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Wessam Abedelaziz

Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations | Resources | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6065

expectations implementation student technology educause 21st-century

shared by Wessam Abedelaziz on 27 Oct 08 - Cached
  • W here students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint." >
  • here students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint."
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 31 Oct 08
       
      I think it is ' death by Powerpoint" is a good phrase as it automatically turns to a lecture form with the help of some slides. It is still boring if it is not mainpulated and being directed to be used effectively.
  • With such specific applications of technology and the limited use of other forms (for example, multimedia), students' low expectations for the use of technology in the curriculum is not surprising. Such constrained use of technology by the faculty in the curriculum and low student expectations may serve to limit innovation and creativity as well as the faculty's capacity to engage students more deeply in their subject matter. Like all organizations, colleges and universities respond to the demands placed upon them. Students' and institutions' low expectations for the use of technology for learning provide insufficient impetus for faculties to change their behavior and make broader, more innovative use of these tools in the service of learning.
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  • Data obtained from these sessions with high school and college seniors in Indiana, Oregon, and Virginia
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Not representative sample
  • From the beginning, however, a problem arose in that those middle school students went on to high schools and later to colleges that did not (and do not) provide this type of rich learning experience—a learning experience that can best be achieved when technology is used in the service of learning.
  • Less attention has been given to how to help students achieve the desired learning outcomes through technology.
  • comparatively little support has been devoted to helping faculty use computers and other technologies in creative and innovative ways to deepen student learning.
  • institutional structures and practices to resolve technical problems that faculty invariably encounter are very limited or are not the type of aid needed. Such lack of support limits the amount of time faculty can spend on what they do best—building a compelling curriculum and integrating technology for more powerful learning.
  • To develop intentional learners, the curriculum must go beyond helping students gain knowledge for knowledge's sake to engaging students in the construction of knowledge for the sake of addressing the challenges faced by a complex, global society.
  • integrating study abroad into courses back on the home campus;
  • Consider this scenario:
  • Faculty concerns perhaps center less on being "replaceable" and more on worrying that the teaching and learning enterprise will be reduced to students gathering information that can be easily downloaded, causing them to rely too heavily on technology instead of intellect.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Mentioned frequently by our group members.
  • First, traditional age students overwhelmingly prefer face-to-face contact with faculty to mediated communication. Second, technology used in the service of learning will require more—not less—sophistication on the part of students as they engage in processes of integration, translation, audience analysis, and critical judgment.
  • Faculty with expertise in one or more subjects, who have been exposed to what we know about how people learn, can determine how to enhance this learning through the use of technology. But simply understanding how to use technology will not provide the integration needed to reach the desired learning outcomes.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Last sentence here most important.
  • There is a need for integrating technology that is in the service of learning throughout the curriculum. More intentional use of technology to capture what students know and are able to integrate in their learning is needed.
Barbara Lindsey

Top News - Jr. colleges outpace 4-year schools in tech use - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...top-news

higher ed technology integration

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Overall, U.S. colleges and universities are only half way to realizing the 21st-century campus, a new survey suggests
  • In a recent survey on technology integration in higher education, community colleges actually scored slightly higher than four-year institutions.
  • U.S. colleges and universities are only half way to fulfilling their potential for 21st-century teaching and learning, according to CDW-G's "21st-Century Campus" report. Only a third of professors said technology is fully integrated into the higher-educational experience, and although 63 percent of students said they use technology to prepare for their classes, just 24 percent said they use it during class.
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  • College faculty and IT staff agreed that a lack of technology know-how among professors is the biggest barrier to technology integration on campus. Although 85 percent of faculty members said their institutions provide some kind of technology training, 44 percent nevertheless said their biggest challenge is knowing how to use technology in their teaching.
  • But community colleges also lag in certain areas, the index suggests--including using social-networking tools to enhance faculty-student interaction and giving students access to their computer networks off campus.
Barbara Lindsey

