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academhack » Blog Archive » Seriously Can We End This Debate Already - 0 views

  • What you want from a secondary source is a good introduction to a concept, that is mostly reliable, up-to-date, entries for as many topics as possible, connections to where to go to learn more, and easy and ubiquitous (as possible) access. A secondary source is not an in depth analysis which upon reading one is suddenly an expert on said entry or topic, it’s not designed to be. it is just a good overview. No secondary source is going to be completely accurate, or engage in the level of detail and nuance which we want from students, or that is required to fully “know” about a subject.
  • The issue is not that Wikipedia is or is not reliable and thus should be banned in academic environments, rather the issue is that Wikipedia is a secondary source and thus should not be treated as a primary one.
  • Wikipedia has substantial advantages over any prior encyclopedia model.
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  • The breadth of knowledge, its ability to be linked to other knowledge, its cost (free), its up-to-dateness, and its preservation of editorial discussions (it records not only the article but the discussion which produced said article) makes it far more useful. And that doesn’t even begin to address things like how much easier Wikipedia is to use for mash-ups and data extraction, repurposing the information for other reference works.
  • Instead lets talk to students about how appropriately to use secondary sources, how to understand how encyclopedias function, how all encyclopedias are biased, all knowledge is discursive, and focus on teaching students how to judge credibility and accuracy instead of outsourcing it to people at Britannica.
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Edge: NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE By Clay Shirky - 0 views

  • When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What do you think about this? If true, what would it mean for you?
  • If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.
  • The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau.
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  • Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.
  • Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole.
  • In craigslist's gradual shift from 'interesting if minor' to 'essential and transformative', there is one possible answer to the question "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
  • Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
  • Second, they will stay focused on producing the best digital news products for their audience, products that take full advantage of the Internet's unique properties — its ability to combine immediacy and depth, its ability to offer highly personalized experiences, its ability to offer instant access to useful information from obscure public records to mundane event listings, and its ability to form networks so that users may form communities that mirror and extend the ones that exist in the physical world. They will learn how to engage their users to create and contribute content to enrich the experience of reading online, and not overwhelm their readers with a cacophony of undifferentiated noise.
  • The point here is that newspapers must accomplish online what they have long been able to achieve for generations of readers in print: they must forge an emotional bond with their readers by becoming an essential part of their daily lives.
  • Third, and perhaps most important (because without this the first two are impossible), newspapers must recognize (as some already have) that technology and journalism are inexorably intertwined.
  •  
    "Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario."
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Academic Evolution: Conventional Scholarship as "Legacy System" and Open Access as "Mid... - 0 views

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

  • 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
       
      Is this a good enough reason?
  • Make students listen to a podcast before class, and they will show up ready to converse.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Do you think this would happen?
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  • 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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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?"
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One Laptop One Child | Scholastic.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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.
  •  
    How 1-1 is changing as students ask to bring in their own laptops
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Ping - Google Goggles, Searching by Image Alone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It’s not hard to imagine a slew of commercial applications for this technology. You could compare prices of a product online, learn how to operate that old water heater whose manual you have lost or find out about the environmental record of a certain brand of tuna. But Goggles and similar products could also tell the history of a building, help travelers get around in a foreign country or even help blind people navigate their surroundings.
  • But recognizing images at what techies call “scale,” meaning thousands or even millions of images, is hugely difficult, partly because it requires enormous computing power. it turns out that Google, with its collection of massive data centers, has just that.
  •  
    Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image wIth a cellphone and feeding It into Google's search engine.
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Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course - Boing Boing - 0 views

  • Kyle's a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course -- he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review -- and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.
  • The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs -- including me, at times -- fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.
  • And in this case, it's especially poignant, since Kyle's workflow actually matches the practices of real-world programmers and academic computer scientists: coders look at one anothers' examples, use reference implementations, publish their code for review by peers. If you hired a programmer who insisted that none of her co-workers could see her work, you'd immediately fire her -- that's just not how software is written. Kyle's prof's idea of how computer programmers work is exactly what's meant by the pejorative sense of "academic" -- unrealistic, hidebound, and out-of-touch with reality. Bravo to Kyle for standing his ground!
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  • I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer
  • Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."
  • Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?
  • The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.
  •  
    Thx to Russel Tarr
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Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix (EDUCAUS... - 0 views

  • Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. it may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications.
  • Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. . . . In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process.2
  • It is common to assume that remakes or reworkings are inherently lesser forms of creation than something that is "original" and that free reuse somehow degrades the value of the source. Modern copyright law and the intense social stigma associated wIth a term such as plagiarism speak to such assumptions.
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  • In his recent Harper's article "The Ecstasy of Influence," the novelist Jonathan Lethem imaginatively reviews the history of appropriation and recasts it as essential to the act of creation.3
  • He asserts that visual, sound, and text collage "might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first."
  • Lethem concludes: "Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses."
  • It's no mere coincidence that the rise of modernist genres using collage techniques and more fragmented structures accompanied the emergence of photography and audio recording. Reading Walter Benjamin's highly influential 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"4 It's clear that the profound effects of reproductive technology were obvious at that time. As Gould argued in 1964 (influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan5), changes in how art is produced, distributed, and consumed in the electronic age have deep effects on the character of the art Itself.
  • The result has been a flood of work created by largely anonymous media artists who are reimagining the iconography of popular culture, unearthing forgotten artifacts and contextualizing them anew. One only has to spend an hour surfing YouTube.com to get a sense of the subversive fun being had by hundreds of thousands of culture mashers.6
  • he statement "users will never add metadata" was becoming a mantra at gatherings of increasingly frustrated learning object promoters (again, I was often present) and when most learning object repositories were floundering, resource-sharing services such as del.icio.us and Flickr were enjoying phenomenal growth, with their user communities eagerly contributing heaps of useful metadata via simple folksonomy-oriented tagging systems.
  • Educators might justifiably argue that their materials are more authoritative, reliable, and instructionally sound than those found on the wider Web, but those materials are effectively rendered invisible and inaccessible if they are locked inside course management systems.
  • It's a dirty but open secret that many courses in private environments use copyrighted third-party materials in a way that pushes the limIts of fair use—third-party IP is a big reason why many courses cannot easily be made open.
  • Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/), another RSS-based personal portal, supports a number of education-specific templates for tracking grades and displaying class schedules along with resources; pages with such sensitive information can also be made private.13
  • nother Pipe that Hirst has created is the "OpenLearn Unit Outlinks Search Hub Pipe," which extracts "all the outgoing links from a course unit, then feeds these into a Yahoo Search pipe, which uses the domains as search limits for the search."20 In other words, this Pipe can create a filtered search of trusted domains that are relevant to a particular course, and the filtered search will adjust automatically as new links are added to the course materials. Of course, this added functionality requires open content and a reusable data format in order to work properly.
  • If the course unit in question is locked away in a course management system behind a password firewall, Pipes cannot access the data required to create the customized search. As with content remixing, open access to materials is not just a matter of some charitable impulse to share knowledge with the world; it is a core requirement for participating in some of the most exciting and innovative activity on the Web.
  • . Working with the Scottish students they could then find out the stories behind these artefacts and create a Google Map which tracks these stories geographically, historically and anecdotally."21
  • All too often, college and university administrators react to this type of innovation with suspicion and outright hostility rather than cooperation. Witness the recent case at Harvard, where students, frustrated with the quality of the official institutional Web portal, decided to build their own portal, entitled Crimson Connect (http://www.crimsonconnect.com/), using RSS feeds and, for the most part, existing free software tools. University officials responded by demanding the removal of material that had been syndicated from password-protected course pages.25
  • those of us in higher education who observe the successful practices in the wider Web world have an obligation to consider and discuss how we might apply these lessons in our own contexts. We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse. When choosing a content management system, we might consider how well it supports RSS syndication.
  • Two of my favorite YouTube clips are the remix of The Shining's trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVjl7gK4HGU) and the mashup of the original Star Trek TV series with a Monty Python song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEnyT0_BjxA). These two videos themselves illustrate the difference between a remix and a mashup.
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Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 | Educationload.com - 0 views

