Skip to main content

Home/ BeyondwebctFall08/ Group items tagged personalized

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Barbara Lindsey

The Twitter Times - 0 views

www.twittertim.es

twitter news personalized

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09
     
    The Twitter Times is a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account
Barbara Lindsey

Locus Online Perspectives: Cory Doctorow: Close Enough for Rock 'n' Roll - 0 views

www.locusmag.com/...w-close-enough-for-rock-n.html

technology change power doctorow

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 08 Jan 10 - Cached
  • This is one of the great conundra of our era: the spectre that haunts every executive, every government, every powerful person who owes her stature to her command of an empire that enjoys its pride of place thanks to the prohibitive cost of replicating it.But lurking in those 80 percent replacements are an infinitude of ideas too weird and too funky and implausible to try at full price. Lurking there are ideas as weird and dumb as a company called (I kid you not) Google, an encyclopedia that everyone can write, a wireless network standard based on open spectrum that anyone is allowed to use, without central planning.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 08 Jan 10
     
    This is one of the great conundra of our era: the spectre that haunts every executive, every government, every powerful person who owes her stature to her command of an empire that enjoys its pride of place thanks to the prohibitive cost of replicating it. But lurking in those 80 percent replacements are an infinitude of ideas too weird and too funky and implausible to try at full price. Lurking there are ideas as weird and dumb as a company called (I kid you not) Google, an encyclopedia that everyone can write, a wireless network standard based on open spectrum that anyone is allowed to use, without central planning.
Barbara Lindsey

Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice - 0 views

www.infed.org/...communities_of_practice.htm

CoP community education wenger collaboration practice learning communities mafla09 actfl09 blended learning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 May 09 - Cached
  • Supposing learning is social and comes largely from of our experience of participating in daily life? It was this thought that formed the basis of a significant rethinking of learning theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s by two researchers from very different disciplines - Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Their model of situated learning proposed that learning involved a process of engagement in a 'community of practice'. 
  • When looking closely at everyday activity, she has argued, it is clear that 'learning is ubiquitous in ongoing activity, though often unrecognized as such' (Lave 1993: 5).
  • Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. (Wenger circa 2007)
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore to call these kinds of communities communities of practice. (Wenger 1998: 45)
  • The characteristics of communities of practice According to Etienne Wenger (c 2007), three elements are crucial in distinguishing a community of practice from other groups and communities: The domain. A community of practice is is something more than a club of friends or a network of connections between people. 'It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people' (op. cit.). The community. 'In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other' (op. cit.). The practice. 'Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction' (op. cit.).
  • The fact that they are organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community.
  • The interactions involved, and the ability to undertake larger or more complex activities and projects though cooperation, bind people together and help to facilitate relationship and trust
  • Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have tried to place it in social relationships – situations of co-participation.
  • It not so much that learners acquire structures or models to understand the world, but they participate in frameworks that that have structure. Learning involves participation in a community of practice. And that participation 'refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities' (Wenger 1999: 4).
  • Initially people have to join communities and learn at the periphery. The things they are involved in, the tasks they do may be less key to the community than others.
  • Learning is, thus, not seen as the acquisition of knowledge by individuals so much as a process of social participation. The nature of the situation impacts significantly on the process.
  • What is more, and in contrast with learning as internalization, ‘learning as increasing participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person acting in the world’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 49). The focus is on the ways in which learning is ‘an evolving, continuously renewed set of relations’ (ibid.: 50). In other words, this is a relational view of the person and learning (see the discussion of selfhood).
  • 'the purpose is not to learn from talk as a substitute for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation'. This orientation has the definite advantage of drawing attention to the need to understand knowledge and learning in context. However, situated learning depends on two claims: It makes no sense to talk of knowledge that is decontextualized, abstract or general. New knowledge and learning are properly conceived as being located in communities of practice (Tennant 1997: 77).
  • There is a risk, as Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger acknowledge, of romanticizing communities of practice.
  • 'In their eagerness to debunk testing, formal education and formal accreditation, they do not analyse how their omission [of a range of questions and issues] affects power relations, access, public knowledge and public accountability' (Tennant 1997: 79).
  • Perhaps the most helpful of these explorations is that of Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues (2001). They examine the work of an innovative school in Salt Lake City and how teachers, students and parents were able to work together to develop an approach to schooling based around the principle that learning 'occurs through interested participation with other learners'.
  • Learning is in the relationships between people. As McDermott (in Murphy 1999:17) puts it: Learning traditionally gets measured as on the assumption that it is a possession of individuals that can be found inside their heads… [Here] learning is in the relationships between people. Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on a relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part.
  • One of the implications for schools, as Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues suggest is that they must prioritize 'instruction that builds on children's interests in a collaborative way'. Such schools need also to be places where 'learning activities are planned by children as well as adults, and where parents and teachers not only foster children's learning but also learn from their own involvement with children' (2001: 3). Their example in this area have particular force as they are derived from actual school practice.
  • learning involves a deepening process of participation in a community of practice
  • Acknowledging that communities of practice affect performance is important in part because of their potential to overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a fast-moving virtual economy. Communities also appear to be an effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems and to share knowledge outside of the traditional structural boundaries. In addition, the community concept is acknowledged to be a means of developing and maintaining long-term organizational memory. These outcomes are an important, yet often unrecognized, supplement to the value that individual members of a community obtain in the form of enriched learning and higher motivation to apply what they learn. (Lesser and Storck 2001)
  • Educators need to reflect on their understanding of what constitutes knowledge and practice. Perhaps one of the most important things to grasp here is the extent to which education involves informed and committed action.
Barbara Lindsey

