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Nicole McClure

Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology ... - 0 views

  • Research indicates that each of these media, when designed for education, fosters particular types of interactions that enable—and undercut—various learning styles.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How much do we know about our students' learning styles? How do we know this?
  • Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn
  • The familiar "world to the desktop." Provides access to distant experts and archives and enables collaborations, mentoring relationships, and virtual communities of practice. This interface is evolving through initiatives such as Internet2. "Alice in Wonderland" multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). Participants' avatars (self-created digital characters) interact with computer-based agents and digital artifacts in virtual contexts. The initial stages of studies on shared virtual environments are characterized by advances in Internet games and work in virtual reality. Ubiquitous computing. Mobile wireless devices infuse virtual resources as we move through the real world. The early stages of "augmented reality" interfaces are characterized by research on the role of "smart objects" and "intelligent contexts" in learning and doing.
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  • But what is so special about the egocentric perspectives and situated learning now enabled by emerging media? After all, each of us lives with an egocentric perspective in the real world and has many opportunities for situated learning without using technology. One attribute that makes mediated immersion different and powerful is the ability to access information resources and psychosocial community distributed across distance and time, broadening and deepening experience. A second important attribute is the ability to create interactions and activities in mediated experience not possible in the real world, such as teleporting within a virtual environment, enabling a distant person to see a real-time image of your local environment, or interacting with a (simulated) chemical spill in a busy public setting. Both of these attributes are actualized in the Alice-in-Wonderland interface.
  • Net Generation learning styles stem primarily from the world-to-the-desktop interface; however, the growing prevalence of interfaces to virtual environments and augmented realities is beginning to foster so-called neomillennial learning styles in users of all ages.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What is the timeline?
    • Nicole McClure
       
