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J Black

The Three-E Strategy for Overcoming Resistance to Technological Change (EDUCAUSE Quarte... - 0 views

  • According to a 2007 Pew/Internet study,1 49 percent of Americans only occasionally use information and communication technology. Of the remaining 51 percent, only 8 percent are what Pew calls omnivores, “deep users of the participatory Web and mobile applications.”
  • Shaping user behavior is a “soft” problem that has more to do with psychological and social barriers to technology adoption. Academia has its own cultural mores, which often conflict with experimenting with new ways of doing things. Gardner Campbell put it nicely last year when he wrote, “For an academic to risk ‘failure’ is often synonymous with ‘looking stupid in front of someone’.”2 The safe option for most users is to avoid trying something as risky as new technology.
  • The first instinct is thus to graft technology onto preexisting modes of behavior.
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  • First, a technology must be evident to the user as potentially useful in making his or her life easier (or more enjoyable). Second, a technology must be easy to use to avoid rousing feelings of inadequacy. Third, the technology must become essential to the user in going about his or her business. This “Three-E Strategy,” if applied properly, has been at the core of every successful technology adoption throughout history.
  • Technology must be easy and intuitive to use for the majority of the user audience—or they won’t use it.
  • Complexity, however, remains a potent obstacle to realizing the goal of making technology easy. Omnivores (the top 8 percent of users) revel in complexity. Consider for a moment how much time some people spend creating clothes for their avatars in Second Life or the intricacies of gameplay in World of Warcraft. This complexity gives the expert users a type of power, but is also a turnoff for the majority of potential users.
  • Web 2.0 and open source present another interesting solution to this problem. The user community quickly abandons those applications they consider too complicated.
  • any new technology must become essential to users
  • Finally, we have to show them how the enhanced communication made possible through technologies such as Web 2.0 will enhance their efficiency, productivity, and ability to teach and learn.
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    First, a technology must be evident to the user as potentially useful in making his or her life easier (or more enjoyable). Second, a technology must be easy to use to avoid rousing feelings of inadequacy. Third, the technology must become essential to the user in going about his or her business. This "Three-E Strategy," if applied properly, has been at the core of every successful technology adoption throughout history.
Dean Mantz

Wiimote Smoothboard Manual and Setup Guide - Smoothboard - 0 views

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    Wiki providing resources to creating and using your own Wiimote interactive whiteboard.
Barbara Lindsey

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

  • The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.” Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in. This culture of discussion and participation is now available on any website with the emerging “second layer” of the web through applications like Diigo which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them.
  • Our physical structures were built prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple with the emerging possibilities.
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  • The physical structures are easiest to see, and are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
  • at the base of this “information revolution” are new ways of relating to one another, new forms of discourse, new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0” buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration. It is this “spirit” of Web 2.0 which is important to education. The technology is secondary. This is a social revolution, not a technological one, and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.
  • Even in situations in which a spirit of exploration and freedom exist, where faculty are free to experiment to work beyond physical and social constraints, our cognitive habits often get in the way
  • Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.
  • Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
  • Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.
  • Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.
  • Taken together, this new media environment demonstrates to us that the idea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.
  • Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers.
  • Usually our courses are arranged around “subjects.” Postman and Weingartner note that the notion of “subjects” has the unwelcome effect of teaching our students that “English is not History and History is not Science and Science is not Art . . . and a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it.” Always aware of the hidden metaphors underlying our most basic assumptions, they suggest calling this “the Vaccination Theory of Education” as students are led to believe that once they have “had” a subject they are immune to it and need not take it again.5
  • As an alternative, I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.”6 You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.
  • We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
  • So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”
  • Students are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to harness and leverage the new media environment to find information, theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each student has a specific role and expertise to develop. A world map is superimposed on the class and each student is asked to become an expert on a specific aspect of the region in which they find themselves. Using this knowledge, they work in 15-20 small groups to create realistic cultures, step-by-step, as we go through each aspect of culture in class. This allows them to apply the knowledge they learn in the course and to recognize the ways different aspects of culture--economic, social, political, and religious practices and institutions--are integrated in a cultural system.
  • The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It is recorded by students on twenty digital video cameras and edited into one final "world history" video using clips from real world history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together in the final weeks of the class, using it as a discussion starter for contemplating our world and our role in its future. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom - profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future, and one humanity. We find ourselves not just as co-creators of a simulation, but as co-creators of the world itself, and the future is up to us.
  • I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.
  • When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension. Many of these dimensions were mentioned in the issue precis, “such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention,” and the list goes on. How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.
  • The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
  • This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases.
Dean Mantz

TrackStar : Home - 0 views

  • TrackStar is your starting point for online lessons and activities. Simply collect Web sites, enter them into TrackStar, add annotations for your students, and you have an interactive, online lesson called a Track. Create your own Track or use one of the hundreds of thousands already made by other educators. Search the database by subject, grade, or theme and standard for a quick and easy activity.
Ben Rimes