Educational Leadership:Giving Students Ownership of Learning:Footprints in the Digital Age - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...prints_in_the_Digital_Age.aspx

web2.0 willrichardson pln digitalfootprint socialnetworking Glastonbury

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Dec 08 - Cached
  • This 10-year-old probably still needs to learn many of these things, and she needs the guidance of teachers and adults who know them in their own practice.
  • We must help them learn how to identify their passions; build connections to others who share those passions; and communicate, collaborate, and work collectively with these networks. And we must do this not simply as a unit built around "Information and Web Literacy." Instead, we must make these new ways of collaborating and connecting a transparent part of the way we deliver curriculum from kindergarten to graduation.
  • Younger students need to see their teachers engaging experts in synchronous or asynchronous online conversations about content, and they need to begin to practice intelligently and appropriately sharing work with global audiences. Middle school students should be engaged in the process of cooperating and collaborating with others outside the classroom around their shared passions, just as they have seen their teachers do. And older students should be engaging in the hard work of what Shirky (2008) calls "collective action," sharing responsibility and outcomes in doing real work for real purposes for real audiences online.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • we educators must first own these technologies and be able to take advantage of these networked learning spaces. In this way, we can fully prepare students not just to be Googled well, but to be findable in good ways by people who share their passions for learning and who may well end up being lifelong teachers, mentors, or friends.
  • So what literacies must we educators master before we can help students make the most of these powerful potentials? It starts, as author Clay Shirky (2008) suggests, with an understanding of how transparency fosters connections and with a willingness to share our work and, to some extent, our personal lives. Sharing is the fundamental building block for building connections and networks;
  • In all likelihood, you, your school, your teachers, or your students are already being Googled on a regular basis, with information surfacing from news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Facebook groups. Some of it may be good, some may be bad, and most is beyond your control. Your personal footprint—and to some extent your school's—is most likely being written without you, thanks to the billions of us worldwide who now have our own printing presses and can publish what we want when we want to.
  • This may be the first large technological shift in history that's being driven by children. Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go. In short, for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.
Barbara Lindsey

T+L Top Story - Banning school technology: A bad idea? - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...index.cfm

technology education banning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Banning school technology: A bad idea? Educators ponder which technologies are pedagogically useful, say planning is the key to success
  • panelists in a session titled "Leveraging Banned Technologies to Create Ubiquitous Learning Environments" offered their advice to educators on why technology shouldn't be banned from classrooms--and why saying "yes" is worth the time and effort
  • 50 percent of participants said they had schoolwide wireless access; most said they don't allow students to bring their own technology devices to school; and many don't have a policy in place about students bringing their own devices to school
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • perhaps the most revealing data came from the next question: Do you allow cell phones in school? Most participants said students can carry cell phones as long as they keep them turned off during class; yet, most also agreed that cell phones could be useful for instruction. Participants also said that if students bring personal devices to school, 40 to 60 percent of those students bring a device with broadband access.
  • "Educators want their students to be able to use these technologies, but they don't know how they can be applied in the classroom."
  • "Schools first need to develop a plan of action for when new technologies are introduced and then determine their bandwidth needs. Then they'll be getting somewhere," she said.
  • Steve Hargadon, director of the K12 Open Technologies Initiative at the Consortium for School Networking, and founder of www.classroom20.com. Hargadon developed his social networking site for educators as a way to get educators used to the idea of social networking not always as a scary, educationally empty phenomenon. "We have to look at the tools and the devices behind popular technologies. Just because bad things sometimes happen on Facebook doesn't mean the technology itself can't be useful. It just depends how it's used," he said. Hargadon says that for educators, profile pages can be portfolios and background information for others to see. The "friends" you are making are really "colleagues," he said--and uploading content and adding commentary provides authentic feedback to your ideas. "Common interest groups can be turned into group projects, and the discussion forums allow for asking questions and getting engaged in meaningful conversation. The wisdom of the group will always help when trying to solve problems," he said.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Nov 08
       
      This is a good way to describe the 'Facebook-like' features to colleagues and admins as well as what some of the benefits are to using these environs.
  • For these panelists, the shift in education from a teacher-centric, factory-style model to a more dynamic model filled with ubiquitous access to information, newly created content, and personal devices is not a struggle if you start with a plan--because only by being open to new ideas will today's students be tomorrow's innovators.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Nov 08
       
