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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

Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...40615

educause web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Web 2.0. It is about no single new development. Moreover, the term is often applied to a heterogeneous mix of relatively familiar and also very emergent technologies
  • Ultimately, the label “Web 2.0” is far less important than the concepts, projects, and practices included in its scope.
  • Social software has emerged as a major component of the Web 2.0 movement. The idea dates as far back as the 1960s and JCR Licklider’s thoughts on using networked computing to connect people in order to boost their knowledge and their ability to learn. The Internet technologies of the subsequent generation have been profoundly social, as listservs, Usenet groups, discussion software, groupware, and Web-based communities have linked people around the world.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • It is true that blogs are Web pages, but their reverse-chronological structure implies a different rhetorical purpose than a Web page, which has no inherent timeliness. That altered rhetoric helped shape a different audience, the blogging public, with its emergent social practices of blogrolling, extensive hyperlinking, and discussion threads attached not to pages but to content chunks within them. Reading and searching this world is significantly different from searching the entire Web world. Still, social software does not indicate a sharp break with the old but, rather, the gradual emergence of a new type of practice.
  • Rather than following the notion of the Web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation. Podcasts are shuttled between Web sites, RSS feeds, and diverse players. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects. Browsers respond to this boom in microcontent with bookmarklets in toolbars, letting users fling something from one page into a Web service that yields up another page. AJAX-style pages feed content bits into pages without reloading them, like the frames of old but without such blatant seams. They combine the widely used, open XML standard with Java functions.3 Google Maps is a popular example of this, smoothly drawing directional information and satellite imagery down into a browser.
  • Web 2.0 builds on this original microcontent drive, with users developing Web content, often collaboratively and often open to the world.
  • openness remains a hallmark of this emergent movement, both ideologically and technologically.
  • Drawing on the “wisdom of crowds” argument, Web 2.0 services respond more deeply to users than Web 1.0 services. A leading form of this is a controversial new form of metadata, the folksonomy.
  • Third, people tend to tag socially. That is, they learn from other taggers and respond to other, published groups of tags, or “tagsets.”
  • First, users actually use tags.
  • Social bookmarking is one of the signature Web 2.0 categories, one that did not exist a few years ago and that is now represented by dozens of projects.
  • This is classic social software—and a rare case of people connecting through shared metadata.
  • RawSugar (http://www.rawsugar.com/) and several others expand user personalization. They can present a user’s picture, some background about the person, a feed of their interests, and so on, creating a broader base for bookmark publishing and sharing. This may extend the appeal of the practice to those who find the focus of del.icio.us too narrow. In this way too, a Web 2.0 project learns from others—here, blogs and social networking tools.
  • How can social bookmarking play a role in higher education? Pedagogical applications stem from their affordance of collaborative information discovery.
  • First, they act as an “outboard memory,” a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings, or distributed in e-mails, printouts, and Web links. Second, finding people with related interests can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Third, the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs. Fourth, the ability to create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Fifth, following a bookmark site gives insights into the owner’s (or owners’) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students’ progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor’s discoveries.
  • After e-mail lists, discussion forums, groupware, documents edited and exchanged between individuals, and blogs, perhaps the writing application most thoroughly grounded in social interaction is the wiki. Wiki pages allow users to quickly edit their content from within the browser window.11 They originally hit the Web in the late 1990s (another sign that Web 2.0 is emergent and historical, not a brand-new thing)
