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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.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • 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

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

Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 0 views

digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/ial-Bookmarking-and-Annotating

diigo del.icio.us social bookmarking Ferriter actfl09

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence
  • While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences.
  • A tagging language is nothing more than a set of categories that all members of a group agree to use when bookmarking websites for shared projects.
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  • In Shirky's terms, teams that embrace social bookmarking decrease the "cost" of  group transactions.  No longer do members resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning, groups can make sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.
  • Imagine the collective power of an army of readers engaged in ongoing conversation about provocative ideas, challenging one another's thought, publicly debating, and polishing personal beliefs.  Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.  Imagine the potential for brainstorming global solutions, for holding government agencies accountable, or for gathering feedback from disparate stakeholder groups when reading moves from a "fundamentally private activity" to a "community event."
  • Understanding that there are times when users want their shared reading experiences to be more focused, however, Diigo makes it possible to keep highlights and annotations private or available to members of predetermined and self-selected groups.  For professional learning teams exploring instructional practices or for student research groups exploring content for classroom projects, this provides a measure of targeted exploration between likeminded thinkers.
  • Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums
  • Many of today's teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.  The results can be disastrous.  Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.  "Why did I bother to plug my students in for this project?" teachers wonder.  "They could have done better work with a piece of paper and a pencil!"
  • With shared annotation services like Diigo, powerful learning depends on much more than understanding the technical details behind adding highlights and comments for other members of a group to see.  Instead, powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together.  That means teachers must systematically introduce students to a set of collaborative dialogue behaviors that can be easily implemented online.
Barbara Lindsey

Why Wordle-By Steven W. Anderson - 0 views

www.techlearning.com/24518

wordle students examples

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • @mrsmac75-As a starter for students to try and guess where we're going with our lesson and create their own learning outcomes. @ktenkely-I use Wordle as warm up. I hate the question, "What are we doing today." I give word clues about what we are doing in class.
  • I use it as an assessment activity at the end of a topic,
  • Barbara Lindsey on 14 Oct 09
     
    Great examples for using Wordle with students
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

Paly Voice - Home - 0 views

voice.paly.net

student-created writing authentic authenticlearning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 14 Oct 09
     
    Palo Alto High School Online Journalism Site. Excellent example of authentic student work.
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.
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

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.
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  • 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

digital digs: Richard Miller's MLA Dream - 1 views

www.alex-reid.net/...richard-millers-mla-dream.html

mla youtube humanities web2.0 teaching research

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Jan 09 - Cached
  • How long do we have before someone comes along and just imposes something or simply supplants us? 30 years? 20 years? Will it begin in as little as five or ten years? Think about Wall St and the auto industry before you answer.
  • A liberal arts college creates a digital humanities center. The center starts to get grants and increasingly becomes better funded by the institution. Faculty from across humanities departments interested in the digital become more closely tied to the center than to their departments. Humanities curriculum become increasingly driven by the Center. Hiring and tenuring priorities still ostensibly in departments start to reflect the priorities of the Center and the faculty associated with it. Graduate students increasingly work with faculty whose interests are as much in the Center as they are in the department. You start to get new interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary programs. Departments get squeezed to the periphery. Faculty in such centers around the nation establish new professional organizations and new national conferences. They get funding for new publishing venues.
  • Miller sees the necessity for developing new media composing pedagogies that foster creativity and collaboration, for preparing faculty to teach in this way (and compose themselves in this way), and for building spaces where such activities might be possible.
Barbara Lindsey

Academic Evolution: Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid - 0 views