      This is key.
Barbara Lindsey

One Laptop One Child | Scholastic.com - 0 views

www2.scholastic.com/...article.jsp

1:1 equity students laptops

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08 - Cached
  • quietly tell select students about the policy
  • “We’re going to invite 20 seniors [this school year] selected by teachers,” he says. We don’t want the computers to be a distraction.”
  • The Consolidated High School District 230 in Orland Park, Illinois, has taken a step in this direction by allowing students to bring their computers to school and connect to the Internet, but not log on to the district’s network, says Darrell Walery, director of technology.Stay Away from My Networkwalery sums up the struggle in this issue succinctly. He says tech directors who have been teachers favor the experiment, while those who have business backgrounds blanche at the thought. “My role as technology director is to mediate this exact issue,” he adds.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • In Forsyth, the district uses radius servers for centralized network management. This device identifies the districts’ computers, allowing them access to the network according to their status. Laptops that don’t pass this test are put on the district’s virtual lan. This gives them online access while keeping the user behind the district’s firewall and within its Internet filters. It keeps these computers—and their users—away from the district’s network.
  • Murray’s Pennsylvania district scans each notebook before it can connect to the school server. Clean Server antivirus software is one of the tools it uses to avoid “malware” and worms. Also, the district’s scans point users to free patches and service packs that are needed to keep security up to date.
  • Compatibility seems to be less of an issue each day as more online applications become available.
  • schools can turn to the growing number of free online tools available to all.
  • Classroom management is another potential worry. If college professors feel like students sometime use their lectures as a quiet place to fool around or get other work done (see sidebar), then what chance do K–12 teachers have of getting—and keeping—25 students on task?Teachers in Pennsylvania use classroom management software (a small software download) to keep control. Murray says this program allows teachers to take complete control of each laptop if they want, pushing out their lesson to each screen, blocking all work with a single button, and even using the pcs as glorified personal response devices.
  • The last big hurdle to make this policy a reality in more districts is one that can’t be cleared with a simple software program. It is instilling the idea that teachers will no longer be the dominant information delivery for each class.
  • “How do you get teachers prepared to teach in a classroom where everyone is a teacher?
  • “Professional development is key. We have instructional technology specialists at every school. These folks are not the fix-it people but certified teachers [usually from that same building]. It’s a peer.”
  • “There’s an explosion of social activities” that computers enable, Murray says,  from talking with people worldwide to keeping in touch with like-minded groups through Twitter to having students take virtual field trips halfway around the world, or just down the street. Science students can do an online dissection with step-by-step analysis, or math problems where a simulation can help illustrate a difficult-to-grasp concept, he adds.
  • Teachers need to think about teaching in a different way,” he says. “If you’re doing that, a lot of these [problems] go away.”
  • Having kids bring in their own computers can help bring 1:1 a lot closer to reality, especially in poorer districts. Klingler says Forsyth can channel its existing computer stock to students without personal computers and help reduce tech disparity.
  • While his state’s Classrooms for the Future program brought 550 pcs into the district, the technology coordinator realizes he won’t have the funding needed to replace these machines in three or four years.
  • “The cell phone is their thing,” Walery says. “Communication is the main [goal]. They constantly text back and forth.”
  • Forsyth has even looked into using Sony Playstation handhelds in class, noting that they have a “decent Web browser.”“We want to support whatever kids bring in,” he adds.
  • “It’s much more likely in a few years all students will have their own smartphones,” he says.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 19 Dec 08
     
    How 1-1 is changing as students ask to bring in their own laptops
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.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • “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

FuturistSpeaker.com - The personal blog of Futurist Thomas Frey » Blog Archi... - 0 views

www.futuristspeaker.com/...the-future-of-education

education future Learning2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Architects refer to schools as a “place,” and over the years place-makers have attempted to create the ultimate classroom – a place where learning can be optimized and students can excel.
  • Using classrooms as the primary “touch point” for learning creates many problems. The person or education system that controls the classroom also controls the time when learning can take place, the students who will participate, the lighting, the sounds, the media used, the tools, the pace, the subject matter, and in many cases, the results.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
       
      Can you provide a counterargument?
  • This transition began with the introduction of comment sections at the end of online news posts. People began to voice their thoughts on whether or not a piece of news was accurate, timely, or in any way news-worthy. Many commenters added additional information.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • New forms of education are not achieved by putting an umbrella over our existing education systems and networking them with hopes that they will get better. And they’re not achieved by simply recording the lectures for later broadcast.
  • he notion that education can take place only in a classroom is similar to the notion that purchasing a product can only take place when you see it on a store shelf. Removing the classroom constraints to learning is similar to removing the shelf space constraints to the marketplace.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
       
      Do you think this analogy works?
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
     