  • How do social writing platforms intersect with the world of higher education? They appear to be logistically useful tools for a variety of campus needs, from student group learning to faculty department work to staff collaborations. Pedagogically, one can imagine writing exercises based on these tools, building on the established body of collaborative composition practice. These services offer an alternative platform for peer editing, supporting the now-traditional elements of computer-mediated writing—asynchronous writing, groupwork for distributed members
  • Blogging has become, in many ways, the signature item of social software, being a form of digital writing that has grown rapidly into an influential force in many venues, both on- and off-line. One reason for the popularity of blogs is the way they embody the read/write Web notion. Readers can push back on a blog post by commenting on it. These comments are then addressable, forming new microcontent. Web services have grown up around blog comments, most recently in the form of aggregation tools, such as coComment (http://www.cocomment.com/). CoComment lets users keep track of their comments across myriad sites, via a tiny bookmarklet and a single Web page.
  • Technorati (http://technorati.com/) and IceRocket (http://icerocket.com/) head in the opposite direction of these sites, searching for who (usually a blogger) has recently linked to a specific item or site. Technorati is perhaps the most famous blog-search tool. Among other functions, it has emphasized tagging as part of search and discovery, recommending (and rewarding) users who add tags to their blog posts. Bloggers can register their site for free with Technorati; their posts will then be searchable by content and supplemental tags.
  • Many of these services allow users to save their searches as RSS feeds to be returned to and examined in an RSS reader, such as Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/). This subtle ability is neatly recursive in Web 2.0 terms, since it lets users create microcontent (RSS search terms) about microcontent (blog posts). Being merely text strings, such search feeds are shareable in all sorts of ways, so one can imagine collaborative research projects based on growing swarms of these feeds—social bookmarking plus social search.
  • Students can search the blogosphere for political commentary, current cultural items, public developments in science, business news, and so on.
  • The ability to save and share a search, and in the case of PubSub, to literally search the future, lets students and faculty follow a search over time, perhaps across a span of weeks in a semester. As the live content changes, tools like Waypath’s topic stream, BlogPulse’s trend visualizations, or DayPop’s word generator let a student analyze how a story, topic, idea, or discussion changes over time. Furthermore, the social nature of these tools means that collaboration between classes, departments, campuses, or regions is easily supported. One could imagine faculty and students across the United States following, for example, the career of an Islamic feminist or the outcome of a genomic patent and discussing the issue through these and other Web 2.0 tools. Such a collaboration could, in turn, be discovered, followed, and perhaps joined by students and faculty around the world. Extending the image, one can imagine such a social research object becoming a learning object or an alternative to courseware.
  • A glance at Blogdex offers a rough snapshot of what the blogosphere is tending to pay attention to.
  • A closer look at an individual Blogdex result reveals the blogs that link to a story. As we saw with del.icio.us, this publication of interest allows the user to follow up on commentary, to see why those links are there, and to learn about those doing the linking. Once again, this is a service that connects people through shared interest in information.
  • The rich search possibilities opened up by these tools can further enhance the pedagogy of current events. A political science class could explore different views of a news story through traditional media using Google News, then from the world of blogs via Memeorandum. A history class could use Blogdex in an exercise in thinking about worldviews. There are also possibilities for a campus information environment. What would a student newspaper look like, for example, with a section based on the Digg approach or the OhmyNews structure? Thematizing these tools as objects for academic scrutiny, the operation and success of such projects is worthy of study in numerous disciplines, from communication to media studies, sociology to computer science.
  • At the same time, many services are hosted externally to academia. They are the creations of enthusiasts or business enterprises and do not necessarily embrace the culture of higher education.
  • Lawrence Lessig, J. D. Lasica, and others remind us that as tools get easier to use and practices become more widespread, it also becomes easier for average citizens to commit copyright violations.19
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 08
       
