Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ BeyondwebctFall08
Barbara Lindsey

Chinesepod and Connectivism: More connections lead to more learning » Moving ... - 0 views

  • More cognitive and affective experiences lead to more thinking, more synaptic connections, and more learning. To this end, we have sought to leverage guesswork, repetition, stories, context, in-depth discussion, etc, to offer what Siemens might call ’frequency, diversity, and depth of exposure’ to the content. I’ve always maintained that learning is multi-dimensional, and deepened when you approach the subject from different angles.
  • we are connectors, or resources who point learners at key patterns or elements that help strengthen their connection to a piece of information (and emphasize the skill of being able to identify patterns).
  • Teachers do NOT provide digital access to notes and materials, and students are quizzed regularly about the content on which they have taken textual notes to see if this traditional “broadcast/spray model” of learning has been effective. (Or at least if the items included in the quiz have temporarily been stored in short term memory.) We MUST move beyond this traditional “banking model” of education, and I’m convinced the impetus for these changes is NOT coming and is not GOING to come from “inside the system” of traditional education.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • How many of the teachers we work with on a daily basis understand the foundational elements of connectivisim? VERY, VERY few in my estimation. Why don’t they understand? Because they have not EXPERIENCED connectivisim. It is not enough to show or be told. One must EXPERIENCE the power of networked learning to understand it and appreciate its potentials.
  • blended learning conference event which is K-12 Online.
  • participate and share the upcoming K-12 Online Conference which starts next week with our pre-conference keynote. The conference is free, it’s global, and the co-learners involved (that includes YOU as well as presenters and other participants) are all providing a rich context for experiential, connectivist learning.
  • if your local educational organization agrees, you can even earn professional development credit for your participation and time!
  • we are not limited in our access to expert teachers and co-learners if we want to learn
  • Ken challenges me by thoughtfully connecting his educational practice with learning theories which build on and powerfully extend those which I’ve studied in graduate school.
  • We can take, ourselves, an online blended course on a topic of interest so that we can personally EXPERIENCE and therefore appropriate / claim for ourselves / understand with depth some of the benefits as well as drawbacks of online learning contexts.
  • Blended learning, because it offers the possibility of appropriating best practices from BOTH face-to-face as well as online/virtual learning contexts, can provide greater opportunities for authentic learning and meaningful connections than any other educational modality.
Barbara Lindsey

Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional? - 0 views

  • According to new research released this week by the University of Wisconsin-Madison involving about 7,500 undergraduate and graduate students, an overwhelming 82 percent of students said they would prefer courses that offer online lectures over traditional classes that do not include an online lecture component. The researchers also pointed out the implications for these findings extend well beyond the classroom.
  • When asked why they prefer courses that offer streaming lectures online, most students cited making up for missed classes, convenience, improving retention of materials covered, improving test scores, and help with material review prior to class.
  • 72 percent of higher education professionals indicated that, as of mid-August, their institutions did not have any kind of formal intellectual property policy in place to deal with captured lectures or other learning materials placed online, according to one of our informal online polls.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Said Veeramani: "There are ... some significant common drivers that academia is wrestling with: first, creating more effective learning outcomes for students and second, accommodating more students from a scalability standpoint. To accomplish this, institutions are increasingly turning to lecture capture technologies that turn a traditional classroom into an instant source of online, interactive content."
Barbara Lindsey

Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional? - 0 views

  • More than 50 percent of the students surveyed said they want course material to be avaalble to them even after the complete a course. According to the report, "They expressed interest in accessing online material in their professional lives, after their coursework is complete." Sixty percent even indicated a willingness to pay for lecture capture services.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Will this be used to benefit the financial prospects of the university or the faculty or both?
Barbara Lindsey

Using Twitter for Language Study « IdeaLogues - 0 views

  • So how do you find non-English-writing Twits? Serendipity:  Search Twitter for a term you’re interested in, see who’s talking about it.  For example, I searched for “Dokdo,” hoping to learn more about the controversy between Japan and South Korea over the islands known as Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese, and found Mojin, a Japanese Twit I now follow. Twitter Search’s Advanced Search Page:  Select the language you want, put in words you’re interested in, and see what you get.  Note that for Japanese I’ve found it to be a little difficult to use actual Japanese words for some reason… Use FriendFeed’s Rooms to find interesting Twits in your target language.  Here’s a Japanese Room I belong to; here’s a Japanese News Room, although more of the links are in English. Search the followers and followings of a Twit you like.  For example, I like the NHK (Japan’s version of PBS or BBC) Twitter feed, and have found some interesting Twits to follow from the list of who NHK follows.
Barbara Lindsey

