Cultures of Thinking” (CoT) as places where a group’s collective as well as individual thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted as part of the regular, day-to-day experience of all group members.
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shared by REZA CHOWDHURY on 16 Apr 15
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Project Zero: Cultures of Thinking - 0 views
www.pz.gse.harvard.edu/cultures_of_thinking.php
#idt7078 #CulturesofThinking #projectzero #IndependentLearning
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language, time, environment, opportunities, routines, modeling, interactions, and expectations.
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this work doesn’t happen by teachers merely implementing a defined set of practices; it must be supported by a rich professional culture.
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In 2005, we began our work at Bialik College by forming two focus groups of eight teachers with whom we worked intensively. These groups were all heterogeneous, including K-12 teachers of various subjects, representing a departure from traditional forms of professional development that target specific subject areas or levels.
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sought to better understand changes in teachers’ and students’ attitudes and practices as thinking becomes more visible in the school and classroom environments.
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Our research to date has shown that students recognize CoT classrooms as being more focused on thinking, learning, and understanding, and more likely to be collaborative in nature than those of teachers not in the project
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Teachers in the project notice that as they work with CoT ideas, their classrooms shift in noticeable ways. Specifically, they find that they give thinking more time, discussion increases, and their questioning of students shifts toward asking students to elaborate on their thinking rather than testing them on their recall of facts and procedures.
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over the course of a single school year, the average CoT classroom students’ growth and maturity, with respect to understanding thinking processes that they themselves use and control, increased by twice the normal rate one might expect by virtue of maturity alone (Ritchhart, Turner, Hadar, 2009).
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Recent data on students’ language arts performance has shown superior performance by students coming from strong CoT classrooms/schools on standardized tests such as the MAEP Writing Assessment (Michigan), MCAS ELA (Massachusetts), VCE English (Victoria, Australia), and IB English exams.
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The book draws on case studies from teachers around the world to demonstrate the power and importance of each cultural force in shaping classroom culture.
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hese include frameworks and tools for professional learning communities, videos, and frameworks for understanding classroom questioning.
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Though the formal research phase of the project ended in 2009, the project continues through 2013 in a support phase to develop internal leadership and outreach around these ideas.
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he research ideas are also being taken up by many new sites, including Oakland County Michigan and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Philosophy | Intrepid Teacher - 4 views
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The new classroom does not integrate technology into an outdated curriculum, but rather infuses technology into the daily performance of classroom life.
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In this new classroom, the teacher is not the sole expert or the only source of information, but rather the teacher is the lead member of a network—guiding and facilitating as students search for answers to questions they have carefully generated.
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It is important to note that some students may be quietly sitting in the corner engrossed in an old fashioned text.
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Daily and total access to computers allows students to realize that technology is not something they “do” when they go to the lab or when the teacher has checked out the laptop cart, but rather technology is something they can use everyday in class to help themselves learn.
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In this new classroom, students will begin to understand that their computer is not simply a novelty to take notes with, but it is their binder, their planner, their dictionary, their journal, their photo album, their music archive, their address book.
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Web 2.0: Terminator of European Eudcation Systems - 0 views
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NTIC have changed our communication rules. Web 2.0 offers unlimited access to knowledge, skills, sustained by Open Source. The traffic on IT highways is fast, dense... endless and offers to digital natives fare-away trips on the www. Pupils and students born and grown up in digital environment develop intuitive intelligence, are used to receive, to handle and to store messages and infos arriving from many channels at the same time. And they are able to stay concentrated. They are also capable to think in snippets and keep a global understanding. Even alone, in front of their desktop, with a headset on the ears, the learning and memorizing of new skills becomes intuitive - a didactic game, and just like any game, there are rules and tasks to respect. Listing to an E-lesson, accomplishing exercices and tasks turns out into an individual challenge where pupils and students don't have any longer to cope with the disapproval of their mates or teachers. Sitting in one of these unpleasant classrooms facing a nasty prof droning out fastidious or fancy French vocabulary doesn't really open the mind. ... didn't understand? No matter with e-learning: Click on the repeat until you got it. Repeat as many times as you want. Nobody will call you an idiot. E-Teaching and E-Learning with all the Web 2.0 opportunities, Wikis and links is the best way to broad global minds and to catch all the minds lost somewhere on the roads of our messy education systems. And it's the end of segregation: Segregation inside our education systems and our societies, all the messy education environment. Let the schools or colleges be places of coming together and socialization, learning is an individually defined way.
