Group items tagged

You can't actually tell people to think for themselves, or be creative. You have to work with them and have them learn it themselves."

"Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."

It was, according to a 1984 briefing document by Negroponte, "designed to be a place where people of dramatically different backgrounds can simultaneously use and invent new media, and where the computer itself is seen as a medium -- part of a communications network of people and machines -- not just an object in front of which one sits."

As Ito sees it, the lab's mission "is to come up with ideas that would never be able to occur anywhere else because most places are incremental, directed and disciplinary".

There are lots of kids who are not happy with this massive consumerism, this unsustainable growth, but who have really smart science and technology values. That's a type of person we can draw into what I think will become a movement."

"We aim to capture serendipity. You don't get lucky if you plan everything -- and you don't get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.

Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It's like venture capital: we don't expect every experiment to succeed -- in fact, a lot are failures. But that's great -- failure is another word for discovery. We're very much against incrementalism -- we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project are uniqueness, impact and magic."

Ito set out some of his key principles. These included: "Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; " Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". "The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."

In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it's working even before they've raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges -- into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control -- the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they're not scholars. They don't care about disciplines. They're antidisciplinary."

So when Ito was appointed, Negroponte wanted the press release headlined: "University dropout named director of Media Lab". "But," he says with raised eyebrows, "the fact that he didn't have a degree was buried near the last paragraph. That's the good Peter Thiel -- if you do drop out and do something creative, more power to you."

five major levels of proficiencyproficiencyOne's functional language ability.: Distinguished, Superior, Advanced, Intermediate, and Novice.

One example: LockDown Browser - students are locked down to just that browser - highly recommended by Berlin, stop students from digitally multi-tasking during exams in class

You need to have published policies and procedures about academic dishonesty - policies, syllabus, and enforcement Education is key - do this as part of orientation - special seminars for students - workshops for teachers

It comes down to this: “Life itself is open book” “Open is the new normal” - some assessment can be made out in the open so students can have their own identities - like blogs - I was very impressed by Dr. Alec Couros‘ presentation yesterday about how students are using their blogs

For many schools, the hardest part is making it acceptable to turn to technologies that aren't traditionally used in schools. It's a culture that has to be cultivated at the school itself. In the book I'm working on now, many of the teachers in the case studies I discuss approached their administrators with something they'd been using with success outside of school, and their administrators were open to trying it out within school. Kipp Rogers at Passages Middle School in Newport News, Va., has done a phenomenal job modeling that approach and valuing not only his teachers, but also his students, who are involved in planning, as well.

Q: From what you've seen in the field, what's the most interesting instructional use of mobile devices happening now? Keren-Kolb: Definitely what's going on in Australia. Teachers are using QR (two-dimensional bar codes) for activities and learning. In the United States, about 60 percent of the phones can do this, but in most other countries, it's almost universal. So, in some Australian schools, this means [that] students come in on the first day of class and their entire syllabus is on a bar code they scan directly into their phone—same thing with some books and homework assignments. They'll scan a code for their homework, and it'll link to video tutorials and activities. So, moving away from textbooks and moving toward paperless learning that's much more interactive. I think that's exciting—how much information you can attach to that little bar code, and use it to extend learning.

When students can use whatever tools are around them, obviously, testing changes. It's not just about a right or wrong answer—it's about inquiry, collaboration, and the higher-order thinking skills we want students to do.

There is no question that historical eras favor certain personalities and types, and the age of the collaborator is here or coming, depending on where you sit. The era of trusted authority (Time magazine, for instance, when I was young) is giving way to an era of transparent and collaborative scholarship (Wikipedia). The expert is giving way to the collaborator, since 1 + 1 truly equals 3 in this realm.

The combination of 1) an increased ability to work on specialized topics by gathering teams from around the globe, and 2) the diversity of those collaborators, should bring with it an incredible amount of innovation.

That anyone, anywhere in the world, can study using over the material from over 1800 open courses at MIT is astounding, and it's only the start.

I believe that the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press

a study that showed that one of the strongest determinants of success in higher education is the ability to form or participate in study groups. In the video of his lecture he makes the point that study groups using electronic methods have almost the exact same results as physical study groups. The conclusion is somewhat stunning--electronic collaborative study technologies = success? Maybe not that simple, but the real-life conclusions here may dramatically alter how we view the structure of our educational institutions. JSB says that we move from thinking of knowledge as a "substance" that we transfer from student to teacher, to a social view of learning. Not "I think, therefore I am," but "We participate, therefore we are." From "access to information" to "access to people" (I find this stunning). From "learning about" to "learning to be." His discussions of the "apprenticeship" model of learning and how it's naturally being manifested on the front lines of the Internet (Open Source Software) are not to be missed.

"differentiated instruction" a reality that both parents and students will demand.

sites that combined several Web 2.0 tools together created the phenomenon of "social networking."

From consuming to producing * From authority to transparency * From the expert to the facilitator * From the lecture to the hallway * From "access to information" to "access to people" * From "learning about" to "learning to be" * From passive to passionate learning * From presentation to participation * From publication to conversation * From formal schooling to lifelong learning * From supply-push to demand-pull

The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.

Participate

Learn About Web 2.0. I

* Lurk.

Teach Content Production.

* Make Education a Public Discussion.

* Help Build the New Playbook.

We've spent the last ten years teaching students how to protect themselves from inappropriate content – now we have to teach them to create appropriate content. They may be "digital natives," but their knowledge is surface level, and they desperately need training in real thinking skills. More than any other generation, they live lives that are largely separated from the adults around them, talking and texting on cell phones, and connecting online.

