Skip to main content

Home/ change11/ Group items tagged tools

Rss Feed Group items tagged

markuos morley

Digital, Networked and Open : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Schol... - 4 views

    • markuos morley
       
      What is Martin's definition of a social network here?
    • markuos morley
       
      Surely scholars could use email distribution lists and Usenet Newsgroups for such activities commonly back in the early 1990's?
    • Rob Parsons
       
      They could but it wasn't that common.
  • Are they central or peripheral to practice?
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Blogs are also the epitome of the type of technology that can lead to rapid innovation. They can be free to set up, are easy to use and because they are at the user's control, they represent a liberated form for expression. There is no word limit or publication schedule for a blog
  • ‘Scholarship’ is itself a rather old-fashioned term.
  • How do we recognise quality?
  • Prior to the Internet, but particularly prior to social networks, this kind of network was limited to those with whom you interacted regularly.
  • the advent of social networks that is having an influence on scholarly practice.
  • Should bloggers use institutional systems or separate out their blogging and formal identities?
  • Dunbar's (1992) research on friends and group size suggests that it has a capacity of around 150. It necessitates keeping in touch with a lot of people, often reinforcing that contact with physical interaction.
  • for those who have taken the step to establishing an online identity, these networks are undoubtedly of significant value in their everyday practice.
  • openness
  • Tim O'Reilly (2004) calls ‘an architecture of participation’, an infrastructure and set of tools that allow anyone to contribute.
  • It is this democratisation and removal of previous filters that has characterised the tools which have formed the second wave of web popularity, such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
  • Openness then refers not only to the technology but also to the practice of sharing content as a default.
    • markuos morley
       
      Significant point for me.
    • markuos morley
       
      The Philosophy is the important thing.
  • Fast – technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. The academic does not need to attend a training course to use it or submit a request to their central IT services to set it up. This means they can experiment quickly.
  • Cheap – tools that are usually free or at least have a freemium model so the individual can fund any extension themselves. This means that it is not necessary to gain authorisation to use them from a budget holder. It also means the user doesn't need to be concerned about the size of audience or return on investment, which is liberating.
  • Out of control – these technologies are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element and are more flexible. They are also democratised tools, so the control of them is as much in the hands of students as it is that of the educator.
  • Overall, this tends to encourage experimentation and innovation in terms of both what people produce for content services and the uses they put technology to in education.
  • ‘the good enough revolution’
  • This reflects a move away from expensive, sophisticated software and hardware to using tools which are easy to use, lightweight and which tie in with the digital, networked, open culture.
  • there seems to be such an anxiety about being labelled a ‘technological determinist’ that many people in education seek to deny the significance of technology in any discussion. ‘Technology isn't important’, ‘pedagogy comes first’, ‘we should be talking about learning, not the technology’ are all common refrains in conferences and workshops.
  • While there is undoubtedly some truth in these, the suggestion that technology isn't playing a significant role in how people are communicating, working, constructing knowledge and socialising is to ignore a major influencing factor in a complex equation.
  • entirely unpredicted, what is often termed ‘emergent use’, which arises from a community taking a system and using it for purposes the creators never envisaged.
  •  
    I've made some annotations and floating comments here. Possibly Martin would like to respond in situ?
Rob Parsons

Is the Revolution Justified? : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scho... - 9 views

  • And Oblinger and Oblinger (2005) claim as one of the defining characteristics of the net generation that ‘they want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda. As a result, they like to know what it will take to achieve a goal. Their preference is for structure rather than ambiguity’. This rather begs the question, ‘was there evidence that previous generations had a stated preference for ambiguity and chaos in their learning?’
  • It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. (Prensky 2001)
    • tatiluna
       
      I think this statement is anachronistic. In fact, the "new students" today who do not fit into the traditional educational system are in many cases people who were raised in the system, and then either rejected it or were rejected by it in some way.  Our educational system is designed to train conformist drones, who do not know how to learn without school.  There are many who are also able to live in both of these worlds, the traditional and the new, but I think they can bring new insights to the traditional school environment.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      I think this is a red herring as far as technology is concerned. it's much more to do with a pervasive social issue about inclusion and exclusion, probably worldwide, but much more marked in the UK due to the enthusiastic implementation of Thatcherism by her and subsequent governments. Many students know or suspect that there is no point for them in school and schools exclude like everyone else does those pupils who are likely to be expensive. Cost has truly overtaken value as the main point of reference
  • ...6 more annotations...
    • Rob Parsons
       
