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Barbara Lindsey

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting | The Penenberg Post | F... - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...say-so-long-book-we-know-it

ebooks books

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Dec 09 - Cached
  • But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
  • Like early filmmakers, some of us will seek new ways to express ourselves through multimedia. Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web and be ported over to any and all mobil devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and beyond.
  • where there's chaos, there's opportunity
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • For the non-fiction author therein lie possibilities to create the proverbial last word on a subject, a one-stop shop for all the information surrounding a particular subject matter. Imagine a biography of Wiley Post, the one-eyed pilot from the 1930s who was the first to fly around the world. It would not only offer the entire text of a book but newsreel footage from his era, coverage of his most famous flights, radio interviews, schematics of his plane, interactive maps of his journeys, interviews with aviation historians and pilots of today, a virtual tour of his cockpit and description of every gauge and dial, short profiles of other flyers of his time, photos, hyperlinked endnotes and index, links to other resources on the subject. Social media could be woven into the fabric of the experience--discussion threads and wikis where readers share information, photos, video, and add their own content to Post's story, which would tie them more closely to the book. There's also the potential for additional revenue streams: You could buy MP3s of popular songs from the 1930s, clothes that were the hot thing back then, model airplanes, other printed books, DVDs, journals, and memorabilia. A visionary author could push the boundaries and re-imagine these books in wholly new ways. A novelist could create whole new realities, a pastiche of video and audio and words and images that could rain down on the user, offering metaphors for artistic expressions. Or they could warp into videogame-like worlds where readers become characters and through the expression of their own free will alter the story to fit. They could come with music soundtracks or be directed or produced by renowned documentarians. They could be collaborations or one-woman projects.
  • Serious literature, and even perhaps much fiction will however, will be published in old book form…or maybe in the current “text on screen” form. The point of reading fiction IS to imagine your own characters and use your imagination…that’s why you read rather then watch a video about it!
  • Traditional books (especially literature) will be relegated to smaller, specialty houses and self-publishing, in its infancy, will boom!
  • The question is, how will the media companies (not just book publishers) respond? We're already seeing the effect on newspapers, as their ad revenue (and business model) collapses. Perhaps history can offer another analogy: When home refrigeration became affordable, it posed an existential threat to the large ice-delivery companies. Some of these firms manufactured ice by the ton in order to warehouse and deliver it at retail. They saw the threat, but not the opportunity - didn't realize the value of their core technology, the ice-making equipment itself. They saw only the falloff in their retail delivery logistics model. Had they licensed their chillers, they could have made a fortune. Likewise, buggy-whip-makers could have retooled as purveyors of leather goods for automobiles.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Dec 09
     
    But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
Barbara Lindsey

Global Voices Online » Brazil: Socio-digital Inclusion through the Lan House... - 0 views

globalvoicesonline.org/...rough-the-lan-house-revolution

access internet third world

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Sep 09 - Cached
  • The photo and caption above illustrate the “Lan House Revolution” taking place right now in Brazil.
  • The concept of the LAN arrived in Brazil in 1998 but it had been previously observed only in the rich Brazilian neighborhoods.
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  • Now it has become a phenomenon especially in poorer and smaller communities, where computers and broadband connection are beyond the reach of the population.
  • “lan houses are places of intense sociability, and are occupying an important place in the life of the favelas”.
  • Research published in 2008 by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) shows that in Brazil 48% of all users access the Internet from commercial premises like lan houses. When it comes to people from the poorest classes D and E, this number jumps to 79% - a 60% increase from the 48.08% in 2006.
  • Playing video games is the main activity at lan houses for 42% of respondents, but an equal proportion access websites, culture, news and entertainment. Social networks, especially Orkut, and online chat are also very popular. In addition, the lan houses are also used for various research, school work and job searches.
  • the lan houses assert both their power to bring digital inclusion by providing access to the Internet for people with low-incomes and their unique characteristics: they provide a source of income for those who manage them and meeting points for youngsters.
  • The headline of the piece of news circulating on the Internet, and that almost certainly will be in the newspapers, is Alleged paedophile arrested in lan house with pictures of children, as you can see in this link from Terra [pt] and from the search on the topic on Google News. It is the lan house that is made infamous, shown in a bad light. Like a den of mismanagement and of corruption for teenagers. This is not the real picture [pt]. The lan houses suffer from the same dangers faced by any other sector of the economy. Lan houses, cyber cafes, telecentres and whatever, have a fundamental role to play in the process of inclusion in the knowledge infrastructure, from digital inclusion to innovation, as is demonstrated by this statistical presentation of the Brazilian market [of lan houses].
  • these laws want to hold them accountable for a problem whose main culprits are authorities and society itself.
  • As of now, there are more than 90,000 lan houses in Brazil, whereas the country has 2,000 movie theatres and 2,600 bookstores. Can they be a place for more than just playing games or updating orkut, or even to use citizenship and e-government services? Pedagogue Rita Guarezi says that lan houses already play a key role in distance learning [pt]:
Barbara Lindsey

