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Toolbox or Trap? Course Management Systems and Pedagogy (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...46576
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Campuses have adopted these programs on a wide scale, yet few studies have looked at how the design and use of a CMS affects pedagogy, and instructors rarely discuss how a CMS affects their teaching.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08
       
      Discuss in class.
  • Decisions about which learning software to use on campus are often made by campus technologists and administrators rather than faculty.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08
       
      Not surprisingly, this also is the case at UCONN.
  • The construction of the course syllabus, a natural beginning point for most instructors, is a good example of how the software imposes limitations. When they first enter a CMS, new instructors see the default buttons of the course menu, which are based on type rather than purpose: Announcements, Course Content, Discussion, even Syllabus.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The default organization of the CMS forces them to think in terms of content types instead, breaking the natural structure of the semester.
  • In addition to a counterintuitive organizational scheme, integrated commercial systems have a built-in pedagogy, evident in the easiest-to-use, most accessible features. The focus on presentation (written documents to read), complemented by basic "discussion" input from students, is based on traditional lecture, review, and test pedagogy. This orientation is very different from the development of knowledge through a constructivist, learner-centered, or inquiry-based approach, which a number of faculty use successfully in the classroom.
  • But at the novice level, the system simply does not encourage such customization. To be able to modify the CMS to employ alternative teaching methods, instructors must have a well-developed sense of what is possible in the online environment before approaching the course design process—a perspective many do not have when they first start teaching online. When presented with a list of options, most people typically choose one option rather than question the list itself.
  • Most faculty do not use the web either extensively or intensively in their own work, and those who aren't "into technology" will quickly find themselves overwhelmed by a CMS.
  • Even after several years of working with a CMS, faculty requests for help tend to focus on what the technology can do rather than how their teaching and learning goals can be achieved.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08
       
      Important distinction.
  • An instructor seeking an easy way to post word-processed documents, enter grades, receive papers and assignments through a digital dropbox, and run a traditional threaded discussion board will tend to show great satisfaction with using a CMS.4 Those who tax the system more, and use the most complex features, show lower levels of satisfaction. In addition, after spending months creating material and quizzes in a proprietary system, faculty rightly panic at the idea of "moving everything" to another system. The big systems simply do not allow for easy export, and no one wants to do all that work over again. It is much easier to simply declare satisfaction with things the way they are.
  • There are, of course, alternatives to these hampering systems, and you don't have to be a programmer or Internet expert to use them.
  • Web 2.0 applications that encourage social construction of knowledge (Wikispaces, BubbleShare, Ning) are freely available and may provide more creative instructors with better options than any LMS currently available. Such programs make possible the creation of one's own mini-CMS, cobbled together out of programs that fit with the instructor's methodology. In these cases, pedagogy comes first—the tools can be used to build the courses we want to teach.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 24 Aug 08
     
