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Barbara Lindsey

Fluid Learning | the human network - 0 views

blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94

mark pesce higher ed technology learning control

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08 - Cached
  • There must be a point to the exercise, some reason that makes all the technology worthwhile. That search for a point – a search we are still mostly engaged in – will determine whether these computers are meaningful to the educational process, or if they are an impediment to learning.
  • What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.
  • A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • it has made the work of educational administrators exponentially more difficult. Students now talk, up and down the years, via the recorded ratings on the site. it isn’t possible for an institution of higher education to disguise an individual who happens to be a world-class researcher but a rather ordinary lecturer. In earlier times, schools could foist these instructors on students, who’d be stuck for a semester. This no longer happens, because RateMyProfessors.com effectively warns students away from the poor-quality teachers.
  • This one site has undone all of the neat work of tenure boards and department chairs throughout the entire world of academia.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Not so sure this has had an impact of this nature at UCONN
  • The battle for control over who stands in front of the classroom has now been decisively lost by the administration in favor of the students.
  • That knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.
  • If we are smart enough, we can learn a lesson here and now that we will eventually learn – rather more expensively – if we wait. The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.
  • the shape of things to come. But there are some other trends which are also becoming visible. The first and most significant of these is the trend toward sharing lecture material online, so that it reaches a very large audience.
  • the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.
  • When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      But what about institutional degree cache?
  • Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?
  • In this near future world, students are the administrators.
  • Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Need to follow up on the mode of educational delivery in the 13th century. Can even see this in ancient Greece with followers of Aristoteles and Plato.
  • The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructor facilitates and mentors, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers,
  • The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens.
  • At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode – vanishing online – and explode – the world will become the classroom.
  • Flexibility and fluidity are the hallmark qualities of the 21st century educational institution. An analysis of the atomic features of the educational process shows that the course is a series of readings, assignments and lectures that happen in a given room on a given schedule over a specific duration. In our drive to flexibility how can we reduce the class into to essential, indivisible elements? How can we capture those elements? Once captured, how can we get these elements to the students? And how can the students share elements which they’ve found in their own studies?
  • This is the basic idea that’s guiding Stanford and MIT: recording is cheap, lecturers are expensive, and students are forgetful. Somewhere in the middle these three trends meet around recorded media. Yes, a student at Stanford who misses a lecture can download and watch IT later, and that’s a good thing. But IT also means that any student, anywhere, can download the same lecture.
  • Every one of these recordings has value, and the more recordings you have, the larger the horde you’re sitting upon. If you think of it like that – banking your work – the logic of capturing everything becomes immediately clear.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      I'm not convinced academics would agree.
  • While education definitely has value – teachers are paid for the work – that does not mean that resources, once captured, should be tightly restricted to authorized users only. In fact, the opposite is the case: the resources you capture should be shared as broadly as can possibly be managed. More than just posting them onto a website (or YouTube or itunes), you should trumpet their existence from the highest tower. These resources are your calling card, these resources are your recruiting tool.
  • the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.
  • Stanford and MIT
  • show a different way to value education – as experience. You can’t download experience. You can’t bottle it. Experience has to be lived, and that requires a teacher.
  • Rather than going for a commercial solution, I would advise you to look at the open-source solutions. Rather than buying a solution, use Moodle, the open-source, Australian answer to digital courseware. Going open means that as your needs change, the software can change to meet those needs. Given the extraordinary pressures education will be under over the next few years, openness is a necessary component of flexibility.
  • Openness is also about achieving a certain level of device-independence.
  • here are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital. Many students will never be very computer literate, but every single one of them has a mobile handset, and every single one of them sends text messages. it’s the big of computer technology we nearly always overlook – because it is so commonplace. Consider every screen when you capture, and when you share; dealing with them all as equals will help you work find audiences you never suspected you’d have.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 04 Feb 09
       
      Why don't educators see this?
  • Yet net filtering throws the baby out with the bathwater. Services like Twitter get filtered out because they could potentially be disruptive, cutting students off from the amazing learning potential of social messaging. Facebook and MySpace are seen as time-wasters, rather than tools for organizing busy schedules. The list goes on: media sites are blocked because the schools don’t have enough bandwidth to support them; Wikipedia is blocked because teachers don’t want students cheating. All of this has got to stop. The classroom does not exist in isolation, nor can it continue to exist in opposition to the Internet. Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.
  • Mind the maxim of the 21st century: connection is king. Students must be free to connect with instructors, almost at whim. This becomes difficult for instructors to manage, but it is vital. Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Do you see this happening at UCONN in the near future? Why or why not?
  • Finally, students must be free to (and encouraged to) connect with their peers. Part of the reason we worry about lecturers being overburdened by all this connectivity is because we have yet to realize that this is a multi-lateral, multi-way affair. it’s not as though all questions and issues immediately rise to the instructor’s attention. This should happen if and only if another student can’t be found to address the issue. Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Any concerns about this?
  • Connection is expensive, not in dollars, but in time. But for all its drawbacks, connection enriches us enormously. it allows us to multiply our reach, and learn from the best.
  • learning by listening is proved to be much harder than learning by reading.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      Multi-sensory learning is actually proven to be most effective: see research by John Medina: "Brain Rules"
  • RateMyProfessors is a good start, and anecdotes about how people use it is interesting, but it has a long long way to go before it comes close to being reliable let alone authoritative.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      He does have a point about the statistical validity of the comments.
Wessam Abedelaziz

Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology | Resources | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6070

student survey technology educause

shared by Wessam Abedelaziz on 27 Oct 08 - Cached
  • They are characterized as preferring teamwork, experiential activities, and the use of technology
  • Doing is more important than knowing, and learning is accomplished through trial and error as opposed to a logical and rule-based approach.2 Similarly, Paul Hagner found that these students not only possess the skills necessary to use these new communication forms, but there is an ever increasing expectation on their part that these new communication paths be used
    • Nicole McClure
      Nicole McClure on 31 Oct 08
       
      This phrase makes me a little uneasy. I recognize that these students are different, but I understand this a difference in learning style, not content. "Doing is more important than knowing" implies, at least to me, that a full understanding of the content. There has to be a little of both.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 31 Oct 08
       
      It's an interesting question. What is 'knowing'? And how do we know what we know?
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 31 Oct 08
       
      I guess doing is more important than knowing in the sense of actual research. We should have a theoritical background and KNOW what is behind but it is also important to try things out and make mistakes and have a feed back. I would say, it is more of an individual thing and it is up to the type of learners and how they learn things. They might be learners who learn by touching things and try it out or just by having a look at it and they will be fine
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 31 Oct 08
       
      Sorry, it is in the sense of ' Action Research" not 'actual reseach'
  • Much of the work to date, while interesting and compelling, is intuitive and largely based on qualitative data and observation.
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  • There is an inexorable trend among college students to universal ownership, mobility, and access to technology.
  • Students were asked about the applications they used on their electronic devices. They reported that they use technology first for educational purposes, followed by communication.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      All self-reported. Would have been powerful if could have actually tracked a representative sample and compared actual use with reported use.
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 31 Oct 08
       
