educational video content from small segments on specific topics to full lectures, all available online.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08
       
      We don't need expensive (to build and maintain) ITV rooms any more.
  • Video capture, in the hands of an entire class, can be a very efficient data collection strategy for field work, or as a way to document service learning projects. Video papers and projects are increasingly common assignments. Student-produced clips on current topics are an avenue for students to research and develop an idea, design and execute the visual form, and broadcast their opinion beyond the walls of their classroom.
  • social networking communities that have evolved around video
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  • Amateur cinematographers and musicians use hosting sites to reach a broader audience for their work and to build a network of fans. Increasingly, learning organizations, faculty, scholars, and students are using these tools as well, and in the coming year, it is very likely that such practice will enter the mainstream of use in these institutions.
  • Two professors
  • video illustrates the mathematical concept i
  • video has been watched more than 1.2 million times since it was put on YouTube.
  • VideoANT is an online environment developed at the University of Minnesota that synchronizes web-based video with an author’s timeline-based text annotations. VideoANT is designed to engage learners by supporting interactions between students, instructors, and their video content.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08
       
      Why not mention Viddler? Does the same and no issues with hosting and has more traffic.
  • Examples of Grassroots Video
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08
       
      Serious omission of Prof. Wesch's work...
Barbara Lindsey

Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology | Resources | EDU... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6070