Harvard University Library : Publications : News : 9/1/09 - 0 views

hul.harvard.edu/...2009_0901.html

Harvard openaccess research

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Non-faculty researchers and students are already afforded deposit privileges, and DASH will eventually have collection spaces for each of the 10 schools at Harvard.
  • a pro-open-access policy with an "opt out" clause.
  • Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.
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  • Among the many features the DASH development team has added to its DSpace implementation is the ability to link directly from a faculty author's name in DASH search results to his or her entry in Profiles, a research social networking site developed by Harvard Catalyst. Profiles, which provides a comprehensive view of a researcher's publications and connections within the University research community, currently indexes faculty from the medical and public health schools; its developers hope to expand it to include the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the near future.
  • "DASH is meant to promote openness in general," stated Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library. "It will make the current scholarship of Harvard's faculty freely available everywhere in the world, just as the digitization of the books in Harvard's library will make learning accumulated since 1638 accessible worldwide. Taken together, these and other projects represent a commitment by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth."
Barbara Lindsey

read-write web vs. academic publishing « an academic at work - 1 views

enzaac.wordpress.com/...ite-web-vs-academic-publishing

aroundtheworld beyondwebct education tenure web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Sep 08 - Cached
  • The question I have been pondering lately is this: What role does a read-write web platform play in the dossier of an academic?
  • ’ve been truly fortunate to have had a paper accepted by the official journal of the American Council for Foreign Language Educators, which has a circulation of approximately 10,000 subscriptions in membership and also has found in approximately 1000 libraries.
  • Now, let’s turn to the world of the read-write web. Perhaps I wouldn’t be able to determine with certainty how many people read it, but I could see how many views my article gets,
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Would any member of the administration of an American college or university consider the number of hits, favorites, downloads, etc. as valuable for a decision on hiring, tenure, promotion, recognition, etc.? I believe in the age of web 2.0, where social networking fosters an environment for sharing and transmitting knowledge (no longer limited to the ivory-tower library), we can’t ignore the importance of web views.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 27 Sep 08
     
    The question I have been pondering lately is this: What role does a read-write web platform play in the dossier of an academic?
Barbara Lindsey

A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do) | Britannica Blog - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...ts-today-what-teachers-must-do

Michael_Wesch education students britannica disengaged

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 24 Oct 08 - Cached
  • My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. It wasn’t the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.
  • Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
  • Despite my role in the production of the video, and the thousands of comments supporting it, I recently came to view the video with a sense of uneasiness and even incredulity. Surely it can’t be as bad as the video seems to suggest, I thought. I started wrestling with these doubts over the summer as I fondly recalled the powerful learning experiences I had shared with my students the previous year. By the end of the summer I had become convinced that the video was over the top, that things were really not so bad, that the system is not as broken as I thought, and we should all just stop worrying and get on with our teaching.
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  • The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Its sheer size, layout, and technology are testaments to the efficiency and expediency with which we can now provide students with their required credit hours.
  • But the problems are not new. They are the same as those identified by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner nearly 40 years ago when they described the plight of “totally alienated students” involved in a cheating scandal
  • Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans.
  • Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.
  • Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
  • Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.” Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.
  • We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies.
  • When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
  • One of the difficulties I find in teaching this way is that each semester I start from scratch. Students need to learn how to learn this way, just as they learned the passivity of the lecture hall over years. By the same token, we need to learn how to teach this way. It does mean changing the role of the teacher. It does mean a shift in the relationship between knowledge, student, and professor. There are difficult institutional-ideological issues coming from all sides there. As such, we are not just talking about changing teaching or learning practices but about changing institutional cultures.
  • And won’t you concede that there’s some things that simply need to be communicated and digested, period? Is there really a better collaborative, social-network paradigm for learning noun endings in Russian or the multiplication tables, or for how best to craft a sentence, which takes the human touch of a creative, talented teacher? Some things just have to be, uh, “learned,” memorized, practiced with pencil and paper, pen and pad.
  • For that very reason of “envelopment,” we need to preserve a few spaces on campus in which the cloud is dispelled and students must engage in the “old dynamics of knowledge”–if only as an exercise in mental flexibility. Shouldn’t we be concerned about what is lost as things have “shifted”?
  • “I agree with some of what he says, but I don’t think I would offer the implicit absolution to students that he does. How are they failing their educations? … Wesch seems to believe that if students are disengaged from the learning process, it’s the fault of the professoriat.”
  • If we assume that students can access information either before class (via textbooks, for instance) or during class as needed (via laptops and other devices), then we need not spend class time transmitting information to our students. We can, instead, spend precious class time helping students make sense of that information, taking advantage of the fact that class time is the only time when we’re all together (face-to-face, at least) to interact with each other around that information. One method of doing so that scales up very well to a class with hundreds of students (to address David Carson’s concern) is what Mazur calls “peer instruction” facilitated by a classroom response system (”clickers”). The teacher poses a challenging and interesting multiple-choice question. (There are such questions as Michael points out with his anecdote about a student “overthinking” a multiple-choice exam question.) The students think about the question and submit their answers using their clickers. If the results generated by the classroom response system show that there’s disagreement about the question (which is likely to happen if the question is sufficiently challenging), then the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbors. After some time for this “peer instruction,” the students vote again with their clickers. Often, this second vote will show some convergence to the correct answer (provided the question has a single correct answer, which isn’t necessary). Either way, the stage is set for a productive classwide discussion of the question or a mini-lecture by the teacher.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 24 Oct 08
       
