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.
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shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Aug 11
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Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online | DMLcentral - 1 views
www.dmlcentral.net/...rticipatory-peer-global-online
learning2.0 cop communitiesofpractice rheingold
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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The objective is a culture of conversation that troubleshoots practical skills, explores theoretical underpinnings, dissects social implications.
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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.
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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.
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Can Higher Education Be Fixed? The Innovative University - Forbes - 0 views
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Harvard has invested heavily in a system of residential housing and high-quality tutoring. This means that even students who pay the tuition sticker price aren’t covering the full cost of their education. Thus, growing the size of its “customer” base, which is how businesses achieve scale economies and greater profitability, is financially problematic for Harvard and for other universities with similar operating models.
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What is the purpose of a university as depicted in this book? Is it: A. A university is an institution that provides a degree, which is a credential or screening device for the economy and for society? Or B. A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need for a particular job? Or C. A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need to be a citizen? Or D. A university is an experience where you acquire a capacity to be a lifelong learner (because most of the knowledge you acquire will be obsolete within a few years and the jobs of tomorrow will not be the jobs of today)? Or E. Something else?
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One of the best ways to learn to learn is to be an active learner and a teacher of one’s fellow students in college. This instructional philosophy isn’t yet widespread, but its effectiveness has been proven, and it doesn’t require additional financial investment, only a change in the attitudes of faculty members and students. Broader adoption seems likely, with time.
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All three require talented faculty members with scholarly training. These things are (1) discovering and disseminating new knowledge, (2) preserving the discoveries of the past, and (3) personally mentoring students in ways that allow them to participate in (1) and (2). Doing these things well takes special training. It is inherently expensive, because the processes involved are hard to automate or even systematize very much.
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Harvard and BYU-Idaho involve their students in teaching one another. They also have general education courses, created in the last five years, that cut across academic disciplines and engage students in applying principles and theories to real-world problems. These instructional approaches challenge students to frame inquiries, rather than merely respond to questions posed by their professors.
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Harvard and other elite institutions are in a paradoxical position. Their students and alumni are satisfied with their current offerings; in fact, they have a huge surplus of qualified applicants.
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We’re likely to significant change in the next decade, the net effect of which will be more students served at a lower average cost. However, the nature of the evolution will differ among institutions. The elite schools will hybridize their courses not primarily to reduce cost or grow enrollments, but to better serve the rising generation of “digital natives” and to make the most of learning-enhancing computer-adaptive technology. By contrast, schools without the benefit of high prestige and large endowments will hybridize and offer fully online courses mainly so that they can keep tuition affordable, admit more students, and use the incremental revenues to plug the hole left by rising operating costs and declining state support. In all cases, students will benefit.
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Most professors will need to spend the majority of their time teaching. A school that generates the bulk of its revenues via tuition will be able to afford some time for faculty research. However, that research will need to have relevance to the student learning experience, and it won’t be the driving factor in tenure decisions; teaching quality will be. Tenure based primarily on publications isn’t a sustainable model for most institutions.
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O'Reilly Network: What Is Web 2.0 - 0 views
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"folksonomy" (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags. Tagging allows for the kind of multiple, overlapping associations that the brain itself uses, rather than rigid categories. In the canonical example, a Flickr photo of a puppy might be tagged both "puppy" and "cute"--allowing for retrieval along natural axes generated user activity.
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RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes.
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RSS is now being used to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data, and photo availability
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One Year or Less: Electronic Books « 2011 Horizon Report - 0 views
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Critical Challenges « 2011 Horizon Report - 0 views
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reconciling new forms of scholarly activity with old standards continues to be difficult, creating tension and raising questions as to where faculty energy is best directed.
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Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university
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There is a greater need than ever for effective tools and filters for finding, interpreting, organizing, and retrieving the data that is important to us.
