Group items tagged

A resource published by Eileen Ferrance on Action Research at the LAB (Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory) at Brown University on Action Research, 2000 Brown University copyright, all rights reserved What is intriguing to me about this report is that the action research mirrors what I think should happen in a CoP, i.e., a group of people identify a common need from practice, they gather data, they interpret the data, they act on the evidence in their own practice, evaluate results, and redefine the next learning quest.

Article from Metropolis Magazine, October 2008 on Asset-based Design See excerpt: "In contrast, an asset-based approach works with communities to identify their skills and capacities, and invites them to play an active role in the renewal of their environment. "This approach says that all communities have assets. The needs-based provision of services really only addresses the symptoms of the issues without doing any deeper social analysis to uncover the root problems. If joblessness is linked to a lack of educational activities, well, then that is the root issue. We're not saying designers can come in and fix all of those problems; we are saying that designers themselves have a particular asset to contribute, which is their professional expertise at creating beautiful spaces and using design to involve the community in discovering and expressing who they are." How to practice design that builds on a community's strengths and priorities: 1. Identify your community partner. Target a specific organization to partner with, whether it's a design center, a development corporation, a block association, or a nonprofit. By honoring the community building that has already taken place, you will also attract less suspicion as a new face. Begin a dialogue to find a design project. 2. Immerse yourself in the life of the community. Spend time or consider living there. Find out where people like to eat and hang out, what kind of meetings they go to, and what places have a lot of energy-perhaps an arts or a recreation center. Find out what the kids are excited about. Connect with community leaders. Go door-to-door if necessary. 3. Conduct a social analysis. Who has power? What are the challenges facing the community? What are its demographics? What are its core values? Who makes the decisions, and who benefits from or bears the costs of them? It helps to understand how the neighborhood came into being, its history, and the larger town or region in which it is situated. Map ex

Wonderful blog by George Siemens from 2010 enriched with good comments and exchange on teaching in social and technological networks. He reviews the traditional role of a teacher in a classroom (role model, encourager, supporter, guide, synthesizer) and shows how this model falls apart in a distributed learning network with multiple educator inputs and peer-based learning. Instead he says the roles teachers play in networked learning environments are to amplify, curate, find the way to help students make sense of information fragments, aggregate, filter, model (to build apprenticeship learning), and provide a persistent presence (place to express herself and be discovered).

George Siemens on the role of the teacher

Blog post by Stephen Downes exploring what a MOOC does and does not do--it does not replicate or build on past failed educational pathways where a person--adult or child--is not motivated enough to invest time in his/her own learning path. He mentions that online gaming is the best pre-MOOC and equivalent to MOOC for young people. Makes me wonder about my addiction to WordsFree and Scrabble on my iphone and desire to beat the computer again and again. Or enrolling in a MOOC where the opportunity to connect with smart, similarly-quested learners/achievers/doers must motivate me to overcome challenges of schedule, technology, serendipitous approach to learning, self-expression, etc. The MOOC is simply a much bigger playground where my motivation and my two feet (or eyes!) rule my behavior .

"Change: Education, Learning, and Technology" assessment of MOOCs by Lisa Chamberlin and Tracy Parish, August 2011. Interesting pro/con assessment of MOOCs--participation, distributed learning, credit or no credit, commitment, facilitation. Conclusion: jury still out!

Terese Bird and Grainne Conole are holding a webinar on A Pedagogical Look at MOOCs. Funded by the EU project eMundus, they are trying to map out patterns of open educational partnerships between institutions around the world. This webinar will take a pedagogical look at MOOCs. They chose 5 MOOCs, each corresponding to a primary learning approach. They then mapped each MOOC against the 12 dimensions Grainne identified. The blog goes on to attempt to do this with one MOOC as an example.

Love this cogent blog post by Jonathan Rees on why MOOCs are failing --because people need the social supports of learning online or in the classroom. published November 15, 2013.

