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Barbara Lindsey

The Chronicle: 10/28/2005: Lectures on the Go - 0 views

chronicle.com/...10a03901.htm

ed higher podcasting

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08 - Cached
  • More and more professors, including Mr. Jackson, are turning to the technology to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling "coursecasting." The portability of coursecasting, its proponents say, makes the technology ideal for students who fall behind in class or those for whom English is a second language. And some advocates say that coursecasting can be more than just a review tool, that it can also enliven classroom interaction and help lecturers critique themselves.
  • One of the things you do by podcasting is participate in student culture," Mr. Jackson says
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Is this a good enough reason?
  • Make students listen to a podcast before class, and they will show up ready to converse.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Do you think this would happen?
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Purdue's podcasting project arose from a desire to let students study without being tethered to their computers, according to Michael Gay, the university's manager of broadcast networks and services for information technology. "We're trying to give people as many options as possible if they miss a course and need to catch up — or if they just want to review," he says.
  • Duke University
  • Drexel University
  • Purdue University
  • American University
  • University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's School of Dentistry
  • "Everybody knows that when you say something in class, the first time, not everybody is paying attention," Mr. Jackson says. "But if you make your lecture available as a podcast, students can relisten to troublesome passages, and it's easy for them to slow things down."
  • St. Mary's College, in California
  • For a graduate-level course in quantitative analysis, Ms. Herkenhoff creates two different series of podcasts, each recontextualizing highlights from her lectures.
  • "When I talked about this with my colleagues, the first thing they all said was 'well, no one's going to go to class,'" says G. Marc Loudon, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue who has posted lectures for students as both audio and video files. Mr. Loudon offers a fairly unsympathetic rejoinder to those concerns: "If a podcast can capture everything you do in class, you deserve to have nobody coming."
  • started penalizing students a grade point for every class session they missed.
  • "Those of you who didn't come to class, but are listening to the podcast, should know that one of the answers to the next test is on the screen," he said. "But I'm not going to tell you what it is."
  • But most students are savvy enough to realize that coursecasts aren't an alternative to class,
  • "a great way to complement the presentation slides many professors already offer online."
  • Richard Smith, a lecturer in instructional technology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, hosts a weekly podcast on scholarship and education. But he is not convinced that the technology can revitalize pedagogy — because, he says, there is little evidence that recorded lectures will hold students' interest.
  • "I don't think most professors, no matter how good they are in the classroom, can avoid being boring as hell when they're recorded."
  • Students reared on iPods and the Internet do not come to class expecting to sit through an hourlong lecture, he says. Instead, they want to gather information on their own terms and spend their class time in discussion, not rapt attention.
  • "The 'sage on the stage' is dying, if not dead already," Mr. Jackson says. "Faculty members are no longer privileged sources of knowledge, so our job should be to get people to think critically and independently about things."
  • Coursecasting, he says, can help that process along. In Mr. Jackson's own courses, he has put lectures online as podcasts and asked students to listen to them before they come to class, a technique he refers to as "distance learning with a twist." "Think about how much classroom time you would save if you didn't have to lecture anymore," Mr. Jackson says. "You free up all this interactive personal space between you and your students. It changes the classroom experience."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Your thoughts?
  • The "decentered classroom," as Mr. Jackson calls it, can be unsettling for students who are not eager to let the lecture-hall experience bleed into their free time.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Is this the resistance Jessie and others have encountered?
  • Richard Edwards, an assistant professor of communication at St. Mary's College, is building a course around a series of 30-minute podcasts about film-noir classics that he and a colleague had made. Students will listen to the podcasts and then elaborate on Mr. Edwards's talking points in class. "Instead of having to run through all of our thoughts on Double Indemnity," Mr. Edwards says, "we can actually start our discussion in the 31st minute, in media res, without setting up the movie for everyone."
  • Mr. Edwards has made the podcasts that will anchor his film-noir course available to the public free through a license from Creative Commons, a group dedicated to making scholarly and artistic material widely available online. "I want people to download this stuff so they can feel free to engage with it," he says.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Would giving your content away freely like this be a problem for you?
  • Michigan's dentistry school, for example, keeps its coursecasts locked behind a firewall so that only students can listen.
  • Administrators received enough complaints that they formed a faculty committee that is now examining BoilerCast's intellectual-property implications. "The fundamental question is who owns a faculty member's lectures," Mr. Loudon says. "If these classes have intellectual value beyond the classroom, who owns that?"
Barbara Lindsey