      That's an interesting question - sometimes I think we are already on the other side of this, meaning we've already passed it in some ways. Last night I was out for dinner at the Main Street and I saw something that was a little crazy. My husband and I were using my cellphone to look up words that would help trigger a creative name for his new company - a UConn professor (who shall remain unnamed :)) was using his iPhone for something other than a phone call - and the women at the table across from me were also engaged in half converstation - half text message/email, etc. The reason that I bring this up is that all of these people, myself included, are NOT part of the millenial generation (way past I'm afraid!) and we were using this stuff. As history goes - if the "grown-ups" are using it, the kids are over it and on to something else.
  • Immersion is the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience.
  • Beyond actional and symbolic immersion, advances in interface technology are now creating virtual environments and augmented realities that induce a psychological sense of sensory and physical immersion.
  • Inducing a participant's symbolic immersion involves triggering powerful semantic associations via the content of an experience.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Felice's Utopian City
  • The research on virtual reality Salzman and I conducted on frames of reference found that the exocentric and the egocentric FORs have different strengths for learning. Our studies established that learning ideally involves a "bicentric" perspective alternating between egocentric and exocentric FORs.
  • The capability of computer interfaces to foster psychological immersion enables technology-intensive educational experiences that draw on a powerful pedagogy: situated learning.
  • The major schools of thought cited are behaviorist theories of learning (presentational instruction), cognitivist theories of learning (tutoring and guided learning by doing), and situated theories of learning (mentoring and apprenticeships in communities of practice).
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What kinds of learning environments do you prefer and what kinds do you create for your students?
  • Situated learning requires authentic contexts, activities, and assessment coupled with guidance from expert modeling, mentoring, and "legitimate peripheral participation."8 As an example of legitimate peripheral participation, graduate students work within the laboratories of expert researchers, who model the practice of scholarship. These students interact with experts in research as well as with other members of the research team who understand the complex processes of scholarship to varying degrees. While in these laboratories, students gradually move from novice researchers to more advanced roles, with the skills and expectations for them evolving.
  • Potentially quite powerful, situated learning is much less used for instruction than behaviorist or cognitivist approaches. This is largely because creating tacit, relatively unstructured learning in complex real-world settings is difficult.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Not too far in the future!
  • Initial research on Environmental Detectives and other AR-based educational simulations demonstrates that this type of immersive, situated learning can effectively engage students in critical thinking about authentic scenarios.
  • However, virtual environments and ubiquitous computing can draw on the power of situated learning by creating immersive, extended experiences with problems and contexts similar to the real world.9 In particular, MUVEs and real-world settings augmented with virtual information provide the capability to create problem-solving communities in which participants can gain knowledge and skills through interacting with other participants who have varied levels of skills, enabling legitimate peripheral participation driven by intrinsic sociocultural forces.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      One of the most difficult skills to master.
  • Situated learning is important in part because of the crucial issue of transfer. Transfer is defined as the application of knowledge learned in one situation to another situation and is demonstrated if instruction on a learning task leads to improved performance on a transfer task, typically a skilled performance in a real-world setting
  • Moreover, the evolution of an individual's or group's identity is an important type of learning for which simulated experiences situated in virtual environments or augmented realities are well suited. Reflecting on and refining an individual identity is often a significant issue for higher education students of all ages, and learning to evolve group and organizational identity is a crucial skill in enabling innovation and in adapting to shifting contexts.
  • Immersion is important in this process of identity exploration because virtual identity is unfettered by physical attributes such as gender, race, and disabilities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Don't agree with this. We come to any environment with our own baggage and we do not interact in a neutral social context.
  • Thanks to out-of-game trading of in-game items, Norrath, the virtual setting of the MMOG EverQuest, is the seventy-seventh largest economy in the real world, with a GNP per capita between that of Russia and Bulgaria. One platinum piece, the unit of currency in Norrath, trades on real world exchange markets higher than both the Yen and the Lira (Castronova, 2001).14
  • Multiple teams of students can access the MUVE simultaneously, each individual manipulating an avatar which is "sent back in time" to this virtual environment. Students must collaborate to share the data each team collects. Beyond textual conversation, students can project to each other "snapshots" of their current individual point of view (when someone has discovered an item of general interest) and also can "teleport" to join anyone on their team for joint investigation. Each time a team reenters the world, several months of time have passed in River City, so learners can track the dynamic evolution of local problems.
  • In our research on this educational MUVE based on situated learning, we are studying usability, student motivation, student learning, and classroom implementation issues. The results thus far are promising: All learners are highly motivated, including students typically unengaged in classroom settings. All students build fluency in distributed modes of communication and expression and value using multiple media because each empowers different types of communication, activities, experiences, and expressions. Even typically low-performing students can master complex inquiry skills and sophisticated content. Shifts in the pedagogy within the MUVE alter the pattern of student performance.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Would like to see research on this.
  • Research shows that many participants value this functionality and choose to access the Web page after leaving the museum.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      More could be done with this.