Top News - Digital debate: Prepare kids for exams or life? - 0 views

  • 's only a question of which technology, and of the alignment between technology in the learning situation and in the assessment situation."
  • "It's not that we want kids to cheat," Prensky said. "It's that the definitions of learning, cheating, researching, and collaborating are changing right in front of our eyes."
  • The ideas about how people find information are very fluid, he added, and that can be seen perhaps most easily in medicine, where medical students and doctors are allowed texts in which to look up the answers to questions--but what is most important is knowing which questions to ask.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • why is it important;
  • "We're preparing [students] for life, not for exams--that's what it has come down to with [No Child Left Behind, preparing for exams], but that's a silly thing to prepare people for, because you really want to prepare them for life and work."
  •  
    An Australian educators lets students use cell phones and the internet during exams prompting global debate regarding the nature of 21st century assessment.
Barbara Lindsey

"Using Virtual Worlds to get students to think in full sentences" submitted by Dr. Mich... - 0 views

  • Dr. Michael N. DeMers New Mexico State University Room 118 Breland Hall MSC MAP, P.O. Box 30001 Las Cruces, New Mexico, 88011 USA Email Address: - demers01@gmail.com Phone Number: - (575) 496-5231
  • After the surprise of learning that the students wanted to use SL for a study group, I was amazed at the consistency of attendance. The students and I would gather every sunday evening for 60 to 90 minutes to review PowerPoint slides they had selected and I displayed in-world using a whiteboard. This worked so well because the students could get together without having to travel at all.
  • During the review sessions I did the following. 1. Required text (no voice was allowed). 2. Displayed the frames the students themselves selected from the f-2-f lecture as ones they were having difficulty with. 3. Asked them to review the slides before showing 4. Put up the slides and employed the Socratic Method and asked them to describe and verbally explain things. The result of using text only was utterly astonishing. I did it at first because some didn't have the equipment. Later, I discovered, that requiring the students to "write out" their answers in full sentences was a wonderful preparation for the essay exams. Prior to this I was always frustrated that the students seemed to know the material, displayed the "aha" reaction, but did terribly on the exams because they weren't thinking in full sentences and paragraphs during the lecture. In Second Life they had to think in the same terms in which the exams would be given. It was fabulous. Their exam scores showed the improvement as well.
  •  
    An interesting resource for our last class meeting
Barbara Lindsey

The Power of Wikis in Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Johns Hopkins and MIT. One thing that came out of those conversations was that, interestingly, the wikis were being used more for administrative purposes than classroom purposes.
  •  
    last page of article
  •  
    page 3 of article
Nicole McClure

Official Google Blog: The future of mobile - 0 views

  • 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
       
      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).
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • 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
       
      are all these features and capabilities available in each and evey phone, even the cheap ones!!
    • Nicole McClure
       
      I'm not even sure 16 years is accurate. It's been crazy fast and it's still changing.
  •  
    We need to read this before our Nov. 7 Skype call with Liz Kolb.
Barbara Lindsey

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

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

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

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

Pollster's New Book Likens Online Universities to Zip Cars in Their Growing A... - 0 views

  • The factor that will close that “enthusiasm gap” is the growing use of distance education by well-respected universities, Mr. Zogby predicts in the book, The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (Random House).
  • Which “national surveys” is Ms. Blumenstyk referring to? I would like to see the citation. The Sloan Foundation has completed many national annual surveys that find Ms. Blumenstyk’s statement to be a myth. Furthermore, she is mixing apples and oranges – she could be referring to an Eduventure’s study that shows many employers are wary of students with degrees from completely online universities, but that has nothing to do with the perception toward distance or online learning in general. Jeffrey Seaman from the Sloan Consortium notes that “virtual universities,” where “100 percent of the applicant’s courses were taken online, represents less than 1 percent of all institutions offering online programs.” Mr. Zogby’s prediction that the growing use of distance education by “well-respected universities” will make distance learning more popular is accurate, but it is not new. Distance education is already more popular and has seen a steady increase in enrollments for the many years.
  •  
    Look at the comment section
Barbara Lindsey

Report: Social Web Usage Tipped in 2008 - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

  • A new report by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research states that usage of social technologies increased markedly in 2008: three in four US online adults now use social tools to connect with each, up from 56% in 2007. According to the report, the largest growth came from ratings and reviews, "voting" on websites, and user-generated video. Blogging and tagging were also popular.
  • Forrester has come up with different categories of social media usage (see image below). It claims that Creators are still growing slowly (it's now 21%), but "Critics" have increased more (to 37%). Critics are defined as people who post online reviews and comments. Collectors are at 19%, Joiners 35% and unsurprisingly "Spectators" are the biggest group with 69% of US online adults 'consuming' social media.
  • As report author Josh Bernoff notes in a blog post, the growth in consumption of online content is mostly coming from older people: "social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives."
Barbara Lindsey