Interesting blog post by Chris Collison on starting learning initiatives although he calls them knowledge management, posted July 16, 2013. They are more like variations on a theme than discreet choices. Nevertheless, they are important for enterprise learning facilitators to know about. 1. Top Down, Big Bang-"The challenge, of course is to find ways to keep people's attention - particularly when the board or senior sponsors have moved onto their next big bang." 2. Top Down, Bottom Up--"there is a deliberate effort to harness the energy and passion of workers at the front line, and to involve them in the programme, perhaps as group of advisors or a community of practice." 3. Slipstream--"Slipstreaming is about working in partnership with other initiatives or "transformation projects"" 4. Outside in--"Sometimes things just sound better when they are heard from the outside." 5. Viral--"you need to be prepared for it to be messy - it's a case of let a thousand flowers bloom, pick the best ones and do the weeding and gardening later. However, it's hard to imagine "lessons learned", "knowledge retention" or the creation of knowledge products spreading like wildfire." 6. Stealth--"build up your organization's capability to manage and share knowledge without them realising what your master plan actually is." 7. Copycat--" it's often successful to point to examples of successful KM from other organisations (competitors and customers are particular impactful) to create some "me too" or "me better" demand." 8. Pilot--"A pilot enables you to try the aspects of KM most likely to make a difference quickly, to build credibility locally, and to learn from each implementation." 9. Buffet Menu--"this approach works with the demand already present, and provides an array of tools and techniques which the organisation chooses from at will, once their "palate" is sufficiently educated." 10. Phoenix from the Ashes--"For a lot of organisation

Blog post by Jeffrey J. Williams, Chronicle Review, December 2, 2013 This post on stratification of the teaching role in HE reminds me of our conversations from 1-2 years ago. Imagine a diorama in an American Museum of Occupations showing the evolution of the professor. The exhibit starts in the early 1800s with an austere, black-suited man in a minister's collar, perhaps looking over the shoulder of a student at a rustic desk, with a Greek text open in front of him. In the next scene, from around 1900, he morphs into a pince-nez-wearing gentleman in starched collar and cravat, at a podium delivering a lecture. The professor of 1950 adopts the rumpled bearing of a tweed jacket, pointing with his pipe to a poem or a physics equation on a chalkboard. In the next frame, circa 1990, she wears jeans and is sitting in front of a computer screen. How would the diorama represent the professor of 2020? Some observers predict that she won't exist: In the memorable phrase of Frank Donoghue, a professor of English at Ohio State University, we are living in the age of "the last professors." Less apocalyptic commentators say the professor has experienced "deprofessionalization." Both views try to capture the squeeze on professorial jobs, but they misrecognize fundamental aspects of the changes that have occurred. Rather than extinction, we have seen the steady expansion of academic labor over the past century, and rather than "deskilling," we are undergoing more rather than less professionalization. What has been going on is what sociologists call "differentiation" and "stratification." We are in the era of the Great Stratification. We have tended to see the professor as a single figure, but he is now a multiple being, of many types, tasks, and positions. Given that there are more than 1.4 million college faculty members in the United States, it is clear that they are not disappearing. But the all-purpose professor has faded. We have tended to see the professor as a s

Very interesting course offered at P2PU on designing collaborative workshops. Looks like this one is three weeks long with 3 synchronous sessions in Google Hangout. Under the About tab: Seems like learning bubbles? "Increasingly informal and temporary learning spaces are being set up in many spheres. These include technology and open education conferences, counter-summits, BarCamps, hackathons and many other events."

Jenny explains her experiences with cMOOCs and xMOOCs, and the difference between them as xMOOCs go beyond the didactic video lecture approach. She basis her blog on her experiences taking two xMOOCs and the several cMOOCs she has taken and designed and led. One of the biggest differences is that cMOOCs were designed to test out a theory, connectivist theory, while xMOOCs are not theory based. As a result, xMOOCs are convened on a designated platform, while cMOOCs are designed as massive networks, or to create them. Going forward, she believes that the route will depend on our fundamental beliefs of what education is for.