    Discuss this in class
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Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAU... - 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
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Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...45823 collaboration educause learning2.0 pedagogy beyondwebct
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jul 08 - Cached
  • But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become “spikier”: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.2
  • various initiatives launched over the past few years have created a series of building blocks that could provide the means for transforming the ways in which we provide education and support learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by the growth and evolution of the Internet, which has created a global “platform” that has vastly expanded access to all sorts of resources, including formal and informal educational materials. The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.
  • the most visible impact of the Internet on education to date has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them. The movement began in 2001 when the William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which today provides open access to undergraduate- and graduate-level materials and modules from more than 1,700 courses (covering virtually all of MIT’s curriculum). MIT’s initiative has inspired hundreds of other colleges and universities in the United States and abroad to join the movement and contribute their own open educational resources.4 The Internet has also been used to provide students with direct access to high-quality (and therefore scarce and expensive) tools like telescopes, scanning electron microscopes, and supercomputer simulation models, allowing students to engage personally in research.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
  • This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated. This perspective also helps to explain the effectiveness of study groups. Students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding (one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others).
  • This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
  • ecoming a trusted contributor to Wikipedia involves a process of legitimate peripheral participation that is similar to the process in open source software communities. Any reader can modify the text of an entry or contribute new entries. But only more experienced and more trusted individuals are invited to become “administrators” who have access to higher-level editing tools.8
  • by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.
  • But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field.
  • Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice.
  • Another interesting experiment in Second Life was the Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School fall 2006 course called “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion.” The course was offered at three levels of participation. First, students enrolled in Harvard Law School were able to attend the class in person. Second, non–law school students could enroll in the class through the Harvard Extension School and could attend lectures, participate in discussions, and interact with faculty members during their office hours within Second Life. And at the third level, any participant in Second Life could review the lectures and other course materials online at no cost. This experiment suggests one way that the social life of Internet-based virtual education can coexist with and extend traditional education.
  • Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India. The project is described by its developers as “the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa.”11 Lectures from model teachers are recorded on video and are then physically distributed via DVD to schools that typically lack well-trained instructors (as well as Internet connections). While the lectures are being played on a monitor (which is often powered by a battery, since many participating schools also lack reliable electricity), a “mediator,” who could be a local teacher or simply a bright student, periodically pauses the video and encourages engagement among the students by asking questions or initiating discussions about the material they are watching.
  • John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan
  • For the past few years, he points out, incoming students have been bringing along their online social networks, allowing them to stay in touch with their old friends and former classmates through tools like SMS, IM, Facebook, and MySpace. Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.
  • The project’s website includes reports of how students, under the guidance of professional astronomers, are using the Faulkes telescopes to make small but meaningful contributions to astronomy.
  • “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists
  • The site is intended to serve as “an open forum for worldwide discussions on the Decameron and related topics.” Both scholars and students are invited to submit their own contributions as well as to access the existing resources on the site. The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.
  • I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another's writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other's writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community's discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.17
  • for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.
  • Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
  • The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20
  • The original World Wide Web—the “Web 1.0” that emerged in the mid-1990s—vastly expanded access to information. The Open Educational Resources movement is an example of the impact that the Web 1.0 has had on education.
  • But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.
  • In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focused on helping students to build stocks of knowledge and cognitive skills that could be deployed later in appropriate situations. This approach to education worked well in a relatively stable, slowly changing world in which careers typically lasted a lifetime. But the twenty-first century is quite different.
  • We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.
  • The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something. Often the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting. Learning occurs in part through a form of reflective practicum, but in this case the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars.
  • The building blocks provided by the OER movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems23 that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.
  • As a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in the late 1970s, Treisman worked on the poor performance of African-Americans and Latinos in undergraduate calculus classes. He discovered the problem was not these students’ lack of motivation or inadequate preparation but rather their approach to studying. In contrast to Asian students, who, Treisman found, naturally formed “academic communities” in which they studied and learned together, African-Americans tended to separate their academic and social lives and studied completely on their own. Treisman developed a program that engaged these students in workshop-style study groups in which they collaborated on solving particularly challenging calculus problems. The program was so successful that it was adopted by many other colleges. See Uri Treisman, “Studying Students Studying Calculus: A Look at the Lives of Minority Mathematics Students in College,” College Mathematics Journal, vol. 23, no. 5 (November 1992), pp. 362–72, http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu/workshops/treisman.html.
  • In the early 1970s, Stanford University Professor James Gibbons developed a similar technique, which he called Tutored Videotape Instruction (TVI). Like DSH, TVI was based on showing recorded classroom lectures to groups of students, accompanied by a “tutor” whose job was to stop the tape periodically and ask questions. Evaluations of TVI showed that students’ learning from TVI was as good as or better than in-classroom learning and that the weakest students academically learned more from participating in TVI instruction than from attending lectures in person. See J. F. Gibbons, W. R. Kincheloe, and S. K. Down, “Tutored Video-tape Instruction: A New Use of Electronics Media in Education,” Science, vol. 195 (1977), pp. 1136–49.
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Lead article: How did a couple of veteran classroom teachers end up in a space like thi... - 0 views

kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/...g-social-software-and-teaching blog course hyperlink management
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 07 - Cached
  • With social networking and media-sharing practices rapidly assuming a central role in our professional and personal lives, teachers have a responsibility to bring these practices into the classroom.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 07
       