    Architects refer to schools as a "place," and over the years place-makers have attempted to create the ultimate classroom - a place where learning can be optimized and students can excel.
Barbara Lindsey

Travis Allen's Blog - 0 views

blog.ischoolinitiative.com

mobiles iphones college student blog

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 10
     
    Colllege student who founded a non-profit initiative to bring tech solutions to classroom learning. Here he talks about how he only uses an iPhone in college. Might be a good person to talk to our students in BWCT!
Barbara Lindsey

Global projects: The three-headed solution | Whip Blog - 0 views

jeffwhipple.ca/...ects-the-three-headed-solution

global learning students

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jan 10 - Cached
  • I still think it comes down to three critical questions when it comes to our children’s learning; what are we doing every day to a) create information artisans who are able to locate, harvest, assess, connect, create and communicate information in a digital, networked form, b) support them in developing and managing their own personal learning networks and c) help them understand and develop their own digital footprint, developing and managing their own personal brand.
Barbara Lindsey

7 Things You Should Know About Next-Generation Presentation Tools | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...194558

presentation nextgen tools nectfl10

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 19 Jan 10
     
    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.
Barbara Lindsey

7 Things You Should Know About Telepresence | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...179124

educause telepresence videoconferencing

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 19 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 19 Jan 10
     
    Telepresence refers to the application of complex video technologies to give geographically separated participants a sense of being together in the same location. These systems use high-definition cameras feeding to life-size, HD displays with high-fidelity acoustics that, in many cases, localize sound to image, simulating the effect of each voice coming from the video display for each participant. In sophisticated telepresence rooms, the furniture and displays are arranged in ways that further enhance the simulation-participants sit at a conference table and see high-resolution video of participants in remote locations at similar tables, allowing participants to imagine sharing a single table. Costs can be an obstacle, but as these systems become more affordable, they have the potential to open new kinds of shared instruction and provide a legitimate alternative to in-person meetings
Barbara Lindsey

Ji Lee: The Transformative Power of Personal Projects :: Videos :: The 99 Percent - 0 views

the99percent.com/...ive-power-of-personal-projects

bubble project nyc

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 22 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 22 Jan 10
     
    The Bubble Project: Blank speech bubbles on NYC public spaces ads and how people responded. Now Creative Director at Google Creative Lab in NY
Barbara Lindsey

Gurus Are Not Enough: A Call for Organizers and Organizing in Social Media | Rootwork |... - 0 views

rootwork.org/...nizers-organizing-social-media

methods freire critical pedagogy social media

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 04 Sep 09
     
    Paulo Freire calls such an approach "co-intentional education," in which each person is both teacher and student. Those with more experience may seek to inspire or ask questions to further dialogue, but as a way to further develop strategy rather than dictate to or control the masses.
Barbara Lindsey

Ending the semester, Lessons Learned (Part 4: Assessment) | Language Lab Unleashed! - 0 views

www.languagelabunleashed.org/...sons-learned-part-4-assessment

assessment student-centered student-created sawhill

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 30 Jul 09 - Cached
  • I see teaching as constantly re-tooling, tweaking, re-evaluating, scrapping, starting over.
  • One of my goals for this class (and for me) was to see what student-centered assessment would look like in a conversation class. I took a big leap and gave the reigns over to them. The content of the class and flow of the class was based on their interested and idea. They were there because they had personal goals that needed to be acknowledged and realized… or at least approximated.
  • What would happen if I felt they didn’t merit the grade they said they did? what if they all wanted an A+?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This is what I asked each student to do: 1) create a series of three goals or metas, one progressively more complex than the other, and each building upon the other, that were to be accomplished his term. The first goal was to be done by the end of March, the second by the end of April, the third maybe by the end of the term…but probably not. 2) create a series of tasks that s/he felt would lead to realizing those goals. 3) blog about about his or her progress at least 2 times per week 4) At the end of the term: write up a final self assessment (in English or in Spanish), reflecting upon the progress completed, including the work done in class that would contribute to these goals, and assign a grade for the term. The students needed to evidence of their progress as a way of justifying their chosen grade. CAVEAT: If the grade s/he chose was lower than one than I would have selected, they would get my grade and an explanation. If the grade was higher, we would continue the conversation and try to see what it was that I was missing. I was willing to be (and wanted to be!) swayed, given that this was the student’s assessment of his/her personal learning goals in Spanish.
  • Some (but very few indeed) met ALL of their goals. Almost all acknowledged that they had set up unrealistic expectations for themselves (in terms of how much they could get done in a semester) and many used their self assessment as a way to set up future goals for their language growth. (Exactly the kinda thing you hope to see happen…learning extending beyond the limits imposed by the classroom).
  • A shy, timid young man, he did not mention in his evaluation the class discussion he led, and managed, and blogged about at the end of the term… nor did he see how any of this was helping him move towards his most lofty goal…to be able to travel with friends in Spain and to be able to communicate with ease and without anxiety.
  • It pains me to read this, but not because of the critiques she makes about me, the tools, or the class. It pains me because Edie passed on an opportunity to try something new, experiment, take a calculated risk…all things she will eventually have to do when she travels in another culture. It’s sad because she was the only student who did not “let go” of something during the semester and instead just held on tight to how she wanted this class to be, vs how it really, truly was. Unstructured to her meant undirected. Allowing the group to decide the flow of the class frustrated her, because the cadence of the class was not one that was controlled by the teacher and therefore predictable
  • In the end, she presented me with a chart that logged over 40 hours of Skype conversations with a native speaker she eventually found, and 110 pages (!) of chat transcripts with others with whom she tried to make regular contact. In class, as a result of her out of class experiences, she became more involved and engaged, eventually leading a class discussion about her interests in music, but doing so such that it wove itself in with the topic the class was discussing that week.
Nicole McClure