student survey technology

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07 - Cached
  • They are characterized as preferring teamwork, experiential activities, and the use of technology
  • Doing is more important than knowing, and learning is accomplished through trial and error as opposed to a logical and rule-based approach.2 Similarly, Paul Hagner found that these students not only possess the skills necessary to use these new communication forms, but there is an ever increasing expectation on their part that these new communication paths be used
  • Much of the work to date, while interesting and compelling, is intuitive and largely based on qualitative data and observation.
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  • There is an inexorable trend among college students to universal ownership, mobility, and access to technology.
  • Students were asked about the applications they used on their electronic devices. They reported that they use technology first for educational purposes, followed by communication.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      All self-reported. Would have been powerful if could have actually tracked a representative sample and compared actual use with reported use.
  • presentation software was driven primarily by the requirements of the students' major and the curriculum.
  • Communications and entertainment are very much related to gender and age.
  • From student interviews, a picture emerged of student technology use driven by the demands of the major and the classes that students take. Seniors reported spending more time overall on a computer than do freshmen, and they reported greater use of a computer at a place of employment. Seniors spent more hours on the computer each week in support of their educational activities and also more time on more advanced applications—spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics.
  • Confirming what parents suspect, students with the lowest grade point averages (GPAs) spend significantly more time playing computer games; students with the highest GPAs spend more hours weekly using the computer in support of classroom activities. At the University of Minnesota, Crookston, students spent the most hours on the computer in support of classroom activities. This likely reflects the deliberate design of the curriculum to use a laptop extensively. In summary, the curriculum's technology requirements are major motivators for students to learn to use specialized software.
  • The interviews indicated that students are skilled with basic office suite applications but tend to know just enough technology functionality to accomplish their work; they have less in-depth application knowledge or problem solving skills.
  • According to McEuen, student technology skills can be likened to writing skills: Students come to college knowing how to write, but they are not developed writers. The analogy holds true for information technology, and McEuen suggested that colleges and universities approach information technology in the same way they approach writing.6
  • he major requires the development of higher-level skill sets with particular applications.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      Not really quantitative--self-reported data back by selected qualitative interviews
  • The comparative literature on student IT skill self-assessment suggests that students overrate their skills; freshmen overrate their skills more than seniors, and men overrate their skills more than women.7 Our data supports these conclusions. Judy Doherty, director of the Student Technologies Resource Group at Colgate University, remarked on student skill assessment, "Students state in their job applications that they are good if not very good, but when tested their skills are average to poor, and they need a lot of training."8
  • Mary Jane Smetanka of the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune reported that some students are so conditioned by punch-a-button problem solving on computers that they approach problems with a scattershot impulsiveness instead of methodically working them through. In turn, this leads to problem-solving difficulties.
  • We expected to find that the Net Generation student prefers classes that use technology. What we found instead is a bell curve with a preference for a moderate use of technology in the classroom (see Figure 1).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      More information needs to be given to find out why--may be tool and method not engaging.
  • It is not surprising that if technology is used well by the instructor, students will come to appreciate its benefits.
  • A student's major was also an important predictor of preferences for technology in the classroom (see Table 3), with engineering students having the highest preference for technology in the classroom (67.8 percent), followed by business students (64.3 percent).
  • Humanities 7.7% 47.9% 40.2
  • he highest scores were given to improved communications, followed by factors related to the management of classroom activities. Lower impact activities had to do with comprehension of classroom materials (complex concepts).
  • I spend more time engaged in course activities in those courses that require me to use technology.
  • The instructors' use of technology in my classes has increased my interest in the subject matter. 3.25 Classes that use information technology are more likely to focus on real-world tasks and examples.
  • Interestingly, students do not feel that use of information technology in classes greatly increases the amount of time engaged with course activities (3.22 mean).12 This is in direct contrast to faculty perceptions reported in an earlier study, where 65 percent of faculty reported they perceived that students spend more time engaged with course materials
  • Only 12.7 percent said the most valuable benefit was improved learning; 3.7 percent perceived no benefit whatsoever. Note that students could only select one response, so more than 12.7 percent may have felt learning was improved, but it was not ranked highest. These findings compare favorably with a study done by Douglas Havelka at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, who identified the top six benefits of the current implementation of IT as improving work efficiency, affecting the way people behave, improving communications, making life more convenient, saving time, and improving learning ability.14
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      Would have been good to know exactly what kinds of technologies were meant here.
  • Our data suggest that we are at best at the cusp of technologies being employed to improve learning.
  • The interactive features least used by faculty were the features that students indicated contributed the most to their learning.
  • he students in this study called our attention to performance by noting an uneven diffusion of innovation using this technology. This may be due, in part, to faculty or student skill. It may also be due to a lack of institutional recognition of innovation, especially as the successful use of course management systems affects or does not affect faculty tenure, promotion, and merit decisions
  • we found that many of the students most skilled in the use of technology had mixed feelings about technology in the classroom.
  • What we found was that many necessary skills had to be learned at the college or university and that the motivation for doing so was very much tied to the requirements of the curriculum. Similarly, the students in our survey had not gained the necessary skills to use technology in support of academic work outside the classroom. We found a significant need for further training in the use of information technology in support of learning and problem-solving skills.
  • Course management systems were used most by both faculty and students for communication of information and administrative activities and much less in support of learning.
  • In 1997, Michael Hooker proclaimed, "higher education is on the brink of a revolution." Hooker went on to note that two of the greatest challenges our institutions face are those of "harnessing the power of digital technology and responding to the information revolution."18 Hooker and many others, however, did not anticipate the likelihood that higher education's learning revolution would be a journey of a thousand miles rather than a discrete event. Indeed, a study of learning's last great revolution—the invention of moveable type—reveals, too, a revolution conducted over centuries leading to the emergence of a publishing industry, intellectual property rights law, the augmentation of customized lectures with textbooks, and so forth.
  • Both the ECAR study on faculty use of course management systems and this study of student experiences with information technology concluded that, while information technology is indeed making important inroads into classroom and learning activities, to date the effects are largely in the convenience of postsecondary teaching and learning and do not yet constitute a "learning revolution." This should not surprise us. The invention of moveable type enhanced, nearly immediately, access to published information and reduced the time needed to produce new publications. This invention did not itself change literacy levels, teaching styles, learning styles, or other key markers of a learning revolution. These changes, while catalyzed by the new technology, depended on slower social changes to institutions. I believe that is what we are witnessing in higher education today.
  • The institutions chosen represent a nonrepresentative mix of the different types of higher education institution in the United States, in terms of Carnegie class as well as location, source of funding, and levels of technology emphasis. Note, however, that we consider our findings to be instructive rather than conclusive of student experiences at different types of Carnegie institutions.
  • Qualitative data were collected by means of focus groups and individual interviews. We interviewed undergraduate students, administrators, and individuals identified as experts in the field of student technology use in the classroom. Student focus groups and interviews of administrators were conducted at six of the thirteen schools participating in the study.
Barbara Lindsey