      Why responsibility? Even if it doesn't serve a pedagogical purpose? Advance the learning that is supposed to take place?
  • technology uber-fans gush over their embrace of every new gadget, technology and practice, affixing computer-driven activities onto factory-model teaching practices as shiny appendages, resulting in a ‘technology façade’
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 07
       
      Well, I would have a problem making a direct connection between über-fans and factory-model teaching proponents. I would like to think the über-fans lean more towards constructivist practices.
  • This does not mean that traditional literacies of critical reading, thinking and communication must make way for emerging literacies of collaboration, online communication and multimedia navigation. It does mean that we have to transform our teaching to accommodate them all effectively.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • a tension between their passions and interests and the Academy’s curricular obligations. When woven into the fabric of the classroom, blogs allow the participants to articulate their feelings as a way of addressing these tensions. As well, blogs provide a space where the participants’ interests and passions can bubble forth for the enrichment of the group.
  • By blogging effectively within classroom settings, we can mentor learner forays into public spaces.
  • We wish to emphasise the importance of distinguishing between using blogs as holders of factory-model teaching practices, and taking advantage of their connectivity and transparency to deepen and liberate learning from the confines of stagnant, teacher-centric models. Ignoring the transformative capabilities of connectivity, some teachers using blogs merely reproduce offline practices online. Limiting classroom blogging to one-way transactions of information and directives from teacher to learners may add convenience and efficiency to the classroom, but does nothing for learning itself. Nor does assigning and directing wooden, forced, framed discussions online, which result in little more than mind-numbing ‘busy work’. We belittle and infantalise our students, further rewarding docility and disengagement if we over-direct posts by giving minute instructions as to their content, number and direction.
  • classroom blogging,
  • focusing on emerging pedagogy rather than tools
  • We will examine hyperlinked slow-blogging as reflective learning; multimedia, interactive blogging as action-based learning; and connected, transparent blogging as social learning.
  • Reflection-through-writing is a powerful aid to information retention, which is poor unless the lesson is repeated in a variety of contexts
  • The learner, in the act of writing down what s/he has learned, solidifies understanding and reveals areas of confusion.
  • Traditionally this kind of reflective narrative, found in journals and portfolios, has helped learners gain skill at meta-discourse and take responsibility for learning in liberal arts contexts. Teachers follow progress and detect comprehension gaps while coming to know learners’ styles, contexts and preferences. Learner-teacher interactions through reflective writing can deepen important bonds, an important indicator of effective learning (Raider Roth 2005).
  • different kinds of learning contexts including vocational by inviting learners to contextualise the learning in their own way within personal experience, thereby making the learning their own (
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      An aspect of constructivist teaching and learning.
  • But if limited to the kinds of practices achieved offline, while efficient and convenient, and affording keyboarding practice, this use ignores new literacies of connectivity, collaboration, communication and multimedia expression. It also leaves out learners for whom written reflection is not always optimal or possible.
  • Although a blog organises itself, ordinarily and on first view, in reverse chronological order, the latest post being most prominent, tagging and hyperlinking allow for more associative, lateral ways of organising and connecting thoughts. Even the novice learner can transcend the limits of time and linearity in linking nascent ideas, discoveries and meta-discourse on the learning, replacing ‘…the essentially linear, fixed methods that had produced the triumphs of capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of human imagination’
  • Learners can link to practices other than written as they struggle to articulate and thus retain and apply what they have learned. For example, some learners will naturally link to audio rather than to text files of their reflections; others will link to images they have taken that are reflective of the learning process and outcomes.
  • thereby extending the reflective practice into synthesis and analysis and invention
  • If we know we are being read, that our explorations have value out in the world, we tend to take more care with our expression and our thinking as communiqués to the Other as well as to the self.