The Future of Less: How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education - 0 views

  • Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions
  • "We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree."
  • Hulu.com, launched just 18 months ago, is widely considered to be the first Web site to prove that mass broadcast-television viewing as we know it can and will shift online. Hulu did that by being attractive, well-designed, and easy to use, and by having a viable business model with actual paying advertisers -- and soon, subscribers.
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  • He has also offered five of his courses to anyone on the Web for free; he donates his own time to review nonenrolled students' work, awarding a signed certificate in lieu of course credit. Wiley's most recent open course was formatted as an online role-playing game, with students divided into "guilds" completing "quests" -- a learning community inspired by the world of online gamers. "If you didn't need human interaction and someone to answer your questions, then the library would never have evolved into the university," Wiley says. "We all realize that content is just the first step."
  • If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.
Dean Mantz

Animation virtual Studio - Aniboom online - 7 views

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    Create your own animations via this web based shape shifter site.
Dean Mantz

Kidblog.org - Blogs for Teachers and Students - 4 views

  • Kidblog.org is designed for elementary and middle school teachers who want to provide each student with their own, unique blog.
Melody Velasco

Glogster - Poster Yourself | Text, Images, Music and Video - 3 views

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    Educational site for Glogster- create your own poster.
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    Glogster.com - Poster yourself - Make your interactive poster easily and share it with friends. Mix Images, Text, Music and Video. It is fantastic!
Professional Learning Board

Attention: Parents, Don't Give Your Kids a Cell Phone Until You Read This - 17 views

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    Good grief. Should we also tell them to stay away from the road because of the dangerous cars? Sounds like another way to deny kids an increasingly important 21C literacy.
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    Your analogy doesn't work. Of course we shouldn't deny them cell phones! Just as we should teach them how to drive before giving them a car, we should also teach them how to safely use cell phones. AND we should keep up on understanding the changes in the technology as well.
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    Apologies - I thought you were advocating for the bulleted section of the article.
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    Thanks. My general rule of thumb is to only advocate for continual improvement through on-going learning. I consider myself to be pretty tech-savvy and was SHOCKED to learn that GPS coordinates get auto-embedded in images. I'd never considered this before and don't consider the extra information (GPS coordinates that can easily be mapped to an exact location) something that "should be" (yet it is) made available to anyone who can view a picture. In other words, let's say, I'm super careful to not include identifying information in my photos (my name, school name, city landmarks, etc) and take a picture of say, my stereo system. I've now included with this image the exact coordinates for where my home (with stereo) is located. Now a potential thief has this information (w/Google Map directions). It's super hard to be intentional about all of our choices and actions (including using GPS data w/cell phone images). That said, the more we all know, the more each of us is able to make decisions that best align with our own views, values and understandings. It's one thing for an adult to make a decision or not make a decision about inclusion of GPS data in their cell phone taken images, it takes another level of consideration when it involves giving that capability to children. THANK YOU for helping me to capture and better articulate my thoughts in this area!
Dean Mantz

Meebo Rooms | meebo - 4 views

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    Create your own chat room
Dean Mantz

[yaplet.com] :: yaplet - 4 views

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    Create your own chat room to be embed into a wiki or website.
Dean Mantz

Tinychat - Free online video chat rooms - 6 views

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    Create your own chat room to be embed into a wiki or website.
Dean Mantz

Create your newspaper | NewsCred - Create and Discover Newspapers About the Things You ... - 1 views

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    Create your own newspaper by writing editorials or collecting news from other sources.
Dean Mantz

Teacher Magazine: Why I Hate Interactive Whiteboards - 10 views

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    This blog post does provide some good points in opposition to IWBs. Good conversation piece.
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    I provide technology training with five different school districts, all using several different types of IWBs. In districts where teachers see IWBs a way to make it easier for them to continue what they've already been doing, that is "stand and deliver", then I agree completely with the author. However, when teachers see IWBs as a way to involve students in and excite them about their own learning, then wonderful things happen. These tools can provide students with outstanding discovery and creative outlets and real learning happens. It's all about the teacher, not the board.
Dean Mantz

kisstunes.com - Play and record musical greetings online and share them with family and... - 3 views

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    Create your own tune using this virtual keyboard.
Dean Mantz

Kubbu - Make Educational Games, Online Activities and Quizzes - 9 views

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    Create your own e-learning games, quizzes, crosswords, etc.
Dean Mantz

22 Useful Online Chart & Graph Generators | Tools - 19 views

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    Create your own Chart & Graph via web based generators.
Dean Mantz

Udemy - Academy of You | Find and Create Online Courses - Teach and Learn Online - 8 views

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    Create your own oline learning/course quickly.
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