Education Week: Information Overloaded - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...44washington.h26.html

information readinglist

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07 - Cached
  • If we’re going to insist that students bring home the information booty on Bradford by extracting the main ideas from his journal instead of simply admiring the book’s aesthetic values of form, rhythm, and content, then we need not bother with him, really. For proficiency’s sake—and ever since the information-overload bomb dropped, it’s all about proficiency (read: testing)—we can amass far more data in less time with a secondary text, whether a CliffsNotes or wordage from an American history scholar.
  • Clearly, living under this full-court press of information overload forces a few key questions for students and adults alike. What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given the fact that by the end of our lives we will only have absorbed and converted to knowledge a sliver of the information available to us in this new database-and-blog universe (the Web-page world, after all, is expanding and contracting at the rate of 1.5 million pages a day), should we bother knowing it?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07
       
      Halo effect of Internet information access? Does it exist really? How do we determine what students read and analyze. Has the Internet changed that at all?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “We are no longer reading,” she writes, “we’re searching.”
  • What will run at a premium is the ability to inspire students to turn up gems of original knowledge in the digital-information mine, thoughts and ideas that advance thinking rather than regurgitate data.
  • The pursuit of knowledge is less a process of acquisition than one of hurling irrelevant material out the window.
Barbara Lindsey

Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 0 views

digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/ial-Bookmarking-and-Annotating

diigo del.icio.us social bookmarking Ferriter actfl09

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence
  • While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences.
  • A tagging language is nothing more than a set of categories that all members of a group agree to use when bookmarking websites for shared projects.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In Shirky's terms, teams that embrace social bookmarking decrease the "cost" of  group transactions.  No longer do members resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning, groups can make sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.
  • Imagine the collective power of an army of readers engaged in ongoing conversation about provocative ideas, challenging one another's thought, publicly debating, and polishing personal beliefs.  Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.  Imagine the potential for brainstorming global solutions, for holding government agencies accountable, or for gathering feedback from disparate stakeholder groups when reading moves from a "fundamentally private activity" to a "community event."
  • Understanding that there are times when users want their shared reading experiences to be more focused, however, Diigo makes it possible to keep highlights and annotations private or available to members of predetermined and self-selected groups.  For professional learning teams exploring instructional practices or for student research groups exploring content for classroom projects, this provides a measure of targeted exploration between likeminded thinkers.
  • Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums
  • Many of today's teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.  The results can be disastrous.  Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.  "Why did I bother to plug my students in for this project?" teachers wonder.  "They could have done better work with a piece of paper and a pencil!"
  • With shared annotation services like Diigo, powerful learning depends on much more than understanding the technical details behind adding highlights and comments for other members of a group to see.  Instead, powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together.  That means teachers must systematically introduce students to a set of collaborative dialogue behaviors that can be easily implemented online.
Celeste Arrieta

Collaborative Editing « Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Int... - 3 views

beyondwebct.wordpress.com/...collaborative-editing-3

collaborative blogs wikis question

shared by Celeste Arrieta on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • In what ways do the readings for this week provide an insight into their potential use in educational settings? In what ways could they support the learning goals you have for your students? What do these venues for collaboration and resource sharing mean for you as an educator and scholar? What questions do they raise for you?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10
       
      Questions to explore for today's class
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 15 Feb 10
       
      Diigo & Zotero are really useful tools to do research.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10
       
      We should try to tease out the similarities and differences between these two tools and when and how one would use each. For some tools it is just a matter of personal preference, say between using pbworks versus wikispaces in creating a wiki. Do you think the same could be said here or are there critical differences?
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 16 Feb 10
       