      That's interesting. I doubt that the older generation were inherently more moral. I suspect that they regarded plagiarism more seriously because it's easier to hold censorious views about a crime that's difficult to commit. When the crime becomes easy to commit fewer people stand out against it. There is also the issue that plagiarism falls into the category of wrong doing that doesn't obviously hurt anybody - like speeding or smoking cannabis.
  • Brown (2009) reports, Recently, the Nielsen Norman Group study of teenagers using the web noted: ‘We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users’. The report added: ‘Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level’.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      Summary: discussions about net gen are not significant. There is not evidence of significant difference between net gen and previous gens. Also there is evidence of significant variation within today's younger generation. Issue also lacks significance because we still need to cater for very large number of other gen learners.
  • A new generation is behaving fundamentally differently – there seems little real evidence beyond the rhetoric that the net generation is in some way different from its predecessors as a result of having been exposed to digital technologies. There is some moderate evidence that they may have different attitudes. There is a general change in society which has relevance for learning – certainly the overall context is an ICT-rich one, and people are using the Internet for a variety of learning-related activities. People are learning in different ways – although firm evidence of informal learning is difficult to gather, there is much by the way of proxy activity that indicates this is the case. There is growing dissatisfaction with current practice in higher education – there seems little strong evidence for this. Probably more significant to the culture of education has been the shift to perceiving the student as a customer. There is certainly little evidence that the dissatisfaction is greater than it used to be, but what may be significant is that there are now viable alternatives for learners. Universities have lost their monopoly on learning, which reinforces the next point.
  • Higher education will undergo similar change to that in other sectors – there are some similarities between higher education and other sectors, such as the newspaper and music industries, but the differences are probably more significant. However, the blurring of boundaries between sectors and the viability of self-directed, community-based learning means that the competition is now more complex.
  • The first is that there is lag between society's acceptance of a technology and then its adoption in higher education. Brown (2009) suggests that in society the stages of technology diffusion can be defined as critical mass (ownership by 20–30 per cent of the population), ubiquity (30–70 per cent) and finally invisibility (more than 70 per cent). If higher education were to wait for the invisibility stage to be reached before it engaged with a technology, then given the time it takes to implement policies and technology, it really will look outdated. For example, in 2007, those using social networks might have been in the minority; now they will be in the majority. This is the problem with waiting for data to determine decisions – if you made a decision based on 2007 data that social networks were largely unused, it would look out of date in 2010. What is significant is the direction of travel, not the absolute percentages at any given time.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      I'm not entirely sure what the argument is here; or what the evidence is. What sort of lag and how much is actually evident? And which bits of society is HE lagging behind - there are lots that haven't caught up with the interwebs at all, and others that are racing ahead.
  •  
    The Digital Scholar - Martin Weller
  •  
    I haven't read any of this book yet, but this quote is running along the lines of my own thinking for my own interaction with the web and all its tools and structures. I'm beginning to feel that many of the new tools used for organization, aggregation, and note taking are too regimented for what I want right now, too task-oriented. I'm figuring out how I learn best, and the most important part of that process that has been missing for me in the past is connection to creativity. Of course, the internet is a place where so much creation is going on and I can certainly find inspiration from it. But in terms of working out my projects using solely these new tools, I keep running against a wall. I'm not exactly sure if that's what Oblinger and Oblinger are talking about, but that's what I thought of.
tatiluna

Walking the Virtuous Middle Way | iterating toward openness - 3 views

shared by tatiluna on 10 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • We are learning that even what we once thought were true self-organizing systems rely heavily on “key, well-informed individuals altering their behavior according to their prior experience” to increase their efficiency.
    • tatiluna
       
      Self-organizing systems are tools.  See connection with my reading of John Dewey: must have a purpose in mind when using the many tools on the Internet, including MOOCS and self-organizing tools, or else it will be haphazard and not that helpful for learning.
Rob Parsons

The Medals of Our Defeats : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholar... - 1 views