  • Participants in these distributed simulations use location-aware handheld computers (with GPS technology), allowing users to physically move throughout a real-world location while collecting place-dependent simulated field data, interviewing virtual characters, and collaboratively investigating simulated scenarios.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Much better
  • he defining quality of a learning community is that there is a culture of learning, in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding. There are four characteristics that such a culture must have: (1) diversity of expertise among its members, who are valued for their contributions and given support to develop, (2) a shared objective of continually advancing the collective knowledge and skills, (3) an emphasis on learning how to learn, and (4) mechanisms for sharing what is learned. If a learning community is presented with a problem, then the learning community can bring its collective knowledge to bear on the problem. It is not necessary that each member assimilate everything that the community knows, but each should know who within the community has relevant expertise to address any problem. This is a radical departure from the traditional view of schooling, with its emphasis on individual knowledge and performance, and the expectation that students will acquire the same body of knowledge at the same time.26
  • This immersion in virtual environments and augmented realities shapes participants' learning styles beyond what using sophisticated computers and telecommunications has fostered thus far, with multiple implications for higher education.
  • Students were most effective in learning and problem-solving when they collectively sought, sieved, and synthesized experiences rather than individually locating and absorbing information from some single best source.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How does this 'fit' learning goals and teaching styles in our program?
  • Rheingold's forecasts draw on lifestyles seen at present among young people who are high-end users of new media
  • Notion of place is layered/blended/multiple; mobility and nomadicity prevalent among dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats (for example, coffeehouses near campus)
  • Rather than having core identities defined through a primarily local set of roles and relationships, people would express varied aspects of their multifaceted identities through alternate extended experiences in distributed virtual environments and augmented realities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How is this different from current experiences for individuals working within/across different social groups and boundaries?
  • one-third of U.S. households now have broadband access to the Internet. In the past three years, 14 million U.S. families have linked their computers with wireless home networks. Some 55 percent of Americans now carry cell phones
  • Mitchell's forecasts25 are similar to Rheingold's in many respects. He too envisions largely tribal lifestyles distributed across dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats: electronic nomads wandering among virtual campfires. People's senses and physical agency are extended outward and into the intangible, at considerable cost to individual privacy. Individual identity is continuously reformed via an ever-shifting series of networking with others and with tools. People express themselves through nonlinear, associational webs of representations rather than linear "stories" and co-design services rather than selecting a precustomized variant from a menu of possibilities.
  • More and more, though, people of all ages will have lifestyles involving frequent immersion in both virtual and augmented reality. How might distributed, immersive media be designed specifically for education, and what neomillennial learning styles might they induce?
  • Guided social constructivism and situated learning as major forms of pedagogy
  • Peer-developed and peer-rated forms of assessment complement faculty grading, which is often based on individual accomplishment in a team performance context  Assessments provide formative feedback on instructional effectiveness
  • Mediated immersion creates distributed learning communities, which have different strengths and limits than location-bound learning communities confined to classroom settings and centered on the teacher and archival materials.27
  • Multipurpose habitats—creating layered/blended/personalizable places rather than specialized locations (such as computer labs)
  • Neomillenial Versus Millennial Learning Styles
  • Emphasis is placed on implications for strategic investments in physical plant, technology infrastructure, and professional development.
  • o the extent that some of these ideas about neomillennial learning styles are accurate, campuses that make strategic investments in physical plant, technical infrastructure, and professional development along the dimensions suggested will gain a considerable competitive advantage in both recruiting top students and teaching them effectively.
  • such as textbooks linked to course ratings by students)
  • Mirroring": Immersive virtual environments provide replicas of distant physical settings
  • Middleware, interoperability, open content, and open source
  • Finding information Sequential assimilation of linear information stream
  • Student products generally tests or papers Grading centers on individual performance
  • These ideas are admittedly speculative rather than based on detailed evidence and are presented to stimulate reaction and dialogue about these trends.
  • f we accept much of the analysis above
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      But have they made the case for its educational value?
  • students of all ages with increasingly neomillennial learning styles will be drawn to colleges and universities that have these capabilities. Four implications for investments in professional development also are apparent. Faculty will increasingly need capabilities in:
  • Some of these shifts are controversial for many faculty; all involve "unlearning" almost unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and values about the nature of teaching, learning, and the academy. Professional development that requires unlearning necessitates high levels of emotional/social support in addition to mastering the intellectual/technical dimensions involved. The ideal form for this type of professional development is distributed learning communities so that the learning process is consistent with the knowledge and culture to be acquired. In other words, faculty must themselves experience mediated immersion and develop neomillennial learning styles to continue teaching effectively as the nature of students alters.
  • Differences among individuals are greater than dissimilarities between groups, so students in any age cohort will present a mixture of neomillennial, millennial, and traditional learning styles
  • The technologies discussed are emerging rather than mature, so their final form and influences on users are not fully understood. A substantial number of faculty and administrators will likely dismiss and resist some of the ideas and recommendations presented here.
Barbara Lindsey