      I think Diigo provides a wide variety of possibilities. Zotero is also useful and maybe it's easier to learn how to use it. But when I tried to find groups and information on my specific field, Zotero didn't show many.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      Celeste, I wonder if part of the reason why you couldn't find groups or specific information in your area of interest is because this part of Zotero is relatively new and that faculty in the humanities, in particular, are not 'rewarded' in the same way as those in the sciences are for collaborating. Do you think humanities faculty regularly collaborate on research currently? Do you know how their scholarly work is evaluated in this regard? What do you think of these new learning and scholarship opportunities and how they might impact you? Once you all have had a chance to use both for a while, I wonder if distinct differences between Diigo and Zotero will begin to emerge for you?
Barbara Lindsey

academhack » Blog Archive » A Model for Teaching College Writing - 0 views

academhack.outsidethetext.com/...l-for-teaching-college-writing

academichack higher ed writing students

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Feb 10 - Cached
  • most rhetoric courses focus strictly on writing, and they limit assignments to the classroom environment – practices that devalue other rhetorical mediums, and the purpose of rhetoric itself.
  • A website containing copies of their larger papers coincided with the blog. This made the assignments more communal in nature and reinforced that writing is meant to be shared.
  • Creating work in a vacuum delegitimizes it. When the goal of your course is to teach students to persuade, and you don’t include what is now the most influential tool for disseminating your argument, you are crippling your students.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      What do you think about this approach?
Barbara Lindsey

Wes Fryer YouTube - Why We Need Pi - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

fryer googleearth math authenticlearning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 13 Feb 10 - Cached
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 13 Feb 10
       
      How did you learn pi and similar concepts? Could you use this approach with declarative knowledge in your content area? http://www.ehhs.cmich.edu/~rmscott/643declarative.html
  • Barbara Lindsey on 13 Feb 10
     
    A cell phone recorded video created on March 14 ,2009, for the Film on the Fly movie contest. By calculating the diameter of the building using Google Earth, we were able to calculate the circumference (or perimeter) of the entire building.
Barbara Lindsey

FRONTLINE: digital nation: watch the full program | PBS - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...view

digitalnation pbs discussion frontline

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Feb 10 - Cached
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.
  • Being told that a bunch of people are addicted is not all that helpful. Even worse is equating lots of time in and of itself to addiction. Why are they addicted? All for the same reasons? What else is going in their lives and cultures? What skills are they picking up if any? Is their massive time-on-task leading to anything or not? What percentage of players are addicted in any harmful sense?
  • There is also an important issue missed by the show and that is the question of how people from different social and economic groups use and benefit (or not) from digital media. I guess it is not surprising that American TV does not much deal with class issues, but there is little doubt that digital media are leveraged by some families to great benefit for their children in school as part of a larger learning and literacy ecology that includes digital media and print. Other families use digital media in quite different ways. Indeed, there are many different uses with many different outcomes--my simple dichotomy really will not do, but it raises the issue of equity and outcomes for diverse people in our society (and, indeed, world).
  • Books can make people smarter or dumber--they can expose them to the world or hide reality from them. So any real understanding of them would have to be nuanced and contextual. For books we have long learned to ignore their power for bad. For digital media we are predisposed--at least if we are Baby Boomers--to look for the dangers.
  • The film is indeed thought provoking. Its power is in being by and large an "etic" (outside) view of other people's new cultures. It is less good at giving a real feel for what those new cultures and their concomitant practices mean to young people today from the inside.
  • What works for me about the website is that it is multi-vocal, allowing many points of view to be expressed on more or less equal footing, encouraging reflection as people make their own decisions about what to watch and how to juxtapose the pieces. I doubt any two readers took the same path through this material or any two teachers used the resources the website provides in precisely the same ways.
  • I frankly found the documentary itself mind-numbing and relentless. It rarely trusts the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what they are seeing and it deploys much of the material in ways which point towards a much less nuanced conclusion than any of the participants in the conversation might have advocated.
Barbara Lindsey