Those of you with suggestions of other resources, please post comments linking to them

When these learners complete the program, they have competencies relevant to 21c life-- they can communicate, collaborate, access and integrate information from diverse sources using electronic libraries. It is an exciting way to teach and learn and it is the wave of the future so we need to gain the skills needed to make these educational experiences consistently meaningful.

Working with online instruction requires different techniques. An instructor online cannot usually look at a student's face and see that she isn't grasping the point, for example, or when she has fallen asleep. I can see why instructors would miss this type of face-to-face communication; online feedback is both less immediate and in some cases more direct. But a lecture can be truly engaging or enormously incomprehensible even for the student who moves to the front row to try to understand it all. Online learning can also reap huge results or can suffer from another set of equally mind-numbing problems.

I have to agree with jsalmons and bghansel. It's not the fact that a school is online or on-ground that matters. It's the quality of the educator that matters. I, too, have gone to and taught in Ivy League schools and found them to be a mixed bag, just as I've found online schools to be a mixed bag.

Yes, softshellcrab, discussion questions are the backbone of online courses. Are you telling me they don't play a role in on-ground education? Are you telling me that only talking-head lectures educate? Is there something wrong with students doing self-studying? Haven't you seen lecture content in online courses? I'm puzzled as to why you think critical thinking, Socratic reasoning/questioning, and constructivism are bad or can't be done online, but can on-ground.

The most (Stress THE MOST)primary issue with distance education is the degree of affective education taught.

We can use SKYPE, WIMBA or other "video" based education, but what we lose is the subtle differences of students and their interactions with others that makes it difficult to determine their level of character (highest level of affect).

Bill Gates may think we will have less seated instruction in the future (see another Chronicle issue elsewhere), but the backlash against online will be in the form of those who cannot interact and thus not obtain jobs (except in the places where it wont matter because none have any affect in that place).The bottom line is that we are losing a major portion of our education system in a pure online education format. Until we recognize how to better teach affective education with online, and more importantly assess that type of education, we will have major issues not only in higher education, but also in industry/business.And this is an open invitation for Bill Gates to discuss this issue.

"Quality on-line teaching is harder than regular classroom teaching, but poor on-line teaching is easier than regular classroom teaching."

But can I make it more specific - "Quality on-line teaching is harder (taking more time, e.g.)than regular classroom teaching of the same quality (in achieving the same extent of satisfaction in students, e.g.)?"

However, no one has mentioned the preparation required for quality online instruction. Some building blocks of good online programs are high quality/targeted content, flexible tools for development and delivery, engaging and interactive design, attentive and responsive instructors during the class, self motivated learners, and as always outcomes-based curriculum.

He figures all of Wikipedia, his gold standard for group activity online, took about 100 million hours of thought to produce. So Americans could build 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year just by writing articles instead of watching television.

Those new activities—and he gives plenty of examples in the book of projects already under way—could center on charity, civic engagement, coping with diseases, and more.

He points out that in the several decades immediately following Gutenberg's first Bible, not much really changed in European information society. Much later, some world-changing ideas came along on how to use the printing press, like the Invisible College.

"The problem with alchemy wasn't that the alchemists had failed to turn lead into gold—no one could do that. The problem, rather, was that the alchemists had failed uninformatively."

"Even when working with the same tools, they were working in a far different, and better, culture of communication."

Today's open-source software and the hypersharing of social networks represent a new, better order. And we're only starting to see the impact of those inventions.

Essentially, says Danah Boyd, a researcher for Microsoft Research and a longtime friend, Shirky thinks Karl Marx got it wrong. While critics like Slee may read any online social participation as economic exploitation, Shirky argues that people are motivated by love, not money. She points to Wikipedia: "People contribute because they enjoy the process," she says. Or academe. "Are we doing it for the pay?" "There's a lot of labor of love. People like being a part of cultural production on every level."

Shirky got the job at NYU because of a talk he gave at a technology conference in the late 1990s, while he was working as a freelance computer programmer and Web designer. T

Drawn to the classroom, he approached Yale in 1995 about teaching a class there on online social groups. Though students there backed the idea, he says, a university committee turned him down. "They killed it because they said it doesn't really make sense to talk about community online because those people aren't really meeting each other," he says.

This year, I’ve taken pictures in class and then uploaded the pictures to VoiceThread. I record their words for each letter sound using Audacity (another free tool that allows you to record and edit audio on your computer) and a microphone attached to my laptop. At home, I add their recorded voices to the alphabet book.

students’ book. I can export a video of our book, with comments, to bring back into class so we can listen to the additions and see how the book has grown. When we reach the letter Z, I’ll burn the book onto CDs for each of my students, so they’ll have a personal copy of their project.

anyone can add words or comments to my

Because VoiceThread is collaborative,

1-Because of a generous network of teachers on Twitter, my students have a chance to hear English spoken in a lot of different accents, by people who speak English as a first language and by people for whom English is an additional language.

2-They’re learning about countries as we see where our comments come from. 3-They have an invaluable connection with a group of students in New Jersey, who are also learning their letters and sounds, thanks to the efforts of Kim George. My students are mighty impressed with how many words Kim’s students know for each letter! (In fact, you may want to fast forward through a few of the alphabet letters when you check out the project–it has really grown since our first letters!)

4-Since the book is web-based, other classes around the world can “read” our book and it can continue to grow.

1-It gave my students a clear, real reason to use English. It also gave them a real audience to write for. They had something to show for their hard work, something they could share with their friends and grandchildren. 2-My students have a chance to interact with other students through comments. I embedded their project on My Corner of the World (my student blog). While they haven’t yet mastered the art of responding to comments (a few are still figuring out where they might find their email addresses ), they do enjoy reading comments from others. 3-Since it’s web-based, I can share a link with the parents of my young learners class, and they can read the book at home. In fact, anyone around the world can read the book.