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Michael Johnson

Teaching in Social and Technological Networks « Connectivism - 9 views

  • The model falls apart when we distribute content and extend the activities of the teacher to include multiple educator inputs and peer-driven learning.
  • Skype brings anyone, from anywhere, into a classroom. Students are not confined to interacting with only the ideas of a researcher or theorist. Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage. Course content is similarly fragmented. The textbook is now augmented with YouTube videos, online articles, simulations, Second Life builds, virtual museums, Diigo content trails, StumpleUpon reflections, and so on.
  • Traditional courses provide a coherent view of a subject. This view is shaped by “learning outcomes” (or objectives). These outcomes drive the selection of content and the design of learning activities. Ideally, outcomes and content/curriculum/instruction are then aligned with the assessment. It’s all very logical: we teach what we say we are going to teach, and then we assess what we said we would teach. This cozy comfortable world of outcomes-instruction-assessment alignment exists only in education. In all other areas of life, ambiguity, uncertainty, and unkowns reign. Fragmentation of content and conversation is about to disrupt this well-ordered view of learning. Educators and universities are beginning to realize that they no longer have the control they once (thought they) did
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  • I’ve come to view teaching as a critical and needed activity in the chaotic and ambiguous information climate created by networks.
  • In networks, teachers are one node among many. Learners will, however, likely be somewhat selective of which nodes they follow and listen to. Most likely, a teacher will be one of the more prominent nodes in a learner’s network. Thoughts, ideas, or messages that the teacher amplifies will generally have a greater probability of being seen by course participants. The network of information is shaped by the actions of the teacher in drawing attention to signals (content elements) that are particularly important in a given subject area.
  • While “curator” carries the stigma of dusty museums, the metaphor is appropriate for teaching and learning. The curator, in a learning context, arranges key elements of a subject in such a manner that learners will “bump into” them throughout the course. Instead of explicitly stating “you must know this”, the curator includes critical course concepts in her dialogue with learners, her comments on blog posts, her in-class discussions, and in her personal reflections. As learners grow their own networks of understanding, frequent encounters with conceptual artifacts shared by the teacher will begin to resonate.
  • Today’s social web is no different – we find our way through active exploration. Designers can aid the wayfinding process through consistency of design and functionality across various tools, but ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to click/fail/recoup and continue. Fortunately, the experience of wayfinding is now augmented by social systems. Social structures are filters. As a learner grows (and prunes) her personal networks, she also develops an effective means to filter abundance. The network becomes a cognitive agent in this instance – helping the learner to make sense of complex subject areas by relying not only on her own reading and resource exploration, but by permitting her social network to filter resources and draw attention to important topics. In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.
  • Aggregation should do the same – reveal the content and conversation structure of the course as it unfolds, rather than defining it in advance.
  • Filtering resources is an important educator role, but as noted already, effective filtering can be done through a combination of wayfinding, social sensemaking, and aggregation. But expertise still matters. Educators often have years or decades of experience in a field. As such, they are familiar with many of the concepts, pitfalls, confusions, and distractions that learners are likely to encounter. As should be evident by now, the educator is an important agent in networked learning. Instead of being the sole or dominant filter of information, he now shares this task with other methods and individuals.
  • Filtering can be done in explicit ways – such as selecting readings around course topics – or in less obvious ways – such as writing summary blog posts around topics. Learning is an eliminative process. By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters
  • Stephen’s statements that resonated with many learners centers on modelling as a teaching practice: “To teach is to model and to demonstrate. To learn is to practice and to reflect.” (As far as I can tell, he first made the statement during OCC in 2007).
  • Modelling has its roots in apprenticeship. Learning is a multi-faceted process, involving cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions. Knowledge is similarly multi-faceted, involving declarative, procedural, and academic dimensions. It is unreasonable to expect a class environment to capture the richness of these dimensions. Apprenticeship learning models are among the most effective in attending to the full breadth of learning. Apprenticeship is concerned with more than cognition and knowledge (to know about) – it also addresses the process of becoming a carpenter, plumber, or physician.
  • Without an online identity, you can’t connect with others – to know and be known. I don’t think I’m overstating the importance of have a presence in order to participate in networks. To teach well in networks – to weave a narrative of coherence with learners – requires a point of presence. As a course progresses, the teacher provides summary comments, synthesizes discussions, provides critical perspectives, and directs learners to resources they may not have encountered before.
  • Persistent presence in the learning network is needed for the teacher to amplify, curate, aggregate, and filter content and to model critical thinking and cognitive attributes that reflect the needs of a discipline.
  • Teaching and learning in social and technological networks is similarly surprising – it’s hard to imagine that many of the tools we’re using are less than a decade old (the methods of learning in networks are not new, however. People have always learned in social networks).
  • We’re still early in many of these trends. Many questions remain unanswered about privacy, ethics in networks, and assessment.
  • We’re still early in many of these trends. Many questions remain unanswered about privacy, ethics in networks, and assessment.
  • The tools for controlling both content and conversation have shifted from the educator to the learner. We require a system that acknowledges this reality.
  • In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.
  • In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.
  • In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.
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    Discusses the role of teachers in the learning  process through social networks: He gives seven roles 1. Amplifying, 2. Curating, 3. Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking, 4. Aggregating, 5. Filtering, 6. Modelling, 7. Persistent presence. He ends with this provocative thought: "My view is that change in education needs to be systemic and substantial. Education is concerned with content and conversations. The tools for controlling both content and conversation have shifted from the educator to the learner. We require a system that acknowledges this reality."
Ben Rimes