Fluid Learning | the human network - 0 views

blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94

mark pesce higher ed technology learning control

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08 - Cached
  • There must be a point to the exercise, some reason that makes all the technology worthwhile. That search for a point – a search we are still mostly engaged in – will determine whether these computers are meaningful to the educational process, or if they are an impediment to learning.
  • What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.
  • A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • it has made the work of educational administrators exponentially more difficult. Students now talk, up and down the years, via the recorded ratings on the site. It isn’t possible for an institution of higher education to disguise an individual who happens to be a world-class researcher but a rather ordinary lecturer. In earlier times, schools could foist these instructors on students, who’d be stuck for a semester. This no longer happens, because RateMyProfessors.com effectively warns students away from the poor-quality teachers.
  • This one site has undone all of the neat work of tenure boards and department chairs throughout the entire world of academia.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Not so sure this has had an impact of this nature at UCONN
  • The battle for control over who stands in front of the classroom has now been decisively lost by the administration in favor of the students.
  • That knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.
  • If we are smart enough, we can learn a lesson here and now that we will eventually learn – rather more expensively – if we wait. The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.
  • the shape of things to come. But there are some other trends which are also becoming visible. The first and most significant of these is the trend toward sharing lecture material online, so that it reaches a very large audience.
  • the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.
  • When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      But what about institutional degree cache?
  • Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?
  • In this near future world, students are the administrators.
  • Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Need to follow up on the mode of educational delivery in the 13th century. Can even see this in ancient Greece with followers of Aristoteles and Plato.
  • The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructor facilitates and mentors, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers,
  • The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens.
  • At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode – vanishing online – and explode – the world will become the classroom.
  • Flexibility and fluidity are the hallmark qualities of the 21st century educational institution. An analysis of the atomic features of the educational process shows that the course is a series of readings, assignments and lectures that happen in a given room on a given schedule over a specific duration. In our drive to flexibility how can we reduce the class into to essential, indivisible elements? How can we capture those elements? Once captured, how can we get these elements to the students? And how can the students share elements which they’ve found in their own studies?
  • This is the basic idea that’s guiding Stanford and MIT: recording is cheap, lecturers are expensive, and students are forgetful. Somewhere in the middle these three trends meet around recorded media. Yes, a student at Stanford who misses a lecture can download and watch it later, and that’s a good thing. But it also means that any student, anywhere, can download the same lecture.
  • Every one of these recordings has value, and the more recordings you have, the larger the horde you’re sitting upon. If you think of it like that – banking your work – the logic of capturing everything becomes immediately clear.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      I'm not convinced academics would agree.
  • While education definitely has value – teachers are paid for the work – that does not mean that resources, once captured, should be tightly restricted to authorized users only. In fact, the opposite is the case: the resources you capture should be shared as broadly as can possibly be managed. More than just posting them onto a website (or YouTube or iTunes), you should trumpet their existence from the highest tower. These resources are your calling card, these resources are your recruiting tool.
  • the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.
  • Stanford and MIT
  • show a different way to value education – as experience. You can’t download experience. You can’t bottle it. Experience has to be lived, and that requires a teacher.
  • Rather than going for a commercial solution, I would advise you to look at the open-source solutions. Rather than buying a solution, use Moodle, the open-source, Australian answer to digital courseware. Going open means that as your needs change, the software can change to meet those needs. Given the extraordinary pressures education will be under over the next few years, openness is a necessary component of flexibility.
  • Openness is also about achieving a certain level of device-independence.
  • here are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital. Many students will never be very computer literate, but every single one of them has a mobile handset, and every single one of them sends text messages. It’s the big of computer technology we nearly always overlook – because it is so commonplace. Consider every screen when you capture, and when you share; dealing with them all as equals will help you work find audiences you never suspected you’d have.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 04 Feb 09
       
      Why don't educators see this?
  • Yet net filtering throws the baby out with the bathwater. Services like Twitter get filtered out because they could potentially be disruptive, cutting students off from the amazing learning potential of social messaging. Facebook and MySpace are seen as time-wasters, rather than tools for organizing busy schedules. The list goes on: media sites are blocked because the schools don’t have enough bandwidth to support them; Wikipedia is blocked because teachers don’t want students cheating. All of this has got to stop. The classroom does not exist in isolation, nor can it continue to exist in opposition to the Internet. Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.
  • Mind the maxim of the 21st century: connection is king. Students must be free to connect with instructors, almost at whim. This becomes difficult for instructors to manage, but it is vital. Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Do you see this happening at UCONN in the near future? Why or why not?
  • Finally, students must be free to (and encouraged to) connect with their peers. Part of the reason we worry about lecturers being overburdened by all this connectivity is because we have yet to realize that this is a multi-lateral, multi-way affair. It’s not as though all questions and issues immediately rise to the instructor’s attention. This should happen if and only if another student can’t be found to address the issue. Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Any concerns about this?
  • Connection is expensive, not in dollars, but in time. But for all its drawbacks, connection enriches us enormously. It allows us to multiply our reach, and learn from the best.
  • learning by listening is proved to be much harder than learning by reading.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Multi-sensory learning is actually proven to be most effective: see research by John Medina: "Brain Rules"
  • RateMyProfessors is a good start, and anecdotes about how people use it is interesting, but it has a long long way to go before it comes close to being reliable let alone authoritative.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      He does have a point about the statistical validity of the comments.
Barbara Lindsey

Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional? - 0 views

www.campustechnology.com/...67990

higher ed learning2.0 online lectures

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08 - Cached
  • According to new research released this week by the University of Wisconsin-Madison involving about 7,500 undergraduate and graduate students, an overwhelming 82 percent of students said they would prefer courses that offer online lectures over traditional classes that do not include an online lecture component. The researchers also pointed out the implications for these findings extend well beyond the classroom.
  • When asked why they prefer courses that offer streaming lectures online, most students cited making up for missed classes, convenience, improving retention of materials covered, improving test scores, and help with material review prior to class.
  • 72 percent of higher education professionals indicated that, as of mid-August, their institutions did not have any kind of formal intellectual property policy in place to deal with captured lectures or other learning materials placed online, according to one of our informal online polls.
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  • Said Veeramani: "There are ... some significant common drivers that academia is wrestling with: first, creating more effective learning outcomes for students and second, accommodating more students from a scalability standpoint. To accomplish this, institutions are increasingly turning to lecture capture technologies that turn a traditional classroom into an instant source of online, interactive content."
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 02 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Through a series of comparative studies--in which students of different age groups studied different subject matters under different instructional conditions--Bloom established that the average student instructed individually by a tutor outperformed 98% of students instructed in a conventional classroom setting.
  • Bloom, B. S. (1984). The 2-Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One tutoring. Educational Researcher, 13(6), 4–16.
  • To be clear, our assertions about the weaknesses of the CMS paradigm should also be taken as critiques of the predominant pedagogical model in higher education
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • The OLN model is aimed at leveraging these affordances in ways that the CMS does not. For example, discussions that last longer than 50 minutes can be conducted online without prompting or intervention by the instructor. And such discussions can include more voices than those of the students formally enrolled in the class. Whatever connections students make with each other can be maintained via social networking applications of their choosing. And students can capture, annotate, and archive the content they assemble and create in their courses as well as in their less formal learning experiences. And since they are using their tools, they maintain control of and access to the content as long as they choose.
  • Given the ever increasing rate of change and improvement in learning technologies and approaches, committed teachers should be anxious to find and employ new, more effective tools to help their students learn more effectively.
  • The OLN also has the significant advantage of being time-persistent. Compared with the frequent starts and stops in the CMS (see Figure 2), much of what happens in the OLN allows learners to build their learning networks over time, since it is not bound to semesters, terms, or even the institution. And the artificial boundaries of the CMS are removed thereby allowing the learner to benefit from participation in a broader community of networked learners, further removing the limitations on learner network growth (see Figure 4).  
  • One of the primary aims of the OLN model is to reestablish teachers and learners at the center of learning activity (both inside and outside of courses).
  • By combining several functions into one application, the CMS has forced us to make a tradeoff that is suboptimal for learning. Because there is some confidential and proprietary data in the CMS, we have traditionally locked all course data behind a login screen, viewable only by an instructor and the officially enrolled members of his or her class - and then only for the duration of the semester or term. This is perhaps the most debilitating example of CMS technology being used to reinvent the past. The traditional classroom has always been a private, physically, and temporally bounded space. The natural inclination was to replicate that model within the CMS. However, doing so has imposed the limits of the old space in a new space where such limitations do not exist.
  • there are several key components of the OLN that should be private and secure, situated within an institution's intranet. These include student information systems (SISs), identity and role repositories, proprietary content stores, and secure online assessment applications. These are and should remain core components of the institutional IT infrastructure. Beyond these, however, there are several OLN components that need not be private. Faculty and student blogs, wikis, portfolios, and open courseware and open educational resource repositories can be open (at the option and discretion of individual faculty members and students). These functions can exist, spread across multiple applications and websites, in the cloud. Some applications might even be mashups of intranet and cloud-based applications.
  • 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).
  • Learning is not a simple acquisition activity. A large body of critical analysis and research concur that learning is at least as much a function of social discourse as it is solitary cognition (e.g., Vygotsky, 1962, 1978, or Schon, Brown, et al., 1989).
  • The same is true for the best educational content—it draws people into arguments, explorations, discussions, and relationships that add depth, meaning, and value to that content.
  • Brown & Adler have argued that, "The 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" (2008, 18). This is in contrast to the prevailing "traditional Cartesian view" of instruction that focuses primarily on the transfer of knowledge—as if it were a substance—from teacher to learner (18). Educational theorists have long argued against the didactic approach. Freire critiqued what he called "banking education," a model in which student activity is limited to "receiving, filing, and storing the deposits" of information apportioned them by the instructor (1970, 72).
  • We may fruitfully update Freire's metaphor of "banking education" to a metaphor of "downloading learning." So much of what passes for innovative uses of instructional technology today, like the OpenCourseWare collections available from MIT and other universities, restricts learners to downloading files.
  • If "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" (Levine, et al., 1999), Web 2.0 tools are making the learning space fundamentally and permanently flat. CIOs, academic leaders, and individual faculty members might argue that they need the structure and security of the CMS. We agree that some elements of the CMS should be maintained. But students, and a growing number of instructors, are engaging in rich, meaningful dialog, content creation, and sharing outside the CMS.