  • From learner posts, the teacher can point to models and questions, to moments of creative and critical success. Learning deepens, writing strengthens: these successes in turn pull the writer back to the blog again and again, to reflect and to improve thinking and expression skills.
  • That these messages to the self (and by extension, to the class and the world) are archived by date and category (or tag) allows them to take their place in an ongoing narrative of the learning.
  • Linking out connects us to more than ourselves. So, in this time of crumbling communities and the cult of the individual, our learners can, through active hyperlinking within a reflective learning practice, become more self-aware rather than more self-absorbed.
  • In selecting media, learners gain critical awareness of the grammar of image and sound as well as language. They learn to evaluate the impact of visual media on their discipline, on their society and on their lives as they develop skill at understanding structure, the arc of an argument, the use of transitions.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      But don't learners need structured guidance in order to be able to do this successfully?
  • Hendrik and Ornberg have asserted, that ‘…audio is more effective than text for creating a sense of co-presence’
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      Reactions to this statement?
  • Students learn the discipline by doing the discipline
  • Evie’s work on the web, and in turn catapulted one of our learners into the role of activist and advocate for a cause about which she cared deeply.
  • By the end of the semester, Evie was not only a committed and involved activist for women’s rights, but a published photographer.
  • And so, the apprentice became the master, the student became the teacher, and Sean’s blog is fulfilling by becoming a valued resource for a teacher in Argentina and for her students as well.
  • Her blogging world and her real world became forever ‘intertwingled’ when she started leaving comments on the blogs of some of the graffiti artists she was following, and they, in turn, left comments on her blog. What followed was a flurry of comments, Instant Messaging (IM) conversations, Skype (r) chats and blogposts each taking Claire ever closer to the very people she has studied and admired and analysed…from afar. After the class ended (and after Claire graduated) Claire’s interest in graffiti continued.
  • But just as in the case of Sean, Claire went from being the observer to participant and now to a creator of graffiti, thanks in part to the connections made via social software tools.
  • it is not difficult to see how a tool such as a blog can keep learners immersed in course content in a way that traditional, teacher and textbook-centric teaching simply cannot.
  • A third, and perhaps most significant, role for classroom blogs to play, then, is in social learning, in the forming of close bonds within the learning community itself and with the outside world. Blogs afford learners a strong sense of belonging to a dynamic learning collaborative, following the apprenticeship model of learning, in which everyone is expert and apprentice to one another
  • The job of the teacher using social software is to create an understanding in and amongst the participants that they need to work together as a social entity, as a collaborative group, that is linked to and communicating among themselves as well as with the world.
  • Student bloggers learn by collaborating with one another through online group projects and through discussions, both formal and informal, that spring up on a central course blog, what we call the ‘Motherblog’, and by linking to one another within their own blogs, and creating feedback loops through the commenting function. Students also learn from one another through the blog archives, which grow year by year. Although we still teach in a departmentalised, semesterised system, the archiving subverts the notion of isolated learning segments by carrying the blog’s accumulated wisdom from group to group, informing the new learners’ experiences by adding context, models and inspiration
  • And unlike a discussion board that might be hosted on a course management tool such as Blackboard, these multimedia posts and comments are archived, hyperlinked and are open and available to all and not just the class.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      Critical difference.
  • Learners and teachers bring into the community discussion their own expertise, prior learning, cultural perspectives. They can converse here about what interests them about what they are studying. This kind of informal discussion weaves the threads of collective intelligence, and it helps learners to think beyond the strict confines of the syllabus, seeing connections to themselves and the world.
  • The class uses Flickr to collect and share images to be used in image-only essays and reflections, and in multimedia texts.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      How interesting.
  • As Garrison and Anderson (2003) point out, ‘…a community of learners is an essential, core element of an educational experience when higher-order learning is the desired outcome’ (2003:22)
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 08 Nov 07
       