      Which is why he led the Creative Commons Movement and why he exhorts us to re-imagine copyright.
  • Web 2.0’s lowered barrier to entry may influence a variety of cultural forms with powerful implications for education, from storytelling to classroom teaching to individual learning. It is much simpler to set up a del.icio.us tag for a topic one wants to pursue or to spin off a blog or blog departmental topic than it is to physically meet co-learners and experts in a classroom or even to track down a professor. Starting a wiki-level text entry is far easier than beginning an article or book.
  • How can higher education respond, when it offers a complex, contradictory mix of openness and restriction, public engagement and cloistering?
  • Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 08
     
    Web 2.0. It is about no single new development. Moreover, the term is often applied to a heterogeneous mix of relatively familiar and also very emergent technologies
Barbara Lindsey

2010 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Open Content - 0 views

wp.nmc.org/...open-content

HorizonReport opencontent

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it.
  • As customizable educational content is made increasingly available for free over the Internet, students are learning not only the material, but also skills related to finding, evaluating, interpreting, and repurposing the resources they are studying in partnership with their teachers.
  • collective knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning and scholarly content,
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • the notion of open content is to take advantage of the Internet as a global dissemination platform for collective knowledge and wisdom, and to design learning experiences that maximize the use of it.
  • The role of open content producers has evolved as well, away from the idea of authoritative repositories of content and towards the broader notion of content being both free and ubiquitous.
  • schools like Tufts University (and many others) now consider making their course materials available to the public a social responsibility.
  • Many believe that reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and a broad view of what constitutes scholarly publication are key challenges that institutions need to solve.
  • learning to find useful resources within a given discipline, assess the quality of content available, and repurpose them in support of a learning or research objective are in and of themselves valuable skills for any emerging scholar, and many adherents of open content list that aspect among the reasons they support the use of shareable materials.
  • Open content shifts the learning equation in a number of interesting ways; the most important is that its use promotes a set of skills that are critical in maintaining currency in any discipline — the ability to find, evaluate, and put new information to use.
  • Communities of practice and learning communities have formed around open content in a great many disciplines, and provide practitioners and independent learners alike an avenue for continuing education.
  • Art History. Smarthistory, an open educational resource dedicated to the study of art, seeks to replace traditional art history textbooks with an interactive, well-organized website. Search by time period, style, or artist (http://smarthistory.org).
  • American Literature before 1860 http://enh241.wetpaint.com Students in this course, held at Mesa Community College, contribute to the open course material as part of their research. MCC also features a number of lectures on YouTube (see http://www.youtube.com/user/mesacc#p/p).
  • Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openLearning/ The Open Learning Initiative offers instructor-led and self-paced courses; any instructor may teach with the materials, regardless of affiliation. In addition, the courses include student assessment and intelligent tutoring capability.
  • Connexions http://cnx.org Connexions offers small modules of information and encourages users to piece together these chunks to meet their individual needs.
  • eScholarship: University of California http://escholarship.org/about_escholarship.html eScholarship provides peer review and publishing for scholarly articles, books, and papers, using an open content model. The service also includes tools for dissemination and research.
  • MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu The Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes lectures and materials from most of its undergraduate and graduate courses online, where they are freely available for self-study.
  • Open.Michigan’s dScribe Project https://open.umich.edu/projects/oer.php The University of Michigan’s Open.Michigan initiative houses several open content projects. One, dScribe, is a student-centered approach to creating open content. Students work with faculty to select and vet resources, easing the staffing and cost burden of content creation while involving the students in developing materials for themselves and their peers.
  • Center for Social Media Publishes New Code of Best Practices in OCW http://criticalcommons.org/blog/content/center-for-social-media-publishes-new-code-of-best-practices-in-ocw (Critical Commons, 25 October 2009.) The advocacy group Critical Commons seeks to promote the use of media in open educational resources. Their Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare is a guide for content developers who want to include fair-use material in their offerings.
  • Flat World Knowledge: A Disruptive Business Model http://industry.bnet.com/media/10003790/flat-world-knowledge-a-disruptive-business-model/ (David Weir, BNET, 20 August 2009.) Flat World Knowledge is enjoying rapid growth, from 1,000 students in the spring of 2009 to 40,000 in the fall semester using their materials. The company’s business model pays a higher royalty percentage to textbook authors and charges students a great deal less than traditional publishers.
Barbara Lindsey

Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network | in education - 0 views

ineducation.ca/...-cms-and-open-learning-network

cms learning openlearning wiley mott

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Light's examination of the impact of group study among students at Harvard is particularly compelling. In Making the Most of College, Light presents evidence that "students who study outside of class in small groups of four to six students, even just once a week, benefit enormously. Group meetings are organized around discussions of the homework, and as a result of their study group discussion, students are far more engaged and better prepared for class, learning significantly more" (2001, 52).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 06 Sep 10
       
      One could argue, I think, that our LTL courses, in addition to their language component, do just this.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      One could argue, I think, that our LTL courses, in addition to their language component, do just this.
  • no record left behind of the activity and learning that occurred within them. This is a pattern that repeats from semester to semester, throughout a student's learning career at a particular institution.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      Do you agree with this statement? Do you see any issues with this current situation?
  • blogs, and wikis
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      What is your initial reaction to our public blog and wiki?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • No longer do students sit passively in the classroom, restricted only to the authority of the instructor and their textbook for the final word on the subject matter of a lecture. Now they can Google terms, concepts, and events mentioned by the instructor, they txt, Facebook, and Twitter each other about what's being said, and they carry their notes and even the lecture itself out of class with them, recorded on laptops, MP3 recorders, and digital pens to be reviewed and shared.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      Your reaction to this?
  • instructors have largely employed the CMS to automate the past,
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      What is so bad about 'automating the past'?
  • which learners select as they engage in their educational experiences (p. 59).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      Does this seem like a radical departure from our current educational paradigm? If so, in what ways? What would this require of you as an educator? 
  • When combined with tools and environments that afford opportunities for social interaction, educational resources become semiotic tools that influence learners' actions and mediate the learning process.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      This is a key statement.
  • This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Barbara Lindsey