  • When students enter the walled garden of the CMS, they are largely "acted upon." Efficacious, self-regulating learners, on the other hand, "act" as they participate in and take ownership of their own learning activities and ultimately what they learn and how they employ that new learning in pursuit of their various life projects.
  • The center of gravity in the CMS is decidedly on institutional and instructor efficiency and convenience, not student participation and learning. This should not be surprising given Cuban's findings that educational technology is used largely to "maintain existing practices" rather than to "revolutionize," or even change in any substantial way, teaching and learning practices (2001).
  • But the CMS paradigm actually works against such a transformation of the relationship between teachers and learners because it privileges the role of the instructor and technically restricts individual students from contributing and to shaping courses in any meaningful way. Sclater has argued that the term "learning management system" itself suggests "disempowerment—an attempt to manage and control the activities of the student by the university" (2008, p. 2). The tendencies of the CMS are not, he argues, just "minor irritations" but rather forces that "may overtly or subtly align the institutional processes with the software rather than having the system serve the requirements of the institution" (p. 3).
  • Most (if not all) of these sorts of activities are absent from the typical CMS-based course. This is true primarily because there is no space provided for students to publish such content and engage in such activities of their own creation. Moreover, students engaged in such activities are unlikely to make the CMS the base of their activities because they would be walled off from the rest of the world, destined for deletion at the end of the semester.
  • 12-year-old home schooled girl, Heather Lawver, who created an online, fan-authored version of The Daily Prophet, the fictional newspaper in the Harry Potter series (see http://dprophet.com).
  • Jenkins argues that Lawver's activities, and those of the reporters she recruited, went far beyond a creative outlet for fans—participants acquired knowledge creation, knowledge pooling, and knowledge sharing skills, gained experiences sharing and comparing value systems, learned how to express and interpret feelings about a literary work, and developed Internet publishing skills (p. 185). Gee has argued that similarly transferable skills can be acquired in online role-playing games, where players learn to work well with team members, collaborate to solve problems, and hone individual skills in the context while understanding and appreciating others' skills, etc. (2009).
  • Learners as Co-Instructors, Instructors as Co-Learners
  • the overwhelming usage patterns of instructors indicate that the CMS has been used primarily to mimic the traditional, semester-based, lecture-driven, content-centric model of instruction - one of bestowing "course info" on students.
  • the CMS was designed primarily to support and enhance traditional teaching. It is not coincidental that the first incarnation of Blackboard was branded "CourseInfo."
  • While perhaps a bit stylized, the typical CMS-delivered, content-centric, lecture-driven course complete with multiple-choice midterm and final exams, does little to prepare students to succeed in a world in which there will always be more new knowledge created every day than they can possibly access, much less assimilate, master, and apply. Given the overwhelming flow of data all around us, our job should be increasingly less focussed on making our students "knowledgeable" and focused instead more on making them "knowledge-able" (Wesch, 2009).
  • When a student at Ryerson University convened a chemistry study group inside Facebook in 2007, the University threatened to expel him for academic misconduct. In his defense, the student observed that he was simply replicating online what was common practice in face-to-face study group and tutorial sessions (Schaffhauser, 2008). The difference between these face-to-face sessions and the groups the student created in Facebook, however, was that the online versions of the study groups would persist over time, perhaps far beyond the students' time at Ryerson. Access to Facebook, unlike access to live study sessions or to the CMS, does not expire when a student graduates.
  • mposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process.
  • Bush & Mott (2009) have argued that the failure of technology to transform learning stems from a preoccupation with "the tactical implementation of specific technologies which often simply automate the past" (p. 17).
  • such software has generally been focused primarily on helping teachers increase the efficiency of the administrative tasks of instruction (e.g., distribute documents, make assignments, give quizzes, initiate discussion boards, assign students to working groups, etc.).
  • tendency to use the CMS to improve instructional efficiency rather than effectiveness.
  • Self-Reported Function Usage in Blackboard by BYU Faculty Members (2004-2009)
  • CMS are "fundamentally a conservative technology ... [for] managing groups, providing tools, and delivering content" (2006, 1).
  • course content distribution and teacher-student communication platform
  • Cuban concluded that "teachers used technology to maintain existing practices" rather than to "revolutionize" the way they teach their students (p. 138).
  • course managment software leads universities to "think they are in the information industry" (356).
  • he industrial, course management model has its center of gravity in teachers generating content, teachers gathering resources, teachers grouping and sequencing information, and teachers giving the information to students (356). This is so, they argue, because teachers "often yield to the seductive appeal of a course management system, where it is easy enough to populate a weekly schedule with static resources and decontextualized tasks" which results in a "focus on content ... rather than the process of educating the student" (357).
  • the CMS continues to artificially situate instruction and learning inside walled gardens that are disconnected from the rich and vibrant networks of learners and content in the wider world.
  • the changes necessary to bridge the 2 sigma gap are at least as much cultural and pedagogical as they are technological.  
  • an unintended consequence of CMS deployment by artificially limiting the potential of the Web to keep students connected to each other and their content. While the CMS facilitates substantial interaction and community building around content within courses, the resulting learning communities are almost always limited to those formally enrolled in the course and those communities exist only for the duration of a particular semester or term. When each period of instruction draws to a close, CMS courses are routinely deactivated and sometimes even deleted to make way for the next semester's courses.
  • course-centric, content-driven model of instruction that dominates higher education.
  • 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 20 Jan 10
       