      I don't believe this line!!
  • presentation software was driven primarily by the requirements of the students' major and the curriculum.
  • Communications and entertainment are very much related to gender and age.
  • From student interviews, a picture emerged of student technology use driven by the demands of the major and the classes that students take. Seniors reported spending more time overall on a computer than do freshmen, and they reported greater use of a computer at a place of employment. Seniors spent more hours on the computer each week in support of their educational activities and also more time on more advanced applications—spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics.
  • Confirming what parents suspect, students with the lowest grade point averages (GPAs) spend significantly more time playing computer games; students with the highest GPAs spend more hours weekly using the computer in support of classroom activities. At the University of Minnesota, Crookston, students spent the most hours on the computer in support of classroom activities. This likely reflects the deliberate design of the curriculum to use a laptop extensively. In summary, the curriculum's technology requirements are major motivators for students to learn to use specialized software.
  • The interviews indicated that students are skilled with basic office suite applications but tend to know just enough technology functionality to accomplish their work; they have less in-depth application knowledge or problem solving skills.
  • According to McEuen, student technology skills can be likened to writing skills: Students come to college knowing how to write, but they are not developed writers. The analogy holds true for information technology, and McEuen suggested that colleges and universities approach information technology in the same way they approach writing.6
  • he major requires the development of higher-level skill sets with particular applications.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Not really quantitative--self-reported data back by selected qualitative interviews
  • The comparative literature on student it skill self-assessment suggests that students overrate their skills; freshmen overrate their skills more than seniors, and men overrate their skills more than women.7 Our data supports these conclusions. Judy Doherty, director of the Student Technologies Resource Group at Colgate University, remarked on student skill assessment, "Students state in their job applications that they are good if not very good, but when tested their skills are average to poor, and they need a lot of training."8
  • Mary Jane Smetanka of the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune reported that some students are so conditioned by punch-a-button problem solving on computers that they approach problems with a scattershot impulsiveness instead of methodically working them through. In turn, this leads to problem-solving difficulties.
  • We expected to find that the Net Generation student prefers classes that use technology. What we found instead is a bell curve with a preference for a moderate use of technology in the classroom (see Figure 1).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      More information needs to be given to find out why--may be tool and method not engaging.
  • It is not surprising that if technology is used well by the instructor, students will come to appreciate Its benefIts.
  • A student's major was also an important predictor of preferences for technology in the classroom (see Table 3), with engineering students having the highest preference for technology in the classroom (67.8 percent), followed by business students (64.3 percent).
  • Humanities 7.7% 47.9% 40.2
  • he highest scores were given to improved communications, followed by factors related to the management of classroom activities. Lower impact activities had to do with comprehension of classroom materials (complex concepts).
  • The instructors' use of technology in my classes has increased my interest in the subject matter. 3.25 Classes that use information technology are more likely to focus on real-world tasks and examples.
  • I spend more time engaged in course activities in those courses that require me to use technology.
  • Interestingly, students do not feel that use of information technology in classes greatly increases the amount of time engaged with course activities (3.22 mean).12 This is in direct contrast to faculty perceptions reported in an earlier study, where 65 percent of faculty reported they perceived that students spend more time engaged with course materials
  • Only 12.7 percent said the most valuable benefit was improved learning; 3.7 percent perceived no benefit whatsoever. Note that students could only select one response, so more than 12.7 percent may have felt learning was improved, but it was not ranked highest. These findings compare favorably with a study done by Douglas Havelka at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, who identified the top six benefits of the current implementation of it as improving work efficiency, affecting the way people behave, improving communications, making life more convenient, saving time, and improving learning ability.14
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 27 Oct 08
       
      Would have been good to know exactly what kinds of technologies were meant here.
  • Our data suggest that we are at best at the cusp of technologies being employed to improve learning.
  • The interactive features least used by faculty were the features that students indicated contributed the most to their learning.
  • he students in this study called our attention to performance by noting an uneven diffusion of innovation using this technology. This may be due, in part, to faculty or student skill. It may also be due to a lack of instItutional recognItion of innovation, especially as the successful use of course management systems affects or does not affect faculty tenure, promotion, and merIt decisions
  • we found that many of the students most skilled in the use of technology had mixed feelings about technology in the classroom.
  • What we found was that many necessary skills had to be learned at the college or university and that the motivation for doing so was very much tied to the requirements of the curriculum. Similarly, the students in our survey had not gained the necessary skills to use technology in support of academic work outside the classroom. We found a significant need for further training in the use of information technology in support of learning and problem-solving skills.
  • Course management systems were used most by both faculty and students for communication of information and administrative activities and much less in support of learning.
  • In 1997, Michael Hooker proclaimed, "higher education is on the brink of a revolution." Hooker went on to note that two of the greatest challenges our institutions face are those of "harnessing the power of digital technology and responding to the information revolution."18 Hooker and many others, however, did not anticipate the likelihood that higher education's learning revolution would be a journey of a thousand miles rather than a discrete event. Indeed, a study of learning's last great revolution—the invention of moveable type—reveals, too, a revolution conducted over centuries leading to the emergence of a publishing industry, intellectual property rights law, the augmentation of customized lectures with textbooks, and so forth.
  • Qualitative data were collected by means of focus groups and individual interviews. We interviewed undergraduate students, administrators, and individuals identified as experts in the field of student technology use in the classroom. Student focus groups and interviews of administrators were conducted at six of the thirteen schools participating in the study.
  • The institutions chosen represent a nonrepresentative mix of the different types of higher education institution in the United States, in terms of Carnegie class as well as location, source of funding, and levels of technology emphasis. Note, however, that we consider our findings to be instructive rather than conclusive of student experiences at different types of Carnegie institutions.
  • Both the ECAR study on faculty use of course management systems and this study of student experiences with information technology concluded that, while information technology is indeed making important inroads into classroom and learning activities, to date the effects are largely in the convenience of postsecondary teaching and learning and do not yet constitute a "learning revolution." This should not surprise us. The invention of moveable type enhanced, nearly immediately, access to published information and reduced the time needed to produce new publications. This invention did not itself change literacy levels, teaching styles, learning styles, or other key markers of a learning revolution. These changes, while catalyzed by the new technology, depended on slower social changes to institutions. I believe that is what we are witnessing in higher education today.
  • The qualitative data suggest a slightly different picture. Students have very basic office suite skills as well as e-mail and basic Web surfing skills. Moving beyond basic activities is problematic. it appears that they do not recognize the enhanced functionality of the applications they own and use.
  • It cannot be assumed that they come to college prepared to use advanced software applications.
  • 25.6 percent of the students preferred limited or no use of technology in the classroom.
  • "Information technology is just a tool. Like all tools, if used properly it can be an asset. If it is used improperly, it can become an obstacle to achieving its intended purpose. Never is it a panacea."
Barbara Lindsey

A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do) | Britannica Blog - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...ts-today-what-teachers-must-do

Michael_Wesch education students britannica disengaged

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 24 Oct 08 - Cached
  • My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. it wasn’t the list that impressed me. it was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.
  • Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
  • Despite my role in the production of the video, and the thousands of comments supporting it, I recently came to view the video with a sense of uneasiness and even incredulity. Surely it can’t be as bad as the video seems to suggest, I thought. I started wrestling with these doubts over the summer as I fondly recalled the powerful learning experiences I had shared with my students the previous year. By the end of the summer I had become convinced that the video was over the top, that things were really not so bad, that the system is not as broken as I thought, and we should all just stop worrying and get on with our teaching.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Its sheer size, layout, and technology are testaments to the efficiency and expediency wIth which we can now provide students wIth their required credIt hours.
  • But the problems are not new. They are the same as those identified by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner nearly 40 years ago when they described the plight of “totally alienated students” involved in a cheating scandal
  • Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans.
  • Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.
  • Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
  • Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.” Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.
  • We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies.
  • When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
  • One of the difficulties I find in teaching this way is that each semester I start from scratch. Students need to learn how to learn this way, just as they learned the passivity of the lecture hall over years. By the same token, we need to learn how to teach this way. it does mean changing the role of the teacher. it does mean a shift in the relationship between knowledge, student, and professor. There are difficult institutional-ideological issues coming from all sides there. As such, we are not just talking about changing teaching or learning practices but about changing institutional cultures.
  • And won’t you concede that there’s some things that simply need to be communicated and digested, period? Is there really a better collaborative, social-network paradigm for learning noun endings in Russian or the multiplication tables, or for how best to craft a sentence, which takes the human touch of a creative, talented teacher? Some things just have to be, uh, “learned,” memorized, practiced with pencil and paper, pen and pad.
  • For that very reason of “envelopment,” we need to preserve a few spaces on campus in which the cloud is dispelled and students must engage in the “old dynamics of knowledge”–if only as an exercise in mental flexibility. Shouldn’t we be concerned about what is lost as things have “shifted”?
  • “I agree with some of what he says, but I don’t think I would offer the implicit absolution to students that he does. How are they failing their educations? … Wesch seems to believe that if students are disengaged from the learning process, it’s the fault of the professoriat.”
  • If we assume that students can access information either before class (via textbooks, for instance) or during class as needed (via laptops and other devices), then we need not spend class time transmitting information to our students. We can, instead, spend precious class time helping students make sense of that information, taking advantage of the fact that class time is the only time when we’re all together (face-to-face, at least) to interact with each other around that information. One method of doing so that scales up very well to a class with hundreds of students (to address David Carson’s concern) is what Mazur calls “peer instruction” facilitated by a classroom response system (”clickers”). The teacher poses a challenging and interesting multiple-choice question. (There are such questions as Michael points out with his anecdote about a student “overthinking” a multiple-choice exam question.) The students think about the question and submit their answers using their clickers. If the results generated by the classroom response system show that there’s disagreement about the question (which is likely to happen if the question is sufficiently challenging), then the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbors. After some time for this “peer instruction,” the students vote again with their clickers. Often, this second vote will show some convergence to the correct answer (provided the question has a single correct answer, which isn’t necessary). Either way, the stage is set for a productive classwide discussion of the question or a mini-lecture by the teacher.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 24 Oct 08
       