A Difference: Flickring Mind Maps ... making learning sticky - 0 views

adifference.blogspot.com/...mind-maps-making-learning.html

authenticlearning filter flickr identity math students

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Mar 08 - Cached
  • If the school division didn't have a filter this project could have started more safely.
  • I expect a lot of deep learning to come out of this. This assignment is being marked for completion only; if it's done they get 100%, if not they get 0%
  • I characterize this as assessment for learning.
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  • there must be a minimum of 5 public pictures in the account in order to start this review process.
  • If they are real pictures, the public photos in the account are added to the pool of pictures in flickr searches and RSS feeds.
  • In the course of looking for the pictures and creating the annotated hot spots they will be thinking about the material covered in a new way and strengthening the mental links to the concepts they have learned. I hope to make their learning sticky.
  • reating digital mind maps of the material we learned way back at the beginning of the semester.
  • At exam time they can review all the annotated pictures in the pool made by themselves and their classmates. They will be teaching and learning from each other.
  • They can use the pictures in projects, assignments and blog posts. I will also be able to use them the next time I teach the course to benefit the next group of students. They will be teaching people they have never met. They are also building a permanent resource collection.
  • They are talking to other students and teachers in the building about this. A buzz is growing. Can you imagine the conversations they are having at home? They are involving their families and friends in their learning.
  • As pictures began to come up in public searches on flickr for each of the unique course tags, I created a flickr badge (you'll have to "sign in" to follow that link) for each class. I put it in each blog's sidebar under the heading "Our Math Photo Gallery." The engine behind the badges is the RSS feed associated with each unique course tag. Flickr generates these RSS feeds automatically.
Barbara Lindsey

Are Schools Inhibiting 21st Century Learning? : April 2008 : THE Journal - 0 views

www.thejournal.com/...22407_3

21st century education learning schools survey

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Apr 08 - Cached
  • educational game
  • Students, teachers, and administrators also expressed interest in online learning. Forty-three percent of high school students said they were interested in it for earning college credit, and 39 percent of middle school students said they were interested in it as a way to get "extra help in a subject.
  • "More than 33 percent of high school students, 24 percent of middle school students, and 19 percent of [students in grades 3 through 5] with no previous online class experience stated said they would like to take an online class, with girls having a slightly stronger interest than boys.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • About a third of teachers said they've :explored" methods for integrating online learning into their instruction. And, furthermore, a third also said they were interested in online learning for teacher professional development, and more than a quarter (26 percent) said that online learning is actually their preferred method for receiving training.
  • As for school and district administrators, 45 percent said they viewed online learning "as a way to boost student engagement."
  • Among teachers, parents, and school administrators, 52 percent said they think mobile technologies can help engage students in learning. They also agreed that mobile devices can help extend learning beyond the school day (43 percent) and help prepare students for work (42 percent).
Barbara Lindsey

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration - 0 views

www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 08 - Cached
  • hey are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.
  • It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.
  • They contribute to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.
  • Most educators remain unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources.
  • he majority of the world does not yet have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current open education efforts.
  • ree strategies to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources
  • we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement.
  • Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.
  • elease their resources openly.
  • Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.
  • governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.
  • These strategies represent more than just the right thing to do. They constitute a wise investment in teaching and learning for the 21st century. They will make it possible to redirect funds from expensive textbooks towards better learning. They will help teachers excel in their work and provide new opportunities for visibility and global impact. They will accelerate innovation in teaching. They will give more control over learning to the learners themselves.
  • We have a chance to nurture a new generation of learners who engage with open educational materials, are empowered by their learning and share their new knowledge and insights with others.
  • we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world through freely available, high-quality, locally relevant educational and learning opportunities.
Inas Ayyoub

Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

www.educause.edu/...6065

educause curricula students netgen

shared by Inas Ayyoub on 17 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Faculty concerns perhaps center less on being "replaceable" and more on worrying that the teaching and learning enterprise will be reduced to students gathering information that can be easily downloaded, causing them to rely too heavily on technology instead of intellect.
  • First, traditional age students overwhelmingly prefer face-to-face contact with faculty to mediated communication. Second, technology used in the service of learning will require more—not less—sophistication on the part of students as they engage in processes of integration, translation, audience analysis, and critical judgment.
  • With such specific applications of technology and the limited use of other forms (for example, multimedia), students' low expectations for the use of technology in the curriculum is not surprising. Such constrained use of technology by the faculty in the curriculum and low student expectations may serve to limit innovation and creativity as well as the faculty's capacity to engage students more deeply in their subject matter.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 17 Mar 10
       
      Your thoughts on this?
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 21 Mar 10
       
      I completely agree. As a student, I don't think a text-based PowerPoint slide presentation would interest me too much, partcularly when there are too many words squeezed into just one slide. If a PowerPoint slide presentation is just a copy of texts, the use of technology makes nothing different from teaching with a blackboard and chalks. The use of technology must have, and then can serve, a pedagogical purpose.
    • Inas Ayyoub
      Inas Ayyoub on 22 Mar 10
       
      This remindes me of the first time stuents at my school started using powerpoints to make presentations and how exciting it was for them to see thier classmates ideas presented in front of them this way. Over using this and without really integraing sth new than their words written, showed boredom and disinterest later! So teachers should think here of using technology in a different way like turning the lesson into a digital story or using technology differently ! Being unexpected in the way you use technology in the classrooom, would make them always eager to learn and excited about it!!!
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Today, these tools still provide middle school teachers with vehicles to enlarge their students' learning. Math and science problem sets are embedded in authentic stories that students understand because the stories reflect their everyday experiences. These authentic problem-solving exercises not only engage students in their learning but also stimulate them to want to learn more.
  • From the beginning, however, a problem arose in that those middle school students went on to high schools and later to colleges that did not (and do not) provide this type of rich learning experience—a learning experience that can best be achieved when technology is used in the service of learning.
  • Students need mastery in areas that include knowledge of human imagination and expression, global and cross-cultural communities, and modeling the natural world.
  • The assignment could take on a deeper dimension by using videoconferencing and e-mail to link teams to students living in the countries of origin of the groups being studied. Integrating real-time global experiences into the classroom can provide a new, first-person information source and engender debate about the validity of various sources of information used in conducting research.
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 21 Mar 10
       
      I guess the project, with the Peace Corp., we saw during last Friday's session is the best example of technology engaging students with course materials by iintegrating real-time experiences with classroom studies.
Barbara Lindsey

10 Rules of Teaching in this Century -- Campus Technology - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...-teaching-in-this-century.aspx

learner technology highered learning2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • the knowledge developed during the course does not pre-exist the course. Second, since the knowledge of the course does not exist before the course (because you and the students develop the knowledge during the course), your chief challenge is to manage the process of knowledge discovery.
  • Now, because learning resources and opportunities are infinite, make the move: Don’t just tell students the key knowledge in your field, but help them discover it through problem-based active learning. Change your curriculum from a list of what you will say to a list of essential problems (or questions) that students will address, with your guidance, throughout the semester.
  • It may well be better to re-state learning outcomes in terms of essential problems and the research associated with those essential problems, and build rubrics based on the problems within a problem-based learning structure.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Move most assessment activity away from testing and toward evaluation of student evidence of learning.
  • In the new paradigm of active and varied learning, testing is less appropriate but assessing student evidence is more appropriate.
  • You, as a faculty member, must be as adept as your students in using Web-based applications, and there is no better way to learn the new breed of applications than to use them yourself for important professional purposes.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 10
     
    Talks about how we now can really walk the walk and have a learner-centered environment and the technologies nec. to support that.
Barbara Lindsey

eLearn: Feature Article - E-learning 2.0 - 0 views

www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm

elearning downes

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • In the future it will be more widely recognized that the learning comes not from the design of learning content but in how it is used. Most e-learning theorists are already there, and are exploring how learning content-whether professionally authored or created by students— can be used as the basis for learning activities rather than the conduit for learning content.
  • there is also an increasing recognition that learning is becoming a creative activity and that the appropriate venue is a platform rather than an application.
Barbara Lindsey