  • Nicholas Carr's (2008) article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ struck a chord with many people. Carr's (2010) argument, which he fleshes out in his book The Shallows, is that our continual use of the net induces a superficiality to our behaviour. He says this is felt particularly when trying to read a complex piece:
  • The issue of quality is perhaps more keenly felt when we consider teaching. I raised the idea of pedagogy of abundance in Chapter 8, and in such a pedagogy the content will vary greatly in terms of quality.
  • the question is not whether some people produce poor quality content, obviously they do and the majority in fact, but whether as a whole this system can produce high-quality content.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • As neuroscientist Joshua Greene puts it, ‘the Internet hasn't changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what we do with it once it's made it into our heads’ (Gerschenfeld 2010).
  • Whether there are social and behavioural impacts of operating online is a serious question, however. Just as the television had serious social impacts, we must accept that computers and Internet will also have consequences. These will undoubtedly be a mixture of positive and negative, but I would argue that using pseudo-scientific explanations to back up prejudices will not help us address these issues.
  • For educators there are two main issues; the first is the extent to which they help students manage their online identity, and the second is how they manage their own boundary between personal and professional life.
  • The over-adoption of tools can lead to what has been termed ‘creepy tree house’ syndrome (Stein 2008) when authority is seen to try and invade a young person's social space.
  • There is strong resistance from students to universities and lecturers making formal use of social networks as this is seen as an invasion of their social space (e.g. Madge 2009).
  • For the teaching function of scholarship then the question is ‘How can educators utilise the potential of these tools without destroying what makes them valuable to students?’
  • I would suggest the following as the most challenging for digital scholarship: Moving beyond the superficial – many successful Web 2.0 services essentially allow a very simple function, for example, sharing a photograph. Can we use the same techniques for deeper, more difficult tasks?
  • Understanding quality – this is not just about maintaining current quality, as this may not be appropriate in many forms, but appreciating when different levels of quality can be used.
  • Managing online identity – there is a tension for scholars and their students in gaining the benefits of a social network, which thrives on personal interactions, while not compromising professional identity.
  • Ownership of scholarly functions – there is also a dilemma regarding how much of scholarly discourse and activity we give over to cloud computing services and whether the benefits in terms of widespread use and (often) superior tools outweigh the potential risks.
anonymous

The Information Diet | Tools for going on an Information Diet - 4 views

  • Make Twitter something you have to check, not something that’s pushed at you.
  • If you’re an Outlook user, turn its desktop alerts off
anonymous

Synthetron - 0 views

  •  
    Tool for group consultation and brainstorming, decisions, consensus.
anonymous

Own It: Social Media Isn't Just Something Other People Do - 4 views

  • We look at a generation that has grown up online, and we worry about how "they" can't put down their iPhones, how "they" can't hold a real conversation, how "they" prefer distraction to presence. How will they form relationships? How will they learn to listen, or to be heard? The real and difficult questions are not about them, but about us. How will we choose to live online? How will we sustain conversations, build relationships, and cultivate genuine connection? And for those who are experiencing the kind of angst Turkle describes, an even more challenging question: How can I change when, where and how to plug in so that I actually like my life online?
  • We can have what Turkle terms a "big gulp of real conversation" -- through a chat window that keeps us connected, all day, to a best friend on the other side of the country. We can embrace the value of solitude and self-reflection, writing a blog post that digs deeply into a personal challenge -- perhaps choosing to write anonymously in order to share a deeper level of self-revelation than we'd brave offline. We can truly listen, and truly be heard, because online affinity groups help us find or rediscover friends who are prepared to meet us as we really are. These are the tools, practices, and communities that can make online life not a flight from conversation, but a flight to it. But we will not realize these opportunities as long as we cling to a nostalgia for conversation as we remember it, describe the emergence of digital culture in generational terms, or absolve ourselves of responsibility for creating an online world in which meaningful connection is the norm rather than the exception. We are making that digital shift together -- old and young, geeky and trepidatious -- and we are only as alone as we choose to be.
anonymous