The Test Generation - 11 views

  • "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      How many decades have teacher's experienced this firsthand as students try to cheat, weasel, and otherwise fabricate their way to the reward, whether it's a gold star, a piece of candy, or some extra credit.
  • In 2005, for example, Alabama reported that 83 percent of its fourth-graders were proficient in reading, even though the NAEP found that only 22 percent of these children were proficient readers. The harsh punishments associated with NCLB had encouraged Alabama and most other states to dumb down their tests and then teach directly to them.
  • The letter is a thinly veiled attack on teachers' unions and the job security for which they fight. Mike Stahl, former executive director of the Pikes Peak Education Association, says union membership in Harrison has decreased by half under Miles' leadership, and that teacher turnover, at about 25 percent from year to year, "is the highest in the state among like-sized or larger districts." According to Stahl, Miles "is very anti-union and very prone to retaliation for speaking in opposition to district or superintendent plans. ... There was no collaboration with staff or union in the development of this plan. As a result, district teacher morale is extremely low."
    • Ben Rimes
       
      This is where a lot of the proponents of education and teacher evaluation reform fall. In the area that no longer concerns itself with building effective cooperation, teamwork, and a positive work atmosphere, a shame really.
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  • Since Miles became superintendent, Harrison's scores on state exams in math, reading, and writing have steadily increased. In reading, for example, 54 percent of Harrison students were proficient in 2005, compared to 61 percent in 2010. Critics who chalk those gains up to "drill and kill" teaching might find at least one thing to love about Harrison District 2: Its test score-based teacher-evaluation system is matched by intense professional-development efforts of the sort promoted by education experts from across the political spectrum.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      The silver lining of this system.
  • But "really systemic, momentous things are happening right now, and I am at the ideological epicenter of that change," he added. "If nothing else, it's really interesting
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Don't our schools deserve reform and/or experimentation that is better than just "really interesting?"
  • Rival groups of education researchers interpret the reliability of value-added differently but even the technique's defenders have urged caution, as have the Educational Testing Service and the Department of Education's own Institute for Education Sciences. Experts raise a number of powerful objections: that value-added measurements are often based on poorly designed, unsophisticated standardized tests; that the ratings are particularly volatile (a teacher who scores very well or very poorly using value-added has only a one-third chance of getting a similar score the following year, and it takes about 10 years of data to reduce the value-added error rate to 12 percent for any individual teacher); and that the technique gives the impression that the teacher is the only factor in student achievement, ignoring parental involvement, after-school tutoring, and other "inputs" that research shows account for up to 80 percent of a student's achievement outcomes
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Although "value-added" seems great on the surface, having to wait around for 10 years to get a 12 percent error rate and then deal with all of the uncontrolable factors, makes student performance assessments seem like a joke almost.
  • A consensus is emerging on what those best practices are, and they have little to do with test-driven instruction. Research by Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University teaching expert and former Obama adviser, has found that in Finland, South Korea, and other high-performing nations, teachers spend just 50 percent of their workday in the classroom with students, compared to about 80 percent for American teachers. During the rest of their day, Finnish and South Korean teachers work with other adults to plan lessons, observe one another's classrooms, and evaluate student work. This balance is especially important for beginning teachers; powerful evidence suggests that the single most helpful teacher-training exercise is to spend time inside a master teacher's classroom and to get feedback from that master teacher on one's own practice.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Reflective practitioning through blogging as a systemic model for teacher PD would be one way to encourage growth in this area.