My School, Meet MySpace: Social Networking at School | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/my-school-meet-myspace

21stcentury critical pedagogy education sla technology web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Months before the newly hired teachers at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) started their jobs, they began the consuming work of creating the high school of their dreams -- without meeting face to face. They articulated a vision, planned curriculum, designed assessment rubrics, debated discipline policies, and even hammered out daily schedules using the sort of networking tools -- messaging, file swapping, idea sharing, and blogging -- kids love on sites such as MySpace.
  • hen, weeks before the first day of school, the incoming students jumped onboard -- or, more precisely, onto the Science Leadership Academy Web site -- to meet, talk with their teachers, and share their hopes for their education. So began a conversation that still perks along 24/7 in SLA classrooms and cyberspace. It's a bold experiment to redefine learning spaces, the roles and relationships of teachers and students, and the mission of the modern high school.
  • When I hear people say it's our job to create the twenty-first-century workforce, it scares the hell out of me," says Chris Lehmann, SLA's founding principal. "Our job is to create twenty-first-century citizens. We need workers, yes, but we also need scholars, activists, parents -- compassionate, engaged people. We're not reinventing schools to create a new version of a trade school. We're reinventing schools to help kids be adaptable in a world that is changing at a blinding rate."
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It's the spirit of science rather than hardcore curriculum that permeates SLA. "In science education, inquiry-based learning is the foothold," Lehmann says. "We asked, 'What does it mean to build a school where everything is based on the core values of science: inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection?'"
  • It means the first-year curriculum is built around essential questions: Who am I? What influences my identity? How do I interact with my world? In addition to science, math, and engineering, core courses include African American history, Spanish, English, and a basic how-to class in technology that also covers Internet safety and the ethical use of information and software. Classes focus less on facts to be memorized and more on skills and knowledge for students to master independently and incorporate into their lives. Students rarely take tests; they write reflections and do "culminating" projects. Learning doesn't merely cross disciplines -- it shatters outdated departmental divisions. Recently, for instance, kids studied atomic weights in biochemistry (itself a homegrown interdisciplinary course), did mole calculations in algebra, and created Dalton models (diagrams that illustrate molecular structures) in art.
  • This is Dewey for the digital age, old-fashioned progressive education with a technological twist.
  • computers and networking are central to learning at, and shaping the culture of, SLA. "
  • he zest to experiment -- and the determination to use technology to run a school not better, but altogether differently -- began with Lehmann and the teachers last spring when they planned SLA online. Their use of Moodle, an open source course-management system, proved so easy and inspired such productive collaboration that Lehmann adopted it as the school's platform. It's rare to see a dog-eared textbook or pad of paper at SLA; everybody works on iBooks. Students do research on the Internet, post assignments on class Moodle sites, and share information through forums, chat, bookmarks, and new software they seem to discover every day.
  • Teachers continue to use Moodle to plan, dream, and learn, to log attendance and student performance, and to talk about everything -- from the student who shows up each morning without a winter coat to cool new software for tagging research sources. There's also a schoolwide forum called SLA Talk, a combination bulletin board, assembly, PA system, and rap session.
  • Web technology, of course, can do more than get people talking with those they see every day; people can communicate with anyone anywhere. Students at SLA are learning how to use social-networking tools to forge intellectual connections.
  • In October, Lehmann noticed that students were sorting themselves by race in the lunchroom and some clubs. He felt disturbed and started a passionate thread on self-segregation.
  • "Having the conversation changed the way kids looked at themselves," he says.
  • "What I like best about this school is the sense of community," says student Hannah Feldman. "You're not just here to learn, even though you do learn a lot. It's more like a second home."
  • As part of the study of memoirs, for example, Alexa Dunn's English class read Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas's account of growing up Iranian in the United States -- yes, the students do read books -- and talked with the author in California via Skype. The students also wrote their own memoirs and uploaded them to SLA's network for the teacher and class to read and edit. Then, digital arts teacher Marcie Hull showed the students GarageBand, which they used to turn their memoirs into podcasts. These they posted on the education social-networking site EduSpaces (formerly Elgg); they also posted blogs about the memoirs.
Barbara Lindsey

