Group items tagged

MERLOT and TLT Group partner to deliver two faculty development programs 1. Group Webcast – MERLOT: Teaching with Technology In April of 2006, MERLOT and the TLT (Teaching, Learning and Technology) Group will offer the three week, online, participatory workshop, MERLOT: Teaching with Technology. The workshop will focus on how the MERLOT collection and services provide faculty with valuable resources in the design, delivery, and assessment of courses offered face-to-face, entirely online, or in a blended (hybrid) format. The workshop is one of many planned activities in which MERLOT and its partner TLT are cooperating. The first of the three part series begins April 5th and runs from 3:00 to 4:00 pm EST. Other session are April 12th and April 19th. Ray Purdom, Editor of MERLOT’s Teaching and Technology discipline, will coordinate the series and conduct the workshops with members of the TLT Board and other MERLOT discipline boards. For more information and to register visit http://www.tltgroup.org/OLI/Schedule.htm. For information regarding other TLT events click on http://www.tltgroup.org/Events/EventsCalendar/Chronological%20View.htm 2. TLT Group Presents On-Line Events The Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group (http://www.tltgroup.org/) strives to motivate and enable institutions and individuals to improve teaching and learning with technology, while helping them cope with continual change. For a list of scheduled events, go to http://www.tltgroup.org/OLI/Schedule.htm.

A live or recorded multi-person conversation, discussion group, talk show or podcast, led by a host with active participants.

Abstract In groups people can accomplish what they cannot do alone. Now new visual and social technologies are making it possible for people to make decisions and solve complex problems collectively. These technologies are enabling groups not only to create community but also to wield power and create rules to govern their own affairs. Electronic democracy theorists have either focused on the individual and the state, disregarding the collaborative nature of public life, or they remain wedded to outdated and unrealistic conceptions of deliberation. This article makes two central claims. First, technology will enable more effective forms of collective action. This is particularly so of the emerging tools for "collective visualization" which will profoundly reshape the ability of people to make decisions, own and dispose of assets, organize, protest, deliberate, dissent and resolve disputes together. From this argument derives a second, normative claim. We should explore ways to structure the law to defer political and legal decision–making downward to decentralized group–based decision–making. This argument about groups expands upon previous theories of law that recognize a center of power independent of central government: namely, the corporation. If we take seriously the potential impact of technology on collective action, we ought to think about what it means to give groups body as well as soul — to "incorporate" them. This paper rejects the anti–group arguments of Sunstein, Posner and Netanel and argues for the potential to realize legitimate self–governance at a "lower" and more democratic level. The law has a central role to play in empowering active citizens to take part in this new form of democracy.

Social constructivist theory has advanced the notion that distance education is inferior, because effective learning is thought to require immersion in a cognitive apprenticeship under the guidance of a mentor. Effective learning is said to be situated in activity, context, and culture as a collaboration in a community of practice. Administrators and practitioners in distance education are confronted with a challenge to the efficacy of their endeavors. The authors briefly trace the evolution of social constructivism, the influence of Piaget and Vygotsky, and analyze the effects of contemporary social constructivism with implications for instructional theory and practice.