To Really Drive Enterprise 2.0 Forward We Need A Behaviour Change - 3 views

  • The ROI of Enterprise 2.0 / Social Anything is not how much did it cost to deploy the technology; it’s what gains have we seen in productivity, employee engagement and customer satisfaction as a result of new collaborative behaviours that are aided and propelled by Enterprise 2.0 / Social Anything technologies.
  • They forget adoption occurs only when people behave in a way that allows collaboration to manifest across an organization.
  • The HR / Learning Professionals are having massive difficulty adjusting to a world with Enterprise 2.0 / Social Anything technologies, but they can’t get in front of it in time to actually establish the behaviours for an organization … even if they knew what behaviours to depict in the first place.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The technologists are happy discussing Enterprise 2.0 / Social Anything features, gizmo’s and futuristic trends … but they forget about the behaviours that are needed to actually make the software more effective in the first place.
  • Whether using new or traditional technologies, the key to digital transformation is re-envisioning and driving change in how the company operates. That’s a management and people challenge, not just a technology one.
  • Dropping Enterprise 2.0 / Social Anything tools into the company theater is not going to guarantee your employees/leaders are collaborating and it’s certainly not going to drive reciprocity.
  • it’s the behavior of people that has to change in parallel with the deployment of any Enterprise 2.0 / Social Anything technology.
anonymous

Beyond Competence: It's the Journey to Mastery That Counts - 5 views

  • all learners, at all levels, collaborate; but how they do it, the degree to which they do it, and the relative importance of the collaboration shifts with their increasing know-how. Bottom line: as people move up the mastery ladder and their capabilities grow, predominant learning strategies change.
  • as learners become more competent and experienced, and especially as they approach master/expert levels, learning embraces much more of a “pull” strategy, where learners take what they need from the repositories of knowledge, tools, and advice available to them. How they navigate these resources is increasingly a decision they make.
  • . Putting too little structure on entry-level learners may make learning more difficult, confusing, and demoralizing for them.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Putting too much structure on advanced-level learners may make learning boring, frustrating, inefficient, and off-target for them.
  •  
    as people strive to move up the ladder they get better at their jobs. As they do, they exhibit increasing performance fluency, agility, and ability to share knowledge. Fluency refers to the smoothness with which they perform their jobs. The lack of hesitancy and the ease at which they perform tasks all improve as workers move up the mastery ladder. Agility, the ability to adapt and react to new situations, to "shift on the fly" based on new information, also increases as people go through the four phases. And as people get more expertise and experience, they become better at sharing it with others through collaboration, coaching, mentoring, and teaching.
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Authentic Learning ~ #change11 - 5 views

  • We know that people learn best by being actively and collaboratively involved in learning but in universities, we continue to use lectures and other one-way, vessel filling, sage-on-stage, methods to tell students what they need to know
  • An authentic learning approach enables educators to design tasks and assessments that are based on the kinds of activities that are performed in the so called ‘real world’.
  • An authentic learning pedagogy focuses on students collaboratively creating genuine products that are polished and professional, and that are shared and published.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • realistic
  • think in the same ways as professionals
  • Technology-based cognitive tools
  • the creation of real products and artefacts, and are more worthy of the investment of time and effort in higher education than decontextualised exercises and tasks.
  • The creation of genuine sharable products ensures that authentic learning is in a position to capitalize on the participatory culture afforded by social media.
  • our model to guide your design: http://web.me.com/janherrington/AuthenticLearning/
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Learnlets » Learning Experience Design thru the Macroscope - 0 views

  •  But with mobile technologies, we have the capability to truly start to deliver what I call ‘slow learning’: delivering small bits of learning over time to really develop an individual.
  •  Most of our learning comes from outside the learning experience.  But can we do better?
  • to develop individuals in micro bits over a macro period of time rather than macro bits over a micro bit of time (which really doesn’t work)
  • ...9 more annotations...
  •  We have pieces of the puzzle ( smaller chunks, content models) and we have the tools (individualized delivery, semantics), but putting them together really hasn’t been done yet.
  •  We still have to figure out what our design process would look like,
  •  It’s really trying to build a system that is more mentor like than instructor like.
  • The point is to take the fact that technology is no longer the limit, our imaginations are.
  • You have more small chunks of content, and more distributed performance model.
  • : "Are you trying to teach information or skills? Okay – a skill. Well, that will require practice.
  • that calling it “slow learning” gives the opposite impression of what it actually is
  • and one could argue that what you are describing could actually be FAST learning
  • “spaced learning”
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Learnlets » The 7 c's of natural learning - 2 views

