Back then, most of his students were unfamiliar with Twitter, the microblogging service that limits messages to 140 characters. And for the first few weeks of course, students were reluctant to tweet, says Mr. Complese. “It took a few weeks for this to click,” he said. “Before it started to work, there was just nothing on the back channel.”
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Wired Campus: Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via... - 0 views
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Once students warmed to the idea that their professors actually wanted them to chat during class, students begin floating ideas or posting links to related materials, the professor says. In some cases, a shy student would type an observation or question on Twitter, and others in the class would respond with notes encouraging the student to raise the topic out loud. Other times, one of the professors would see a link posted by a student and stop class to discuss it.
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his hope is that the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls.
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I am one of Cole’s “experimental lab rats,” and I must say that Cole and his colleague changed the way that I view teaching and learning. That course disrupted my notions of participation, identity, and community, and the changes are for the better. The course was so intellectually stimulating that when the course ended, I experienced a tremendous loss. The loss was so great that I felt myself trying to create Twitter communities in my future classes because I missed that engagement. If you are curious about our course, visit my course blog. https://blogs.psu.edu/mt4/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=655&tag=CI597C&limit=20 From there, you can access other students’ blogs and see some of the other conversations that ensued. For those who are critiquing Cole for his “grand experiment,” I must say that those of us who were in the course take pride in being a part of such an innovative course that challenged our perspectives of teaching and learning. We truly became a community, and that community has continued to this day on Twitter. I have even started using Twitter when I teach my undergraduate courses! Thank you, Cole (and colleague), for making a difference in my life! If you still curious about the course, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE935OqkKE8 and hear more about it.
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@Bill Sodeman, FERPA does not come into play in what we did here. Twitter was not a replacement for a course management system and we didn’t hand out grades or force anyone into the environment. Those who adopted found it worthwhile. Also, controlling access would have killed one of the other really important (and unintentional) things that happened here — people not enrolled in the course followed and contributed via Twitter live!
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We introduced quite a variety of technologies as we explored themes of community, identity, and design — all while participating in some very rigorous readings and conversations. I wrote a few posts about it a while back. Twitter was the most surprising outcome on many levels. At the end of the day, it was the class that became the community. Twitter empowered that in a strange way — a way that has us thinking about how we do this again. The one thing I am thrilled to see is that this conversation is happening — again, not about Twitter per se, but about rethinking practice. Thanks to everyone who is contributing thoughts!
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@Megan Fritz The most intriguing part for me was the there was no official “monitor” of our conversation. Instead, we new that Cole and his colleague were tuned in, but it didn’t matter. We were in charge of our conversation. We became the drivers of the conversation, which made it meaningful for us as we constructed our learning. The channels of communication changed from bi-directional (teacher-to-student) to multi-directional (teacher-student-student-teacher, etc.). I would be bothered by thinking that the professor thought that we were “off track” and needed someone to monitor us to keep the back channel on track. In our case, the back channel was very much on task and often sat in the driver’s seat. It gives a whole new meaning to student-directed instruction. While such openness can be scary and intimidating because the control is handed over to the students, the experience can be powerful because the teacher becomes a member of the community partaking in the negotiation of the steering of the conversation.
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I’m a PR student at the University of Oregon and this term I’m taking a social media marketing class with Kelli Matthews. She allows us to tweet during lecture as long as we tag content with #j412. If anyone would like to sit in just do a twitter search for #j412. We meet Monday and Wednesdays noon to 1:30 (pacific time). Or, check out our class website: http://strategicsocialmedia.wordpress.com/
The Many Roles of Skype in the Classroom | ISTE's NECC09 Blog - 0 views
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From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views
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wesch social media web2.0 education teaching academic commons
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The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.” Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in. This culture of discussion and participation is now available on any website with the emerging “second layer” of the web through applications like Diigo which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
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Our physical structures were built prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple with the emerging possibilities.
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The physical structures are easiest to see, and are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
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at the base of this “information revolution” are new ways of relating to one another, new forms of discourse, new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0” buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration. It is this “spirit” of Web 2.0 which is important to education. The technology is secondary. This is a social revolution, not a technological one, and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.
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Even in situations in which a spirit of exploration and freedom exist, where faculty are free to experiment to work beyond physical and social constraints, our cognitive habits often get in the way
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Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
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Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.
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Taken together, this new media environment demonstrates to us that the idea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.
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Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers.
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Usually our courses are arranged around “subjects.” Postman and Weingartner note that the notion of “subjects” has the unwelcome effect of teaching our students that “English is not History and History is not Science and Science is not Art . . . and a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it.” Always aware of the hidden metaphors underlying our most basic assumptions, they suggest calling this “the Vaccination Theory of Education” as students are led to believe that once they have “had” a subject they are immune to it and need not take it again.5
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As an alternative, I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.”6 You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.