  • A keyword search for the word “tech%” and “computer” in the Modern Language Association (MLA) job list1 returns over 43 relevant ads out of 236 job postings (as of November 20, 2007): “familiarity with teaching-related technologies” (tenure track in Spanish, Missouri); “experience with technology in the classroom” (tenure track in French, Michigan); “ability to use technology effectively in teaching and learning” (tenure track in Japanese, South Carolina). The wording varies slightly from one ad to the next, but the message is the same: job candidates are well advised to have an answer ready when asked how they use technology in the classroom.
  • The history of educational technology in higher education provides ample support for the claim that technology should never outstrip pedagogy.
  • many Web 2.0 applications are powerful socialization and communication tools. As such, they have an incredible educational potential for foreign language instruction.
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  • Sadly, this potential often fails to be realized because of the widespread belief that these tools are somehow inherently educational. The iPod might have an instructional potential, but it is the educators who arrange and structure instructional events around it to make learning happen, not the instrument itself. To realize the instructional potential of technology requires a set of skills that can only be acquired through adequate instruction and practice. Just as speaking a foreign language is not a qualification to teach it, knowing how to use a technology does not mean that one knows intuitively how to use it as a teaching tool.
  • a recent MLA report on the status of foreign language instruction in higher education3 underscored that most incoming foreign language faculty would be teaching at the undergraduate level. The report calls for the integration of technology training in the graduate curriculum, asking departments to “take the necessary steps to teach graduate students to use technology in language instruction and learning.” The report, which called for drastic transformations of foreign language academic programs nationwide, also emphasized the importance of providing graduate students with a good pedagogical basis.
  • Few graduate programs include such training as a part of the curriculum. As a matter of fact, pedagogy itself often represents a negligible fraction of graduate program requirements.
  • Because the field of language technology is at the crossroads of technology, instructional design, and languages, it calls for the close collaboration of experts in each area. Today, language centers are the only campus units where such a wide range of expertise can easily be found.
  • The role of language technologists goes beyond teaching what a blog is and how to set up a browser to display Japanese characters. It includes sorting through novel technologies, evaluating their instructional potential, researching current educational uses, and sharing findings wIth educators. The most promising applications available today were not designed for instructional use and do not come wIth an instruction manual. To use them in the classroom requires the abilIty to redirect their intended purpose and, more importantly, to think through possible consequences of doing so.
  •  
    Technological skills and understanding how to employ Web 2.0 tools to successfully support pedagogy are vital for foreign language faculty today
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Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai - CNN.com - 0 views

  • One tweet from "Dupree" appeared to be coming from inside one of the hotels: "Mumbai terrorists are asking hotel reception for rooms of American citizens and holding them hostage on one floor." A group of Mumbai-based bloggers turned their Metroblog into a news wire service, while the blog MumbaiHelp offered to help users get through to their family and friends in the city, or to get information about them, and has had a number of successes. Flickr also proved a useful source of haunting images chronicling the aftermath of the attacks. Journalist Vinukumar Ranganathan's stream of photos were published by CNN and other major broadcasters. iReport.com: Are you there? Share your photos, videos and stories A Google Map showing the key locations and buildings with links to news stories and eyewitness accounts, and CNN's iReporters flooded the site with their videos and images of the terror attacks.
  • However, as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies. For example, a rumor that the Indian government was asking tweeters to stop live updates to avoid compromising its security efforts was published and republished on the site.
  • As blogger Tim Mallon put it, "I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.
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  • What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted. A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media. Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information
  •  
    Neha Viswanathan, a former regional editor for Southeast Asia and a volunteer at Global Voices, told CNN, "Even before I actually heard of it on the news I saw stuff about this on Twitter.
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Pixar University: Thinking Outside The Mouse - 0 views

