Group items tagged

Our pedagogical imperative is to let a course unfold according to the whim and determination of the group - to replace teacher-as-content with learning-community-as-content-maker. Doesn't this replace the content-as-authority with the random knowledges of various members of the group? How does "whim" become "content"? Wouldn't it be better to start with actual, factual knowledge? on Dec 09, 14 - Edit - Remove This is at the heart of what Freire calls "co-intentional education," in which "Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge." The collective knowledge of a group of students will almost always exceed the expertise of one instructor. The last sentence is misleading -- not what Freire says. If the teacher is not included as part of the task, the knowledge of the group of students probably doesn't exceed the instructor's expertise.

"Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. At the heart of the TPACK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (CK), Pedagogy (PK), and Technology (TK). See Figure above. As must be clear, the TPACK framework builds on Shulman's idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge. "

"Abstract: Knowledge sharing and creation are considered key processes leading to innovation and organizational performance. Several organizational initiatives have focused on building communities of practice in order to create a platform where employees can share experiences and insights. The focus in this paper is on one type of network structure, termed distributed networks of knowledge (DNoK). The success of such practices is deeply linked to whether or not formalization of the networks can hamper their knowledge creation and creativity. The role of leadership has been extensively discussed in the setting of communities of practice. However, this paper intends to shed new light on the topic by exploring the boundary management perspective in order to enable knowledge sharing and creation within this specific context of DNoK. To this end, we have examined the role of leadership styles in different DNoKs in a multinational firm." More related to business CoPs, but of interest.

"Research supports the focus on text complexity and vocabulary. "The Baseball Study" by Recht and Leslie (1988) began by identifying the correlation between reading comprehension and student knowledge. Recht and Leslie discovered that students with low reading ability but high knowledge of baseball, outscored students with high reading ability but low knowledge of baseball on tests of comprehension. Landauer and Dumais (1997) took it a step further, finding that students acquire vocabulary up to four times faster when they read a series of related texts. Combined, these studies indicate the immense possibilities when we equip our students with the necessary vocabulary, providing them with sufficient prior knowledge before tackling reading tasks." This blog entry explores 5 terrific tools to help students, including one that makes texts simpler to help lower-level readers.

Article on PBL: The assumption of non-constructivist approaches to learning has been that as long as learners are provided with knowledge, they will be able to use it. Education based on that assumption is thus primarily concerned with transferring substance to the learner, and little importance is placed on the role of the learning activity. From a constructivist view, on the other hand, learning is the process of constructing knowledge - not merely obtaining it - in social environments (Brooks & Brooks, 1993). The theory of situated learning consistent with this view asserts that what we come to know and understand is fundamentally a product of the learning situation and the nature of the learning activity. Learning tasks should thus, as far as possible, be embedded in the target context and require the kind of thinking that would be done in real life (Brown et al., 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991).

"Project learning, also known as project-based learning, is a dynamic approach to teaching in which students explore real-world problems and challenges, simultaneously developing cross-curriculum skills while working in small collaborative groups. Because project-based learning is filled with active and engaged learning, it inspires students to obtain a deeper knowledge of the subjects they're studying. Research also indicates that students are more likely to retain the knowledge gained through this approach far more readily than through traditional textbook-centered learning. In addition, students develop confidence and self-direction as they move through both team-based and independent work."

"Real-world learning experiences can significantly improve children's knowledge in a matter of just days, a new study suggests. "Researchers found that 4- to 9-year-old children knew more about how animals are classified after a four-day camp at a zoo. "It wasn't that children who attended just knew more facts about animals, the researchers noted. The camp actually improved how they organised what they knew - a key component of learning. "This suggests the organisation of knowledge doesn't require years to happen. It can occur with a short, naturalistic learning experience," said Layla Unger, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at The Ohio State University." A very, very small study, but supports intuitive notions of the neccesity of real-world, real-life experiences.

"Step 1: Import your kindle highlights to your Diigo library. With the new Diigo chrome extension, it only takes one click to import all of your highlights from a book to your Diigo library. "Step 2: Organize highlights from a book in your own knowledge structure. "After Kindle highlights are imported in your Diigo library, it's easy to add them to an outliner where you can then organize these highlights in your own structure."