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

www.integrating-technology.com/pd

pd pln workshops certificate wiziq

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Dec 09
     
    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

The End in Mind » Blackboard & the Innovator's Dilemma - 0 views

www.jonmott.com/blog

blackboard cms lms webct

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Mar 09 - Cached
  • there remain fundamental flaws with Blackboard’s (and virtually every other CMS provider’s) underlying infrastructure. For all of the new window dressing, Blackboard remains first and foremost a semester-based, content-delivery oriented, course management system. The software is not (at least noticeably) evolving to become a student-centered learning management system. And while the addition of wikis and blogs inside the Blackboard system is as welcome improvement, there is still little or no integration between student learning tools “inside the moat” and outside of it “in the cloud.”
  • rapidly growing number of people are creating their own personal learning environments with tools freely available to them, without the benefit of a CMS. As Christensen would say, they have hired different technologies to do the job of a CMS for them
  • the really valuable learning technologies will increasily be in the cloud.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Mar 09
     
    there remain fundamental flaws with Blackboard's (and virtually every other CMS provider's) underlying infrastructure. For all of the new window dressing, Blackboard remains first and foremost a semester-based, content-delivery oriented, course management system. The software is not (at least noticeably) evolving to become a student-centered learning management system. And while the addition of wikis and blogs inside the Blackboard system is as welcome improvement, there is still little or no integration between student learning tools "inside the moat" and outside of it "in the cloud."
Barbara Lindsey

UMW New Media Toolkit » ACCS 2009 - 0 views

toolkit.umwblogs.org/accs2009

cms webct blackboard student-centered

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Mar 09 - Cached
  • While I applaud these innovations as good steps in the right direction, there remain fundamental flaws with Blackboard’s (and virtually every other CMS provider’s) underlying infrastructure. For all of the new window dressing, Blackboard remains first and foremost a semester-based, content-delivery oriented, course management system. The software is not (at least noticeably) evolving to become a student-centered learning management system. And while the addition of wikis and blogs inside the Blackboard system is as welcome improvement, there is still little or no integration between student learning tools “inside the moat” and outside of it “in the cloud.
  • Probably the most significant development in the last ten years for the new direction of Personal Learning Networks has been the deployment of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) – that allowed content creators to syndicate their writings and other creations. Using RSS feed readers, web users do not go to web pages or search for content, but rather, subscribe to RSS feeds and let the content come to them.
  • I am reminded of Franz Kafka’s “An Old Manuscript,” an account of a nomadic army arriving in an imperial city. The nomads arrive suddenly, surprising the urban population and appearing without warning in city streets, markets, libraries, and homes. Kafka’s tale focuses on the incomprehension of the city-dwellers, as well as on their dogged willingness to attempt living life as if the nomads simply weren’t there. The story charts their progressive decay and their slipping grasp on reality while the nomads build a new civilization literally in their front yard. It’s a very funny story, in Kafka’s unique way, but of course it’s also a cautionary tale, especially for those of us in higher education. At colleges and universities around the world, the nomadic swarms are already arriving.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Mar 09
     
    While I applaud these innovations as good steps in the right direction, there remain fundamental flaws with Blackboard's (and virtually every other CMS provider's) underlying infrastructure. For all of the new window dressing, Blackboard remains first and foremost a semester-based, content-delivery oriented, course management system. The software is not (at least noticeably) evolving to become a student-centered learning management system. And while the addition of wikis and blogs inside the Blackboard system is as welcome improvement, there is still little or no integration between student learning tools "inside the moat" and outside of it "in the cloud.
Barbara Lindsey

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation... - 0 views

openedconference.org/...1037

bryanalexander socialmedia CMS Web2.0 education methods roml 5395

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Aug 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature.
  • Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments,
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 09
       
      This is very interesting
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • § 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.
  • 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.
  • For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
  • 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?
  • Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.”
  • What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?
  • 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.
  • 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.
Barbara Lindsey

Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member Supposed to Do? (EDUCAUS... - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...44993

blogs education educause highered podcasts web 2.0 wikis

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 Oct 08 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 03 Oct 08
     
    Thanks to Yesenia Hernandez on Diigo: Great discussion of the challenges, opps, institutional framework for higher ed web 2.0 integration.
Barbara Lindsey

Jon D Pennington | - 0 views

www.jdpennington.com

pennington skype blog googledocs twitter student-centered

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09
     
    Great description how Jon integrates the use of skype, twitter, blog and google docs to create student-centered language learning opportunities
Barbara Lindsey