      What do you think of this approach?
  • I must admit that I enjoy teaching a large class of 400, many of whom enter the class for a requirement, because it gives me an opportunity to reach out to them with insights and transformative experiences that they are highly unlikely to stumble across in self-directed study. It also gives me a much more diverse group of people to work with and engage with in collaborative study, which can be much more powerful than simple self-directed study.
  • Are you right that “knowledge is made” in a “cloud of ubiquitous digital information”? Or, is this precisely one of anthropology’s significant contributions to the life of the mind, to a mindful life? Common sense cannot be trusted. Information, even in the highly evocative cloud-form, is *not* knowledge. Whatever knowledge is (i.e. as the philosopher’s ‘true justified belief ‘ or some even more exotic formulation), surely it is an actionable individual possession. The cloud is not knowledgeable, it is informational. And, I wonder how you might respond to a claim that our walls, the particular architectonics of the disciplines we work within, provide students with the conversational, narrative, cognitive, epistemological, methodological, ontological, the –ogical means for converting mere information into knowledge.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 24 Oct 08
     
    My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can "get by" without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA's continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can "get by" without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. It wasn't the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that "getting by" is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.
Barbara Lindsey

The Rise of Twitter as a Platform for Serious Discourse - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...form_for_serious_discourse.php

higher ed twitter

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08 - Cached
  • captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging."
  • Twitter
  • Twitter
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  • Twitter is fast becoming a serious platform for discourse and discussion. More than a status app, it is being used as a first alert mechanism for the dissemination of news and for immediate discussion surrounding that news. It is the coverage of news events and the continued emergence of citizen journalism that will push Twitter toward the mainstream this year.
  • Increasingly mainstream news reporters and bloggers are utilizing Twitter to put up news tid bits as they happen, and commentary as it pops into their heads.
  • Twitter has smartly nourished a large set of tools that help people use the service. This makes it easier for people to get content on Twitter in the manner most convenient and most comfortable to them, which in the long run should help drive adoption of the service. "The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we've done with Twitter," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told us in September.
  • The API has also allowed for mashups that filter Twitter content making it easier to find. One relevant Twitter aggregator is Politweets (our coverage), which brings together all the messages sent over Twitter about the US election.
  • Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation.
  • Twitter encourages discourse and feedback. For reporters that aren't afraid to get down and dirty, Twitter is a golden opportunity to build a rapport with readers and gauge public opinion. It also makes readers feel more connected to the news when they can participate in a discussion about it as it happens, often times with the people reporting it first hand.
  • "It's not right for every piece of information. It's certainly not well suited for longer analysis. But when it comes to instantly assembling raw data from several sources that then go into fully baked news stories, nothing beats it."
  • But for the mainstream audience, Twitter might need better filtering tools before people can really wrap their heads around it.
  • it's not threaded, so replies get shuffled around and often times, out of context, just become confusing. Further, when everyone is having a conversation at once, things get noisy. Twitter desperately needs a filter.
  • Twitter is being used more and more for mainstream news coverage. KPBS News San Diego uses Twitter to put out updates about stories, for example, and during the California wildfires last fall it was a must read. The potential for Twitter to be used for news dissemination is something the site's founders realized early on during an earthquake.
  • it seems likely that Twitter will become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs.
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.
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  • 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

Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Into Language & Culture Courses - bit... - 0 views

j.mp/8Xiuxa

bit.ly j.mp urlshortener stats

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09
     
    j.mp and bit.ly let you see who, where and how often your public URLs are shared.
Barbara Lindsey

Edge: NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE By Clay Shirky - 0 views

www.edge.org/...shirky09_index.html

shirky future newspapers

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09 - Cached
  • When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09
       