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Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 2 views
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But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become “spikier”: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.2
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various initiatives launched over the past few years have created a series of building blocks that could provide the means for transforming the ways in which we provide education and support learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by the growth and evolution of the Internet, which has created a global “platform” that has vastly expanded access to all sorts of resources, including formal and informal educational materials. The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.
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the most visible impact of the Internet on education to date has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them. The movement began in 2001 when the William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which today provides open access to undergraduate- and graduate-level materials and modules from more than 1,700 courses (covering virtually all of MIT’s curriculum). MIT’s initiative has inspired hundreds of other colleges and universities in the United States and abroad to join the movement and contribute their own open educational resources.4 The Internet has also been used to provide students with direct access to high-quality (and therefore scarce and expensive) tools like telescopes, scanning electron microscopes, and supercomputer simulation models, allowing students to engage personally in research.
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most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
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This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated. This perspective also helps to explain the effectiveness of study groups. Students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding (one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others).
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This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
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ecoming a trusted contributor to Wikipedia involves a process of legitimate peripheral participation that is similar to the process in open source software communities. Any reader can modify the text of an entry or contribute new entries. But only more experienced and more trusted individuals are invited to become “administrators” who have access to higher-level editing tools.8
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by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.
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Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice.
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But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field.
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Another interesting experiment in Second Life was the Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School fall 2006 course called “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion.” The course was offered at three levels of participation. First, students enrolled in Harvard Law School were able to attend the class in person. Second, non–law school students could enroll in the class through the Harvard Extension School and could attend lectures, participate in discussions, and interact with faculty members during their office hours within Second Life. And at the third level, any participant in Second Life could review the lectures and other course materials online at no cost. This experiment suggests one way that the social life of Internet-based virtual education can coexist with and extend traditional education.
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Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India. The project is described by its developers as “the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa.”11 Lectures from model teachers are recorded on video and are then physically distributed via DVD to schools that typically lack well-trained instructors (as well as Internet connections). While the lectures are being played on a monitor (which is often powered by a battery, since many participating schools also lack reliable electricity), a “mediator,” who could be a local teacher or simply a bright student, periodically pauses the video and encourages engagement among the students by asking questions or initiating discussions about the material they are watching.
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For the past few years, he points out, incoming students have been bringing along their online social networks, allowing them to stay in touch with their old friends and former classmates through tools like SMS, IM, Facebook, and MySpace. Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.
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The project’s website includes reports of how students, under the guidance of professional astronomers, are using the Faulkes telescopes to make small but meaningful contributions to astronomy.
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“This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
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HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists
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The site is intended to serve as “an open forum for worldwide discussions on the Decameron and related topics.” Both scholars and students are invited to submit their own contributions as well as to access the existing resources on the site. The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.
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I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another's writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other's writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community's discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.17
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for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.
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Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
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We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
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An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
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The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20
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The original World Wide Web—the “Web 1.0” that emerged in the mid-1990s—vastly expanded access to information. The Open Educational Resources movement is an example of the impact that the Web 1.0 has had on education.
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But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.
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In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focused on helping students to build stocks of knowledge and cognitive skills that could be deployed later in appropriate situations. This approach to education worked well in a relatively stable, slowly changing world in which careers typically lasted a lifetime. But the twenty-first century is quite different.
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We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.
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The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something. Often the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting. Learning occurs in part through a form of reflective practicum, but in this case the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars.