      Do you agree with this statement? Do you see any issues with this current situation?
  • These learning network disruptions are even more jarring for students who transfer from one institution to another or those who take courses from multiple institutions. Unless students fastidiously copy the content from their CMS courses and save the contact information of their classmates, the learning network connections they have made (both content and social) are essentially lost.
  • flocking to time-persistent social networking and media sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, GMail, and Google Docs.
  • blogs, and wikis
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      What is your intial reaction to our public blog and wiki?
  • While we know of no formal research on the topic, we believe that knowing that the fruits of their efforts will be categorically deleted at the end of term is a significant negative motivation for students to contribute meaningfully within the CMS, particularly when the same effort invested elsewhere would persist indefinitely.
  • By eliminating access to the courses a student participates in within a CMS, an institution not only hampers them during their formal learning careers, but it takes away a potentially invaluable knowledge-able tool for continued success as a lifelong learner.
  • The old paradigm of making our students "knowingly prepared" is rapidly losing its value. We should instead help our students be "unknowingly prepared—to be unknowing but to possess the tools and skills to rapidly become 'knowing' at the moment-of-need" (p. 3).
  • 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 20 Jan 10
       
      Your reaction to this?
  • Between 2000 and 2008, the average licensing cost per campus for commercial CMS skyrocketed  500% (Delta Initiative, 2009; slide 11).
  • includes such factors as hosting, faculty development, curriculum and instructional course design, multimedia support, and help desk support while making literally no mention of student learning or student activity within the CMS (slide 21).
  • Where once the instructor was the sole (or at lease substantially privileged) possessor of content expertise and certainly the exclusive provider of course materials, learners are now instantaneously able to Google virtually any information about the content of a course (often during the lectures themselves), independently publish their thoughts about it, and interact with others (both inside and outside of the official course roster) about the course and it's subject matter.
  • instructors have largely employed the CMS to automate the past,
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      What is so bad about 'automating the past'?
  • In a learning context, he argues that no educational information and communication technology can be "universally good." Rather, he asserts, "the best way to invest in instructional technologies is an instrumental approach that analyzes the natures of the curriculum, students, and teachers to select the appropriate tools, applications, media and environments" (59).
  • which learners select as they engage in their educational experiences (p. 59).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      Pretty radical approach, no?
  • we prefer to think of educational content as a campfire around which learners gather.
  • 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 20 Jan 10
       
      This is a key statement.
  • it seems paradoxical that we would we put hundreds, thousands, or millions of learners in front of advanced communications technology so that they can simply retrieve data instead of interacting with each other around that data.
  • We contend that its inadequacy stems from three specific weaknesses of the CMS—(1) the organization of learning experiences into discrete, artificially time-bound units, (2) the predominance of instructor-focused and content-centric tools in the CMS, and (3) the lack of persistent connections between learners, instructors, content, and the broader community across semesters and across class, program, and institutional boundaries.
  • these disruptions are likely to come from educational technologists and leaders exploring new tools and new approaches to learning.
  • while opening the space necessary for learners to act as co-instructors and for teachers to act as co-learners in a dynamically generated space (9).
  • Most institutions of higher education appear focused on . . . content coverage, course structure, and pre-existing time arrangments such as semesters and hours of credit than . . . issues such as learning and performance (
  • This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Barbara Lindsey