      What do you think about this? If true, what would it mean for you?
  • If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.
  • The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau.
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  • Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.
  • Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole.
  • In craigslist's gradual shift from 'interesting if minor' to 'essential and transformative', there is one possible answer to the question "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
  • Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
  • Second, they will stay focused on producing the best digital news products for their audience, products that take full advantage of the Internet's unique properties — its ability to combine immediacy and depth, its ability to offer highly personalized experiences, its ability to offer instant access to useful information from obscure public records to mundane event listings, and its ability to form networks so that users may form communities that mirror and extend the ones that exist in the physical world. They will learn how to engage their users to create and contribute content to enrich the experience of reading online, and not overwhelm their readers with a cacophony of undifferentiated noise.
  • The point here is that newspapers must accomplish online what they have long been able to achieve for generations of readers in print: they must forge an emotional bond with their readers by becoming an essential part of their daily lives.
  • Third, and perhaps most important (because without this the first two are impossible), newspapers must recognize (as some already have) that technology and journalism are inexorably intertwined.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09
     
    "Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario."
Barbara Lindsey

Why Indie Directors Are Releasing Movies Online - For Free - TIME - 0 views

www.time.com/...0,8599,1950005,00.html

viral videos

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Dec 09 - Cached
  • So Vuorensola took matters into his own hands: he used a Finnish social networking site to build up an online fan base who contributed to the storyline, made props and even offered their acting skills. In return for the help, Vuorensola released Star Wreck in 2005 online for free. Seven hundred thousand copies were downloaded in the first week alone; to date, the total has now reached 9 million.
  • "Whether it's through piracy or distribution your film is out there on the Internet, so we decided to harness this."
  • "I have my blog, but I essentially gave the film to the audience and they ran with it," Paley says. "It wasn't self-distribution, it was audience distribution."
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  • "What I have learned is that the more freely you show the film, the more audiences will buy the DVD and surrounding merchandise," she says.
  • The Internet has become a free distribution machine, so what can you sell that makes money? Things you can't copy. They need to be things that are based around your audience. Directors cuts, merchandise, 35mm prints of your film."
Barbara Lindsey

Why Indie Directors Are Releasing Movies Online -- For Free - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...08599195000500

viral videos

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Dec 09 - No Cached
  • "What I have learned is that the more freely you show the film, the more audiences will buy the DVD and surrounding merchandise," she says. "
  • And in May, documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong launched a website called www.indiescreenings.net, where people can buy a license and then screen her climate-change documentary, The Age of Stupid. Armstrong incentivizes buyers by allowing them to keep any profits from ticket sales.
  • So Vuorensola took matters into his own hands: he used a Finnish social networking site to build up an online fan base who contributed to the storyline, made props and even offered their acting skills. In return for the help, Vuorensola released Star Wreck in 2005 online for free. Seven hundred thousand copies were downloaded in the first week alone; to date, the total has now reached 9 million.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "Whether it's through piracy or distribution your film is out there on the Internet, so we decided to harness this." And he has managed to make quite a bit of money out of it.
  • The Internet has become a free distribution machine, so what can you sell that makes money? Things you can't copy. They need to be things that are based around your audience. Directors cuts, merchandise, 35mm prints of your film."
  • Barbara Lindsey on 27 Dec 09
     
    "What I have learned is that the more freely you show the film, the more audiences will buy the DVD and surrounding merchandise," she says.
Barbara Lindsey

Technology in the Middle » Blog Archive » In the Classroom: Global Collaboration - 0 views

pwoessner.com/...classroom-global-collaboration

globallyconnectedproj global collaboration students education2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 May 09 - Cached
  • Technology also determined how the project would end. Considering I was using the internet for overseas contact, I decided to look domestically for the conclusion. As a result of just a few minutes effort using emails I found three US museums (see below) who agreed to take our class interview projects for safe keeping in their archives. I was overwhelmed by the interest in our work and was amazed when the US National WWII Museum in New Orleans asked to have us provide links and information for their website. In conclusion, some simple email and wiki-site contact with a handful of schools brought the WWII period to life for Midwestern students in the US like nothing else could have.
  • Poland offered vivid stories and images of invasion, concentration camps, and families torn apart, and my students were able examine perspectives that were not to be found in our text book.
  • After blanketing the world with polite requests for collaboration things began shaping up. My 6th graders were set to work with schools in Turkey, Lebanon, and Morocco. My 7th graders were set to work with schools in Germany, Denmark, Japan, the Philippines, and most importantly Junior High #4 in Poland.
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  • My students were involved in two projects. One was collecting and discussing input from around the world on WWII, and the other was interviewing someone in their own life who had a connection to the war. The combination of the two projects proved powerful. The process connected them with friends and family who told amazing stories of their youth, they were able to social network with other students on the other side of the world, and we managed to slip in a good deal of history when they were not looking.
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