      What do you think of this approach?
  • I must admit that I enjoy teaching a large class of 400, many of whom enter the class for a requirement, because it gives me an opportunity to reach out to them with insights and transformative experiences that they are highly unlikely to stumble across in self-directed study. it also gives me a much more diverse group of people to work with and engage with in collaborative study, which can be much more powerful than simple self-directed study.
  • Are you right that “knowledge is made” in a “cloud of ubiquitous digital information”? Or, is this precisely one of anthropology’s significant contributions to the life of the mind, to a mindful life? Common sense cannot be trusted. Information, even in the highly evocative cloud-form, is *not* knowledge. Whatever knowledge is (i.e. as the philosopher’s ‘true justified belief ‘ or some even more exotic formulation), surely it is an actionable individual possession. The cloud is not knowledgeable, it is informational. And, I wonder how you might respond to a claim that our walls, the particular architectonics of the disciplines we work within, provide students with the conversational, narrative, cognitive, epistemological, methodological, ontological, the –ogical means for converting mere information into knowledge.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 24 Oct 08
     
    My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can "get by" without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA's continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can "get by" without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. it wasn't the list that impressed me. it was the unquestioned assumption that "getting by" is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.
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.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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?
  • 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.
  • 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

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

www.academiccommons.org/...knowledgable-knowledge-able

wesch social media web2.0 education teaching academic commons

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 31 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.” Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in. This culture of discussion and participation is now available on any website with the emerging “second layer” of the web through applications like Diigo which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them.
  • Our physical structures were built prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple with the emerging possibilities.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The physical structures are easiest to see, and are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
  • at the base of this “information revolution” are new ways of relating to one another, new forms of discourse, new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0” buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration. it is this “spirit” of Web 2.0 which is important to education. The technology is secondary. This is a social revolution, not a technological one, and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.
  • Even in situations in which a spirit of exploration and freedom exist, where faculty are free to experiment to work beyond physical and social constraints, our cognitive habits often get in the way
  • Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.
  • Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
  • Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.
  • Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.
  • Taken together, this new media environment demonstrates to us that the idea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.
  • Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers.
  • Usually our courses are arranged around “subjects.” Postman and Weingartner note that the notion of “subjects” has the unwelcome effect of teaching our students that “English is not History and History is not Science and Science is not Art . . . and a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it.” Always aware of the hidden metaphors underlying our most basic assumptions, they suggest calling this “the Vaccination Theory of Education” as students are led to believe that once they have “had” a subject they are immune to it and need not take it again.5
  • As an alternative, I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.”6 You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.
  • We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
  • So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”
  • Students are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to harness and leverage the new media environment to find information, theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each student has a specific role and expertise to develop. A world map is superimposed on the class and each student is asked to become an expert on a specific aspect of the region in which they find themselves. Using this knowledge, they work in 15-20 small groups to create realistic cultures, step-by-step, as we go through each aspect of culture in class. This allows them to apply the knowledge they learn in the course and to recognize the ways different aspects of culture--economic, social, political, and religious practices and institutions--are integrated in a cultural system.
  • The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. it is recorded by students on twenty digital video cameras and edited into one final "world history" video using clips from real world history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together in the final weeks of the class, using it as a discussion starter for contemplating our world and our role in its future. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom - profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future, and one humanity. We find ourselves not just as co-creators of a simulation, but as co-creators of the world itself, and the future is up to us.
  • I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.
  • When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension. Many of these dimensions were mentioned in the issue precis, “such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention,” and the list goes on. How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.
  • The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
  • This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases.
Barbara Lindsey

The Rise of Twitter as a Platform for Serious Discourse - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...form_for_serious_discourse.php

higher ed twitter

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08 - Cached
  • captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging."
  • Twitter
  • Twitter
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Twitter is fast becoming a serious platform for discourse and discussion. More than a status app, it is being used as a first alert mechanism for the dissemination of news and for immediate discussion surrounding that news. it is the coverage of news events and the continued emergence of citizen journalism that will push Twitter toward the mainstream this year.
  • Increasingly mainstream news reporters and bloggers are utilizing Twitter to put up news tid bits as they happen, and commentary as it pops into their heads.
  • Twitter has smartly nourished a large set of tools that help people use the service. This makes it easier for people to get content on Twitter in the manner most convenient and most comfortable to them, which in the long run should help drive adoption of the service. "The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we've done with Twitter," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told us in September.
  • The API has also allowed for mashups that filter Twitter content making it easier to find. One relevant Twitter aggregator is Politweets (our coverage), which brings together all the messages sent over Twitter about the US election.
  • Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation.
  • Twitter encourages discourse and feedback. For reporters that aren't afraid to get down and dirty, Twitter is a golden opportunity to build a rapport with readers and gauge public opinion. it also makes readers feel more connected to the news when they can participate in a discussion about it as it happens, often times with the people reporting it first hand.
  • "It's not right for every piece of information. It's certainly not well suIted for longer analysis. But when It comes to instantly assembling raw data from several sources that then go into fully baked news stories, nothing beats It."
  • But for the mainstream audience, Twitter might need better filtering tools before people can really wrap their heads around it.
  • it's not threaded, so replies get shuffled around and often times, out of context, just become confusing. Further, when everyone is having a conversation at once, things get noisy. Twitter desperately needs a filter.
  • Twitter is being used more and more for mainstream news coverage. KPBS News San Diego uses Twitter to put out updates about stories, for example, and during the California wildfires last fall it was a must read. The potential for Twitter to be used for news dissemination is something the site's founders realized early on during an earthquake.
  • it seems likely that Twitter will become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs.
Barbara Lindsey