  • The teachers are grouped to maximize the sharing of best practices; one team includes a second-year teacher struggling with classroom management, a veteran teacher who is excellent at discipline but behind the curve on technology, and a third teacher who is an innovator on using technology in the classroom.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Interesting group composition, and would be easy to put together in any school with proper surveys and cooperation among teaching "families".
  • When I visited MSLA in November, the halls were bright and orderly, the students warm and polite, and the teachers enthusiastic -- in other words, MSLA has many of the characteristics of high-performing schools around the world. What sets MSLA apart is its commitment to teaching as a shared endeavor to raise student achievement -- not a competition. During the 2009-2010 school year, all of the school's teachers together pursued the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards' Take One! program, which focuses on using curriculum standards to improve teaching and evaluate student outcomes. This year, the staff-wide initiative is to include literacy skills-building in each and every lesson, whether the subject area is science, art, or social studies.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      This is what schools should be doing. Foster community, cooperation, and collaboration among the teachers, not isolating them in content area groups, and separating them based on department. Inter-disciplinary teaching teams is a first start, but having everyone in a district adopt the same goal, and work together would be huge.
  • As Nazareno walked me through MSLA's hallways, introducing me to kids and teachers, she reflected on how her profession is changing. "I'm not afraid of being held accountable. I haven't dedicated a career to have kids unable to read or do science," she said. "But people need to understand that teaching and learning are very complex processes, and any time you try to measure anything that's highly complex, you can miss the nuances." Nazareno paused outside a classroom door and lowered her voice. "We had a girl in the second grade whose mother died. At the school next door, a girl was brutally murdered. That's all they've been talking about there for two weeks; they lost a lot of instruction time." She raised her eyebrows. "How do you factor that into value-added?"
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Education ultimately is about navigating the real world, and attempting to make meaning from our daily individual experiences, or building community around shared experiences.
alexandra m. pickett

Favorite Resources - 125 views

Hi. Here was my top 10 list in february 2008 twitter - http://twitter.com - microblog, community of practice, communication, support Second Life - https://secure-web14.secondlife.com/join/- to cr...

Favorite Resources

Michael Johnson

Microsoft Invests Millions In Innovative Teaching Practices Research - 0 views

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    Microsoft investing millions to investigate innovative teaching practices using technology. "The primary focus of this research, which is being guided by outside advisors from the OECD, UNESCO, the World Bank, the International Society for Technology in Education and other organizations, is to assess teachers' adoption of innovative classroom teaching practices and the degree to which those practices provide students with personalized learning experiences."
Jennifer Lamkins

Intel® Teach Elements-Online Professional Development Courses - 11 views

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    "Intel® Teach helps K-12 teachers of all subjects learn to engage students with digital learning, including digital content, Web 2.0, social networking, and online tools and resources. Intel Teach professional development empowers teachers to integrate technology effectively into their existing curriculum, focusing on their students' problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration, which are precisely the skills required in the high tech, networked society in which we live."
jamilaexom

30 Activities, Teaching Strategies, and Resources for Teaching Children with Autism - W... - 0 views

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    Teaching strategies for autism
Ninja Essays

7 Resources For Essay Writing That Make a Teacher's Life Easier - 0 views

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    "What's the toughest part of your work as an educator? You are used to teaching lessons…you already have the knowledge, so it's not that difficult to express it. However, the task of motivating your students to write falls in another category. It's hard for you to take control over the process and explain how they should infuse their creativity into the rigid form of academic writing. The following 7 online resources will help you teach essay writing in a more inspiring way."
Clif Mims