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

www.educause.edu/...6069

shared by Nicole McClure on 10 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Research indicates that each of these media, when designed for education, fosters particular types of interactions that enable—and undercut—various learning styles.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      How much do we know about our students' learning styles? How do we know this?
  • Over the next decade, three complementary interfaces will shape how people learn
  • The familiar "world to the desktop." Provides access to distant experts and archives and enables collaborations, mentoring relationships, and virtual communities of practice. This interface is evolving through initiatives such as Internet2. "Alice in Wonderland" multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). Participants' avatars (self-created digital characters) interact with computer-based agents and digital artifacts in virtual contexts. The initial stages of studies on shared virtual environments are characterized by advances in Internet games and work in virtual reality. Ubiquitous computing. Mobile wireless devices infuse virtual resources as we move through the real world. The early stages of "augmented reality" interfaces are characterized by research on the role of "smart objects" and "intelligent contexts" in learning and doing.
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • But what is so special about the egocentric perspectives and situated learning now enabled by emerging media? After all, each of us lives with an egocentric perspective in the real world and has many opportunities for situated learning without using technology. One attribute that makes mediated immersion different and powerful is the ability to access information resources and psychosocial community distributed across distance and time, broadening and deepening experience. A second important attribute is the ability to create interactions and activities in mediated experience not possible in the real world, such as teleporting within a virtual environment, enabling a distant person to see a real-time image of your local environment, or interacting with a (simulated) chemical spill in a busy public setting. Both of these attributes are actualized in the Alice-in-Wonderland interface.
  • Net Generation learning styles stem primarily from the world-to-the-desktop interface; however, the growing prevalence of interfaces to virtual environments and augmented realities is beginning to foster so-called neomillennial learning styles in users of all ages.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      What is the timeline?
    • Nicole McClure
      Nicole McClure on 14 Nov 08
       