The Alexandrine Dilemma | the human network - 0 views

blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=101

libraries britannica mark pesce

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08 - Cached
  • People were invited to come by and sample the high-quality factual information on offer – and were encouraged to leave their own offerings. The high-quality facts encouraged visitors; some visitors would leave their own contributions, high-quality facts which would encourage more visitors, and so, in a “virtuous cycle”, Wikipedia grew as large as, then far larger than Encyclopedia Britannica.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      How does the actual quality and perception of quality of wikipedia affect its acceptance by academia?
  • It wasn’t the server crash that doomed BrItannica; when the business minds at BrItannica tried to crash through into profItabilIty, that’s when they crashed into the paywall they themselves established.
  • Just a few weeks ago, the European Union launched a new website, Europeana. Europeana is a repository, a collection of cultural heritage of Europe, made freely available to everyone in the world via the Web. From Descartes to Darwin to Debussy, Europeana hopes to become the online cultural showcase of European thought.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      But it appears that they and the sites they link to will not allow for unfettered use of their content. Current, restrictive copyright laws are in place, it seems.
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  • there is an almost insatiable interest in factual information made available online
  • rbitrarily restricting access to factual information simply directs the flow around the institution restricting access. Britannica could be earning over a hundred million dollars a year from advertising revenue – that’s what it is projected that Wikipedia could earn, just from banner advertisements, if it ever accepted advertising. But Britannica chose to lock itself away from its audience.
  • under no circumstances do you take yourself off the network.
  • t seems as though many of our institutions are mired in older ways of thinking, where selfishness and protecting the collection are seen as a cardinal virtues. There’s a new logic operating: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.
  • In a landmark settlement of a long-running copyright dispute with book publishers in the United States, Google agreed to pay a license fee to those publishers for their copyrights – even for books out of print. In return, the publishers are allowing Google to index, search and display all of the books they hold under copyright.
  • Each of these texts is indexed and searchable – just as with the books under copyright, but, in this case, the full text is available through Google’s book reader tool. For works under copyright but out-of-print, Google is now acting as the sales agent, translating document searches into book sales for the publishers, who may now see huge “long tail” revenues generated from their catalogues.
  • Since Google is available from every computer connected to the Internet (given that it is available on most mobile handsets, it’s available to nearly every one of the four billion mobile subscribers on the planet), this new library – at least seven million volumes – has become available everywhere. The library has become coextensive with the Internet.
  • When CD-ROM was introduced, twenty years ago, it was hailed as the “new papyrus,” capable of storing vast amounts of information in a richly hyperlinked format. As the limits of CD-ROM became apparent, the Web became the repository of the hopes of all the archivists and bibliophiles who dreamed of a new Library of Alexandria, a universal library with every text in every tongue freely available to all.
  • We have now gotten as close to that ideal as copyright law will allow;
  • For libraries, Google has established subscription-based fees for access to books covered by copyright.
  • Within another few years, every book within arm’s length of Google (and Google has many, many arms) will be scanned, indexed and accessible through books.google.com. This library can be brought to bear everywhere anyone sits down before a networked screen. This librar
  • The library has been obsolesced because it has become universal; the stacks have gone virtual, sitting behind every screen. Because the idea of the library has become so successful, so universal, it no longer means anything at all. We are all within the library.
  • The central task of the librarian – if I can be so bold as to state something categorically – is to bring order to chaos. The librarian takes a raw pile of information and makes it useful.
  • At its most visible, the book cataloging systems used in all libraries represents the librarian’s best efforts to keep an overwhelming amount of information well-managed and well-ordered.
  • Google seems to have abandoned – or ignored – library science in its own book project. I can’t tell you why this is, I can only tell you that it looks very foolish and naïve.
  • because the library is universal, library science now needs to be a universal skill set, more broadly taught than at any time previous to this. We have become a data-centric culture, and are presently drowning in data. It’s difficult enough for us to keep our collections of music and movies well organized; how can we propose to deal wIth collections that are a hundred thousand times larger?
Barbara Lindsey

Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network | in education - 0 views