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The building blocks provided by the OER movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems23 that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.
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As a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in the late 1970s, Treisman worked on the poor performance of African-Americans and Latinos in undergraduate calculus classes. He discovered the problem was not these students’ lack of motivation or inadequate preparation but rather their approach to studying. In contrast to Asian students, who, Treisman found, naturally formed “academic communities” in which they studied and learned together, African-Americans tended to separate their academic and social lives and studied completely on their own. Treisman developed a program that engaged these students in workshop-style study groups in which they collaborated on solving particularly challenging calculus problems. The program was so successful that it was adopted by many other colleges. See Uri Treisman, “Studying Students Studying Calculus: A Look at the Lives of Minority Mathematics Students in College,” College Mathematics Journal, vol. 23, no. 5 (November 1992), pp. 362–72, http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu/workshops/treisman.html.
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In the early 1970s, Stanford University Professor James Gibbons developed a similar technique, which he called Tutored Videotape Instruction (TVI). Like DSH, TVI was based on showing recorded classroom lectures to groups of students, accompanied by a “tutor” whose job was to stop the tape periodically and ask questions. Evaluations of TVI showed that students’ learning from TVI was as good as or better than in-classroom learning and that the weakest students academically learned more from participating in TVI instruction than from attending lectures in person. See J. F. Gibbons, W. R. Kincheloe, and S. K. Down, “Tutored Video-tape Instruction: A New Use of Electronics Media in Education,” Science, vol. 195 (1977), pp. 1136–49.
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Benefits of teaching writing online - 0 views
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Using reply-with-quote for peer revision and exchanging documents online facilitates collaborative peer review
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Carrying out peer review prior to teacher intervention promotes student autonomy and encourages students to take responsibility for the review and negotiation process
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A strong focus on peer revision requires a great effort on the part of students unfamiliar with the practice but ultimately gives them a skill they will use in their professional lives
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Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers - Chronicle.com - 0 views
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College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy.
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Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital books at the click of a mouse.
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So far the publishing group has not sought to take legal action against individual student downloaders, as the Recording Industry Association of America has done in its campaign to stamp out the illegal trading of music at colleges. The book-publishing group has not sought to shut down entire Web sites that offer downloads either, said Mr. McCoyd. Instead, officials are doing research on the extent of the problem and asking Web-site owners to remove individual files. "We've just tried to keep sweeping away these infringements as they continue to come online," he said.
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"We have been fairly vigorous in monitoring these sites and in requesting that they take down our copyrighted content,"
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One place their titles keep popping up is Scribd, a document-sharing Web site that opened this year. The site's policies do not allow users to post copyrighted content without permission, but some people break the rules.
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He said that if the problem worsens, publishers may have to take other steps to prevent piracy, such as releasing a new version of most textbooks every semester. The versions could include slight modifications that could be changed easily—such as altering the numbers in math problems. "They may compelled to," he said, "in order to stay one step ahead of the pirates."
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Wrong response. Instead of trying to force students into a model that doesn't work any longer, why not give them what they want and need? Look at MIT OpenCourseWare, Berkeley course content on iTunes, Flat World Knowledge, the California Open Source Project, Connexions. Heck! Look at OpenSource software such as Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice. THIS is the new model and companies will need to figure out a way to monetize this in a way that works for everyone.
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Footnote.com - The place for original historical documents online - 7 views
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shared by Dennis OConnor on 09 May 11
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The rise of K-12 blended learning: Profiles of emerging models | Innosight Institute - 2 views
www.innosightinstitute.org/blended_learning_models
blended learning elearning blended innosight research
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Definition of blended learning In a field with significant confusion around what K−12 blended learning is, the 40 programs converged under a simple, umbrella definition. First, in all of the blended programs, the students learned in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home at least some of the time. Second, in all of the cases, the students experienced online delivery with some control over the time, place, path, and/or pace. These two requirements, then, start to distinguish blended learning from other types of learning.