www.academicevolution.com/...intellectual-apartheid.html

publishing2.0 academy higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid
  • I mean academia’s policy that enforces an unnecessary and counterproductive intellectual divide. What intellectual divide? It is that gaping chasm between two opposing models of disseminating knowledge: toll access and open access.
  • lack of access to technology (dubbed the "digital divide") seriously handicaps half the world's population. That is a giant problem but one being gradually ameliorated by mobile telephony and economic forces.
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  • Academics and their institutions have sold out to economic interests in the name of preserving the only system trustworthy enough to produce authoritative information.
  • I believe it is fair to label as “apartheid” any artificial social construct that privileges an elite minority to the detriment of a majority. The artificial construct doing that in the world of knowledge is the toll-access system of traditional scholarly communication.
  • Despite all the digitizing and online publishing now extant, despite the proliferation of websites and web users, despite the largely up-to-date technological infrastructure within academia, it is still the case that most of the world’s most important knowledge remains out of reach of most of the world. Keep that simple fact central in your mind as I revisit the mission statements of universities and academic presses that purport to promote scholarship for the general benefit of humankind.
  • “The mission of a university press,” said Daniel Coit Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University in 1880, “is to assist the university in fulfilling its noble mission ‘to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.'" Universities and academic publishers are ostensibly dedicated to the very opposite of keeping people and knowledge apart. And yet, they do.
  • You really don’t need to go to the developing world to recognize that advanced knowledge is a big club with stiff entrance fees. Even middle class Americans will think twice before throwing down $30 for a scholarly article. How likely will this knowledge ever reach scholars in Mexico or India? And just how broadly can the editors of Subjectivity expect it to reach when subscribing costs $503/year?
  • Academic authors, editors, publishers, and distributors are simply not in the business of reaching the masses; they are in the business of reaching other specialists.
  • Academia banks on Intellectual Apartheid; its knowledge economy only rewards specialists publishing to specialists. In such a world, the “influence” of scholarship is not often correlated to real-world effects; it is usually correlated to how well a given work contributes to the specialist knowledge economy. Citation indexes measure reputations among specialists; “impact factor” relates not to real-world impact, but to reputation within the closed system.
  • one of the great secrets of academic publishing
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      What do you think about this statement? Who knows (and perpetuates) this secret, in your opinion?
  • academia could care less about whether anything its scholars do actually makes a difference in the world, except for the occasional puff piece to show to contributors or alumni. Reaching out to the whole world is the stuff that convocation speeches and university mission statements are made of, but in the day-to-day world of academia, actually reaching the world with one’s refined knowledge is not rewarded. In fact, it is often punished. Generalists, such as those who are using blogging to actually talk to the public about their ideas, are threatened with lack of tenure or advancement if they waste their time in anything but publications oriented towards their disciplinary peers.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      Do you agree with this statement? If so, what does this mean for you and your academic future?
  • A university’s reward system requires its faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals serve the purpose of authenticating knowledge, but at the same time they also wall in that knowledge by making it available only to those willing to pay for it.
  • There is an assumption that if something is “published” (meaning published in a conventional, peer-reviewed journal), then it is appropriately circulating and available.
  • It may be “circulating” among subscribers (a few hundred), but it is simultaneously being kept from the online public (a few billion).
  • Essentially, scholars whose work is measured in terms of how often their articles are cited within peer-reviewed literature demonstrate not so much the actual worth or impact of their ideas as they demonstrate their fidelity to a closed knowledge economy. Impact factor statistics are really loyalty points for the gentlemen's club: if you impressed other members of the club, you get to stay in it. If you try for other audiences--like the one's loftily imagined in university mission statements--you show disloyalty to the club.
  • scholars underestimate the value and influence of their work, voluntarily giving up what their work might mean and do if circulating among a public that is literally six or seven orders of magnitude larger in size that the subscriber base of the most used journals. And it's a shame that broader, open, multi-disciplinary review is considered inferior to one-time assessment by two or three experts. Can we really be sure that conventional peer-reviewed knowledge is as reliable as it pretends to be when its adherents resist transparency and the checks and balances of exposing this knowledge more broadly?
  • I call upon you to join me in a full divestment from intellectual apartheid.
  • Here's how each academic stakeholder can fight Intellectual Apartheid: Scholars: Publish your work in Open Access journals or arrange open access for publications in conventional journals. Use Creative Commons licensing (rather than signing away copyright) in order to preserve access to your own work Deposit your publications in institutional or disciplinary archives to ensure permanent open access and the broadest exposure to search engines. Refuse to peer-review manuscripts or serve in editorial capacities for any journal that does not accommodate open access. Cancel subscriptions to toll-access scholarship Wean yourself from using any research materials that an everyday person from a developing country wouldn't have full access to via the Internet
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      What do you think?
  • In training students, patrons, and faculty, teach them more about how and why to use open access resources rather than how to use expensive proprietary databases and services. Work with administrators to educate faculty about the benefits of open access publishing and rights management.
  • Administrators Create a university-wide mandate (as Harvard has done), requiring faculty to retain copyright of their scholarship and to license the non-exclusive depositing of that scholarship in the institutional archive. Update promotion and tenure policies to favor open access publications and to accommodate evolving scholarly genres (such as data sets, software, and scholarly tools that build the cyberinfrastructure). Require chairs and deans to educate faculty on evolving academic publishing models and to ready their conversion to using and publishing open access scholarship.
Barbara Lindsey

Top News - This fair-use guide offers copyright shelter - 0 views

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

copyright fair use education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Media and legal experts create a code to help teachers and students understand fair use of copyrighted materials
  • Along with these five principles, the code lists common myths about fair use and provides the truth behind these myths. For example, it explains there are no "rules of thumb" for fair use, and that fair use is situational--and context is critical. Also, educators don't always have the last word on fair-use policy.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 09 Dec 08
     