Presentation by Stephen Downes to the London School of Economics, pretty ironic for Stephen to give a lecture on how learning is different now, August 2014. Amazing and funny! "People are looking for learning that isn't so much the repetition of their professors' ideas, but learning that they can apply, that is a part of their life, whether it's part of their life in work, part of their life in their hobbies or their avocations, or part of their life just in what interests them. They expect universities to be flexible." different learning going on The fact is that people learn differently, that they have different objectives, different priorities, different goals, different times that they want to learn, different pets sleeping on their keyboard, all of these impact how people want to learn. That's immediately obvious to anyone who actually looks at people learning. Even as I look around this room, he's on an iPad, she's typing, she's writing on a notepad, he's asleep. Everyone learns differently. Connectivism MOOC George and I launched our MOOC on connectivism, which some of you may have heard of. Most of you may not have heard of it. If you talk about a niche subject, this is as niche as it can get. It's an unknown theory in the field of educational technology.

excerpt from AICPA website on the future of learning "Ellen Wagner has studied the Hype Cycle as it relates to education. In 2012, MOOCs and gamification were trending up the cycle toward the "Peak of Inflated Expectations." In 2013, MOOCs were adopted in many learning capacities and met with some criticism. This, says Wagner, is all part of the cycle. "When this new thing does not do all of the things that we say it's going to, we get disappointed and say, 'Ah, well, it doesn't really work very well.' The fact is that it probably worked fine all along, but when we start inflating our expectations for what it can do, it's not going to ever be able to meet those expectations." MOOCs"

Review by Rob Jenkins on the Chronicle, 3.18.13, on why MOOCs are a massively bad idea for wait-listed community college students in California as proposed in new legislation there. Excerpt: "We know that succeeding in online classes requires an extraordinary degree of organization, self-discipline, motivation, and time-management skill. A simple Google search of "how to succeed in online classes" yields a plethora of Web sites-including many college and university sites-offering students such gems as "be organized," "manage your time wisely," and (my favorite) "stay motivated."" Excerpt: So to recap, California's plan (or to be fair, one senator's plan) is basically to dump hundreds of thousands of the state's least-prepared and least-motivated students into a learning environment that requires the greatest amount of preparation and motivation, where they will take courses that may or may not be effective in that format. Here's a prediction: Those students will fail and drop out at astronomical rates. Then the hand-wringing will begin anew, the system will pour millions more dollars into "retention" efforts, and the state will be in an even deeper fix than it is now. (Virtual cheating will probably run rampant, too, followed by expensive anticheating measures, but that's another blog post.) Look, I'm not a politician or an economist. I don't know the answer to California higher education's budget woes. But I'm pretty sure herding community-college students into MOOCs is not it.

Very interesting blog post in Wired Campus by Karen Head with Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Media, and Communication, 2.21.13. Raises interesting curricular and technological design issues for upcoming MOOC underwritten in part by Gates.

MIT and Harvard have teamed up to offer MOOCs, and this month Stanford, Princeton, U of PA, U of MI have created a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

This goes with the recent buzz on our Moocs. Here's the NYTimes article on the formation of heavy-hitter Moocs. It appears the Harvard MIT collaborative is also a research project on how people learn online, which could be interesting.

Book about online courseware case studies at MIT, Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, etc. with the best known at MIT by Taylor Walsh, 2011, Princeton Press

A wonderful testimonial by a language arts teacher--Melinda Rench--in IL on the value of connecting with peers via social media (Ning, Twitter, and personal networks) to feed her mind and soul, Winter 2012. See excerpt below: "Using social networks to further my learning has enriched my professional life in more ways than I can name. I have a support network, a never-ending source of inspiration and new ideas, and a learning network that spans the globe. It is professional development that matters and feeds my soul."

great background on George Siemens