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Portrait Illustration Maker : Free Illustration Generater! - 1 views
Mapping America - Census Bureau 2005-9 American Community Survey - NYTimes.com - 0 views
projects.nytimes.com/...explorer
maps census data mapping nytimes demographics statistics math education tools teachnology web2.0 technology web
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Martin Dougiamas Keynote at Moodlemoot Canada | Some Random Thoughts - 13 views
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Martin updated us with the current stats on Moodle 54,000 verified sites worldwide. 41 Million users 97 language packs (17 fully complete, the rest are in various states) 54 Moodle Partners who fund the project and its going very well ensuring the project will continue into the future. (such as Remote-Learner who I work for) USA still has the highest raw number of installations and Spain has half of that with much less population. Brazil is now 3rd in the world and has overtaken the UK now in total installs. 3 of the top 10 are English speaking per head of population, Portugal has the largest number of Moodle installations.
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”a lot of people find that giving students the ability to teach is a valuable learning process” – Martin Dougiamas.
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As many may have seen before, there are 10 steps of pedagogical usage of Moodle, which is outlined on Moodle Docs. It details the typical 10 step progression which looks like: Putting up the handouts (Resources, SCORM) Providing a passive Forum (unfacilitated) Using Quizzes and Assignments (less management) Using the Wiki, Glossary and Database tools (interactive content) Facilitate discussions in Forums, asking questions, guiding Combining activities into sequences, where results feed later activities Introduce external activities and games (internet resources) Using the Survey module to study and reflect on course activity Using peer-review modules like Workshop, giving students more control over grading and even structuring the course in some ways Conducting active research on oneself, sharing ideas in a community of peers
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A lot of people want that secure private place in the LMS with big gates, with students needing to gain competencies and knowledge. Many people really want this “Content Pump” focus, becuase it is what they need. Others use it as a community of practitioners, connected activities, content created by students and teachers alike and many methods of assessment. These are the two ends of the spectrum of usage.
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Moodle has two roles: to be progressive and integrate with things coming up, and a drag and drop UI, with innovate workflows and improve media handling and mobile platforms to be conservative and improve security and usability and assessment , accredition, detailed management tracking and reports and performance and stability
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Since Moodle 1.9 came out three years ago, March 2008 and most are still using the three year old code which has had fixes applied since then (1.9.11 is the current release.) The support for 1.9 will continue until the middle of 2012 as it is understood that it will be a big move to Moodle2. “If you are going to Moodle2, you may as well go to Moodle 2.1 as it is better with 6 months more work” .
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However, the ongoing support for each release will be 1 yr moving to the future. Moodle will be released every 6 months which enables the organisations to plan their upgrade times ahead of time.
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What will be in Moodle 2.1? Performance Restore 1.9 backups Quiz/question refactor Page course format Interface polishing Official Mobile app (there now is a Mobile division)
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HQ are working on an official app which uses Moodle 2 built-in web services. This provides a secure access to the data in Moodle 2 for people who have accounts in Moodle which greatly benefits mobile apps.
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Moodle HQ has looked at what is Mobile really good at and identified them one by one and implemented them. This includes messaging, list of participants in your course, marking attendence (in class roll call). This will be for the iPhone first and then someone will make it for Android so it will lag behind, but will be the same.
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Grading and Rubrics Competency Tracking (from activity level, course level, outside courses to generate a competency profile) Assignment (planning to combine all 4 into one type and simplify it) Forum (big upgrade probably based on OU Forum) Survey (to include feedback/questionnaire – being rewritten currently) Lesson Scorm 2 Improved reporting IMS LTI IMS CC (although it is in 1.9 needs to be redone)
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E-Learning and Blended Learning - 0 views
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It is difficult to find one simple solutions for a complex issues. The expectations with regards to performance at work place or at home are complex; we need a blend of various learning solutions to resolve these complex issues. In such a scenario, Blended learning offers a greater chance of success.