      That's an interesting question - sometimes I think we are already on the other side of this, meaning we've already passed it in some ways. Last night I was out for dinner at the Main Street and I saw something that was a little crazy. My husband and I were using my cellphone to look up words that would help trigger a creative name for his new company - a UConn professor (who shall remain unnamed :)) was using his iPhone for something other than a phone call - and the women at the table across from me were also engaged in half converstation - half text message/email, etc. The reason that I bring this up is that all of these people, myself included, are NOT part of the millenial generation (way past I'm afraid!) and we were using this stuff. As history goes - if the "grown-ups" are using it, the kids are over it and on to something else.
  • Immersion is the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience.
  • Beyond actional and symbolic immersion, advances in interface technology are now creating virtual environments and augmented realities that induce a psychological sense of sensory and physical immersion.
  • Inducing a participant's symbolic immersion involves triggering powerful semantic associations via the content of an experience.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Felice's Utopian City
  • The research on virtual reality Salzman and I conducted on frames of reference found that the exocentric and the egocentric FORs have different strengths for learning. Our studies established that learning ideally involves a "bicentric" perspective alternating between egocentric and exocentric FORs.
  • The capability of computer interfaces to foster psychological immersion enables technology-intensive educational experiences that draw on a powerful pedagogy: situated learning.
  • The major schools of thought cited are behaviorist theories of learning (presentational instruction), cognitivist theories of learning (tutoring and guided learning by doing), and situated theories of learning (mentoring and apprenticeships in communities of practice).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      What kinds of learning environments do you prefer and what kinds do you create for your students?
  • Situated learning requires authentic contexts, activities, and assessment coupled with guidance from expert modeling, mentoring, and "legitimate peripheral participation."8 As an example of legitimate peripheral participation, graduate students work within the laboratories of expert researchers, who model the practice of scholarship. These students interact with experts in research as well as with other members of the research team who understand the complex processes of scholarship to varying degrees. While in these laboratories, students gradually move from novice researchers to more advanced roles, with the skills and expectations for them evolving.
  • Potentially quite powerful, situated learning is much less used for instruction than behaviorist or cognitivist approaches. This is largely because creating tacit, relatively unstructured learning in complex real-world settings is difficult.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Not too far in the future!
  • Initial research on Environmental Detectives and other AR-based educational simulations demonstrates that this type of immersive, situated learning can effectively engage students in critical thinking about authentic scenarios.
  • However, virtual environments and ubiquitous computing can draw on the power of situated learning by creating immersive, extended experiences with problems and contexts similar to the real world.9 In particular, MUVEs and real-world settings augmented with virtual information provide the capability to create problem-solving communities in which participants can gain knowledge and skills through interacting with other participants who have varied levels of skills, enabling legitimate peripheral participation driven by intrinsic sociocultural forces.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      One of the most difficult skills to master.
  • Situated learning is important in part because of the crucial issue of transfer. Transfer is defined as the application of knowledge learned in one situation to another situation and is demonstrated if instruction on a learning task leads to improved performance on a transfer task, typically a skilled performance in a real-world setting
  • Moreover, the evolution of an individual's or group's identity is an important type of learning for which simulated experiences situated in virtual environments or augmented realities are well suited. Reflecting on and refining an individual identity is often a significant issue for higher education students of all ages, and learning to evolve group and organizational identity is a crucial skill in enabling innovation and in adapting to shifting contexts.
  • Immersion is important in this process of identity exploration because virtual identity is unfettered by physical attributes such as gender, race, and disabilities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Don't agree with this. We come to any environment with our own baggage and we do not interact in a neutral social context.
  • Thanks to out-of-game trading of in-game items, Norrath, the virtual setting of the MMOG EverQuest, is the seventy-seventh largest economy in the real world, with a GNP per capita between that of Russia and Bulgaria. One platinum piece, the unit of currency in Norrath, trades on real world exchange markets higher than both the Yen and the Lira (Castronova, 2001).14
  • Multiple teams of students can access the MUVE simultaneously, each individual manipulating an avatar which is "sent back in time" to this virtual environment. Students must collaborate to share the data each team collects. Beyond textual conversation, students can project to each other "snapshots" of their current individual point of view (when someone has discovered an item of general interest) and also can "teleport" to join anyone on their team for joint investigation. Each time a team reenters the world, several months of time have passed in River City, so learners can track the dynamic evolution of local problems.
  • In our research on this educational MUVE based on situated learning, we are studying usability, student motivation, student learning, and classroom implementation issues. The results thus far are promising: All learners are highly motivated, including students typically unengaged in classroom settings. All students build fluency in distributed modes of communication and expression and value using multiple media because each empowers different types of communication, activities, experiences, and expressions. Even typically low-performing students can master complex inquiry skills and sophisticated content. Shifts in the pedagogy within the MUVE alter the pattern of student performance.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Would like to see research on this.
  • Research shows that many participants value this functionality and choose to access the Web page after leaving the museum.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      More could be done with this.
  • Participants in these distributed simulations use location-aware handheld computers (with GPS technology), allowing users to physically move throughout a real-world location while collecting place-dependent simulated field data, interviewing virtual characters, and collaboratively investigating simulated scenarios.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      Much better
  • he defining quality of a learning community is that there is a culture of learning, in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding. There are four characteristics that such a culture must have: (1) diversity of expertise among its members, who are valued for their contributions and given support to develop, (2) a shared objective of continually advancing the collective knowledge and skills, (3) an emphasis on learning how to learn, and (4) mechanisms for sharing what is learned. If a learning community is presented with a problem, then the learning community can bring its collective knowledge to bear on the problem. It is not necessary that each member assimilate everything that the community knows, but each should know who within the community has relevant expertise to address any problem. This is a radical departure from the traditional view of schooling, with its emphasis on individual knowledge and performance, and the expectation that students will acquire the same body of knowledge at the same time.26
  • This immersion in virtual environments and augmented realities shapes participants' learning styles beyond what using sophisticated computers and telecommunications has fostered thus far, with multiple implications for higher education.
  • Students were most effective in learning and problem-solving when they collectively sought, sieved, and synthesized experiences rather than individually locating and absorbing information from some single best source.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      How does this 'fit' learning goals and teaching styles in our program?
  • Rheingold's forecasts draw on lifestyles seen at present among young people who are high-end users of new media
  • Notion of place is layered/blended/multiple; mobility and nomadicity prevalent among dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats (for example, coffeehouses near campus)
  • Rather than having core identities defined through a primarily local set of roles and relationships, people would express varied aspects of their multifaceted identities through alternate extended experiences in distributed virtual environments and augmented realities.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      How is this different from current experiences for individuals working within/across different social groups and boundaries?
  • one-third of U.S. households now have broadband access to the Internet. In the past three years, 14 million U.S. families have linked their computers with wireless home networks. Some 55 percent of Americans now carry cell phones
  • Mitchell's forecasts25 are similar to Rheingold's in many respects. He too envisions largely tribal lifestyles distributed across dispersed, fragmented, fluctuating habitats: electronic nomads wandering among virtual campfires. People's senses and physical agency are extended outward and into the intangible, at considerable cost to individual privacy. Individual identity is continuously reformed via an ever-shifting series of networking with others and with tools. People express themselves through nonlinear, associational webs of representations rather than linear "stories" and co-design services rather than selecting a precustomized variant from a menu of possibilities.
  • More and more, though, people of all ages will have lifestyles involving frequent immersion in both virtual and augmented reality. How might distributed, immersive media be designed specifically for education, and what neomillennial learning styles might they induce?
  • Guided social constructivism and situated learning as major forms of pedagogy
  • Peer-developed and peer-rated forms of assessment complement faculty grading, which is often based on individual accomplishment in a team performance context  Assessments provide formative feedback on instructional effectiveness
  • Mediated immersion creates distributed learning communities, which have different strengths and limits than location-bound learning communities confined to classroom settings and centered on the teacher and archival materials.27
  • Multipurpose habitats—creating layered/blended/personalizable places rather than specialized locations (such as computer labs)
  • Neomillenial Versus Millennial Learning Styles
  • Emphasis is placed on implications for strategic investments in physical plant, technology infrastructure, and professional development.
  • o the extent that some of these ideas about neomillennial learning styles are accurate, campuses that make strategic investments in physical plant, technical infrastructure, and professional development along the dimensions suggested will gain a considerable competitive advantage in both recruiting top students and teaching them effectively.
  • such as textbooks linked to course ratings by students)
  • Mirroring": Immersive virtual environments provide replicas of distant physical settings
  • Middleware, interoperability, open content, and open source
  • Finding information Sequential assimilation of linear information stream
  • Student products generally tests or papers Grading centers on individual performance
  • These ideas are admittedly speculative rather than based on detailed evidence and are presented to stimulate reaction and dialogue about these trends.
  • f we accept much of the analysis above
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Nov 08
       