      A good rationale for collaborative engagement.
  • Using blogs as a complement to the face-to-face classroom environment not only provides more time on task for the learners, but if left open to world (as opposed to behind a firewall or a password or contained within the shell of a Learning Management System) these tools allow the real world - those crucial informal learning networks - into our classrooms…and the remarkable connections that happen as a result.
  • We can invite the outside world into the course intentionally, by asking experts in our field to participate in time-limited blog-based discussions with our learners. In these ‘blogging invitationals’ our learners can interact with professionals, joining the conversation of the real-world discipline in a meaningful way.
  • Other powerful connections with the world outside the classroom can occur through inter-classroom or inter-school blogging exchanges, or in service-learning initiatives, in which university learners, for example, mentor younger learners via connected blogging and feedback through comments, classroom to classroom, as writing buddies.
18More

Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations | Resources | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6065 expectations implementation student technology
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07 - Cached
  • W here students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint." >
  • here students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      Not representative sample
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 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. Like all organizations, colleges and universities respond to the demands placed upon them. Students' and institutions' low expectations for the use of technology for learning provide insufficient impetus for faculties to change their behavior and make broader, more innovative use of these tools in the service of learning.
  • Consider this scenario:
  • 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.
  • Data obtained from these sessions with high school and college seniors in Indiana, Oregon, and Virginia
  • Less attention has been given to how to help students achieve the desired learning outcomes through technology.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      Mentioned frequently by our group members.
  • To develop intentional learners, the curriculum must go beyond helping students gain knowledge for knowledge's sake to engaging students in the construction of knowledge for the sake of addressing the challenges faced by a complex, global society.
  • institutional structures and practices to resolve technical problems that faculty invariably encounter are very limited or are not the type of aid needed. Such lack of support limits the amount of time faculty can spend on what they do best—building a compelling curriculum and integrating technology for more powerful learning.
  • integrating study abroad into courses back on the home campus;
  • comparatively little support has been devoted to helping faculty use computers and other technologies in creative and innovative ways to deepen student learning.
  • 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.
  • Faculty with expertise in one or more subjects, who have been exposed to what we know about how people learn, can determine how to enhance this learning through the use of technology. But simply understanding how to use technology will not provide the integration needed to reach the desired learning outcomes.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Oct 07
       
      Last sentence here most important.
  • There is a need for integrating technology that is in the service of learning throughout the curriculum. More intentional use of technology to capture what students know and are able to integrate in their learning is needed.
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Collaborative Editing « Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Int... - 3 views

beyondwebct.wordpress.com/...collaborative-editing-3 collaborative blogs wikis question
shared by Celeste Arrieta on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • In what ways do the readings for this week provide an insight into their potential use in educational settings? In what ways could they support the learning goals you have for your students? What do these venues for collaboration and resource sharing mean for you as an educator and scholar? What questions do they raise for you?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10
       
      Questions to explore for today's class
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 15 Feb 10
       
      Diigo & Zotero are really useful tools to do research.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10
       
      We should try to tease out the similarities and differences between these two tools and when and how one would use each. For some tools it is just a matter of personal preference, say between using pbworks versus wikispaces in creating a wiki. Do you think the same could be said here or are there critical differences?
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 16 Feb 10
       
      I think Diigo provides a wide variety of possibilities. Zotero is also useful and maybe it's easier to learn how to use it. But when I tried to find groups and information on my specific field, Zotero didn't show many.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 10
       