Philosophy | Intrepid Teacher - 0 views

intrepidteacher.edublogs.org/philosophy

educator blogger Qatar international

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 09 - Cached
  • The 21st century classroom must be a place to network, to create, to publish, to share.
  • The new classroom does not integrate technology into an outdated curriculum, but rather infuses technology into the daily performance of classroom life.
  • In this new classroom, the teacher is not the sole expert or the only source of information, but rather the teacher is the lead member of a network—guiding and facilitating as students search for answers to questions they have carefully generated.
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  • It is important to note that some students may be quietly sitting in the corner engrossed in an old fashioned text.
  • Daily and total access to computers allows students to realize that technology is not something they “do” when they go to the lab or when the teacher has checked out the laptop cart, but rather technology is something they can use everyday in class to help themselves learn.
  • In this new classroom, students will begin to understand that their computer is not simply a novelty to take notes with, but it is their binder, their planner, their dictionary, their journal, their photo album, their music archive, their address book.
  • tudents will begin to understand that their computer is not simply a novel
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 09
     
    Outstanding teaching philosophy that gets at the heart of how and why technology should be used in learning.
Barbara Lindsey

Envisioning the 21st-Century University - Abilene Christian University - 0 views

www.acu.edu/...index.html

21st century edutech higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08 - Cached
  • will also let students access knowledge and information recursively, coming back to its advice and expanding on its vision with web research and real-world access to their peers.
  • The majority of students entering college today have always composed at the computer, yet an increasing amount of the writing they do consists of dashed-off messages to friends and family via email, IM, or Facebook. How can composition instructors increase the amount of time students spend in the writing process and encourage a greater investment in the final writing product? Dr. Kyle Dickson believes one solution lies in the audio essay.
  • Dickson, working with colleagues in the English department, developed an essay assignment based on the This I Believe program recently revived on National Public Radio.
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  • Students began by identifying a personal belief before writing drafts that refined their focus through vividly related examples. Finally, they were invited to submit essays to the NPR website and record them on iPods with a memo recorder attachment for transmission via iTunes U. Though public distribution was not required, this aspect of the assignment provided additional motivation for students carefully to hone their final essays. "I think it's very important to provide students an opportunity to write for a broader audience, instead of simply writing for the teacher," Dickson said. "These kinds of assignments put writing back into the public sphere as an essential skill of the future community leader. iTunes U helps create this broader audience."
  • This new form of writing assignment involves students in a wider debate of public and private beliefs and encourages them to add their own voices to this dialogue. Much like their NPR counterparts, the essay podcasts emphasize the diversity of viewpoints on campus through the simple power of the human voice. Assignments like these, in providing students a real-world audience, value the experiences and expertise each student brings to the classroom. Whether podcasts are shared with the class, the campus, or the world, students move from simply receiving messages to a higher-level of investment in crafting and refining messages of their own.  
  • In the converged space where the Internet and telecommunications meet, new possibilities exist for the convergence of in-class and out-of-class activities, curricular and extra-curricular learning. And as we've already seen, new tools enable new approaches, extending the classroom of the 21st century by making new learning opportunities possible.
  • It's not that post-millenials are ambivalent to news; it's just that they consume it in a new, digital way.
  • This trend simply opens up opportunities unavailable to print media in the past. Journalists who could publish only once a day now have unlimited publication opportunities and can send stories out by email, text message, and RSS feed.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      What do you all think about this?
  • Journalists who only had text and still pictures available to them in the past now can tell their stories with audio and video.
  • students are conditioned to consume news, like everything else, in a buffet style, offering them print, still photography, audio and video serves them the way they consume.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      Is there a danger to this mode of 'consumption'?
  • We don't know of any universities that are doing it exactly like this."
  • To take advantage of these changes, the university and the department have raised $1.2 million to fund the construction of a new media center. The "Convergence Newsroom" will house the student reporting staffs of all the respective ACU media: Optimist (a semi-weekly newspaper), The Prickly Pear (the annual yearbook), Paw-TV (bi-weekly television), and ACUOptimist.com (online print, audio and video). Internally, the convergence of staffs into a unified space will allow greater synergy in training and production among the student journalists.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      Could you think of physical convergence centers that would support intellectual synergies between, within and across disciplines at UCONN for the new building?
  • The New Media Newsroom is the first step in preparing future journalists for the newsrooms in which they'll work as they enter into their careers.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      What about preparing you for your future careers with your future students?
  • "True learning is a deeply emotional process.
  • Team members would also no longer have to be in the same location to prepare strategy presentations. They could share new ideas or notify one another about important market news immediately with an email, a text message, or a conference call, regardless of their location. During presentations, requests for additional information could be met immediately. Even calls with a company's investor relations office could be set up on the fly.Incorporating the new generation of converged devices into their studies would improve student managers' ability to conduct business. It would also make STAR more valuable to students by allowing them to practice with the type of cutting-edge technology that will be their everyday tools once they move into the war rooms of Wall Street.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Sep 08
       