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

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

civic gaming macarthur pewresearch social teens

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

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

connect.educause.edu/...44592

educause mashup remix

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

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.
Barbara Lindsey

ASCD Express 5.18 - Cell Phones Allow Anytime Learning - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...518-varlas.aspx

mobiles mobile Kolb ascd

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Jun 10 - Cached
  • She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Cases for Using Students' Cell Phones in Education: A Practical Guide to Using Cell Phones in K–12 Schools, which looks at 11 U.S. and 5 international case studies of teachers integrating students' own cell phones into instruction.
  • One of Larry Cuban's (Teachers and Machines, Oversold and Underused) theories about why ed technology often fails in schools is that we use this top-down approach where administrators or tech coordinators introduce the technologies to the teachers, and they in turn try to introduce and teach it to the students. It's a very foreign concept for the students, as well as the teachers. And often what happens is maybe a handful of teachers end up using this very expensive technology, and students don't have any access to it outside of school. Cuban recommends a much more bottom-up approach to ed technology. Rather than making specialized software and hardware just for school learning, students and society introduce the technologies that schools should be integrating into learning.
  • People who know the history of ed technology know that it hasn't been that successful, long-term, with sustaining learning because it's often attached to a tool that students don't have access to outside of school.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 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.
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

Higher Education Reimagined With Online Courseware - Education Life - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18open-t.html

education higher online courses

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • M.I.T. officials like to tell about an unsolicited comment they received one day about the online course “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.” “I learned a LOT from these lectures and the other course material,” the comment said. “Thank you for having it online.” The officials did a double take. It was from Bill Gates. (Really.)
  • But just 9 percent of those who use M.I.T. OpenCourseWare are educators. Forty-two percent are students enrolled at other institutions, while another 43 percent are independent learners like Mr. Gates. Yale, which began putting free courses online just four years ago, is seeing similar proportions: 25 percent are students, a majority of them enrolled at Yale or prospective students; just 6 percent are educators; and 69 percent are independent learners.
  • Professor Shankar is working on his second semester of recorded videos, and says that the experience has improved his teaching.
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  • So Professor Shankar has begun inserting links to specific portions of Professor Lewin’s course, and, “since any mistake would affect larger numbers of students listening online,” he says, he thinks harder about every topic he teaches in the classroom.
  • His intense, animated ruminations — the title of his course is “Death” — have brought fan mail from Mexico, Iraq, Korea and China. Several months ago, he got a response from somebody suffering from a brain injury and who was using the lectures to exercise his mind. “I don’t think anyone knows what this will do to education 15 years from now,” Professor Kagan says. “But even if it does nothing more than that, that’s enough.”
  • The backers of free courseware acknowledge the benefit of self-enrichment. Still, they say they expect open education not only to expand access to information but also to lead to success in higher education, particularly among low-income students and those who are first in their family to go to college.
  • Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative is working with teams of faculty members, researchers on Learning and software engineers to develop e-courses designed to improve the educational experience.
  • Carnegie Mellon is working with community colleges to build four more courses, with the three-year goal of 25 percent more students passing when the class is bolstered by the online instruction.
  • The intended user is the beginning college student, whom Dr. Smith describes as “someone with limited prior knowledge in a college subject and with little or no experience in successfully directing his or her own learning.”
  • . “We now have the technology that enables us to go back to what we all know is the best educational experience: personalized, interactive engagement,” Dr. Smith says.
  • That won’t happen, and in the terms-of-use section of Open Yale Courses, the university makes that clear. Besides not granting degrees or certificates, open courses do not offer direct access to faculty. They, in other words, are strictly “for those who wish to learn,” as the Web site says. “Its purpose is not to duplicate a Yale education.”
  • Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.
  • Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?
  • P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.
  • David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions. Dr. Wiley says that models like P2PU address an important component missing from open courseware: human support. That is, when you have a question, whom can you ask? “No one gets all the way through a textbook without a dozen questions,” he says. “Who’s the T.A.? Where’s your study group?” “If you go to M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, there’s no way to find out who else is studying the same material and ask them for help,” he says. At P2PU, a “course organizer” leads the discussion but “you are working together with others, so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers. The core idea of P2PU is putting people together around these open courses.”
  • Mr. Reshef’s plan is to “take anyone, anyone whatsoever,” as long as they can pass an English orientation course and a course in basic computer skills, and have a high school diploma or equivalent. The nonprofit venture has accepted, and enrolled, 380 of 3,000 applicants, and is trying to raise funds through microphilanthropy — “$80 will send one student to UoPeople for a term” — through social networking.
  • Mr. Reshef has used $1 million of his own money to start the University of the People, which taps open courses that other universities have put online and relies on student interaction to guide learning; students even grade one another’s papers.
Barbara Lindsey

