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Barbara Lindsey

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

www.educause.edu/...162420

seelybrown openeducation educause

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
  • The openness of Wikipedia is instructive in another way: by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.
  • viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
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  • A very different sort of initiative that is using technology to leverage social learning is Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India.
  • many students in the United States and in many other parts of the world are already involved with online social networks that include their friends. John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan, has attempted to bring attention to this phenomenon by asking how many students are being taught each year by his institution. Although about 40,000 students are enrolled in classes on the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, King believes that the actual number of students being reached by the school today is closer to 250,000.13
  • Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.
  • Hands-On Universe (HOU) is also designed to promote collaborative learning in astronomy (http://www.handsonuniverse.org). Based at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists. According to Kyle Cudworth, the science director at Yerkes Observatory, which is part of the HOU network: “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • the emphasis is on building a community of students and scholars as much as on providing access to educational content.
  • longtail
  • The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments
  • The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.
  • An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
  • The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20
  • We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.
  • Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.6
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads.
Barbara Lindsey

WA Open Educational Resources: It Is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right - 0 views

blog.oer.sbctc.edu/...t-time-getting-our-values.html

openeducation copyright lessig

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Dec 09 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 04 Dec 09
     
    Larry Lessig talks about open access and higher education
Barbara Lindsey

Open, Online University Courses-Special Guest: Alec Couros - Classroom 2.0 LIVE! - 0 views

live.classroom20.com/...special-guest-alec-couros.html

classroom 2.0 openeducation higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09
     
    Recording of Classroom 2.0 session with Alec Couros
Barbara Lindsey

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

synthesizingeducation.com/...ught-the-transfer-of-knowledge

learning students openeducation

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Jan 10 - Cached
  • This type of rigorous thought will only come with altering the structure to include more collaboration and realignment of priorities to ensure that adequate time is spent discussing “cross sections” of curriculum. Since time is a valuable priority, I would suggest a virtual set-up (via blogs or a Ning) that allows for ideas to flow freely. In addition, including some aspect of this in end-of-year summaries for teachers and administrators would stimulate more of a sense of urgency to deal with this problem. I contend that much of the reason these types of assignments do not exist is the product of a lack of time for teachers to develop strong collegial relationships with teachers that they normally do not come in contact with. The key is that we need to break the tradition of “closed door” classrooms and allow professionals from other departments, schools, and districts in to acquire a gauge on what students are studying in other subject areas.
  • By working to create a culture and structure that cultivate deeper professional relationships between teachers of different backgrounds, the challenge of assignments can only improve.
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