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a brief philosophy of "anti-teaching" | Savage Minds - 0 views
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But while the sheer numbers of students are a burden in one sense, there is also tremendous potential. Think of the knowledge and life experience that is in that single room, if only I could find a way to harness it! I wanted the students to be fully engaged, talking to one another, grappling with interesting questions, and exploring any and all resources to find answers (and more questions). I wanted them to really get a strong sense of the importance of what we discuss in cultural anthropology. I wanted them to expand their empathy, to actually try to experience the life-worlds of others. Above all, I wanted them to recognize their own importance in helping to shape an increasingly globally interconnected world society.
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World Simulation. Students are asked to imagine the world in the classroom. We create a map that mimics the geographical, environmental, and biological diversity of our real world. The map is laid onto a map of the classroom, and students are asked to imagine themselves living in the environment that maps onto them. The class is divided into 15-20 groups of about 12-20 students in each group. Each group is challenged to create their own cultures to survive in their own unique environments.
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The creativity of the students in creating their cultures subverts any simple monocausal determinism (just as human creativity does in the real world). Environmental determinism is just one theory on the table as students try to create a reasonably realistic culture that could exist within their given environment. To add realism, students are required to provide comparisons to real life cultures at every step along the way, justifying why they have chosen to construct their culture in one way rather than another (sometimes creating elaborate histories to explain some unique characteristic). Three weeks before the end of the semester, all groups have completed their culture and submit a final ethnography to me. I read these over, and begin planning the main event: the world simulation.
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To Orange, I will show an actual example of a map in my next full post and explain more about the parameters that are given and what the students fill in themselves. You raise a much more important question though, about the necessity of simplifying in order for the simulation to work. This aspect of the simulation almost led me to abandon the whole thing as I started to think it through and plan for it. Instead I found two ways to deal with it: 1. I challenge my students to tell me where the simulation is oversimplified and make their own case for how the simulation should change for the next time it is performed. This way they are not simply accepting our imaginary world “as is” and are instead actively thinking about how the real world works and how we may have misrepresented it in our simulation. (Even if the simulation fails miserably, it has succeeded in getting students to think about how the world works!) 2. I encourage the students to use the simplification as a canvas on which they can build and/or interpret complexity. In a lecture format I only have so much time to cover the effects of colonization – perhaps 50 minutes – not enough to really explore all of the different facets. In the World Simulation I can encourage each student to think about how colonization would affect their culture in multiple ways and at multiple levels (e.g. infrastructure, social structure, superstructure). Sometimes this is to complex to be incorporated into the simulation, but they are asked to do a reflection paper immediately following the simulation in which they write their own “cultural history.” This written format allows them to explore some complexities they might not have had the time or means to express in the simulation.
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shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Apr 11
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Online Learning is so last year… | 21st Century Collaborative - 0 views
www.21stcenturycollaborative.com/...nline-learning-is-so-last-year
cop communitiesofpractice nussbaum collaboration learning actfl11
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are people confusing talking to people online with deep, connected learning? Does being part of a social networking site or a NING community mean you are going deep- growing in your ability to co-construct or deconstruct knowledge? Does it mean you are collaborating if you post, reply to a post, Tweet, or engage in a #edchat conversation? Are we moving toward an acceptance of superficiality as a replacement for deep learning? Has our multiple choice culture trained our brains to believe that innovation is the holy grail?
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If all I do is network I do not shift or grow because I am missing the opportunity to go deep and actually learn by doing. It takes both: Networks and Community. Online, global communities of practice and f2f learning communities in my local context.
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Imagine the deep learning that can be produced when we come together in learning communities and do some of the following (below).
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Action Research Groups: Active research done by communities of practice focused on improvement around a possibility or problem in a classroom, school, district, or province.
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Community of Practice (CoP): A CoP is group of professionals with shared interests and challenges who make a commitment to improve or get better at something over time by sharing ideas, finding solutions, and creating innovations. This requires new dispositions and values such as resisting the urge to quit prematurely.
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Book Study Groups: PLPeeps, often in cross cohort groups, come together to read and discuss a book collectively in an online space
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Connected Coaching: individuals on teams are assigned a connected coach who discusses and shares teaching practices as a means of promoting collegiality and support and to help educators think about how the new literacies inform current teaching practices.
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Professional Learning Communities (PLC):