Group items tagged

The other benefit that comes out of that, especially with group work, is you can see what students are doing as they are doing it....

you know what is going on, and you can see from the interaction they are having and the contribution of material in the wiki.

mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those).

And fewer teens are wearing watches now because they use their phones to tell time instead

The phone that you have in your pocket, pack, or handbag is probably ten times more powerful than the PC you had on your desk only 8 or 9 years ago (assuming you even had a PC; most mobile users never have).

With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?

These amazing people are bloggers who live in various countries around the world. We have invited them as contributors or hired them as editors because they understand the context and relevance of information, views, and analysis being posted every day from their countries and regions on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, videoblogs - and other kinds of online citizen media. They are helping us to make sense of it all, and to highlight things that bloggers are saying which mainstream media may not be reporting

At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, podcasts, photos, video, wikis, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our interconnected world. We aim to do the following:

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.

More cognitive and affective experiences lead to more thinking, more synaptic connections, and more learning. To this end, we have sought to leverage guesswork, repetition, stories, context, in-depth discussion, etc, to offer what Siemens might call ’frequency, diversity, and depth of exposure’ to the content. I’ve always maintained that learning is multi-dimensional, and deepened when you approach the subject from different angles.

we are connectors, or resources who point learners at key patterns or elements that help strengthen their connection to a piece of information (and emphasize the skill of being able to identify patterns).

Teachers do NOT provide digital access to notes and materials, and students are quizzed regularly about the content on which they have taken textual notes to see if this traditional “broadcast/spray model” of learning has been effective. (Or at least if the items included in the quiz have temporarily been stored in short term memory.) We MUST move beyond this traditional “banking model” of education, and I’m convinced the impetus for these changes is NOT coming and is not GOING to come from “inside the system” of traditional education.

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.

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

Back then, most of his students were unfamiliar with Twitter, the microblogging service that limits messages to 140 characters. And for the first few weeks of course, students were reluctant to tweet, says Mr. Complese. “It took a few weeks for this to click,” he said. “Before it started to work, there was just nothing on the back channel.”

Once students warmed to the idea that their professors actually wanted them to chat during class, students begin floating ideas or posting links to related materials, the professor says. In some cases, a shy student would type an observation or question on Twitter, and others in the class would respond with notes encouraging the student to raise the topic out loud. Other times, one of the professors would see a link posted by a student and stop class to discuss it.

his hope is that the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls.

I would argue that postliteracy is a return to more natural forms of multisensory communication—speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multimedia formats.

Libraries, especially those that serve children and young adults, need to acknowledge that society is becoming postliterate.

PL libraries budget, select, acquire, catalog, and circulate as many or more materials in nonprint formats as they do traditional print materials. The circulation policy for all materials, print and nonprint, is similar.2. PL libraries stock, without prejudice, age-appropriate graphic novels and audio books, both fiction and nonfiction, for informational and recreational use.3. PL libraries support gaming for instruction and recreation.4. PL libraries purchase high-value online information resources.5. PL libraries provide resources for patrons to create visual and auditory materials and promote the demonstration of learning and research through original video, audio, and graphics production. They also provide physical spaces for the presentation of these creations.6. PL libraries allow the use of personal communication devices (MP3 players, handhelds, laptops, etc.) and provide wireless network access for these devices.7. PL library programs teach the critical evaluation of nonprint information.8. PL library programs teach the skills necessary to produce effective communication in all formats.9. PL library programs accept and promote the use of nonprint resources as sources for research and problem-based assignments.10. PL librarians recognize the legitimacy of nonprint resources and promote their use without bias.

For centuries the university model dominated because nothing else worked. No technology existed that might deliver an interactive, engaging educational experience without gathering students and teachers in the same physical space. In the past century, a powerful social bias set in: Only accredited universities were allowed to grant degrees, and most professional jobs required an accredited degree.

Technology also determined how the project would end. Considering I was using the internet for overseas contact, I decided to look domestically for the conclusion. As a result of just a few minutes effort using emails I found three US museums (see below) who agreed to take our class interview projects for safe keeping in their archives. I was overwhelmed by the interest in our work and was amazed when the US National WWII Museum in New Orleans asked to have us provide links and information for their website. In conclusion, some simple email and wiki-site contact with a handful of schools brought the WWII period to life for Midwestern students in the US like nothing else could have.

Poland offered vivid stories and images of invasion, concentration camps, and families torn apart, and my students were able examine perspectives that were not to be found in our text book.

After blanketing the world with polite requests for collaboration things began shaping up. My 6th graders were set to work with schools in Turkey, Lebanon, and Morocco. My 7th graders were set to work with schools in Germany, Denmark, Japan, the Philippines, and most importantly Junior High #4 in Poland.