Pixar University: Thinking Outside The Mouse - 0 views

  • Pixar University -- a professional-development program that puts as much emphasis on employee education as it does on company training -- is the company's secret weapon. "During 90 percent of your workday, you're in this box -- you get to do only certain things," said Polson. "And yet we're all here because we love movies and art. At Pixar University, all the boxes get removed. All the walls come down, and you get to be the director of your own creative idea." Polson has taken classes in drawing, screenwriting, and color, and he's completed a course in which he made his own short film.
  • The point of improv -- like most of classes in the packed curriculum -- is to push Pixar employees to try new things, work together better and test new ideas. "If you don't create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it's likely you're going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace," said Pixar University Dean Randy Nelson. "Those kind of irrational what-ifs eventually lead to something that makes you go, 'Wow, I never would have thought about it.'"
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Does current graduate educational system create derivative mini-mes?
  • Animators agree that Disney, Pixar's most prized partner in production of its first films -- and its recognized competitor in the animation world at large -- has begun to produce films critics call formulaic.
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  • Nelson said the university's primary purpose is to build morale, spirit and communication among employees.
  • By the time these people worked together for 25 years, you would just not believe the things that would happen."
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    "Pixar University -- a professional-development program that puts as much emphasis on employee education as it does on company training -- is the company's secret weapon. "During 90 percent of your workday, you're in this box -- you get to do only certain things," said Polson. "And yet we're all here because we love movies and art. At Pixar University, all the boxes get removed. All the walls come down, and you get to be the director of your own creative idea." Polson has taken classes in drawing, screenwriting, and color, and he's completed a course in which he made his own short film. "
Barbara Lindsey

Integrating Technology for Active Life-long Learning (IT4ALL) - 0 views

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    Free professional development (Certificates included) on how to integrate technology for active learning via blended (BL) and blended online learning (BOL) courses and workshops
Barbara Lindsey

#movemeon 2009 by Doug Belshaw in Education & Language - 0 views

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    Valuable professional development from seasoned educattors via Twitter and published for FREE with LULU!  
Barbara Lindsey

twtpoll :: What do you want to talk about during this weeks (12/8) #edchat? (via @web20... - 0 views

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    Great use of twtpoll for ongoing, online, collaborative professional development. Could also use with students as comprehension check, way for students to have more voice in their learning, etc.
Barbara Lindsey

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

  • 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.
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  • 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

Educating With "The Big Three": Critical Thinking, Interdisciplinary Thought, & the Tra... - 1 views

  • This type of rigorous thought will only come with altering the structure to include more collaboration and realignment of priorities to ensure that adequate time is spent discussing “cross sections” of curriculum. Since time is a valuable priority, I would suggest a virtual set-up (via blogs or a Ning) that allows for ideas to flow freely. In addition, including some aspect of this in end-of-year summaries for teachers and administrators would stimulate more of a sense of urgency to deal with this problem. I contend that much of the reason these types of assignments do not exist is the product of a lack of time for teachers to develop strong collegial relationships with teachers that they normally do not come in contact with. The key is that we need to break the tradition of “closed door” classrooms and allow professionals from other departments, schools, and districts in to acquire a gauge on what students are studying in other subject areas.
  • By working to create a culture and structure that cultivate deeper professional relationships between teachers of different backgrounds, the challenge of assignments can only improve.
Barbara Lindsey

Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 0 views

  • intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence
  • While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences.
  • A tagging language is nothing more than a set of categories that all members of a group agree to use when bookmarking websites for shared projects.
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  • In Shirky's terms, teams that embrace social bookmarking decrease the "cost" of  group transactions.  No longer do members resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning, groups can make sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.
  • Imagine the collective power of an army of readers engaged in ongoing conversation about provocative ideas, challenging one another's thought, publicly debating, and polishing personal beliefs.  Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.  Imagine the potential for brainstorming global solutions, for holding government agencies accountable, or for gathering feedback from disparate stakeholder groups when reading moves from a "fundamentally private activity" to a "community event."
  • Understanding that there are times when users want their shared reading experiences to be more focused, however, Diigo makes it possible to keep highlights and annotations private or available to members of predetermined and self-selected groups.  For professional learning teams exploring instructional practices or for student research groups exploring content for classroom projects, this provides a measure of targeted exploration between likeminded thinkers.
  • Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums
  • Many of today's teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.  The results can be disastrous.  Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.  "Why did I bother to plug my students in for this project?" teachers wonder.  "They could have done better work with a piece of paper and a pencil!"
  • With shared annotation services like Diigo, powerful learning depends on much more than understanding the technical details behind adding highlights and comments for other members of a group to see.  Instead, powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together.  That means teachers must systematically introduce students to a set of collaborative dialogue behaviors that can be easily implemented online.
Barbara Lindsey