  • Pixar University -- a professional-development program that puts as much emphasis on employee education as it does on company training -- is the company's secret weapon. "During 90 percent of your workday, you're in this box -- you get to do only certain things," said Polson. "And yet we're all here because we love movies and art. At Pixar University, all the boxes get removed. All the walls come down, and you get to be the director of your own creative idea." Polson has taken classes in drawing, screenwriting, and color, and he's completed a course in which he made his own short film.
  • The point of improv -- like most of classes in the packed curriculum -- is to push Pixar employees to try new things, work together better and test new ideas. "If you don't create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it's likely you're going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace," said Pixar University Dean Randy Nelson. "Those kind of irrational what-ifs eventually lead to something that makes you go, 'Wow, I never would have thought about it.'"
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Does current graduate educational system create derivative mini-mes?
  • Animators agree that Disney, Pixar's most prized partner in production of its first films -- and its recognized competitor in the animation world at large -- has begun to produce films critics call formulaic.
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  • Nelson said the university's primary purpose is to build morale, spirit and communication among employees.
  • By the time these people worked together for 25 years, you would just not believe the things that would happen."
  •  
    "Pixar University -- a professional-development program that puts as much emphasis on employee education as it does on company training -- is the company's secret weapon. "During 90 percent of your workday, you're in this box -- you get to do only certain things," said Polson. "And yet we're all here because we love movies and art. At Pixar University, all the boxes get removed. All the walls come down, and you get to be the director of your own creative idea." Polson has taken classes in drawing, screenwriting, and color, and he's completed a course in which he made his own short film. "
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Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views

  • The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
  • The openness of Wikipedia is instructive in another way: by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.
  • viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
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  • A very different sort of initiative that is using technology to leverage social learning is Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India.
  • many students in the United States and in many other parts of the world are already involved with online social networks that include their friends. John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan, has attempted to bring attention to this phenomenon by asking how many students are being taught each year by his institution. Although about 40,000 students are enrolled in classes on the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, King believes that the actual number of students being reached by the school today is closer to 250,000.13
  • Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.
  • Hands-On Universe (HOU) is also designed to promote collaborative learning in astronomy (http://www.handsonuniverse.org). Based at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists. According to Kyle Cudworth, the science director at Yerkes Observatory, which is part of the HOU network: “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • the emphasis is on building a community of students and scholars as much as on providing access to educational content.
  • The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.
  • The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments
  • longtail
  • An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
  • The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20
  • We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.
  • Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.6
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads.
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Locus Online Perspectives: Cory Doctorow: Close Enough for Rock 'n' Roll - 0 views

  • 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.
  •  
    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.
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NYC school uses collaborative wikis to cut costs and save time - 0 views

  • The wikis include everything from test scheduling (internal) to early dismissal information (external).
  • "We've saved lots of money," Cohen said. "But the real drag of using [expensive collaboration products] was you have these elaborate systems; parents had to get accounts; you had to give vendors the students' names; there was lots of work just to get it to work."
  • With the Wikispaces, Cohen can just set the program up and have users do the work for him. Privacy concerns are minimal because the only publicly accessible information is the student's name and time of meeting,
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  • Cohen also likes the project because it was a simple way for teachers to "get their toes wet" with collaborative technology with a shallow learning curve and a high return on investment. For the spring semester, he said, teachers would actually have to sit and field calls for scheduling parent-teacher appointments.
  • Demonstrating the value of collaborative technology, while teaching how to use it, is the hardest challenge in its adoption, said Zeus Kerravala, a Yankee Group analyst. "The success depends more on the utilization of the tools than the tools themselves," Kerravala said. Keeping it simple and easy to access increases the chance of success.
  • Much of the essential documentation for teachers is now on wikis at the school, but Cohen still fields requests for how to do this, or for hard copies of those forms. He regularly denies such requests and points the users to the appropriate wiki page.
  • "Kids only use technology for the things they want to use it for," Cohen said. "They won't necessarily check the website for their homework."
  •  
    Excellent article on why and how a NYC school uses wikis
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Could animations hurt learning? » Making Change - 0 views