Weblogg-ed » Reading to Find: Rip-Mix Classrooms - 0 views

weblogg-ed.com/...ing-to-find-rip-mix-classrooms

ripmix readmix student-created

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Nov 08 - Cached
  • I’m thinking “Rip-Mix Classrooms” or “Rip-Mix Workshops” or heck, “Rip-Mix Conferences.” I’ve been railing of late at all the paper note talking conference attendees whose observations and reflections and experiences will never be connected after the conference ends. And I know that we’re already doing this to some extent on the conference level and the classroom level (i.e. Darren’s scribes and others.) Problem is, most schools would probably attempt to shut this down and call it cheating, especially if, as this group is doing, they are collecting and adding tests and quizzes to the mix.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Nov 08
       
      What do you think about this?
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Nov 08
     
    Rip Mix Learners is a student-run Open Courseware project, in which students make audio recordings of the lectures, compile class notes, and other materials and share them with their peers online.
Barbara Lindsey

Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional? - 0 views

www.campustechnology.com/...67990_2

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08 - Cached
  • More than 50 percent of the students surveyed said they want course material to be avaalble to them even after the complete a course. According to the report, "They expressed interest in accessing online material in their professional lives, after their coursework is complete." Sixty percent even indicated a willingness to pay for lecture capture services.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      Will this be used to benefit the financial prospects of the university or the faculty or both?
Barbara Lindsey

digital digs: a straighterline to higher education hell - 0 views

www.alex-reid.net/...-to-higher-education-hell.html

higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Even when one gets beyond the general education lecture hall, lectures will still become unnecessary. True, an upper-division undergrad or grad course may call upon faculty specialized knowledge, but it is not the knowledge alone that make faculty valuable. It is the opportunity students have to interact with faculty. It is human interaction, whether FTF or online, that is labor intensive. The opportunity to work individually or in small groups with faculty or participate in a class small enough to allow for discussion: this is where the value lies in higher education.
  • So if you were to build a higher education system from the ground up, keeping for the moment disciplinary specializations (the question of discipline is a different matter), the one thing you'd want to retain from the current system is the opportunity for students to interact with faculty-scholars. You can dump the rest of it. The rest is really just there for accounting and management purposes.
  • For example, one could imagine an English undergraduate program where one could find a repository of educational media dealing with subjects across the discipline which would serve as points of reference for the curriculum. Then you would have faculty who would announce various projects, perhaps developed in collaboration with interested students. Students would enlist in the project, work with faculty, and produce work. There could be student publications and conferences. Eventually there could be a portfolio review, culminating exam, and so on. Obviously the system would need to be a little more complex than that. There would be some introductory projects that would need to be taught that would serve as pre-reqs. Some projects that might serve the purpose of general education. And one would look to faculty to provide a certain level of interaction for students.
Barbara Lindsey

One Laptop One Child | Scholastic.com - 0 views

www2.scholastic.com/...article.jsp

1:1 equity students laptops

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08 - Cached
  • quietly tell select students about the policy
  • “We’re going to invite 20 seniors [this school year] selected by teachers,” he says. We don’t want the computers to be a distraction.”
  • The Consolidated High School District 230 in Orland Park, Illinois, has taken a step in this direction by allowing students to bring their computers to school and connect to the Internet, but not log on to the district’s network, says Darrell Walery, director of technology.Stay Away from My Networkwalery sums up the struggle in this issue succinctly. He says tech directors who have been teachers favor the experiment, while those who have business backgrounds blanche at the thought. “My role as technology director is to mediate this exact issue,” he adds.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • In Forsyth, the district uses radius servers for centralized network management. This device identifies the districts’ computers, allowing them access to the network according to their status. Laptops that don’t pass this test are put on the district’s virtual lan. This gives them online access while keeping the user behind the district’s firewall and within its Internet filters. It keeps these computers—and their users—away from the district’s network.
  • Murray’s Pennsylvania district scans each notebook before it can connect to the school server. Clean Server antivirus software is one of the tools it uses to avoid “malware” and worms. Also, the district’s scans point users to free patches and service packs that are needed to keep security up to date.
  • Compatibility seems to be less of an issue each day as more online applications become available.
  • schools can turn to the growing number of free online tools available to all.
  • Classroom management is another potential worry. If college professors feel like students sometime use their lectures as a quiet place to fool around or get other work done (see sidebar), then what chance do K–12 teachers have of getting—and keeping—25 students on task?Teachers in Pennsylvania use classroom management software (a small software download) to keep control. Murray says this program allows teachers to take complete control of each laptop if they want, pushing out their lesson to each screen, blocking all work with a single button, and even using the pcs as glorified personal response devices.
  • The last big hurdle to make this policy a reality in more districts is one that can’t be cleared with a simple software program. It is instilling the idea that teachers will no longer be the dominant information delivery for each class.
  • “How do you get teachers prepared to teach in a classroom where everyone is a teacher?
  • “Professional development is key. We have instructional technology specialists at every school. These folks are not the fix-it people but certified teachers [usually from that same building]. It’s a peer.”
  • “There’s an explosion of social activities” that computers enable, Murray says,  from talking with people worldwide to keeping in touch with like-minded groups through Twitter to having students take virtual field trips halfway around the world, or just down the street. Science students can do an online dissection with step-by-step analysis, or math problems where a simulation can help illustrate a difficult-to-grasp concept, he adds.
  • Teachers need to think about teaching in a different way,” he says. “If you’re doing that, a lot of these [problems] go away.”
  • Having kids bring in their own computers can help bring 1:1 a lot closer to reality, especially in poorer districts. Klingler says Forsyth can channel its existing computer stock to students without personal computers and help reduce tech disparity.
  • While his state’s Classrooms for the Future program brought 550 pcs into the district, the technology coordinator realizes he won’t have the funding needed to replace these machines in three or four years.
  • “The cell phone is their thing,” Walery says. “Communication is the main [goal]. They constantly text back and forth.”
  • Forsyth has even looked into using Sony Playstation handhelds in class, noting that they have a “decent Web browser.”“We want to support whatever kids bring in,” he adds.
  • “It’s much more likely in a few years all students will have their own smartphones,” he says.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08
     