  • Yesterday I talked about the seeding, feeding, and weeding necessary to develop a self-sustaining network
  • Choose: we are self-service learners.  We follow what interests us, what is meaningful to us, what we know is important. Commit: we take ownership for the outcomes.  We work until we’ve gotten out of it what we need. Crash: our commitment means we make mistakes, and learn from them. Create: we design, we build, we are active in our learning. Copy: we mimic others, looking to their performances for guidance. Converse: we talk with others. We ask questions, offer opinions, debate positions. Collaborate: we work together. We build together, evaluate what we’re doing, and take turns adding value.
  • With this list of things we do, we need to find ways to support them, across both formal and informal learning. 
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In formal learning, we should be presenting meaningful and authentic tasks, and asking learners to solve them, ideally collaboratively.
  • While individual is better than none, collaborative allows opportunity for meaning negotiation.  We need to allow failure, and support learning from it. We need to be able to ask questions, and make decisions and see the consequences.
  • I think there are 8 elements!! I miss Collate, this is not the same as Choose, it is about organising anbd structuring what we learn, (constructing our emergent uderstanding) as opposed to the selection of a direction.
  • in informal learning, we need to create ways for people to develop their understandings, work together, to put out opinions and get feedback, ask for help, and find people to use as models.  By using tools like blogs for recording and sharing personal learning and information updates, wikis to collaborate, discussion forums to converse, and blogs and microblogs to track what others think are important, we provide ways to naturally learn together.
  • the intersection of 1) self-organized learning and 2) online collaboration is what I consider should be a primary focus of organizational learning professionals
  • Common web 2.0 practice is to link back to what has been copied, a form of collaboration or perhaps cooperation.
  • However, real learning involves research, design, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, experimentation, etc
  • informal learning is NOT, by definition, manageable
  • just trying to raise awareness that what we typically do formally is not well aligned with how people really learn, and that supporting some of these activities is the key to unlocking organizational innovation.
  • but instead to provide a conducive environment and encourage them
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Ideas from the thirteen weeks of MOOC « Not Worth Printing - 4 views

  • Search: Not Worth Printing open source, elearning trends, ethics in technology and education About
  • In terms of formal learning, Tony Bates believes that changes can occur within the existing education institutes
  • Martin Weller points to the importance of academic institutes recognizing digital scholarship, moving away from the inefficient and costly publishing model and moving towards online publications that better promotes interdisciplinary endeavours
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • David Wiley and Rory McGreal urge universities to open their content; Wiley further envisions the future of education consisting of learner-generated materials;
  • Building rhizome-like learning networks can foster an environment more conducive to continuous knowledge acquisition and constructio
  • This does not match the way our brain process information, as we are better at learning incremental chunks of knowledge in a meaningful and authentic context.
  • Dave Cormie
  • Clark Quinn’s idea of slow learning
  • Here Jon Dron reminds us that tools themselves are not technology
  • Dron’s definitions of hard vs soft technologies relevant to both formal and informal learning, further help us to undertand that soft technologies are perhaps more useful in building learning and support communities and equipping learners with the ability to  navigate information in networks, thereby promoting lifelong learning.
  • The learners will end up leading the way, as they should.
Keith Hamon

Organizing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - 4 views

  • Typically, a MOOC begins by setting up a simple registration website put together by your facilitators
  • Offering a MOOC is like putting on Woodstock. It will probably be chaotic, unruly, produce totally unexpected outcomes
  • Everyone is part participant and part presenter
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • If your company is looking for ways to expand its client base and position itself as a thought leader, consider hosting a MOOC.
  • For our purposes, consider a MOOC to be a free, open-ended, online course involving potentially thousands of participants using all kinds of social tools like websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums — you name it — to discuss and learn about a topic from every angle and generate a body of knowledge that all can share.
  • I usually ask clients what they can give away for free that will increase their brand recognition or status. A MOOC is a great example.
  • the necessary ingredients for a MOOC: Knowledge or the opposite of knowledge: a question to which you don’t have an answer, but that you’d like to have answered. People to serve as facilitators. A digital infrastructure.
  • Hosting a MOOC doesn’t require: A large budget for staff. The mandate to measure ROI. A significant input of time, since participants take much of the lead. Physical space, since MOOCs take place in the virtual world.
  •  
    Not just for ed or other training, relevant to local development, PR, marketing, branding, etc. 
  •  
    the necessary ingredients for a MOOC:  Knowledge or the opposite of knowledge: a question to which you don't have an answer, but that you'd like to have answered. People to serve as facilitators. A digital infrastructure.
1 - 20 of 35 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page