Charts demonstrate various content areas and expected depth of knowledge. This is a good blog with many interesting articles.

"This is a listing of 82 sites that legally offer free textbooks and written course material. "There is a separate page with links to free audio and video courses Free Audio & Video Courses Online "To the best of my knowledge all of the websites listed here offer only content that they are legally entitled to transfer to you. If you find a site listed here that you know illegally offers copyrighted material, please contact me through the site with a link to the infringing content. Mr6n8 "To the best of my knowledge every website listed here, and its downloads, are safe. By the rules of this site, no website that has a red or an orange rating at Web of Trust (WOT) is allowed in the listings. I also use LinkExtend, a browser addon that offers the ratings from six other website rating products, to verify the sites here are clean. I have never encountered any issue while visiting these sites. Additionally, I have downloaded something from every site that offers a download and have never encountered an issue. If you should ever encounter malware on any of these sites, please contact me through the site and provide the link to the offending content. Mr6n8" The lists will take some time to go through: 783 sites are included, with minimal descriptions. Variety of subjects. T/H to psmiley in Group diigo in Education This list is not comprehensive and if you know of any other sites please post in the comments below or at our forums. A comprehensive alphabetical listing of free books for reading or listening can be found on these pages:"

Review of Digital Dante Website. "Great works continue to draw new specialists into the field and serve to bring the history of a language, its people, and their culture to life. Literary works serve as examples of the power and beauty of language at its best. Helping to make such texts more accessible to learners, the Web can make use of hypertext and multimedia to provide context that is so often lacking for those without the general background knowledge that a good reader is assumed to possess. "

I will analyze three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet. First is the idea that the instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary. Second is the celebration of the virtues of collaborative learning as superior to outmoded individual learning. And third is the insistence that lengthy, complex books, which constitute a single, static, one-way conversation with an individual, are inferior to knowledge co-constructed by members of a group."

The official Knowledge Base has lots of videos to help you get the most out of Second Life. Has both text faqs and video tutorials.

"How I use Twitter, search, Diigo Delicious, DEVONthink, Scrivener to find, refine, organize information -->knowledge" A nice illustration in a Screenr screencast of how a Stanford professor uses various online tools to organize Internet information.

"Because "hypertext is a mental process, as well as a digital tool,"[1] one of the larger cultural implications arising from this change in the meaning of text concerns the role of the reader. Text in print implies and, to a certain degree, constructs a passive reader, one who is often a "receptacle" of information. Hypertext is shaping an appropriative reader who is interacting with the text, and is involved in knowledge construction."

The Knowledge Tree is an e-journal generated by members of the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system to enable the sharing of research and learning innovation in national and global e-learning practice.

An important issue for CBI and CALL--who has authority and control of the knowledge? firstmonday.org

"Vygotsky controversially argued for educators to assess students' ability to solve problems, rather than knowledge acquisition. The idea of collaborative learning has a lot to do with Vygotsky's idea of the "zone of proximal development". It considers what a student can do if aided by peers and adults. By considering this model for learning, we might consider collaboration to increase students' awareness of other concepts." Excellent, well-documented advise on using collaborative learning and its value for learners.

""Always on" access has created an abundance of learning potentials that scarcely existed even a decade ago. "No, this is not the picture most of us painted for ourselves when we went into education. Most of us went into teaching understanding that school was pretty much the only education game in town, the place where kids came to get information, where, at the end of the day, we were responsible for disseminating the knowledge, we assessed whether our students got it, and we stamped it "an education." For that vast majority of kids (and for us, too) who attended a brick-and-mortar school, that's been the unbending, monolithic vision of schooling for 150 years. "So what do we do when that vision begins, finally, to be undermined?" Technology is changing what it means to be educated. Thoughtful article.

BAsed on Bloom's revised taxonomy. This page has several variations on ways to look at the taxonomy and action verbs for objectives, including a mouse-over set of colored blocks with example of objectives for various combinations of cognitive processes and knowledge dimensions. The rainbow table of cognitive processes is also very helpful to visual the dimensions, and each part is well explained. Includes resources and other pages with the taxonomy explained. From CELT.