    How 1-1 is changing as students ask to bring in their own laptops
Barbara Lindsey

Academic Evolution: Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid - 0 views

www.academicevolution.com/...intellectual-apartheid.html

publishing2.0 academy higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid
  • I mean academia’s policy that enforces an unnecessary and counterproductive intellectual divide. What intellectual divide? It is that gaping chasm between two opposing models of disseminating knowledge: toll access and open access.
  • lack of access to technology (dubbed the "digital divide") seriously handicaps half the world's population. That is a giant problem but one being gradually ameliorated by mobile telephony and economic forces.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Academics and their institutions have sold out to economic interests in the name of preserving the only system trustworthy enough to produce authoritative information.
  • I believe it is fair to label as “apartheid” any artificial social construct that privileges an elite minority to the detriment of a majority. The artificial construct doing that in the world of knowledge is the toll-access system of traditional scholarly communication.
  • Despite all the digitizing and online publishing now extant, despite the proliferation of websites and web users, despite the largely up-to-date technological infrastructure within academia, it is still the case that most of the world’s most important knowledge remains out of reach of most of the world. Keep that simple fact central in your mind as I revisit the mission statements of universities and academic presses that purport to promote scholarship for the general benefit of humankind.
  • “The mission of a university press,” said Daniel Coit Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University in 1880, “is to assist the university in fulfilling its noble mission ‘to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.'" Universities and academic publishers are ostensibly dedicated to the very opposite of keeping people and knowledge apart. And yet, they do.
  • You really don’t need to go to the developing world to recognize that advanced knowledge is a big club with stiff entrance fees. Even middle class Americans will think twice before throwing down $30 for a scholarly article. How likely will this knowledge ever reach scholars in Mexico or India? And just how broadly can the editors of Subjectivity expect it to reach when subscribing costs $503/year?
  • Academic authors, editors, publishers, and distributors are simply not in the business of reaching the masses; they are in the business of reaching other specialists.
  • Academia banks on Intellectual Apartheid; its knowledge economy only rewards specialists publishing to specialists. In such a world, the “influence” of scholarship is not often correlated to real-world effects; it is usually correlated to how well a given work contributes to the specialist knowledge economy. Citation indexes measure reputations among specialists; “impact factor” relates not to real-world impact, but to reputation within the closed system.
  • one of the great secrets of academic publishing
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      What do you think about this statement? Who knows (and perpetuates) this secret, in your opinion?
  • academia could care less about whether anything its scholars do actually makes a difference in the world, except for the occasional puff piece to show to contributors or alumni. Reaching out to the whole world is the stuff that convocation speeches and university mission statements are made of, but in the day-to-day world of academia, actually reaching the world with one’s refined knowledge is not rewarded. In fact, it is often punished. Generalists, such as those who are using blogging to actually talk to the public about their ideas, are threatened with lack of tenure or advancement if they waste their time in anything but publications oriented towards their disciplinary peers.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      Do you agree with this statement? If so, what does this mean for you and your academic future?
  • A university’s reward system requires its faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals serve the purpose of authenticating knowledge, but at the same time they also wall in that knowledge by making it available only to those willing to pay for it.
  • There is an assumption that if something is “published” (meaning published in a conventional, peer-reviewed journal), then it is appropriately circulating and available.
  • It may be “circulating” among subscribers (a few hundred), but it is simultaneously being kept from the online public (a few billion).
  • Essentially, scholars whose work is measured in terms of how often their articles are cited within peer-reviewed literature demonstrate not so much the actual worth or impact of their ideas as they demonstrate their fidelity to a closed knowledge economy. Impact factor statistics are really loyalty points for the gentlemen's club: if you impressed other members of the club, you get to stay in it. If you try for other audiences--like the one's loftily imagined in university mission statements--you show disloyalty to the club.
  • scholars underestimate the value and influence of their work, voluntarily giving up what their work might mean and do if circulating among a public that is literally six or seven orders of magnitude larger in size that the subscriber base of the most used journals. And it's a shame that broader, open, multi-disciplinary review is considered inferior to one-time assessment by two or three experts. Can we really be sure that conventional peer-reviewed knowledge is as reliable as it pretends to be when its adherents resist transparency and the checks and balances of exposing this knowledge more broadly?
  • I call upon you to join me in a full divestment from intellectual apartheid.
  • Here's how each academic stakeholder can fight Intellectual Apartheid: Scholars: Publish your work in Open Access journals or arrange open access for publications in conventional journals. Use Creative Commons licensing (rather than signing away copyright) in order to preserve access to your own work Deposit your publications in institutional or disciplinary archives to ensure permanent open access and the broadest exposure to search engines. Refuse to peer-review manuscripts or serve in editorial capacities for any journal that does not accommodate open access. Cancel subscriptions to toll-access scholarship Wean yourself from using any research materials that an everyday person from a developing country wouldn't have full access to via the Internet
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      What do you think?
  • In training students, patrons, and faculty, teach them more about how and why to use open access resources rather than how to use expensive proprietary databases and services. Work with administrators to educate faculty about the benefits of open access publishing and rights management.
  • Administrators Create a university-wide mandate (as Harvard has done), requiring faculty to retain copyright of their scholarship and to license the non-exclusive depositing of that scholarship in the institutional archive. Update promotion and tenure policies to favor open access publications and to accommodate evolving scholarly genres (such as data sets, software, and scholarly tools that build the cyberinfrastructure). Require chairs and deans to educate faculty on evolving academic publishing models and to ready their conversion to using and publishing open access scholarship.
Barbara Lindsey