      Or your classrooms of the future?
  • Enhancing his interaction with students and their engagement in his courses, educators like Beck want to keep building relationships with students that change thinking - and change lives. They want solutions that "just work" to help them in those efforts. 
  • Using team-based learning, my classroom takes advantage of moving desks and chairs so that students can engage in problem-solving rather than focusing on me behind a podium. The stadium seating is a challenge, too, because I move among the teams, often sitting to have conversations with them as they work through the course materials." This kind of teaching is difficult to imagine in a fixed-seat space with small fold-away desks.
  • As the first semester of "American Identity in the Modern Period" neared, conversations about the logistics of team-teaching and the classroom space were replaced with discussions anticipating the integrative learning experience. As McGregor noted, 'What I looked forward to most was being a fellow learner along with my colleagues and students. This course was the first I ever participated in as a faculty member where I wasn't the exclusive 'expert.' I learned much alongside my students from my colleagues' fields of expertise and the connections they brought."
  • Students from this generation really want to do something bigger than themselves."
  • While it's nearly impossible to gather all 180 Barret students and faculty mentors together for a traditional meeting, a virtual meeting - where documents, audio, video, and web content are shared - could be more easily managed with this sort of technology.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
     
    will also let students access knowledge and information recursively, coming back to its advice and expanding on its vision with web research and real-world access to their peers.
Barbara Lindsey

Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 | Educationload.com - 0 views

educationload.com/?p=87

web 2.0 faculty foreignlanguage manuela

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 09 - Cached
  • A keyword search for the word “tech%” and “computer” in the Modern Language Association (MLA) job list1 returns over 43 relevant ads out of 236 job postings (as of November 20, 2007): “familiarity with teaching-related technologies” (tenure track in Spanish, Missouri); “experience with technology in the classroom” (tenure track in French, Michigan); “ability to use technology effectively in teaching and learning” (tenure track in Japanese, South Carolina). The wording varies slightly from one ad to the next, but the message is the same: job candidates are well advised to have an answer ready when asked how they use technology in the classroom.
  • The history of educational technology in higher education provides ample support for the claim that technology should never outstrip pedagogy.
  • many Web 2.0 applications are powerful socialization and communication tools. As such, they have an incredible educational potential for foreign language instruction.
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  • Sadly, this potential often fails to be realized because of the widespread belief that these tools are somehow inherently educational. The iPod might have an instructional potential, but it is the educators who arrange and structure instructional events around it to make learning happen, not the instrument itself. To realize the instructional potential of technology requires a set of skills that can only be acquired through adequate instruction and practice. Just as speaking a foreign language is not a qualification to teach it, knowing how to use a technology does not mean that one knows intuitively how to use it as a teaching tool.
  • a recent MLA report on the status of foreign language instruction in higher education3 underscored that most incoming foreign language faculty would be teaching at the undergraduate level. The report calls for the integration of technology training in the graduate curriculum, asking departments to “take the necessary steps to teach graduate students to use technology in language instruction and learning.” The report, which called for drastic transformations of foreign language academic programs nationwide, also emphasized the importance of providing graduate students with a good pedagogical basis.
  • Few graduate programs include such training as a part of the curriculum. As a matter of fact, pedagogy itself often represents a negligible fraction of graduate program requirements.
  • Because the field of language technology is at the crossroads of technology, instructional design, and languages, it calls for the close collaboration of experts in each area. Today, language centers are the only campus units where such a wide range of expertise can easily be found.
  • The role of language technologists goes beyond teaching what a blog is and how to set up a browser to display Japanese characters. It includes sorting through novel technologies, evaluating their instructional potential, researching current educational uses, and sharing findings with educators. The most promising applications available today were not designed for instructional use and do not come with an instruction manual. To use them in the classroom requires the ability to redirect their intended purpose and, more importantly, to think through possible consequences of doing so.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 09
     