ineducation.ca/...-cms-and-open-learning-network

cms learning openlearning wiley mott

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Through a series of comparative studies--in which students of different age groups studied different subject matters under different instructional conditions--Bloom established that the average student instructed individually by a tutor outperformed 98% of students instructed in a conventional classroom setting.
  • Bloom, B. S. (1984). The 2-Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One tutoring. Educational Researcher, 13(6), 4–16.
  • To be clear, our assertions about the weaknesses of the CMS paradigm should also be taken as critiques of the predominant pedagogical model in higher education
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • The OLN model is aimed at leveraging these affordances in ways that the CMS does not. For example, discussions that last longer than 50 minutes can be conducted online without prompting or intervention by the instructor. And such discussions can include more voices than those of the students formally enrolled in the class. Whatever connections students make with each other can be maintained via social networking applications of their choosing. And students can capture, annotate, and archive the content they assemble and create in their courses as well as in their less formal learning experiences. And since they are using their tools, they maintain control of and access to the content as long as they choose.
  • Given the ever increasing rate of change and improvement in learning technologies and approaches, committed teachers should be anxious to find and employ new, more effective tools to help their students learn more effectively.
  • The OLN also has the significant advantage of being time-persistent. Compared with the frequent starts and stops in the CMS (see Figure 2), much of what happens in the OLN allows learners to build their learning networks over time, since it is not bound to semesters, terms, or even the institution. And the artificial boundaries of the CMS are removed thereby allowing the learner to benefit from participation in a broader community of networked learners, further removing the limitations on learner network growth (see Figure 4).  
  • One of the primary aims of the OLN model is to reestablish teachers and learners at the center of learning activity (both inside and outside of courses).
  • By combining several functions into one application, the CMS has forced us to make a tradeoff that is suboptimal for learning. Because there is some confidential and proprietary data in the CMS, we have traditionally locked all course data behind a login screen, viewable only by an instructor and the officially enrolled members of his or her class - and then only for the duration of the semester or term. This is perhaps the most debilitating example of CMS technology being used to reinvent the past. The traditional classroom has always been a private, physically, and temporally bounded space. The natural inclination was to replicate that model within the CMS. However, doing so has imposed the limits of the old space in a new space where such limitations do not exist.
  • there are several key components of the OLN that should be private and secure, situated within an institution's intranet. These include student information systems (SISs), identity and role repositories, proprietary content stores, and secure online assessment applications. These are and should remain core components of the institutional it infrastructure. Beyond these, however, there are several OLN components that need not be private. Faculty and student blogs, wikis, portfolios, and open courseware and open educational resource repositories can be open (at the option and discretion of individual faculty members and students). These functions can exist, spread across multiple applications and websites, in the cloud. Some applications might even be mashups of intranet and cloud-based applications.
  • Light's examination of the impact of group study among students at Harvard is particularly compelling. In Making the Most of College, Light presents evidence that "students who study outside of class in small groups of four to six students, even just once a week, benefit enormously. Group meetings are organized around discussions of the homework, and as a result of their study group discussion, students are far more engaged and better prepared for class, learning significantly more" (2001, 52).
  • Learning is not a simple acquisition activity. A large body of critical analysis and research concur that learning is at least as much a function of social discourse as it is solitary cognition (e.g., Vygotsky, 1962, 1978, or Schon, Brown, et al., 1989).
  • The same is true for the best educational content—it draws people into arguments, explorations, discussions, and relationships that add depth, meaning, and value to that content.
  • Brown & Adler have argued that, "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" (2008, 18). This is in contrast to the prevailing "traditional Cartesian view" of instruction that focuses primarily on the transfer of knowledge—as if it were a substance—from teacher to learner (18). Educational theorists have long argued against the didactic approach. Freire critiqued what he called "banking education," a model in which student activity is limited to "receiving, filing, and storing the deposits" of information apportioned them by the instructor (1970, 72).
  • We may fruitfully update Freire's metaphor of "banking education" to a metaphor of "downloading learning." So much of what passes for innovative uses of instructional technology today, like the OpenCourseWare collections available from Mit and other universities, restricts learners to downloading files.
  • If "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" (Levine, et al., 1999), Web 2.0 tools are making the learning space fundamentally and permanently flat. CIOs, academic leaders, and individual faculty members might argue that they need the structure and security of the CMS. We agree that some elements of the CMS should be maintained. But students, and a growing number of instructors, are engaging in rich, meaningful dialog, content creation, and sharing outside the CMS.
  • When students enter the walled garden of the CMS, they are largely "acted upon." Efficacious, self-regulating learners, on the other hand, "act" as they participate in and take ownership of their own learning activities and ultimately what they learn and how they employ that new learning in pursuit of their various life projects.
  • The center of gravity in the CMS is decidedly on institutional and instructor efficiency and convenience, not student participation and learning. This should not be surprising given Cuban's findings that educational technology is used largely to "maintain existing practices" rather than to "revolutionize," or even change in any substantial way, teaching and learning practices (2001).
  • But the CMS paradigm actually works against such a transformation of the relationship between teachers and learners because it privileges the role of the instructor and technically restricts individual students from contributing and to shaping courses in any meaningful way. Sclater has argued that the term "learning management system" itself suggests "disempowerment—an attempt to manage and control the activities of the student by the university" (2008, p. 2). The tendencies of the CMS are not, he argues, just "minor irritations" but rather forces that "may overtly or subtly align the institutional processes with the software rather than having the system serve the requirements of the institution" (p. 3).
  • Most (if not all) of these sorts of activities are absent from the typical CMS-based course. This is true primarily because there is no space provided for students to publish such content and engage in such activities of their own creation. Moreover, students engaged in such activities are unlikely to make the CMS the base of their activities because they would be walled off from the rest of the world, destined for deletion at the end of the semester.
  • 12-year-old home schooled girl, Heather Lawver, who created an online, fan-authored version of The Daily Prophet, the fictional newspaper in the Harry Potter series (see http://dprophet.com).
  • Jenkins argues that Lawver's activities, and those of the reporters she recruited, went far beyond a creative outlet for fans—participants acquired knowledge creation, knowledge pooling, and knowledge sharing skills, gained experiences sharing and comparing value systems, learned how to express and interpret feelings about a literary work, and developed Internet publishing skills (p. 185). Gee has argued that similarly transferable skills can be acquired in online role-playing games, where players learn to work well with team members, collaborate to solve problems, and hone individual skills in the context while understanding and appreciating others' skills, etc. (2009).
  • Learners as Co-Instructors, Instructors as Co-Learners
  • the overwhelming usage patterns of instructors indicate that the CMS has been used primarily to mimic the traditional, semester-based, lecture-driven, content-centric model of instruction - one of bestowing "course info" on students.
  • the CMS was designed primarily to support and enhance traditional teaching. it is not coincidental that the first incarnation of Blackboard was branded "CourseInfo."
  • While perhaps a bit stylized, the typical CMS-delivered, content-centric, lecture-driven course complete with multiple-choice midterm and final exams, does little to prepare students to succeed in a world in which there will always be more new knowledge created every day than they can possibly access, much less assimilate, master, and apply. Given the overwhelming flow of data all around us, our job should be increasingly less focussed on making our students "knowledgeable" and focused instead more on making them "knowledge-able" (Wesch, 2009).
  • When a student at Ryerson University convened a chemistry study group inside Facebook in 2007, the University threatened to expel him for academic misconduct. In his defense, the student observed that he was simply replicating online what was common practice in face-to-face study group and tutorial sessions (Schaffhauser, 2008). The difference between these face-to-face sessions and the groups the student created in Facebook, however, was that the online versions of the study groups would persist over time, perhaps far beyond the students' time at Ryerson. Access to Facebook, unlike access to live study sessions or to the CMS, does not expire when a student graduates.
  • mposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process.
  • Bush & Mott (2009) have argued that the failure of technology to transform learning stems from a preoccupation with "the tactical implementation of specific technologies which often simply automate the past" (p. 17).
  • such software has generally been focused primarily on helping teachers increase the efficiency of the administrative tasks of instruction (e.g., distribute documents, make assignments, give quizzes, initiate discussion boards, assign students to working groups, etc.).
  • tendency to use the CMS to improve instructional efficiency rather than effectiveness.
  • Self-Reported Function Usage in Blackboard by BYU Faculty Members (2004-2009)
  • CMS are "fundamentally a conservative technology ... [for] managing groups, providing tools, and delivering content" (2006, 1).
  • course content distribution and teacher-student communication platform
  • Cuban concluded that "teachers used technology to maintain existing practices" rather than to "revolutionize" the way they teach their students (p. 138).
  • course managment software leads universities to "think they are in the information industry" (356).
  • he industrial, course management model has its center of gravity in teachers generating content, teachers gathering resources, teachers grouping and sequencing information, and teachers giving the information to students (356). This is so, they argue, because teachers "often yield to the seductive appeal of a course management system, where it is easy enough to populate a weekly schedule with static resources and decontextualized tasks" which results in a "focus on content ... rather than the process of educating the student" (357).
  • the CMS continues to artificially situate instruction and learning inside walled gardens that are disconnected from the rich and vibrant networks of learners and content in the wider world.
  • the changes necessary to bridge the 2 sigma gap are at least as much cultural and pedagogical as they are technological.  
  • an unintended consequence of CMS deployment by artificially limiting the potential of the Web to keep students connected to each other and their content. While the CMS facilitates substantial interaction and community building around content within courses, the resulting learning communities are almost always limited to those formally enrolled in the course and those communities exist only for the duration of a particular semester or term. When each period of instruction draws to a close, CMS courses are routinely deactivated and sometimes even deleted to make way for the next semester's courses.
  • course-centric, content-driven model of instruction that dominates higher education.
  • no record left behind of the activity and learning that occurred within them. This is a pattern that repeats from semester to semester, throughout a student's learning career at a particular institution.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      Do you agree with this statement? Do you see any issues with this current situation?
  • These learning network disruptions are even more jarring for students who transfer from one institution to another or those who take courses from multiple institutions. Unless students fastidiously copy the content from their CMS courses and save the contact information of their classmates, the learning network connections they have made (both content and social) are essentially lost.
  • flocking to time-persistent social networking and media sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, GMail, and Google Docs.
  • blogs, and wikis
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      What is your intial reaction to our public blog and wiki?
  • While we know of no formal research on the topic, we believe that knowing that the fruits of their efforts will be categorically deleted at the end of term is a significant negative motivation for students to contribute meaningfully within the CMS, particularly when the same effort invested elsewhere would persist indefinitely.
  • By eliminating access to the courses a student participates in within a CMS, an institution not only hampers them during their formal learning careers, but it takes away a potentially invaluable knowledge-able tool for continued success as a lifelong learner.
  • The old paradigm of making our students "knowingly prepared" is rapidly losing its value. We should instead help our students be "unknowingly prepared—to be unknowing but to possess the tools and skills to rapidly become 'knowing' at the moment-of-need" (p. 3).
  • No longer do students sit passively in the classroom, restricted only to the authority of the instructor and their textbook for the final word on the subject matter of a lecture. Now they can Google terms, concepts, and events mentioned by the instructor, they txt, Facebook, and Twitter each other about what's being said, and they carry their notes and even the lecture itself out of class with them, recorded on laptops, MP3 recorders, and digital pens to be reviewed and shared.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      Your reaction to this?
  • Between 2000 and 2008, the average licensing cost per campus for commercial CMS skyrocketed  500% (Delta Initiative, 2009; slide 11).
  • includes such factors as hosting, faculty development, curriculum and instructional course design, multimedia support, and help desk support while making literally no mention of student learning or student activity within the CMS (slide 21).
  • Where once the instructor was the sole (or at lease substantially privileged) possessor of content expertise and certainly the exclusive provider of course materials, learners are now instantaneously able to Google virtually any information about the content of a course (often during the lectures themselves), independently publish their thoughts about it, and interact with others (both inside and outside of the official course roster) about the course and it's subject matter.
  • instructors have largely employed the CMS to automate the past,
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      What is so bad about 'automating the past'?
  • In a learning context, he argues that no educational information and communication technology can be "universally good." Rather, he asserts, "the best way to invest in instructional technologies is an instrumental approach that analyzes the natures of the curriculum, students, and teachers to select the appropriate tools, applications, media and environments" (59).
  • which learners select as they engage in their educational experiences (p. 59).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      Pretty radical approach, no?
  • we prefer to think of educational content as a campfire around which learners gather.
  • When combined with tools and environments that afford opportunities for social interaction, educational resources become semiotic tools that influence learners' actions and mediate the learning process.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 20 Jan 10
       
      This is a key statement.
  • it seems paradoxical that we would we put hundreds, thousands, or millions of learners in front of advanced communications technology so that they can simply retrieve data instead of interacting with each other around that data.
  • We contend that its inadequacy stems from three specific weaknesses of the CMS—(1) the organization of learning experiences into discrete, artificially time-bound units, (2) the predominance of instructor-focused and content-centric tools in the CMS, and (3) the lack of persistent connections between learners, instructors, content, and the broader community across semesters and across class, program, and institutional boundaries.
  • these disruptions are likely to come from educational technologists and leaders exploring new tools and new approaches to learning.
  • while opening the space necessary for learners to act as co-instructors and for teachers to act as co-learners in a dynamically generated space (9).
  • Most institutions of higher education appear focused on . . . content coverage, course structure, and pre-existing time arrangments such as semesters and hours of credit than . . . issues such as learning and performance (
  • This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Barbara Lindsey