Squidoo - 0 views

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    I'm sharing this resource because, in the right context, I see true potential in its integration with teaching and learning. You can read about my ideas for teaching and learning with Squidoo at http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/197.
Dean Mantz

eMINTS - 0 views

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    The eMINTS National Center is a non-profit, independent business unit of the University of Missouri. eMINTS offers professional development programs created by educators for educators. Leading experts have collaborated to produce programs that * inspire educators to use instructional strategies powered by technology * engage students in the excitement of learning * enrich teaching to dramatically improve student performance eMINTS changes how teachers teach and students learn. Its instructional model provides a research-based approach to organizing instruction and can be implemented in any subject area at any level.
drew polly

Teaching Resources, Ideas, Lesson Plans, and Tools for Teachers Grades PreK-12 | Schola... - 5 views

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    Find resources for what you're teaching now: tools, printables, and 10,000+ teaching ideas for K-12 grades at your fingertips.
Dean Mantz

How-and why-to teach innovation in our schools | 21st Century Education | eSchoolNews.com - 8 views

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    Thought provoking article from eSchool News about "Teaching innovation in our schools".
jamilaexom

6 Tips for Teaching Students With Autism | Teach For America - 0 views

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    Teach of America
Jennifer Lamkins

Infection Detection Protection - 5 views

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    Through the use of colorful text and interactive games, this engaging site from the American Museum of Natural History teaches about the causes of infection, and about how to detect and prevent infection. The site includes facts about infections, interactive games that teach about microbes and bacteria, tips on solving microbe mysteries, and more.
Lynley Greer

Google Presentations - 0 views

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    This website is very easy to use and yet it allows you to teach a lesson effectively. Presentations let students see the picture of a lesson. Visual aids are always a good approach to teaching.
andrew jhons

Online Tutoring: New Phenomenon in Teaching | Tutoring Online | Tutoring Online | Onlin... - 0 views

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    The profession of teaching has changed a lot over the last few years. The emergence of Information Communication Technology or ICT as it is commonly called has revolutionized the profession ...
Ninja Essays

How to Teach Essay Writing: 10 Tools for Educators - 0 views

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    "n its beginnings, the prospects of educational technology were associated to the goal of making math easier. If you thought it would be impossible to improve a student's literacy and writing skills with the help of an app, you're in for a surprise. Essay writing is a huge trend in the world of educational technology."
Dean Mantz

Curriculumbits.com Online Interactive ELearning Teaching Resources - 13 views

  • Curriculumbits.com offer free online access to a growing range of interactive multimedia e-learning teaching resources. The online teaching resource library contains educational games, quizzes, animations and videos in a variety of subjects at key stage 3 and 4 of the UK National Curriculum.
Clif Mims

Into the Book: Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies - 0 views

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    A reading comprehension resource for K-4 students and teachers. Focuses on eight research-based strategies: Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. Watch the engaging 15-minute videos and try the online interactive activities. "Behind the Lesson" provides teachers with information and teaching resources for each strategy. Watch the 10-minute professional development videos, and explore the Web site for lesson plans, video and audio clips, downloads, and more.
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

ALA | AASL Best Web sites for Teaching and Learning Top 25 Award - 0 views

  • Diigo  Need help in organizing your favorite websites? Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows users to save websites, as well as tag them, add sticky notes and annotations, and share them with other users in various groups. Tip: Sticky notes are an effective way to start a virtual conversation among teams of students on the merits of a website.
  • Our Story  Create your story! Our Story permits users to develop and save collaborative timelines that can be personalized with annotations, photos, and videos. Stories (timelines) can be printed in book format, archived on DVD, or even sent as postcards. Tip: Teach your students to develop content-specific timelines that are linked to the teaching of research and information literacy skills.
  • Primary Access  Capture your students' imagination with movie narratives based on primary sources. Primary Access is an online tool that allows students and teachers to combine text, visual, and sound elements, which are then combined to convey information about their chosen historical event or time frame. A library of Primary Access movies is available through a catalog by historical time period. Tip: Encourage active learning: have students choose a historical event or time frame to research and synthesize their information through a Primary Access movie.
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