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We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
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So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”
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Students are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to harness and leverage the new media environment to find information, theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each student has a specific role and expertise to develop. A world map is superimposed on the class and each student is asked to become an expert on a specific aspect of the region in which they find themselves. Using this knowledge, they work in 15-20 small groups to create realistic cultures, step-by-step, as we go through each aspect of culture in class. This allows them to apply the knowledge they learn in the course and to recognize the ways different aspects of culture--economic, social, political, and religious practices and institutions--are integrated in a cultural system.
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The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It is recorded by students on twenty digital video cameras and edited into one final "world history" video using clips from real world history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together in the final weeks of the class, using it as a discussion starter for contemplating our world and our role in its future. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom - profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future, and one humanity. We find ourselves not just as co-creators of a simulation, but as co-creators of the world itself, and the future is up to us.
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I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.
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When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension. Many of these dimensions were mentioned in the issue precis, “such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention,” and the list goes on. How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.
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The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
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This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases.
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Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional? - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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."
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Mobile Computing Articles - Educators assess iPhones for instruction - 0 views
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others say its high cost and lack of certain key features-such as a video camera-will keep them from investing in the device for their classrooms,
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Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 0 views
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diigo del.icio.us social bookmarking Ferriter actfl09
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums
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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!"
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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.
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Digiteen Global Project 2009 - 0 views
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Welcome to the Digiteen 09-3, digital citizenship global project for September - December 2009. This is where schools and classrooms from around the world will discuss issues, research and take action to do with being online in the 21st century. The project also has a Digiteen Ning where students and teachers connect, interact, share multimedia and reflect on their experiences throughout the project.
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The 21st Century Learning Initiative : The History of Education 2000 and the Explanatio... - 0 views
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The application of "market principles" quickly destroyed the concept of a community of learners that extended beyond the school and effectively turned each school against its "rival"; a preoccupation with the assessment of pupils as a way of monitoring teachers led to even more "teaching for the test," and the relegation of information technology to that of a vocational skill.
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"By 1988, with increasing pressure with every subsequent year, Education 2000 became evermore isolated by a whole series of legislative proposals made by a Government whose educational policy was increasingly to become prescriptive, centralized, and based on assumptions that originated in the 1950s. Teacher education courses were reorganized to focus far more heavily on subject content and classroom practice, at the cost of a hefty reduction in all aspects of the course dealing with educational theory, purpose and philosophy. Her Majesty's Inspectorate was abolished as being too much on "the side of the teachers," and replaced by a more rigorous assessment and evaluation system. "There is no such subject as education," said Margaret Thatcher, "only subjects to be taught.""
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The relationship between tolerance for ambiguity and need for course structure | Journa... - 0 views
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Results suggest that tolerance for ambiguity may be an important variable to assess and train so that students are better prepared for unstructured elements of a course that promote critical thinking and parallel the complexities of the applied world.
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Although many other researchers have theorized that tolerance for ambiguity is associated with critical thinking, empirical evidence to support the relationship between tolerance for ambiguity and critical thinking is lacking (Murphy, 1999). Johnson, Court, Roersma & Kinnaman (1995) have suggested that instructors of undergraduate programs actively examine tolerance for ambiguity as an important element in development of flexible, integrative, and independent thinking.
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Assessment of the relationship between comfort with ambiguity and affinity to structured elements of classroom teaching and evaluation seem important to address given the changing nature of the classroom environment.
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Collectively, these findings suggest that tolerance for ambiguity is a dimension particularly worthy of examination in individuals in training or practice for the mental health field.
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7 Things You Should Know About Next-Generation Presentation Tools | EDUCAUSE - 0 views
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New kinds of electronic tools are emerging that allow instructors to craft presentations that more closely reflect new approaches to teaching and learning. For instance, many of these tools allow collaboration between multiple authors, and some use nonlinear branching or sequencing so that class discussion can guide the presentation. Presentation tools based on new models of representing information also encourage instructors to rethink learning activities in ways that can improve learning. These tools might also bring about a more thorough merging of in-person and remote classroom audiences.
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What is the Future of Teaching? - 1 views
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Students spending three hours per day in an online environment under the guidance of a great professor are likely, and not surprisingly, going to be better prepared than those spending an hour per week in a classroom with a mediocre one. And because the study’s results were correlational and not causal, it is impossible to say for certain whether it was actually the online learning environment that caused better tested performance. We can conclude that those in online learning environments tested better, but not necessarily why.
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A major part of the job of a good educator is to equip students with the necessary mental tools to be able to continue learning on their own. Those skills are likely to be less developed in younger students, making face-to-face teacher intervention more necessary.
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good teachers will always be necessary to draw out that knowledge and help students develop the skills needed to think critically about the information they consume. In other words, online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied.
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Shai Reshef of the University of the People, an online-only institution aiming to bring quality education to students, mostly in developing nations, for whom cost is a prohibitive barrier to traditional classroom learning. Reshef told me that his University really acts as a guide, helping people to organize the types of knowledge discovery and peer-to-peer teaching activities they’re already doing into a more formal program of study. And does the University of the People model still have room for teachers? You bet.