A Sense of Purpose (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...WeschInterview

wesch educause interview pedagogy

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Bayne: You are one of the most active practitioners of teaching in the cloud. How can teaching in the cloud foster collaborative learning and collective intelligence?Wesch: I often like to think of the quote from Kevin Kelly, who says: "Nobody is as smart as everybody." That hangs in my head every time I go into a classroom. I look at the classroom. I look at the students. I start to think about who they are. Throughout the semester, I learn more and more about who they are, and it becomes increasingly evident to me that with all the intelligence and life experiences that they have, they are collectively much smarter than I am alone. Then the goal becomes trying to somehow harness all of that. And I think I've finally found the "secret sauce." it basically comes down to approaching the students as collaborators, co producers, co researchers, or whatever you want to call them — but not as students. So you take away that hierarchy.
  • pointing out to them that whatever we do is going to contribute to the real world. We're not just going to be hiding behind the classroom walls and doing our own thing.
  • "What does the world need from us? What can we do?" Given the topic at hand, we start mining the literature, trying to find holes in the literature or debates in the literature, things that we can help resolve, some way that we can contribute to the discourse. The main point is that we do it. it's all about the doing of it. While we're doing this, while we're going out and researching together and learning together, it's almost as if the learning happens accidentally.
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  • It struck me the other day when we were in class: we spent the whole class, like we do every class, on the edge of our seats; everybody was leaning forward, brainstorming, trying to solve various problems in our current project. Everybody is deeply engaged in all of It. And at the end of the class, somebody mentioned: "Isn't It funny that we get three credIts for this?" I go into this classroom thinking: "This is an excIting research group. We're doing really excIting research right now." It is a class, but you almost forget that It's a class.Bayne: That speaks to a certain sort of naturalism.Wesch: That's exactly what It's about, right? When It's completely real and relevant and when what we're doing matters, the learning becomes authentic and natural. It's so much fun to do that. It creates an environment in which the students themselves are thinking about harnessing collective intelligence, because they also recognize their peers as collaborators.Bayne: Your students tend to work in groups a lot, working as a team. How do you assess individual students?Wesch: To me, the art of encouraging collaboration is like trying to find that balance between assigning individual responsibilIty and also finding a way to leverage all the individual contributions in a way that the endpoint is greater than the sum of Its parts. The way I do that — sort of the secret behind It all — is that even though It looks like group work, every student has his or her own, very specific role and assignment in that group. A lot of that is self-constructed, so that the students are developing their own project wIthin the larger project. That self-guided piece creates more motivation and also ultimately creates a better product, because they know better than I do what their expertise is and how they can contribute.In all of my projects, there is an individually graded piece. Every student keeps his or her own research blog. All of those blogs are aggregated into a single feed that anybody can check out. It becomes like a learning diary. I can see what they've learned and what they've contributed over time. It's the same on the wiki: the wiki is a collaborative tool, but the wiki also tracks exactly what every individual contributes.The final video project that we create will be a fifty-minute documentary, but It will be made up of sixteen projects, each one of which will be about five minutes long. Each will be individually graded. Then I'll pick the best or the most relevant to create the final fifty-minute documentary. So every student walks an individual path while at the same time contributing to the whole.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Dec 09
     
    An interview with Asst. Prof Michael Wesch
Barbara Lindsey

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation - Open Education Conference - 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

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

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  • 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.
Barbara Lindsey

Print: The Chronicle: 6/15/2007: The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority - 0 views

chronicle.com/...printable.cgi

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 08 - Cached
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 08
       
      Higher ed slow to respond.
  • Web 1.0,
  • garbed new business and publishing models in 20th-century clothes.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.
  • micromarkets
  • Flickr, YouTube
  • multiple demographics
  • Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the "authority market" substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratingsis now presumed, and when it's not available, it's missed.
  • Web 2.0 is all about responding to abundance, which is a shift of profound significance.
  • Chefs simply couldn't exist in a world of universal scarcity
  • a time when scholarship, and how we make it available, will be affected by information abundance just as powerfully as food preparation has been.
  • Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; It was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars wIth the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 08
       
      Comments?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 08
       
      Where critical analysis comes in
  • Google
  • Google
  • Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, by Page A, for Page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important,'"
  • if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 08
       
      Your thoughts?
  • The challenge for all those sites pertains to abundance:
  • It has Its limIts, but It also both confers and confirms authorIty because people tend to point to authorItative sources to bolster their own work.
  • Such systems have not been framed to confer authority, but as they devise means to deal with predators, scum, and weirdos wanting to be a "friend," they are likely to expand into "trust," or "value," or "vouching for my friend" metrics — something close to authority — in the coming years.
  • ecently some more "authoritative" editors have been given authority to override whining ax grinders.
  • In many respects Boing Boing is an old-school edited resource. it doesn't incorporate feedback or comments, but rather is a publication constructed by five editor-writers
  • As the online environment matures, most social spaces in many disciplines will have their own "boingboings."
  • That kind of democratization of authority is nearly unique to wikis that are group edited, since not observation, but active participation in improvement, is the authority metric.
  • user-generated authority, many of which are based on algorithmic analysis of participatory engagement. The emphasis in such models is often not on finding scarce value, but on weeding abundance
  • They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.
  • In the very near future, if we're talking about a universe of hundreds of billions of documents, there will routinely be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of documents that are very similar to any new document published on the Web. If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure you'll be read? By competing in computability. Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with interested readers. Encourage free access to much or all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take advantage of institutional repositories, as well as open-access publishers. The list could go on.
  • the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.
  • cholarly publishers
  • They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.
  • Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument.
  • Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.
  • Online scholarly publishing in Web 1.0 mimicked those fundamental conceptions. The presumption was that information scarcity still ruled. Most content was closed to nonsubscribers; exceedingly high subscription costs for specialty journals were retained; libraries continued to be the primary market; and the "authoritative" version was untouched by comments from the uninitiated. Authority was measured in the same way it was in the scarcity world of paper: by number of citations to or quotations from a book or article, the quality of journals in which an article was published, the institutional affiliation of the author, etc.
  • Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be): Prestige of the publisher (if any). Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any). Prestige of commenters and other participants. Percentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered. Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion. Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted. Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status? Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community. Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s). Significance of author's other work. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc. Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read. Length of time a document has existed. Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations. Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.
  • Most technophile thinkers out there believe that Web 3.0 will be driven by artificial intelligences — automated computer-assisted systems that can make reasonable decisions on their own, to preselect, precluster, and prepare material based on established metrics, while also attending very closely to the user's individual actions, desires, and historic interests, and adapting to them.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 08
     
    When the system of scholarly communications was dependent on the physical movement of information goods, we did business in an era of information scarcity. As we become dependent on the digital movement of information goods, we find ourselves entering an era of information abundance. In the process, we are witnessing a radical shift in how we establish authority, significance, and even scholarly validity. That has major implications for, in particular, the humanities and social sciences.
Barbara Lindsey