      But have they made the case for its educational value?
  • students of all ages with increasingly neomillennial learning styles will be drawn to colleges and universities that have these capabilities. Four implications for investments in professional development also are apparent. Faculty will increasingly need capabilities in:
  • Some of these shifts are controversial for many faculty; all involve "unlearning" almost unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and values about the nature of teaching, learning, and the academy. Professional development that requires unlearning necessitates high levels of emotional/social support in addition to mastering the intellectual/technical dimensions involved. The ideal form for this type of professional development is distributed learning communities so that the learning process is consistent with the knowledge and culture to be acquired. In other words, faculty must themselves experience mediated immersion and develop neomillennial learning styles to continue teaching effectively as the nature of students alters.
  • Differences among individuals are greater than dissimilarities between groups, so students in any age cohort will present a mixture of neomillennial, millennial, and traditional learning styles
  • The technologies discussed are emerging rather than mature, so their final form and influences on users are not fully understood. A substantial number of faculty and administrators will likely dismiss and resist some of the ideas and recommendations presented here.
Nicole McClure

Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6072

shared by Nicole McClure on 07 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Over the past decade, higher education has invested millions of dollars in classroom technology. The addition of document cameras, DVD players, Internet access, and projectors (to name a few) has added new functionality to the classroom. It is now possible to bring much more diverse materials to the classroom, to present them in a variety of ways, and to devise new classroom activities for students. As a result, the concept of the classroom has expanded to include this set of new functions.
    • Nicole McClure
      Nicole McClure on 07 Nov 08
       
      I think it's interesting that putting some tech in the room makes it "new." Classrooms have always had new technology (relative to the time of course), but having a group of students stare at a projection screen is not that different than having them stare at a person. I'm more interested in the "new" classrooms that challenge the idea of space altogether.
Barbara Lindsey

untitled - 0 views

landscape.blogspot.com/...ious-is-changing-academic.html

delicious research academia

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence as an academic these days. It's where I make my friends, how I get the news, and where I go to trade. All this from a little server that does nothing but share bookmarks in public.
  • I've been building a taxonomy -- the way some people use wikis, the way my boyfriend uses that utterly cool personal software, "the brain;" the way my father uses his vertical file, the way my DC friends use their rolodexes -- so I sort out all the information I take in, annexing technology to memory, sorting factoids and spare threads and notable evidence in neat, interlocking piles where I can find information again, draw connections, and create new connections.
  • The forty American history students I teach are instructed to go to my delicious page for writing help, research help, maps, and images relating to the class.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • What's rapidly happening with these shared tags is academics finding each other in rapid numbers. I have some twenty people in my network, at least half of whom I've never met in real life.
  • Every morning, I log into my delicious network and read the links that my small army of admired, clever, canny, eccentric brains has put together for me. What's more, I'm developing what I'd consider an actual working relationship with these other scholars. A few of them have added me to their own networks. Day to day, I watch their reactions to Bush, I get a sense of where their research is going, and they get a sense of mine. It's low-level, low-commitment hanging out with high levels of information exchange.
  • As Hannah Arendt understood, the modern democratic state happened when people in public spaces began interacting, and thus began taking action together. For this reason, she identified the medival carnivals and fair days of Europe as the seat of literature, culture, debate, and politics. The rule goes like this: make a public, get action. Today, Delicious does for the internet what open-air markets did for medieval society. Low key, high-information, continuous-formation community building.
Barbara Lindsey