Presentation Zen: We learn from stories and experience - 0 views

www.presentationzen.com/...om-stories-and-experience.html

storytelling experience learning presentationzen

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Stories have an emotional component and when you engage people's emotions, even just a little bit, you stand a better chance of them paying attention and remembering your point (whether or not they agree with you is another matter entirely).
  • It was informative but also emotional. In this case, those things together made quite an impact and the content was memorable.
  • "Research and education has shown that field trips are remembered long into adulthood.  Why? Because you’re experiencing something rather than simply reading it in a book…. To experience something has a far more profound effect on your ability to remember and influence you than if you simply read it in a book.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 14 Mar 10
     
    Thanks to tweet from Wes Fryer
anonymous

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

www.educause.edu/...156831

podcast student studyabroad educause

shared by anonymous on 12 Mar 10 - Cached
  • My experience in creating podcasts came through much nobler endeavors. It began with a research project in the working-class neighborhoods of North Belfast and a frustrated conversation over pints in a pub. I was on a research high after an interview with two women of very different political backgrounds. They were friends, brought together by the work of a local nonprofit, and their mutual admiration shone from the lightning-fast banter that they tossed back and forth throughout the interview. It was clear to me that they were a perfect example of a friendship from different sides of the political divide. But my friend at the pub just couldn't get it. He suggested that their friendship might be contrived, a mere show for my benefit, or that if real, it didn't mean as much as I thought. Exasperated, I pulled out my recorder and played the conversation back to him. As their Belfast accents filled up our corner booth, I could see his posture slacken and the battle turn my way. In that moment, I decided that only a podcast could finish telling my story. Over the next months, armed with just an MP3 player and some freeware suggested by a friend, I worked to piece together the story of North Belfast through interviews, conversations, and the sounds of the streets. The result was crude, elementary, and slightly difficult to listen to. But I was hooked.
  • Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology
  • In fact, the iPod topped the list of the most "in" things on campus in 2006, according to Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10
       
      How many in our class own an iPod? Other mp3 player?
    • Inas Ayyoub
      Inas Ayyoub on 15 Mar 10
       
      I don't have any of them, but after studying and teaching in an American university , I feel it is one of the important things that I have to own!!
    • Kemen Zabala
      Kemen Zabala on 15 Mar 10
       
      I own an iPod touch and I believe my cellphone is also part mp3 player
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 15 Mar 10
       
      I have 2
    • Blanca Garcia Valenzuela
      Blanca Garcia Valenzuela on 15 Mar 10
       
      I have a mp3 player, not an iPod and, anyway, I do not see why iPods are so popular...
    • Catherine Ross
      Catherine Ross on 15 Mar 10
       
      I own an iPod but I never use it!
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 15 Mar 10
       
      I don't have an IPod
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 15 Mar 10
       
      You made very interesting comments, Inas! Congratulations!!
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 15 Mar 10
       
      I own one but have yet to use it! :(
    • Christopher Laine
      Christopher Laine on 15 Mar 10
       
      Mine doesn't really work since I put it in the laundry. But I never used it much anyway because it's not compatible with .flac files.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • transfer lectures and course material
  • "The good thing was that you could listen to a section over and over again if you wanted to review it," Clemen says. "There were a few podcasts that I had to review a couple of times. I could write out what he was saying and listen to what he was saying again." Reviewing came in handy, they all say, especially during project or exam times. "[With the podcasts], I've got more material to go back to if I wanted to review that module," Clemen says. "Whereas with the rest of the material, I just have some PowerPoint and my own notes."
  • The trick, students say, is to make sure that there is something to gain by attending class and downloading the lecture.
  • the material has to be relevant to the rest of the course. Otherwise, it's just a cool technology to have." Material should have a clear connection to the actual course, making a seamless transition between face time and the online realm.
  • Students stress the need to keep audio and video concise and engaging.
  • ust because a student totes an iPod on campus doesn't mean that the student is podcast-savvy.
  • "There aren't any time constraints. Your podcast doesn't have to be an exact amount of time. You have carte blanche to change the format and grow your show." He also helps capture audio from guest speakers so that the programs can be
  • n to the guest lectures while on the bus, at the gym, or in their dorm rooms. Still, Stein never felt the urge to skip class. "It was nice to know that if you missed class, you could record the lectures," she says. "But the iPod didn't encourage you to miss class. There's not a chalkboard that you can see or problems that you can see worked out. I think more people show up in a [podcasting] course because it encourages more interaction."
  • "It's much better than writing a paper. It's more interesting, much more fun, and much more creative. You get a lot of time to work on it, and it's more collaborative because you're working with other people. You're creating the performance as you go and then continuously working on it." Creating a podcast didn't mean less work, he says.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10
       