      Celeste, I wonder if part of the reason why you couldn't find groups or specific information in your area of interest is because this part of Zotero is relatively new and that faculty in the humanities, in particular, are not 'rewarded' in the same way as those in the sciences are for collaborating. Do you think humanities faculty regularly collaborate on research currently? Do you know how their scholarly work is evaluated in this regard? What do you think of these new learning and scholarship opportunities and how they might impact you? Once you all have had a chance to use both for a while, I wonder if distinct differences between Diigo and Zotero will begin to emerge for you?
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FRONTLINE: digital nation: reactions to digital nation: henry jenkins | PBS - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...ital-nation-henry-jenkins.html frontline digitalnation henry_jenkins discussion pbs
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Feb 10 - Cached
  • I have found the Digital Nation website to be an extraordinary resource which I used repeatedly in my teaching last semester, drawing in many different segments to stimulate discussion, to allow students to hear more directly the point of view and see the personalities of writers we were engaging with through our readings. What works for me about the website is that it is multi-vocal, allowing many points of view to be expressed on more or less equal footing, encouraging reflection as people make their own decisions about what to watch and how to juxtapose the pieces. I doubt any two readers took the same path through this material or any two teachers used the resources the website provides in precisely the same ways. Y
  • The website allows us to ask our own questions, while the documentary tells us what to think.
  • For example, I might use the documentary to talk about the primacy effect -- the degree to which what comes first in a linear media experience sets the horizon of expectations and frames how we understand the material which follows. It strikes me that we go more than 20 minutes into the film before we hear what might be considered an authoritative voice offering a sympathetic comment about the value of digital media and that initial critical framing of media as a social problem gets reasserted multiple times in the course of the documentary. This surely encourages greater skepticism when alternative viewpoints get expressed later.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • We might talk about the ways that voice-over narrators carry much greater weight in our response to documentaries than the subjects they are drawing upon
  • We might talk about conversion narratives such as the way Rushkoff deploys his own shifts in thinking to add greater credibility to his current position in the classic "once was lost but now am found" tradition of religious witnessing.
  • We might talk about notions of juxtaposition -- the ways that each positive claim is followed by a critical perspective, while for the most part, people who are more sympathetic to new media practices are not allowed to interject or challenge claims made in the more critical segments.
  • As someone who taught at MIT for 20 years, I scarcely recognized the place depicted on the documentary -- I certainly would have no trouble creating a documentary which arrived at the exact opposite conclusion about what was going on when those students used their computers in the classroom.
  • Critics of new media are allowed to make unqualified statements, while advocates are shown to be more equivocating. The result of such practices over time has served to polarize the conversation -- so we are either for or against digital media, it is either good or bad, rather than allowing a meaningful discussion of its potentials and risks, its benefits and problems, which might allow for us over time to find common ground and act meaningfully in response to a situation none of us fully understand.
  • I am struck by how consistently the documentary connects new media practices to hot button issues within the demographic which is most apt to watch PBS -- framing digital media in opposition to books, say, or linking it to the military or to corporations.
  • You had a chance to do so much more than this -- creating a context where serious thinkers with a range of different perspectives can talk through their differences and try to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of a complex situation. I believe the website did this. I believe an online conversation may do this. I don't think the documentary does. What does this tell us about television as a vehicle for serious reflection? What does this suggest about the value of the kinds of social spaces for open ended inquiry and discussion digital media at its best can provide? For example, what does it suggest about the need of television to compress for time and the potential of the web to offer unlimited material?
  • It is nonsensical to make a judgement about whether the web is good or bad. The web is. How do we use it in a way which maximizes the benefits and lowers the risks?
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Digital Natives - 0 views

www.digitalnative.org/#home digital natives cybersafety fryer media
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Feb 10
     
    A collaborative space supported by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The project's goal is to better understand young people's experiences with digital media, including Internet, cell phones and related technologies. By gaining insight into how digital natives make sense of their interactions in this digital lanscape, we may address the issues their practices raise, learn how to harness the opportunities their digital fluency presents, and shape our regulatory and educational frameworks in a way that advances the public interest. Thx to Wes Fryer for this find!
3More

Podcasts: what it is and how it works - 0 views

gruntmedia.com/podgrunt_001_view.html podcasting howtos
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10 - Cached
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10
       
      What important role do RSS and feed readers play in podcasting?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10
       
      How do podcasts differ from audio or video content found on the Internet?
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 10
     
    A brief overview of what podcasts are and how they are made.
1More

Networked Learners | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project - 0 views

pewinternet.org/...52-Networked-Learners.aspx teenagers adults pew research survey internet
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 May 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 May 10
     
    In the opening keynote, "Networked Learners," Lee Rainie discusses the latest findings of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project about how teenagers and young adults have embraced technology of all kinds - including broadband, cell phones, gaming devices and MP3 players. He describes how technology has affected the way "digital natives" search for, gather and act on information.
1More

The Tech Curve: RSU #19 Google Apps for Education Plan - 0 views

thetechcurve.blogspot.com/...e-apps-for-education-plan.html googleapps education gmail brown appl grant glastonbury portfolio
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 May 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 May 10
     