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting | The Penenberg Post | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...say-so-long-book-we-know-it

ebooks books

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Dec 09 - Cached
  • But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
  • Like early filmmakers, some of us will seek new ways to express ourselves through multimedia. Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web and be ported over to any and all mobil devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and beyond.
  • where there's chaos, there's opportunity
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • For the non-fiction author therein lie possibilities to create the proverbial last word on a subject, a one-stop shop for all the information surrounding a particular subject matter. Imagine a biography of Wiley Post, the one-eyed pilot from the 1930s who was the first to fly around the world. it would not only offer the entire text of a book but newsreel footage from his era, coverage of his most famous flights, radio interviews, schematics of his plane, interactive maps of his journeys, interviews with aviation historians and pilots of today, a virtual tour of his cockpit and description of every gauge and dial, short profiles of other flyers of his time, photos, hyperlinked endnotes and index, links to other resources on the subject. Social media could be woven into the fabric of the experience--discussion threads and wikis where readers share information, photos, video, and add their own content to Post's story, which would tie them more closely to the book. There's also the potential for additional revenue streams: You could buy MP3s of popular songs from the 1930s, clothes that were the hot thing back then, model airplanes, other printed books, DVDs, journals, and memorabilia. A visionary author could push the boundaries and re-imagine these books in wholly new ways. A novelist could create whole new realities, a pastiche of video and audio and words and images that could rain down on the user, offering metaphors for artistic expressions. Or they could warp into videogame-like worlds where readers become characters and through the expression of their own free will alter the story to fit. They could come with music soundtracks or be directed or produced by renowned documentarians. They could be collaborations or one-woman projects.
  • Serious literature, and even perhaps much fiction will however, will be published in old book form…or maybe in the current “text on screen” form. The point of reading fiction IS to imagine your own characters and use your imagination…that’s why you read rather then watch a video about it!
  • Traditional books (especially literature) will be relegated to smaller, specialty houses and self-publishing, in its infancy, will boom!
  • The question is, how will the media companies (not just book publishers) respond? We're already seeing the effect on newspapers, as their ad revenue (and business model) collapses. Perhaps history can offer another analogy: When home refrigeration became affordable, it posed an existential threat to the large ice-delivery companies. Some of these firms manufactured ice by the ton in order to warehouse and deliver it at retail. They saw the threat, but not the opportunity - didn't realize the value of their core technology, the ice-making equipment itself. They saw only the falloff in their retail delivery logistics model. Had they licensed their chillers, they could have made a fortune. Likewise, buggy-whip-makers could have retooled as purveyors of leather goods for automobiles.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Dec 09
     
    But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
Barbara Lindsey

Virtual Libraries Are Teaching Treasures | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/-collections-digital-resources

virtual library library2.0 europe digital OpenAccess roml5395 mafla09 actfl09 Glastonbury

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 14 May 09 - Cached
  • Another ambitious virtual library project is Europeana, an ongoing effort to digitize the archive, library, museum, and audiovisual collections of all the European Union's 27 nations through a single portal by 2010. "it won't matter which European country holds an item or whether it's in a library, museum, or archive," says Europeana spokesperson Jonathan Purday. "it will be possible to find it and bring it into context with other related materials."
  • "I can work from home when developing curriculum -- I don't need to go to the actual library," says the science and literature teacher, who works at the Lincoln Akerman School, in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 14 May 09
     
    Another ambitious virtual library project is Europeana, an ongoing effort to digitize the archive, library, museum, and audiovisual collections of all the European Union's 27 nations through a single portal by 2010. "it won't matter which European country holds an item or whether it's in a library, museum, or archive," says Europeana spokesperson Jonathan Purday. "it will be possible to find it and bring it into context with other related materials."
Barbara Lindsey

Wired Campus: Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...notes-during-class-via-twitter

twitter higher ed classroom

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Back then, most of his students were unfamiliar with Twitter, the microblogging service that limits messages to 140 characters. And for the first few weeks of course, students were reluctant to tweet, says Mr. Complese. “it took a few weeks for this to click,” he said. “Before it started to work, there was just nothing on the back channel.”
  • Once students warmed to the idea that their professors actually wanted them to chat during class, students begin floating ideas or posting links to related materials, the professor says. In some cases, a shy student would type an observation or question on Twitter, and others in the class would respond with notes encouraging the student to raise the topic out loud. Other times, one of the professors would see a link posted by a student and stop class to discuss it.
  • his hope is that the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls.
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  • I am one of Cole’s “experimental lab rats,” and I must say that Cole and his colleague changed the way that I view teaching and learning. That course disrupted my notions of participation, identity, and community, and the changes are for the better. The course was so intellectually stimulating that when the course ended, I experienced a tremendous loss. The loss was so great that I felt myself trying to create Twitter communities in my future classes because I missed that engagement. If you are curious about our course, visit my course blog. https://blogs.psu.edu/mt4/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=655&tag=CI597C&limit=20 From there, you can access other students’ blogs and see some of the other conversations that ensued. For those who are critiquing Cole for his “grand experiment,” I must say that those of us who were in the course take pride in being a part of such an innovative course that challenged our perspectives of teaching and learning. We truly became a community, and that community has continued to this day on Twitter. I have even started using Twitter when I teach my undergraduate courses! Thank you, Cole (and colleague), for making a difference in my life! If you still curious about the course, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE935OqkKE8 and hear more about it.
  • @Bill Sodeman, FERPA does not come into play in what we did here. Twitter was not a replacement for a course management system and we didn’t hand out grades or force anyone into the environment. Those who adopted found it worthwhile. Also, controlling access would have killed one of the other really important (and unintentional) things that happened here — people not enrolled in the course followed and contributed via Twitter live!
  • We introduced quite a variety of technologies as we explored themes of community, identity, and design — all while participating in some very rigorous readings and conversations. I wrote a few posts about it a while back. Twitter was the most surprising outcome on many levels. At the end of the day, it was the class that became the community. Twitter empowered that in a strange way — a way that has us thinking about how we do this again. The one thing I am thrilled to see is that this conversation is happening — again, not about Twitter per se, but about rethinking practice. Thanks to everyone who is contributing thoughts!
  • @Megan Fritz The most intriguing part for me was the there was no official “monitor” of our conversation. Instead, we new that Cole and his colleague were tuned in, but it didn’t matter. We were in charge of our conversation. We became the drivers of the conversation, which made it meaningful for us as we constructed our learning. The channels of communication changed from bi-directional (teacher-to-student) to multi-directional (teacher-student-student-teacher, etc.). I would be bothered by thinking that the professor thought that we were “off track” and needed someone to monitor us to keep the back channel on track. In our case, the back channel was very much on task and often sat in the driver’s seat. it gives a whole new meaning to student-directed instruction. While such openness can be scary and intimidating because the control is handed over to the students, the experience can be powerful because the teacher becomes a member of the community partaking in the negotiation of the steering of the conversation.
  • I’m a PR student at the University of Oregon and this term I’m taking a social media marketing class with Kelli Matthews. She allows us to tweet during lecture as long as we tag content with #j412. If anyone would like to sit in just do a twitter search for #j412. We meet Monday and Wednesdays noon to 1:30 (pacific time). Or, check out our class website: http://strategicsocialmedia.wordpress.com/
Nicole McClure

Official Google Blog: The future of mobile - 0 views

googleblog.blogspot.com/...future-of-mobile.html

shared by Nicole McClure on 25 Oct 08 - Cached
  • mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those).
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 04 Nov 08
       
      For me, it is a funny comparison. it is hard to hold such a comparison but it is good in the sense of showing the vast growing of this device.
  • And fewer teens are wearing watches now because they use their phones to tell time instead
  • The phone that you have in your pocket, pack, or handbag is probably ten times more powerful than the PC you had on your desk only 8 or 9 years ago (assuming you even had a PC; most mobile users never have).
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  • it is by its very nature always connected.
  • Your phone will be smart about your situation and alert you when something needs your attention.
  • Your phone uses its arsenal of sensors to understand your situation and provide you information that might be useful.
  • Your phone is your omnipresent microphone to the world, a way to publish pictures, emails, texts, Twitters, and blog entries.
  • If you take that intelligence and combine it in the cloud with that of every other phone, we have an incredible snapshot of what is going on in the world right now.
  • in southern India, fishermen use text messaging to find the best markets for their daily catch, in South Africa, sugar farmers can receive text messages advising them on how much to irrigate their crops, and throughout sub-Saharan Africa entrepreneurs with mobile phones become phone operators, bringing communications to their villages. These innovations will only increase in the future, as mobile phones become the linchpin for greater economic development.
  • Trust is the most important currency in the always connected world, and your phone will help you stay in control of your information. You may choose to share nothing at all (the default mode), or just share certain things with certain people -- your circle of trusted friends and family. You'll make these decisions based on information you get from the service and software providers, and the collective ratings of the community as well. Your phone is like your trusted valet: it knows a lot about you, and won't disclose an iota of it without your OK.
    • Wessam Abedelaziz
      Wessam Abedelaziz on 04 Nov 08
       
      are all these features and capabilities available in each and evey phone, even the cheap ones!!
    • Nicole McClure
      Nicole McClure on 07 Nov 08
       
