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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Russell D. Jones

Russell D. Jones

Putting Technology in Its Place - Lesson Plans Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • I rarely grade alone. The students rarely do their homework in isolation. The same chatting software that, when mismanaged, give us fits in our classrooms, enables us to collaborate in dynamic ways. Students now continue fiery classroom debates when they get home from school. They now walk each other through difficult readings of “The Odyssey” and “Hamlet” and return to class with stronger understandings
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      Social Learning
  • it is more crucial that they learn how to sift thoughtfully through increasing amounts of information.
  • The issue now is distinguishing between rich resources and the online collection of surface facts, misinformation, and inexcusable lies that masquerade as the truth. It will be hard for our students to be thoughtful citizens without this ability to discern the useful from the irrelevant. This is especially clear during this election season. If they are never asked to practice dealing with this new onslaught of information, they will have to practice when the stakes are much higher.
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      Another comment about information literacy and the value of information literacy.
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    Using Technology in the classroom and the social learning environment
Russell D. Jones

R.I.P.: Lectures, Notes, and Tests (Scrapping the Old Ways) | Britannica Blog - 0 views

  • Where I used to have to call on students and provoke and pull discussion out of them, the discussions took off. I had assigned student teams to experiment with collaboration using wikis and forums to plan group projects. The presentations that the students gave at the end of the term blew us all away — the other students were as amazed and rapt as I was. So I began thinking about radically changing the way I taught. What about eliminating lectures entirely, and assigning the students to co-teach with me?
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      So this is where collaborative learning could end up.
Russell D. Jones

Turned On, Plugged In, Online, & Dumb: Student Failure Despite the Techno Revolution | ... - 0 views

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    Bauerlain continues his rant against the poor performance of students on standardized tests. This article, citing many reports, shows that introducing technology into the classroom has done nothing to improve student performance.
Russell D. Jones

DR4WARD: TOPLESS MEETINGS / CLASSROOMS ENGAGING CONTROVERSY - 0 views

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    Classrooms barring new techs
Russell D. Jones

A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do) | Britannica Blog - 0 views

  • It has taken years of acclimatizing our youth to stale artificial environments, piles of propaganda convincing them that what goes on inside these environments is of immense importance, and a steady hand of discipline should they ever start to question it.
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      There is a huge investment in resources, time, and tradition from the teacher, the instutions, the society, and--importantly--the students. Students have invested much more time (proportional to their short lives) in learning how to be skillful at the education game. Many don't like teachers changing the rules of the game just when they've become proficient at it.
  • Last spring I asked my students how many of them did not like school. Over half of them rose their hands. When I asked how many of them did not like learning, no hands were raised. I have tried this with faculty and get similar results. Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      So we (teachers and students) are willing to endure a little (or a lot) of uncomfortableness in order to pursue that love of learning.
  • They tell us, first of all, that despite appearances, our classrooms have been fundamentally changed.
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  • While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
  • And that’s what has been wrong all along. Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.”
  • We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
  • At the root of your question is a much more interesting observation that many of the styles of self-directed learning now enabled through technology are in conflict with the traditional teacher-student relationship. I don’t think the answer is to annihilate that relationship, but to rethink it.
  • Personally, I increasingly position myself as the manager of a learning environment in which I also take part in the learning. This can only happen by addressing real and relevant problems and questions for which I do not know the answers. That’s the fun of it. We become collaborators, with me exploring the world right along with my students.
  • our walls, the particular architectonics of the disciplines we work within, provide students with the conversational, narrative, cognitive, epistemological, methodological, ontological, the –ogical means for converting mere information into knowledge.
Russell D. Jones

Brave New Classroom 2.0 (New Blog Forum) | Britannica Blog - 0 views

  • The new classroom is about information, but not just information. It’s also about collaboration, about changing roles of student and teacher, and about challenges to the very idea of traditional authority. It may also be about a new cognitive model for learning that relies heavily on what has come to be called “multitasking.”
Russell D. Jones

Jabberwiki: The Educational Response, Part II | Britannica Blog - 0 views

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    Critical of Web 2.0 techs at university and in culture
Russell D. Jones

Credibility and Digital Media @ UCSB - Past Research - 0 views

  • traditional notions of credibility as coming from a centralized authority (e.g., a teacher, expert, or author) and individualized appraisal processes are challenged by digital technologies.
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      Here is the break down of traditional modernist classroom.
  • Credibility assessments as constructed through collective or community efforts (e.g., wikis, text messaging via cell phones, or social networking applications) emerge as a major theme in recent discussions, and phrases like "distributed" and "decentralized" credibility, the "democratization of information," and "collectively versus institutionally-derived credibility" are common.
  • At core is the belief that digital media allow for the uncoupling of credibility and authority in a way never before possible.
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  • Digital media thus call into question our conceptions of authority as centralized, impenetrable, and singularly accurate and move information consumers from a model of single authority based on hierarchy to a model of multiple authorities based on networks of peers.
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    much of the information on the Web at the time (and still today) was not subject to the same types of credibility standards as most traditional mainstream media.
Russell D. Jones

News: When Wikipedia Is the Assignment - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • They also reach a much wider audience, through the Wikipedia site and search engines. "How do you motivate students to do their best work?" she asked -- implying that the answer lies in the possibility of others viewing it.
Russell D. Jones

News: Making Wikis Work for Scholars - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Others, noting features of the Web site that contribute to inaccuracies and shortchange the value of expertise, are building variations on the model that are more amenable to academics and to peer review.
  • "I use Wikipedia a lot for my own research and for course preparation. Often, to the extent that [Wikipedia articles] appear on my syllabi it’s to give students a quick overview of a subject or concept when I’m looking less for a theoretical or critical perspective and more for this kind of open-source knowledge, or kind of 'crowd-sourced' perspective,"
    • Russell D. Jones
       
      Uses of Wikipedia in the Classroom
  • Still, some continue to worry that the very structure of Wikipedia encourages editors (who can be anyone) to disregard expertise and undermine the basic mechanics of peer review and academic credibility.
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  • In other words, what happens to articles once they're posted? Will they be watered down or made inaccurate by someone with no relevant credentials? Wikipedians would argue that credentials are besides the point -- that anyone with a computer can police the encyclopedia by judging source material, sifting through edits and using a neutral tone to describe disputes. It's a dynamic that Sorin Matei, a communications professor at Purdue University, describes this way: "He who can sit for the longest in front of the computer is right."
  • accountability
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