  • elearning’s strength is in its ability to challenge learners with realistic interactions that make them interpret and apply new information. Animation could have a role in such an interaction—for example, it might be needed to duplicate a process in the real world.
  • How will business performance improve if we’re successful with this material? (More cynically, how can we justify the expense of creating this material?) 2. What do people need to *do* in the real world to create that business improvement? 3. What online activities will help people practice those real-world actions? (In an ideal project, these activities are also the assessment, avoiding a fact-based quiz.) 4. What’s the *minimum* information people need to complete those activities? Should it be in the course or in a job aid? This is the reverse of the common, “Here’s the content they need to know. Please make a course out of it.” The content is identified only after the performance (not learning) objectives are solid. Ideally all the stakeholders are involved in answering these questions, so we don’t have people adding additional content at the last minute. As Jenise points out, we have to please a lot of people who have sometimes conflicting goals.
  • here are some research-based principles from Efficiency in Learning (Clark, Nguyen, Sweller) that the animated version violates, and sometimes the non-animated version as well: –”Give learners control over pacing.” The slides were presented to a class that had no control over them. –”Present information in as few modes as needed to make it understandable” because “multiple content expressions actually overload working memory.” While we’re processing the audio in the slides, we’re also seeing redundant text, pictures, and animation, and some bullet points are inexplicably in different colors. –”Audio explanations aided learning only when the tasks were more complex and only for visuals that were not self-explanatory.” The only time audio seems useful to me is when the presentation explains the screen shot. –”Instructors should remain silent when presenting textual information to learners.” –”Sequence on-screen text after audio to minimize redundancy”
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  • This kind of research and discussion is valuable. At the same time, this focus on the fine points of content presentation obscures a larger question: Why is basic material delivered this way at all? Why is “instruction” so often equated with putting simple, factual content on tiny screens and spoon-feeding it to passive learners? Couldn’t that be part of the problem here–learners are resenting their treatment?
  • So the question might not be simply, “How do media choices affect our ability to process info?” I think we should also consider, “How do media choices affect our *willingness* to process info?”
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Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags - 1 views

  • what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them.
  • The Filtering is Done Post Hoc - There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. it's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.
  • It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see wIth del.icio.us, wIth Flickr, wIth systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefIt of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing wIth a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web Itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often wIthout realizing It.
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Harvard University Library : Publications : News : 9/1/09 - 0 views

  • Non-faculty researchers and students are already afforded deposit privileges, and DASH will eventually have collection spaces for each of the 10 schools at Harvard.
  • a pro-open-access policy with an "opt out" clause.
  • Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.
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  • Among the many features the DASH development team has added to its DSpace implementation is the ability to link directly from a faculty author's name in DASH search results to his or her entry in Profiles, a research social networking site developed by Harvard Catalyst. Profiles, which provides a comprehensive view of a researcher's publications and connections within the University research community, currently indexes faculty from the medical and public health schools; its developers hope to expand it to include the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the near future.
  • "DASH is meant to promote openness in general," stated Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library. "it will make the current scholarship of Harvard's faculty freely available everywhere in the world, just as the digitization of the books in Harvard's library will make learning accumulated since 1638 accessible worldwide. Taken together, these and other projects represent a commitment by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth."
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Teachers And YouTube: Connecticut May Study Impact Of Video-Recording Devices In Classr... - 0 views

  • Still, Smoker was worried that the video would be taken out of context, and he called it a "rude awakening." He contacted the student, who has since graduated, to ask that it be taken down.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Why you should post it yourself and give it all the context you want!
  • So the clip is "a little upsetting," Smoker said, "because I do teach mostly seniors, and they know what the policy is. To do a sneaky video like this was out of line."
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Should we limit our students' access to information if they are interested in it?
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Wade Davis on endangered cultures | Video on TED.com - 0 views

  • When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. it's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
  • And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better? Wouldn't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great, let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. Let's make it Kogi." And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language.
  • What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world.
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  • It's not change or technology that threatens the integrIty of the ethnosphere. It is power. The crude face of domination. Where ever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away. These are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacIty to adapt to.
  • You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally -- in many quarters -- celebrated as part of a development strategy.
  • Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.
  • When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices.
  • the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.
  •  
    When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. it's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
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Ending the semester, Lessons Learned (Part 4: Assessment) | Language Lab Unleashed! - 0 views

  • 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+?
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  • 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.
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