      I'm not even sure 16 years is accurate. It's been crazy fast and It's still changing.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Oct 08
     
    We need to read this before our Nov. 7 Skype call with Liz Kolb.
Barbara Lindsey

Envisioning the 21st-Century University - Abilene Christian University - 0 views

www.acu.edu/...index.html

21st century edutech higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08 - Cached
  • will also let students access knowledge and information recursively, coming back to its advice and expanding on its vision with web research and real-world access to their peers.
  • The majority of students entering college today have always composed at the computer, yet an increasing amount of the writing they do consists of dashed-off messages to friends and family via email, IM, or Facebook. How can composition instructors increase the amount of time students spend in the writing process and encourage a greater investment in the final writing product? Dr. Kyle Dickson believes one solution lies in the audio essay.
  • Dickson, working with colleagues in the English department, developed an essay assignment based on the This I Believe program recently revived on National Public Radio.
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  • Students began by identifying a personal belief before writing drafts that refined their focus through vividly related examples. Finally, they were invited to submit essays to the NPR website and record them on iPods with a memo recorder attachment for transmission via itunes U. Though public distribution was not required, this aspect of the assignment provided additional motivation for students carefully to hone their final essays. "I think it's very important to provide students an opportunity to write for a broader audience, instead of simply writing for the teacher," Dickson said. "These kinds of assignments put writing back into the public sphere as an essential skill of the future community leader. itunes U helps create this broader audience."
  • This new form of writing assignment involves students in a wider debate of public and private beliefs and encourages them to add their own voices to this dialogue. Much like their NPR counterparts, the essay podcasts emphasize the diversity of viewpoints on campus through the simple power of the human voice. Assignments like these, in providing students a real-world audience, value the experiences and expertise each student brings to the classroom. Whether podcasts are shared with the class, the campus, or the world, students move from simply receiving messages to a higher-level of investment in crafting and refining messages of their own.  
  • In the converged space where the Internet and telecommunications meet, new possibilities exist for the convergence of in-class and out-of-class activities, curricular and extra-curricular learning. And as we've already seen, new tools enable new approaches, extending the classroom of the 21st century by making new learning opportunities possible.
  • It's not that post-millenials are ambivalent to news; It's just that they consume It in a new, digItal way.
  • This trend simply opens up opportunities unavailable to print media in the past. Journalists who could publish only once a day now have unlimited publication opportunities and can send stories out by email, text message, and RSS feed.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      What do you all think about this?
  • Journalists who only had text and still pictures available to them in the past now can tell their stories with audio and video.
  • students are conditioned to consume news, like everything else, in a buffet style, offering them print, still photography, audio and video serves them the way they consume.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      Is there a danger to this mode of 'consumption'?
  • We don't know of any universities that are doing it exactly like this."
  • To take advantage of these changes, the university and the department have raised $1.2 million to fund the construction of a new media center. The "Convergence Newsroom" will house the student reporting staffs of all the respective ACU media: Optimist (a semi-weekly newspaper), The Prickly Pear (the annual yearbook), Paw-TV (bi-weekly television), and ACUOptimist.com (online print, audio and video). Internally, the convergence of staffs into a unified space will allow greater synergy in training and production among the student journalists.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      Could you think of physical convergence centers that would support intellectual synergies between, within and across disciplines at UCONN for the new building?
  • The New Media Newsroom is the first step in preparing future journalists for the newsrooms in which they'll work as they enter into their careers.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
       
      What about preparing you for your future careers with your future students?
  • "True learning is a deeply emotional process.
  • Team members would also no longer have to be in the same location to prepare strategy presentations. They could share new ideas or notify one another about important market news immediately with an email, a text message, or a conference call, regardless of their location. During presentations, requests for additional information could be met immediately. Even calls with a company's investor relations office could be set up on the fly.Incorporating the new generation of converged devices into their studies would improve student managers' ability to conduct business. it would also make STAR more valuable to students by allowing them to practice with the type of cutting-edge technology that will be their everyday tools once they move into the war rooms of Wall Street.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Sep 08
       
      Or your classrooms of the future?
  • Enhancing his interaction with students and their engagement in his courses, educators like Beck want to keep building relationships with students that change thinking - and change lives. They want solutions that "just work" to help them in those efforts. 
  • Using team-based learning, my classroom takes advantage of moving desks and chairs so that students can engage in problem-solving rather than focusing on me behind a podium. The stadium seating is a challenge, too, because I move among the teams, often sitting to have conversations with them as they work through the course materials." This kind of teaching is difficult to imagine in a fixed-seat space with small fold-away desks.
  • As the first semester of "American Identity in the Modern Period" neared, conversations about the logistics of team-teaching and the classroom space were replaced with discussions anticipating the integrative learning experience. As McGregor noted, 'What I looked forward to most was being a fellow learner along with my colleagues and students. This course was the first I ever participated in as a faculty member where I wasn't the exclusive 'expert.' I learned much alongside my students from my colleagues' fields of expertise and the connections they brought."
  • Students from this generation really want to do something bigger than themselves."
  • While it's nearly impossible to gather all 180 Barret students and faculty mentors together for a traditional meeting, a virtual meeting - where documents, audio, video, and web content are shared - could be more easily managed with this sort of technology.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 08
     
    will also let students access knowledge and information recursively, coming back to its advice and expanding on its vision with web research and real-world access to their peers.
Barbara Lindsey

Why Twitter Will Endure - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...03carr.html

twitter NYTimes

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 10 - Cached
  • On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.
  • imagine knowing what the thought leaders in your industry were reading and considering. And beyond following specific individuals, Twitter hash tags allow you to go deep into interests and obsession: #rollerderby, #physics, #puppets and #Avatar, to name just a few of many thousands.
  • Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.
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  • Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.
  • The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.
  • the ethos of Twitter, which is based on self-defining groups, is far more well-mannered than many parts of the Web — more Toastmasters than mosh pit. On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you, so best not to act like a lout and when people want to flame you for something you said, they are responding to their own followers, not yours, so trolls quickly lose interest.
  • “Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it; Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since e-mail,” said Clay Shirky, who wrote “Here Comes Everybody,” a book about social media. “it will be hard to wait out Twitter because it is lightweight, endlessly useful and gets better as more people use it. Brands are using it, institutions are using it, and it is becoming a place where a lot of important conversations are being held.”
  • I have found transcendent tacos at a car wash in San Antonio, rediscovered a brand of reporter’s notepad I adore, uncovered sources for stories, all just by typing a query into Twitter. All those riches do not come at zero cost: If you think e-mail and surfing can make time disappear, wait until you get ahold of Twitter, or more likely, it gets ahold of you. There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.
  • As news outlets were scrambling to understand the implications for travelers on Saturday morning, Twitter began lighting up with reports of new security initiatives, including one from @CharleneLi, a consultant who tweeted from the Montreal airport at about 7:30 a.m.: “New security rules for int’l flights into US. 1 bag, no electronics the ENTIRE flight, no getting up last hour of flight.” it was far from the whole story and getting ahead of the news by some hours would seem like no big deal, but imagine you or someone you loved was flying later that same day: Twitter might seem very useful.
Nicole McClure

Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology and Faculty | Resources | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...6069

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

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky - 0 views

www.shirky.com/...s-and-thinking-the-unthinkable

newspapers future media shirky publishing printing

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 24 Mar 09 - Cached
  • 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 increasingly resembled the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
  • With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
  • But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
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  • Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
  • During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
  • That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.
  • o who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
  • Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.
  • 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.
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