    Technological skills and understanding how to employ Web 2.0 tools to successfully support pedagogy are vital for foreign language faculty today
jessica mcbride

elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age - 0 views

www.elearnspace.org/...connectivism.htm

shared by jessica mcbride on 10 Nov 08 - Cached
  • In many fields the life of knowledge is now measured in months and years.
  • The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete.
  • All of these learning theories hold the notion that knowledge is an objective (or a state) that is attainable (if not already innate) through either reasoning or experiences.
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  • “black box theory”
  • Behaviorism
  • Cognitivism
  • Learning is viewed as a process of inputs, managed in short term memory, and coded for long-term recall.
  • Behaviorism and cognitivism view knowledge as external to the learner and the learning process as the act of internalizing knowledge.
  • learners are actively attempting to create meaning.
  • Learning theories are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the value of what is being learned.
  • When knowledge is subject to paucity, the process of assessing worthiness is assumed to be intrinsic to learning. When knowledge is abundant, the rapid evaluation of knowledge is important.
  • Unlike constructivism, which states that learners attempt to foster understanding by meaning making tasks, chaos states that the meaning exists – the learner's challenge is to recognize the patterns which appear to be hidden.
  • Self-organization on a personal level is a micro-process of the larger self-organizing knowledge constructs created within corporate or institutional environments. The capacity to form connections between sources of information, and thereby create useful information patterns, is required to learn in our knowledge economy.
  • Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.
  • Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.
  • Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
  • Within social networks, hubs are well-connected people who are able to foster and maintain knowledge flow. Their interdependence results in effective knowledge flow, enabling the personal understanding of the state of activities organizationally.
  • John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few.
  • Media, news, information. This trend is well under way. Mainstream media organizations are being challenged by the open, real-time, two-way information flow of blogging.
  • When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.
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

Scaffolding your Lesson Plans - Lessons Learned from Traditional Teaching! - 0 views

www.techlearning.com/25904

technology integration scaffolding

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Dec 09 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Dec 09
     
    I see too many projects with technology that do not translate into stepping-stones for future projects and work. (Maybe this is just a reflection of my previous work.)  Tech conferences are full of creative ideas with new programs and new websites.  How many presentations are focused on building skills on a long-term basis? What approach do you take with scaffolding your technology learning?  Do you have a system?  Is there are formal system that we need to focus on? Do you use Understanding by Design?
Barbara Lindsey

The relationship between tolerance for ambiguity and need for course structure | Journa... - 0 views

findarticles.com/...ai_105478978

ambiguity creativity tolerance pedagogy teaching learning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Dec 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Barbara Lindsey

Wade Davis on endangered cultures | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...is_on_endangered_cultures.html

languages loss culture

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Jan 10 - Cached
  • When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
  • And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better? Wouldn't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great, let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. Let's make it Kogi." And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language.
  • What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world.
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  • It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power. The crude face of domination. Where ever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away. These are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to.
  • You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally -- in many quarters -- celebrated as part of a development strategy.
  • Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.
  • When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices.
  • the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 17 Jan 10
     
    When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
Barbara Lindsey

Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...163095

faculty higher ed technology MLA pedagogy

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Adequate training is needed to help spread good practices and to better prepare graduate students for the needs of the current job market and of the job itself. In addition to enhancing teaching and learning, technology literacy will allow future faculty to better connect with a generation of undergraduate students that depends largely on technology to function on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, a recent MLA report on the status of foreign language instruction in higher education3 underscored that most incoming foreign language faculty would be teaching at the undergraduate level. The report calls for the integration of technology training in the graduate curriculum, asking departments to "take the necessary steps to teach graduate students to use technology in language instruction and learning." The report, which called for drastic transformations of foreign language academic programs nationwide, also emphasized the importance of providing graduate students with a good pedagogical basis.
Barbara Lindsey

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

www.academiccommons.org/...knowledgable-knowledge-able

wesch social media web2.0 education teaching academic commons

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 31 Mar 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.
  • Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
  • Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
  • 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?”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
  • 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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