The Chronicle: 10/28/2005: Lectures on the Go - 0 views

chronicle.com/...10a03901.htm

ed higher podcasting

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08 - Cached
  • More and more professors, including Mr. Jackson, are turning to the technology to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling "coursecasting." The portability of coursecasting, its proponents say, makes the technology ideal for students who fall behind in class or those for whom English is a second language. And some advocates say that coursecasting can be more than just a review tool, that it can also enliven classroom interaction and help lecturers critique themselves.
  • One of the things you do by podcasting is participate in student culture," Mr. Jackson says
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Is this a good enough reason?
  • Make students listen to a podcast before class, and they will show up ready to converse.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Do you think this would happen?
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Purdue's podcasting project arose from a desire to let students study without being tethered to their computers, according to Michael Gay, the university's manager of broadcast networks and services for information technology. "We're trying to give people as many options as possible if they miss a course and need to catch up — or if they just want to review," he says.
  • Duke University
  • Drexel University
  • Purdue University
  • American University
  • University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's School of Dentistry
  • "Everybody knows that when you say something in class, the first time, not everybody is paying attention," Mr. Jackson says. "But if you make your lecture available as a podcast, students can relisten to troublesome passages, and it's easy for them to slow things down."
  • St. Mary's College, in California
  • For a graduate-level course in quantitative analysis, Ms. Herkenhoff creates two different series of podcasts, each recontextualizing highlights from her lectures.
  • "When I talked about this with my colleagues, the first thing they all said was 'well, no one's going to go to class,'" says G. Marc Loudon, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue who has posted lectures for students as both audio and video files. Mr. Loudon offers a fairly unsympathetic rejoinder to those concerns: "If a podcast can capture everything you do in class, you deserve to have nobody coming."
  • started penalizing students a grade point for every class session they missed.
  • "Those of you who didn't come to class, but are listening to the podcast, should know that one of the answers to the next test is on the screen," he said. "But I'm not going to tell you what it is."
  • But most students are savvy enough to realize that coursecasts aren't an alternative to class,
  • "a great way to complement the presentation slides many professors already offer online."
  • Richard Smith, a lecturer in instructional technology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, hosts a weekly podcast on scholarship and education. But he is not convinced that the technology can revitalize pedagogy — because, he says, there is little evidence that recorded lectures will hold students' interest.
  • "I don't think most professors, no matter how good they are in the classroom, can avoid being boring as hell when they're recorded."
  • Students reared on iPods and the Internet do not come to class expecting to sit through an hourlong lecture, he says. Instead, they want to gather information on their own terms and spend their class time in discussion, not rapt attention.
  • "The 'sage on the stage' is dying, if not dead already," Mr. Jackson says. "Faculty members are no longer privileged sources of knowledge, so our job should be to get people to think critically and independently about things."
  • Coursecasting, he says, can help that process along. In Mr. Jackson's own courses, he has put lectures online as podcasts and asked students to listen to them before they come to class, a technique he refers to as "distance learning with a twist." "Think about how much classroom time you would save if you didn't have to lecture anymore," Mr. Jackson says. "You free up all this interactive personal space between you and your students. It changes the classroom experience."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Your thoughts?
  • The "decentered classroom," as Mr. Jackson calls it, can be unsettling for students who are not eager to let the lecture-hall experience bleed into their free time.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Is this the resistance Jessie and others have encountered?
  • Richard Edwards, an assistant professor of communication at St. Mary's College, is building a course around a series of 30-minute podcasts about film-noir classics that he and a colleague had made. Students will listen to the podcasts and then elaborate on Mr. Edwards's talking points in class. "Instead of having to run through all of our thoughts on Double Indemnity," Mr. Edwards says, "we can actually start our discussion in the 31st minute, in media res, without setting up the movie for everyone."
  • Mr. Edwards has made the podcasts that will anchor his film-noir course available to the public free through a license from Creative Commons, a group dedicated to making scholarly and artistic material widely available online. "I want people to download this stuff so they can feel free to engage with it," he says.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 07 Oct 08
       
      Would giving your content away freely like this be a problem for you?
  • Michigan's dentistry school, for example, keeps its coursecasts locked behind a firewall so that only students can listen.
  • Administrators received enough complaints that they formed a faculty committee that is now examining BoilerCast's intellectual-property implications. "The fundamental question is who owns a faculty member's lectures," Mr. Loudon says. "If these classes have intellectual value beyond the classroom, who owns that?"
1 - 20 of 36 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page