Deliberate Engagement of Laptops in Large Lecture Classes to Improve Attentiveness and Engagement - 0 views

www.lecturetools.com/...Deliberate_Engagement.pdf

laptops classroom large engagement learning2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 29 Jan 11
     
    The value of in-class Internet technologies to student attentiveness, engagement, and learning remains both controversial and filled with promising potential. In this study, students were given the option to use LectureTools, an interactive suite of tools designed specifically for larger classes. The availability of these tools dramatically changed the mechanics of the course as over 90% of students attending lecture voluntarily brought their laptops to class. On one hand, surveys over multiple semesters show that students believe the availability of a laptop is more likely to increase their time on tasks unrelated to the conduct of the course. On the other hand, the surveys also ascertained that students felt more attentive with the technology, significantly more engaged, and able to learn more with the technology than in similar classes without it. LectureTools also led to a dramatic increase in the number of students posing questions during class time, with more than half posing at least one question during class over the course of a semester, a percentage far higher than achieved in semesters prior to the use of this technology. These results suggest that while having laptops in the classroom can be a distraction to students, students of today show confidence that they are capable of productive multitasking, showing that they not only can handle this technology when applied through "deliberate engagement" using tools like LectureTools, but thrive with it, as seen through improved attentiveness, learning, and overall engagement even in larger classes.
Barbara Lindsey

C. M. Rubin: The Global Search for Education: More Technology, Please! - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...tion-technology_b_1675040.html

blendedlearning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • One of the best examples I have seen of the flex model was in Morgan Hill, California. This is a district south of San Jose where about a third of its students are Hispanic and I believe over a third of its students are on free-and-reduced price lunch. The school is called the Silicon Valley Flex Academy - Grades 6 through 12. As you walk into the school there are a couple of huge open spaces on either side where every student has his/her own office. In this space, each student has his/her own computer. The students are encouraged to decorate their own space with things they like (in the same way an adult might decorate an office at work). There are break out classrooms around the perimeter of the building. Here teachers are getting the data on how the kids are doing. Teachers can pull students into these break-out classrooms in very small groups. The teacher is then able to focus on a student's individual issues. The teacher's job is totally different in this arrangement. The fascinating thing was how much ownership the students have over their learning. They all knew exactly what was expected of them the entire year. They knew exactly how they were doing at any point. Their job was to learn the material. If they could get the work done during the school day there was no homework. So it was up to the individual students to make those decisions.
  • The teachers I spoke to explained that they had been trained to do lesson planning, lectures to large groups of students and classroom management -- none of which they were now doing. They explained that the adjustment was difficult. Training has not been built into the formal teacher training system for programs like this, and few are really thinking about it at the moment. Now, the teacher is still doing teaching or tutoring when pulling students out into small groups for project-based work, but instead of this being determined by a pacing guide, this is now being determined by where the students are in their learning. What was so interesting was that in this model, teachers were able to do the tutoring and value enrichment work that teachers really like to do but don't always get time to do in a classroom. One of the challenges the teachers mentioned was staying on top of scheduling. How do you keep track when you have students at different places in the curriculum? Those were tough decisions for teachers to make and they were, as you say, learning on the job.
  • When students own their learning, they feel responsible for it and motivated to do it. What they also appreciated was that the teacher was no longer there to "punish them" or "grade them down". Instead the teacher was there to help them reach their goal. This is much more of an environment built around success and motivation versus failure.
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  • I also think the assessment system that we have in place in schools is a problem for this learning system going forward. Assessment needs to be based on where each individual child started and then grew to and finally ended up in a particular year, versus a snapshot once a year view of an entire school.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 19 Jul 12
     
    fall 2012 syllabus
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