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...162420

seelybrown openeducation educause

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The 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
  • The openness of Wikipedia is instructive in another way: 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.
  • 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. 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.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • A very different sort of initiative that is using technology to leverage social learning is Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India.
  • many students in the United States and in many other parts of the world are already involved with online social networks that include their friends. John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan, has attempted to bring attention to this phenomenon by asking how many students are being taught each year by his institution. Although about 40,000 students are enrolled in classes on the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, King believes that the actual number of students being reached by the school today is closer to 250,000.13
  • 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.
  • Hands-On Universe (HOU) is also designed to promote collaborative learning in astronomy (http://www.handsonuniverse.org). Based at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, 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. According to Kyle Cudworth, the science director at Yerkes Observatory, which is part of the HOU network: “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • the emphasis is on building a community of students and scholars as much as on providing access to educational content.
  • 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.
  • The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments
  • longtail
  • 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
  • We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.
  • Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.6
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • 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.
Barbara Lindsey

FuturistSpeaker.com - The personal blog of Futurist Thomas Frey » Blog Archi... - 0 views

www.futuristspeaker.com/...the-future-of-education

education future Learning2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Architects refer to schools as a “place,” and over the years place-makers have attempted to create the ultimate classroom – a place where learning can be optimized and students can excel.
  • Using classrooms as the primary “touch point” for learning creates many problems. The person or education system that controls the classroom also controls the time when learning can take place, the students who will participate, the lighting, the sounds, the media used, the tools, the pace, the subject matter, and in many cases, the results.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
       
      Can you provide a counterargument?
  • This transition began with the introduction of comment sections at the end of online news posts. People began to voice their thoughts on whether or not a piece of news was accurate, timely, or in any way news-worthy. Many commenters added additional information.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • New forms of education are not achieved by putting an umbrella over our existing education systems and networking them with hopes that they will get better. And they’re not achieved by simply recording the lectures for later broadcast.
  • he notion that education can take place only in a classroom is similar to the notion that purchasing a product can only take place when you see it on a store shelf. Removing the classroom constraints to learning is similar to removing the shelf space constraints to the marketplace.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
       
      Do you think this analogy works?
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
     
    Architects refer to schools as a "place," and over the years place-makers have attempted to create the ultimate classroom - a place where learning can be optimized and students can excel.
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