AdelaideNow... School uses mobile phones as learning tool - 0 views

  • St Johns Grammar is encouraging mobiles as part of an Australian-first trial to promote the benefits of mobile technology in increasing fluency in foreign languages.
  • The Year 10 students, studying Indonesian, are given a mobile each which they use to call up an automated service that guides them through a menu. They choose from conversations about booking a hotel to a menu and are prompted to go through the details in Indonesian. Their answers are uploaded on to a website and get marked on their use of the language.
  • unique trial by the the Government's Le@rning Federation's Mobile Applications for Language Learning project.
Barbara Lindsey

The Power of Wikis in Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Mader talks about powerful ways to use wikis in education, content ownership issues, and how wikis tend to be used--and why.
  • In higher ed, there are really three ways I think a wiki can be useful: teaching, research, and administration.
  • teachers can work together using a wiki to write curriculum and lesson plans for courses, to develop assignments, and so forth. If you have multiple teachers teaching sections of a course and they need to teach from the same materials, they have a central hub to which they can collaboratively contribute material ... and then from which they can teach and keep all their sections.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      What do you think about this example? Would this be useful in group collaborations in your sections?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • For students, wikis are beneficial primarily as a collaborative tool for things like group assignments in courses.
  •  
    Stewart Mader describes how he uses wikis in higher ed environments.
Barbara Lindsey

The Power of Wikis in Higher Ed - 0 views

  • In this first half of a two-part interview, Mader talks about powerful ways to use wikis in education, content ownership issues, and how wikis tend to be used--and why.
  • In higher ed, there are really three ways I think a wiki can be useful: teaching, research, and administration.
  • teachers can work together using a wiki to write curriculum and lesson plans for courses, to develop assignments,
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • If you have multiple teachers teaching sections of a course and they need to teach from the same materials, they have a central hub to which they can collaboratively contribute material ... and then from which they can teach and keep all their sections.
Barbara Lindsey

In search of enlightenment ...: Exploring Japanese with google maps - 0 views

  • The subject is Japanese, the topic is "travelling in Japan" & the idea is to create a map in google maps with placemarks that describe various tourist locations in a city (in this case Kyoto).
  • The subject is Japanese, the topic is "travelling in Japan" & the idea is to create a map in google maps with placemarks that describe various tourist locations in a city (in this case Kyoto).
  • Why have I done this? What use could it have? Why didn't I simply create a reading comprehension & stick some pictures in?Well ...The students all visited the locations in Kyoto on a school trip last December so they are relevant to themI will create comprehension questions for the students to answer - a simple activity (but important in gauging their understanding of the unit vocab and kanji)I will embed or link to the map in our class ning so that the students can access the map from anywhere at anytime and comment on the whole process. Easy access.I will invite the class as collaborators (allowing them to edit the map) and have them add to the map. Each student will be given 2 locations that they have visited and will be required to write a written piece in each placemark describing the location and what you can do there.Students will then (via the ning forum) comment on each others creations and suggest grammar and vocabulary that they could have used
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • All in all, the aim is to engage the students with "real" Japanese. Have them create written pieces that are useful, relevant & easily expanded upon later on if they choose - as further revision, extension work or simply to use the language somewhere that it can be seen and recognized; not simply written in an exercise or workbook, marked and forgotten.
Barbara Lindsey

Sentiments On Common Sense » Credit where credit is due…. BLAME where blame sits - 0 views

  • With the use of quality networking tools, we can as a professional expand our learning and conversation and bring a true sense of understanding to the communities in which we work.  I would even guess that if used properly, we could drag the “parking lot conversations” that are currently happenning online into the staff room and even the administrators office where they could be productively dealt with in effective and productive ways.
  • IMAGINE a faculty meeting where a ning site was set up to allow for followup questions and online conversation. 
  • People are more apt to give you accurate and honest feedback immediately following a meeting instead of days and weeks afterward. 
Barbara Lindsey

Beyond Campus Boundaries ePortfolio Transforms into 'Cultural Application' - 0 views

  • ePortfolios are not a higher education application. It’s not a K-12 application. It’s a cultural application.
  • ePortfolios can authenticate what kind of work people do in between the times when they are at the community college studying formally. So, it bridges the gap between informal learning and formal learning
  • So universities—especially schools of education around the country—are rushing to implement ePortfolio systems so that they can do the kind of reporting the accrediting agencies are asking for.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • What’s happening with universities in this knowledge age is that the boundaries between the university and the rest of the world have pretty much dissolved. We are now a learning culture, or a knowledge culture.
Nicole McClure

Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

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

Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before - 0 views

  • Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are now nearly 600 maps.
  •  
    A collection of world maps where territories are re-sized according to the subject content. Creative Commons licensed.
« First ‹ Previous 201 - 220 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page