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Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation... - 0 views
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Unfortunately, this margin and that niche don’t map well onto each other, to the extent that education extends beyond single classes and connects with the world.
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CMSes offer versions of most of these, but in a truncated way. Students can publish links to external objects, but can’t link back in. (In fact, a Blackboard class is a fine place to control access to content for one concerned about “deep linking”) An instructor can assign a reading group consisting of students in one’s class, but no one else. These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.
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professors can readily built media criticism assignments into class spaces. These experiences are analogous to the pre-digital classroom, and can work well enough. But both refuse to engage with today’s realities, namely that media are deeply shaped by the social. Journaling privately, restricted to an audience not of the writer’s choosing, is unusual.
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We’ve seen an explosion in computer-mediated teaching and learning practices based on Web 2.0, in variety and scope too broad to summarize here. Think of the range from class blogs to Wikipedia writing exercises, profcasting to Twitter class announcements, mashups and academic library folksonomies and researchers’ social bookmarking subscriptions. CMSes react in the following ways: first, by simply not recapitulating these functions; second, by imitating them in delayed, limited fashions; third, by attempting them in a marginal way (example: Blackboard’s Scholar.com). CMSes are retrograde in a Web 2.0 teaching world.
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CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference.
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Moreover, those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.
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If we focus on the copyright issue, then the CMS makes for an apparently adequate shield. It also represents an uncritical acceptance of one school of copyright practice, as it enforces one form of fair use through software. However, it does not open up the question of copyright. Compare, for example, with the Creative Commons option increasingly available to content authors in platforms such as Flickr or WordPress. That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.
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Yet does this argument seem familiar, somehow? It was made during the 1990s, once the first Web ballooned, and new forms of information anxiety appeared. Mentioning this historicity is not intended as a point of style, but to remind the audience that, since this is an old problem, we have been steadily evolving solutions. Indeed, ever since the 20th century we can point to practices – out in the open, wild Web! – which help users cope with informational chaos. These include social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed. Most of these skills are not well suited to the walled garden environment, but can be discussed there, of course. Without undue risk of exposure.
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Put another way, we can sum up the CMS alternative to Web 2.0’s established and evolving pedagogies as a sort of corporate model. This doesn’t refer to the fact that the leading CMS is a business product, produced by a fairly energetic marketplace player. No, the architecture of CMSes recapitulates several aspects of modern business. It enforces copyright compliance. It resembles an intranet, akin to those run by many enterprises. It protects users from external challenges, in true walled garden style. Indeed, at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.
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The academic uses of realtime search follow the pre-Web pedagogy of seeking timely references to a classroom topic. Think of a professor bringing a newspaper to class, carrying a report about the very subject under discussion. How can this be utilized practically? Faculty members can pick a Web service (Google News, Facebook, Twitter) and search themselves, sharing results; or students can run such queries themselves.
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Over the past near-decade CMSes have not only grown in scale, but feature development. Consider the variety: gradebooks, registrar system integration, e-Reserve integration, discussion tools, drop boxes, news alerts. Consider too the growth of parallel Web 2.0 tools: wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, podcasting.
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Now to compare CMSes and Web 2.0: imagine an alternate history, a counterfactual, whereby the world outside academia had Blackboard instead of Web 2.0: § White House health care reform debates: each citizen must log into a town-hall-associated “class,” registering by zip code and social security number. Information is exchanged between “town classes” via email. Relevant documents can be found, often in .doc format, by logging into one’s town class.
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§ Iranian activists collaborate via classes, frantically switching logins and handles to keep government authorities from registering and snooping. § “Citizen media” barely exist. Instead we rely on established authorities (CNN, BBC, Xinua, etc) to sift, select, and, eventually, republish rare selections of user-generated media. § Wikipedia, Flickr and Picasa, the blogosphere, Facebook and MySpace, the world of podcasting simply don’t exist. Instead, we rely on static, non-communicable Web documents, and consult the occasional e-Reserve, sometimes on a purchased DVD. § The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) maintains fan clubs, small, temporary groups where fans of certain bands and artists can sign in and listen to time-limited, DRM’d music. “It’s like tape trading, but legal!” says one promotional campaign.
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Once we had Bertold Brecht writing plays for radio, neighborhood-based radio shows, and the stupendous Orson Wells; then we moved on, through payola, and onto Kasey Kasem and Clear Channel.
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For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
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Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?
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Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.”
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What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?
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CMS. What is it best used for? We have said little about its integration with campus information systems, but these are critical for class (not learning) management, from attendance to grading. Web 2.0 has yet to replace this function. So imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.
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It makes for a separation from the social media world, a paused space, perhaps one fertile for reflection. If that works for some situations, then it works, and should be selected… consciously, not as a default or unreflective option, but as the result of a pedagogical decision process.
50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom | Teaching Degree.org - 0 views
23 Ways to use Wordle in the MFL Classroom « The LanguagesResources Blog - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
EDUCAUSE Review - Why IT Matters to Higher Education | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views
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