Chinesepod and Connectivism: More connections lead to more learning » Moving ... - 0 views

  • More cognitive and affective experiences lead to more thinking, more synaptic connections, and more learning. To this end, we have sought to leverage guesswork, repetition, stories, context, in-depth discussion, etc, to offer what Siemens might call ’frequency, diversity, and depth of exposure’ to the content. I’ve always maintained that learning is multi-dimensional, and deepened when you approach the subject from different angles.
  • we are connectors, or resources who point learners at key patterns or elements that help strengthen their connection to a piece of information (and emphasize the skill of being able to identify patterns).
  • Teachers do NOT provide digital access to notes and materials, and students are quizzed regularly about the content on which they have taken textual notes to see if this traditional “broadcast/spray model” of learning has been effective. (Or at least if the items included in the quiz have temporarily been stored in short term memory.) We MUST move beyond this traditional “banking model” of education, and I’m convinced the impetus for these changes is NOT coming and is not GOING to come from “inside the system” of traditional education.
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  • How many of the teachers we work with on a daily basis understand the foundational elements of connectivisim? VERY, VERY few in my estimation. Why don’t they understand? Because they have not EXPERIENCED connectivisim. It is not enough to show or be told. One must EXPERIENCE the power of networked learning to understand it and appreciate its potentials.
  • blended learning conference event which is K-12 Online.
  • participate and share the upcoming K-12 Online Conference which starts next week with our pre-conference keynote. The conference is free, it’s global, and the co-learners involved (that includes YOU as well as presenters and other participants) are all providing a rich context for experiential, connectivist learning.
  • if your local educational organization agrees, you can even earn professional development credit for your participation and time!
  • we are not limited in our access to expert teachers and co-learners if we want to learn
  • Ken challenges me by thoughtfully connecting his educational practice with learning theories which build on and powerfully extend those which I’ve studied in graduate school.
  • We can take, ourselves, an online blended course on a topic of interest so that we can personally EXPERIENCE and therefore appropriate / claim for ourselves / understand with depth some of the benefits as well as drawbacks of online learning contexts.
  • Blended learning, because it offers the possibility of appropriating best practices from BOTH face-to-face as well as online/virtual learning contexts, can provide greater opportunities for authentic learning and meaningful connections than any other educational modality.
Barbara Lindsey

digital digs: Richard Miller's MLA Dream - 1 views

  • How long do we have before someone comes along and just imposes something or simply supplants us? 30 years? 20 years? Will it begin in as little as five or ten years? Think about Wall St and the auto industry before you answer.
  • A liberal arts college creates a digital humanities center. The center starts to get grants and increasingly becomes better funded by the institution. Faculty from across humanities departments interested in the digital become more closely tied to the center than to their departments. Humanities curriculum become increasingly driven by the Center. Hiring and tenuring priorities still ostensibly in departments start to reflect the priorities of the Center and the faculty associated with it. Graduate students increasingly work with faculty whose interests are as much in the Center as they are in the department. You start to get new interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary programs. Departments get squeezed to the periphery. Faculty in such centers around the nation establish new professional organizations and new national conferences. They get funding for new publishing venues.
  • Miller sees the necessity for developing new media composing pedagogies that foster creativity and collaboration, for preparing faculty to teach in this way (and compose themselves in this way), and for building spaces where such activities might be possible.
Barbara Lindsey

One Laptop One Child | Scholastic.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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.
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    How 1-1 is changing as students ask to bring in their own laptops
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