    Page 2 of copyright article. HATE how they break up articles into separate pages!
Barbara Lindsey

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

www.educause.edu/...163095

educause web2.0 highered faculty languages

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Dec 09 - Cached
  • graduate students interested in becoming acquainted with relevant instructional technologies have a limited number of options. 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. The University of Minnesota offers excellent training through its summer institutes,4 but access is an issue. Most IT departments offer training sessions on how to use the university course management system, build a web page, or create a PowerPoint presentation, but technical training is not enough.
  • 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

Academic Evolution: Conventional Scholarship as "Legacy System" and Open Access as "Mid... - 0 views

www.academicevolution.com/...legacy-academic-systems.html

OpenAccess opencontent higher ed research

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Witness, for example, the article from last week's Chronicle of Higher Education in which editors of humanities journals complained that the journal issue is now a kind of threatened species because the article is becoming a more primary unit (either compiled in collected print volumes or placed independently online). This sort of balkanizing apparently erodes the relationship among articles whose coherence is physiclly obvious within the binding of a printed issue; it sacrifices the disciplinary organization of knowledge that editors work hard to provide in their careful assembly of related works. Those are some interesting arguments, though they ignore the ways the semantic web and social filters can organize knowledge in more flexible ways than any given issue of a given journal.
  • Despite going electronic, the contemporary academic journal remains largely unmediated in the ways that popular communication now is by default. A few more pictures, perhaps, but the genres of academic publication resist all the ways in which knowledge today is now rapidly interconnected. Hyperlinks are superior to traditional scholarly citations, but even links that are cited in scholarly publications get fossilized as footnotes rather than being living links. And worst of all, academic publishing remains quarantined behind commercial barriers. In a world in which there are now four billion near-instantaneous delivery devices (mobile phones), professors are content to have their best thinking enter a distribution stream that guarantees their work will be limited to as few as several hundred potential users. At some point it will be impossible to refer to such limited distribution as publication at all. Access is everything.
  • Modern popular knowledge has been socialized through commenting and recommendation systems that academic knowledge has kept itself immune from behind its ivory curtain. And there is strong motivation for it to resist current communications. If academic publishing stays within its established genres and persists in the gateway model of peer review, it can continue to pretend to fixed and certain authority, as though knowledge is a commodity (as indeed, it is within the academic reward system).
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  • ost of the Open Access movement is taking place in terms of accommodating Scholarship 1.0. Almost all the discussion regarding Open Access takes as a given the persistence of the traditional genres of academic knowledge (especially the journal article, but also the monograph, the dissertation, the thesis, etc.), and the persistence of the single-instance, gateway model of peer review. (It is still rare to hear OA advocates speak about born-digital scholarship, teaching media, or student-generated work--all of which should be captured and maintained in such repositories, as I've argued elsewhere).
  • Journal articles are going to be versioned one day just as Wikipedia pages, collaboratively created and mediated with sound and image as never before. Tagging and linking will be as critical, as required to substantiate knowledge, as peer review and documentation conventions are now. Scholarly social networks are emerging whose value will outstrip the greatest collections of fossilized knowledge.
  • An Institutional Repository will hopefully contain all the intellectual output of a given university or discipline, permanently and openly connecting this data to all other open knowledge portals worldwide. But if such a repository is imagined simply as a collection of digitized texts--print monographs or PDF versions of articles that look and act like print, disconnected from the various media and socializing conventions of the digital knowledge paradigm--then these nerve centers for the future risk becoming monuments to the past. Enough college campuses are already going to serve that memorial function as location becomes less critical to knowledge-generating activities. Our precious databases upon which to build a bright future should not be just the "middleware" to the Second Middle Ages--what we may one day term those print-bound centuries preceding the Digital Renaissance we now enter.
Barbara Lindsey

Multimedia & Internet@Schools Magazine - 0 views

www.mmischools.com/...MmisXtra.aspx

media literacy reading education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Jul 09 - Cached
  • 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.
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  • Culture determines library programs; libraries transmit culture.
  • If we as librarians support and use learning resources that are meaningful, useful, and appealing to our students, so might the classroom teacher.
  • In Phaedrus, Plato decries an "alternate" communication technology:The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves.The Greek philosopher was, of course, dissing the new technology of his day: writing. Plato might well approve of our return to an oral tradition in a digital form. But his quote also demonstrates that sometimes our greatest fears become our greatest blessings.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 18 Jul 09
     
    Thanks to Russel Tarr via Twitter
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)
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  • 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.
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