    Great description of how one school district is using Google Apps for lifelong learning and teaching. Wonderful embedded video on advantages to migrating over to Google Email for educational institutions. Terrific description of how this school district in Maine is creating a scaffolded portfolio system that gives students increasing responsibility over their portfolio as they move from one grade level to the next, culminating in providing each graduating senior with his/her own domain name to use as their '21st century business card'.
13More

Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online | DMLcentral - 1 views

www.dmlcentral.net/...rticipatory-peer-global-online learning2.0 cop communitiesofpractice rheingold
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • I have found that in both my traditional physical classrooms and online environments, the chances of successful outcomes are multiplied when every person in the group makes a commitment to active participation in helping others learn.
  • When a sufficient number of people jump in and start contributing and building on one another's contributions, it becomes clear to all that it's not just about the teacher's performance and the student's ability to complete assignments. It's about our joint effort to make the whole of our encounter more valuable than just the sum of our individual learning.
  • I type roles on the whiteboard and show how to use the whiteboard tools to enter, format and move around elements. Roles include searchers, chat summarizers, session summarizers, mindmap leaders, session bloggers. I ask co-learners to write their own names on the whiteboard next to the roles they want to take, show them how to create break-out rooms to coordinate their collaborations, and ask the summarizers to feed their output to the bloggers, who take responsibility for posting a reflective summary of the session later
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 11
       
      How about we try this out in our online sessions?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • It's confusing at first, but it is also flowing.
  • Yes, we're a collective intelligence, which is exhilarating, but we're a toddler collective intelligence, stumbling around learning to walk and trying to figure out where we're going at the same time. A number of new skills are required in short order. Information and communication flow through multiple simultaneous channels. The enterprise is challenging - that's part of the exercise. Taking my direction from George Siemens' ideas about networked learning ("we emphasize that early course experiences tend to be overwhelming and chaotic") I assure co-learners early and often that we can relax, accept and even embrace the chaos, and regard our networked attempts to make sense of it as the scaffold for our co-learning. 
  • Instead of seeking to put every fact in its place in an existing well-ordered taxonomy, why not seek to learn together by asking questions about what puzzles us, then organizing our discussions and mining them for knowledge?
  • Sometimes, I get into predicaments and don't know how to quit a webtour or place people in breakout rooms. So I calmly start exploring possible solutions, talking about it as I try to recover. While doing so, I also talk about the importance of exploring close enough to the edge to fall over it frequently. I model tolerance for error, learning from error, pushing the envelope of tech. Indeed, I've found that the earlier I can break something and fix it in public, the better. We talk about what works and what doesn't, discard what doesn't suit our purposes, push a tool further if it helps us learn together. It requires regular doses of humility to abandon what seemed like a bright idea at the time.
  • The objective is a culture of conversation that troubleshoots practical skills, explores theoretical underpinnings, dissects social implications.
  • Our internal social bookmarks enable us to create a mini-collective-intelligence by gathering resources about our discussion topics, selecting or writing descriptive snippets, assigning tags. The emerging tag-cloud serves as an index to the resources.
  • Wiki-work is about collaborative authoring.
  • In the process of using these tools to try to make sense together, we co-construct our learning. The last week of the course is about re-examining our learning process, reiterating the most important things we've learned, and redesigning the parts of the process that didn't work so well.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 02 Aug 11
     
    fall 2011 syllabus
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How Social Media is Changing Education [Infographic] - Edudemic - 0 views

edudemic.com/...changing-education-infographic infographic social media education highered
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Apr 11
     
    Not so sure how reliable the sources for this are...
1More

With workplace training, Japan's Kosen colleges bridge 'skills gap' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAF0gmjL_story_1.html japan highered bridge tech skills training
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 15 Oct 11
     
    How could this model be adapted for use in the U.S.? And integrate the liberal arts? Thinking How you could include ethics, arts, philosophy, culture...
8More

What we learned from 5 million books | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...rned_from_5_million_books.html digitalhumanities lcl TED Google ngram tedtalks
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Apr 12 - No Cached
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 12 Apr 12
       