      Your thoughts?
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 15 Mar 10
       
      This seems to go on the idea of trying to make one's class accessible to everyone. So with podcasts students with strong oral skills might excell.
    • Inas Ayyoub
      Inas Ayyoub on 15 Mar 10
       
      Still, we don't want students to end up with poor writing skills. So I guess with the help of other uses of technolog like wikis we can make writing papers more fun and help stdents improve that as well.
  • Though her goal was to increase learning for her peers in the anatomy course, she found that creating the material was a boon to her own learning. "As a student creating the podcasts, I had the chance to learn a lot more than I would have taking a course," she says. "It's about learning how to teach the material and how to make a narration out of it. You have this intimate knowledge of the material, and now you know how to show the different sides of an issue."
  • Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject.
  • I don't want [the podcasts] to overlap with lectures too much; I still want people to go to the lecture. This is a very relaxed way to get the information to them. They can do it on their own time and download it whenever."
    • Inas Ayyoub
      Inas Ayyoub on 15 Mar 10
       
      Though the podcasts arre a great idea for reviewing materials and catching up on things you missed in a class, still they will result in having less and less face-to-face interaction which is still needed especially when learning languages. I guess students will be tempted to miss classes more and more , even though the article suggested that using podcasts will encourage them not to do so!!
  • Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—though it was now slightly rougher for the wear—I asked students at colleges and universities across North America about their iPod and MP3 use, their familiarity with podcasting, and just how they saw podcasting as part of the classroom.
  • Knowing my own podcast history, I had to wonder just how quickly the students were jumping on board. Armed with my same recorder—th
  • Inas Ayyoub on 15 Mar 10
     
    "Besides the entertainment value, Westfall and Finnegan say that the podcasts were especially useful for reviewing material. They used the podcasts as refreshers throughout the semester and during exam time. In addition, creating a segment meant that they had to brush up on their own knowledge of the subject."
suzanne ondrus

Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations - ReadWriteWeb - 1 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...ia_in_africa_part_2_mobile.php

mobile_phones africa social_networking mobile

shared by suzanne ondrus on 05 Apr 10 - Cached
  • social media technology conference PICNIC2008
  • conference featured prolific social entrepreneurs and technology developers from around the world who offered insight into various projects from the African continent.
  • Africa is unique in that it seems to have bypassed the same era of community infrastructure building that has occurred in developed nations around the world.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • most of the technologies that currently permeate Africa aren't terrestrial. There are very few telephone lines, but mobile penetration is higher than any other region in the world.
  • Instead, internet connectivity is distributed nearly entirely by satellite.
  • The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 29 Apr 10
       
      The word "developers" could also be "capitalists." Again, I don't see why cell phones are so expensive in Benin & Burkina Faso!!
  • Perhaps this thought is what motivated Google to invest in O3B Networks earlier this month. O3B Networks is an ambitious attempt to bring three billion people in the developing world (mainly in parts of Asia and Africa) online by launching sixteen inexpensive, low-orbit satellites. The potential benefits for Google are obvious. This is three billion new internet users, who will more than likely use Google to search, and who will potentially click-through Adsense links and use other Google products. An indicator that Google may be anticipating as much is their move into Africa last year. They've since opened offices and hired people in both South Africa and Kenya with plans to eventually operate out of all sub-Saharan African countries.
  • At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4% Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country. Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt
  • The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers. In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.
  • Micro-payments and Mobile Banking
  • Mobile News Reporting
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