      From YouTube version of this talk: "[Google's digtized books] are very practical and extremely awesome." Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel from Harvard University use the 15 million books scanned and digitized by Google to show how a visual and quantitative analysis of text can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.
  • ELA: There are more sobering notes among the n-grams. For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall, an artist born in 1887. And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person. He gets more and more and more famous, except if you look in German. If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre, something you pretty much never see, which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets, going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945, before rebounding afterward. And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany. Now these signals are actually so strong that we don't need to know that someone was censored. We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing. Here's a simple way to do it. Well, a reasonable expectation is that somebody's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after. So that's sort of what we expect. And we compare that to the fame that we observe. And we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index. If the suppression index is very, very, very small, then you very well might be being suppressed. If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda.
  • Now when Google digitizes a book, they put it into a really nice format. Now we've got the data, plus we have metadata. We have information about things like where was it published, who was the author, when was it published. And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that's not the highest quality data. What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome -- a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over -- a veritable shard of our cultural genome.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • we're going to release statistics about the books. So take for instance "A gleam of happiness." It's four words; we call that a four-gram. We're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801, 1802, 1803, all the way up to 2008. That gives us a time series of how frequently this particular sentence was used over time. We do that for all the words and phrases that appear in those books, and that gives us a big table of two billion lines that tell us about the way culture has been changing.
  • You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram, and that's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead, although you might agree that he might need a better publicist.
  • JM: Now you can actually look at the distribution of suppression indexes over whole populations. So for instance, here -- this suppression index is for 5,000 people picked in English books where there's no known suppression -- it would be like this, basically tightly centered on one. What you expect is basically what you observe. This is distribution as seen in Germany -- very different, it's shifted to the left. People talked about it twice less as it should have been. But much more importantly, the distribution is much wider. There are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been. But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda. This picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record.
  • ELA: So culturomics is what we call this method. It's kind of like genomics. Except genomics is a lens on biology through the window of the sequence of bases in the human genome. Culturomics is similar. It's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture. Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record. The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it. Why can everyone do it? Everyone can do it because three guys, Jon Orwant, Matt Gray and Will Brockman over at Google, saw the prototype of the Ngram Viewer, and they said, "This is so fun. We have to make this available for people." So in two weeks flat -- the two weeks before our paper came out -- they coded up a version of the Ngram Viewer for the general public. And so you too can type in any word or phrase that you're interested in and see its n-gram immediately -- also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Apr 12
     
    fall 2012 syllabus
4More

ACTFL Guidelines 2012 - 0 views

actflproficiencyguidelines2012.org guidelines proficiency actfl methods
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • The Guidelines are not based on any particular theory, pedagogical method, or educational curriculum. They neither describe how an individual learns a language nor prescribe how an individual should learn a language, and they should not be used for such purposes. They are an instrument for the evaluation of functional language abilityfunctional language abilityA language user's ability to accomplish real world communicative tasks such as handling a simple social transaction or resolving a situation with a complication..
  • what individuals can do with language in terms of speaking, writing, listening, and reading in real-world situations in a spontaneous and non-rehearsed context.
  • These Guidelines present the levels of proficiency as ranges, and describe what an individual can and cannot do with language at each level, regardless of where, when, or how the language was acquired.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • five major levels of proficiencyproficiencyOne's functional language ability.: Distinguished, Superior, Advanced, Intermediate, and Novice.
1More

How to Drag and Drop PDF Documents to Evernote. on Vimeo - 0 views

vimeo.com/45176790 pdf documents evernote video howto
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jul 12
     
    Great idea and demo showing how to put a pdf in a shared evernote doc and then create a qr code for it that students can use to download, esp. on an iPad where it then shows up in their iBook library.
1More

How to read a paper - 1 views

blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/...paper-reading.pdf research paper steps read howto
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 12
     
    Provides steps on how to effectively read a research paper for maximum effect.
3More

A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube - Technology - The Chronic... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...65793 youtube videos lecture learning disruptive education
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.
  • Mr. Khan has a vision of turning his Web site into a kind of charter school for middle- and high-school students, by adding self-paced quizzes and ways for the site to certify that students have watched certain videos and passed related tests. "This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever," he said.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jun 10
     
    "Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model-often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia."
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