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Barbara Lindsey

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 1 views

  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Christopher Pappas

What kind of support do Online graduate students need? - 0 views

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    What kind of support do Online graduate students need? - A must read article that online educators should read! Online learners face many challenges - from staying motivated and beating procrastination, to meeting multiple deadlines. And, as we know, e-learning students are already busy; preoccupied with many competing priorities. http://elearningindustry.com/subjects/general/item/424-online-graduate-students-support-education Thank you Dr. Liz Hardy!
Barbara Lindsey

My School, Meet MySpace: Social Networking at School | Edutopia - 1 views

  • Months before the newly hired teachers at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) started their jobs, they began the consuming work of creating the high school of their dreams -- without meeting face to face. They articulated a vision, planned curriculum, designed assessment rubrics, debated discipline policies, and even hammered out daily schedules using the sort of networking tools -- messaging, file swapping, idea sharing, and blogging -- kids love on sites such as MySpace.
  • hen, weeks before the first day of school, the incoming students jumped onboard -- or, more precisely, onto the Science Leadership Academy Web site -- to meet, talk with their teachers, and share their hopes for their education. So began a conversation that still perks along 24/7 in SLA classrooms and cyberspace. It's a bold experiment to redefine learning spaces, the roles and relationships of teachers and students, and the mission of the modern high school.
  • When I hear people say it's our job to create the twenty-first-century workforce, it scares the hell out of me," says Chris Lehmann, SLA's founding principal. "Our job is to create twenty-first-century citizens. We need workers, yes, but we also need scholars, activists, parents -- compassionate, engaged people. We're not reinventing schools to create a new version of a trade school. We're reinventing schools to help kids be adaptable in a world that is changing at a blinding rate."
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  • It's the spirit of science rather than hardcore curriculum that permeates SLA. "In science education, inquiry-based learning is the foothold," Lehmann says. "We asked, 'What does it mean to build a school where everything is based on the core values of science: inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection?'"
  • It means the first-year curriculum is built around essential questions: Who am I? What influences my identity? How do I interact with my world? In addition to science, math, and engineering, core courses include African American history, Spanish, English, and a basic how-to class in technology that also covers Internet safety and the ethical use of information and software. Classes focus less on facts to be memorized and more on skills and knowledge for students to master independently and incorporate into their lives. Students rarely take tests; they write reflections and do "culminating" projects. Learning doesn't merely cross disciplines -- it shatters outdated departmental divisions. Recently, for instance, kids studied atomic weights in biochemistry (itself a homegrown interdisciplinary course), did mole calculations in algebra, and created Dalton models (diagrams that illustrate molecular structures) in art.
  • This is Dewey for the digital age, old-fashioned progressive education with a technological twist.
  • computers and networking are central to learning at, and shaping the culture of, SLA. "
  • he zest to experiment -- and the determination to use technology to run a school not better, but altogether differently -- began with Lehmann and the teachers last spring when they planned SLA online. Their use of Moodle, an open source course-management system, proved so easy and inspired such productive collaboration that Lehmann adopted it as the school's platform. It's rare to see a dog-eared textbook or pad of paper at SLA; everybody works on iBooks. Students do research on the Internet, post assignments on class Moodle sites, and share information through forums, chat, bookmarks, and new software they seem to discover every day.
  • Teachers continue to use Moodle to plan, dream, and learn, to log attendance and student performance, and to talk about everything -- from the student who shows up each morning without a winter coat to cool new software for tagging research sources. There's also a schoolwide forum called SLA Talk, a combination bulletin board, assembly, PA system, and rap session.
  • Web technology, of course, can do more than get people talking with those they see every day; people can communicate with anyone anywhere. Students at SLA are learning how to use social-networking tools to forge intellectual connections.
  • In October, Lehmann noticed that students were sorting themselves by race in the lunchroom and some clubs. He felt disturbed and started a passionate thread on self-segregation.
  • "Having the conversation changed the way kids looked at themselves," he says.
  • "What I like best about this school is the sense of community," says student Hannah Feldman. "You're not just here to learn, even though you do learn a lot. It's more like a second home."
  • As part of the study of memoirs, for example, Alexa Dunn's English class read Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas's account of growing up Iranian in the United States -- yes, the students do read books -- and talked with the author in California via Skype. The students also wrote their own memoirs and uploaded them to SLA's network for the teacher and class to read and edit. Then, digital arts teacher Marcie Hull showed the students GarageBand, which they used to turn their memoirs into podcasts. These they posted on the education social-networking site EduSpaces (formerly Elgg); they also posted blogs about the memoirs.
REZA CHOWDHURY

Project Zero: Cultures of Thinking - 0 views

  • 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.
  • Ron Ritchhart (2002)
  • CoT project focuses
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  • eight cultural forces
  • in every school, classroom, and group learning situation.
  • language, time, environment, opportunities, routines, modeling, interactions, and expectations.
  • scaffolds
  • make their own thinking visible,
  • this work doesn’t happen by teachers merely implementing a defined set of practices; it must be supported by a rich professional culture.
  • a core premise of the CoT project is
  • that for classrooms to be cultures of thinking for students
  • schools must be cultures of thinking for teachers.
  • 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. 
  • diverse range of teachers
  • Team teaching efforts
  • developmental perspective on students’ thinking
  • In 2011, we published Making Thinking Visible,
  • which captures much of the great work being done by teachers in the project.
  • the CoT project’s research agenda
  • sought to better understand changes in teachers’ and students’ attitudes and practices as thinking becomes more visible in the school and classroom environments.
  • measures of school and classroom thoughtfulness to capture these changes.
  • at how students’ conceptual understanding of the domain of thinking developed
  • case studies of teachers
  • 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
  • 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.
  • Our research on students’ conceptual development found that
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • The new book, Creating Cultures of Thinking,
  • 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.
  • hese include frameworks and tools for professional learning communities, videos, and frameworks for understanding classroom questioning.
  • 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.
  • he research ideas are also being taken up by many new sites, including Oakland County Michigan and Santa Fe, New Mexico. 
  • Funding: Bialik College (Melbourne, Australia) under the patronage of Abe and Vera Dorevitch 
  • Project Staff: Ron Ritchhart Mark Church (consultant)
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    Project Zero: Cultures of Thinking
Michael Johnson

E-Learning 2.0 ~ Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes - 20 views

  • In general, where we are now in the online world is where we were before the beginning of e-learning [1]. Traditional theories of distance learning, of (for example) transactional distance, as described by Michael G. Moore, have been adapted for the online world. Content is organized according to this traditional model and delivered either completely online or in conjunction with more traditional seminars, to cohorts of students, led by an instructor, following a specified curriculum to be completed at a predetermined pace.
  • networked markets
  • In learning, these trends are manifest in what is sometimes called "learner-centered" or "student-centered" design. This is more than just adapting for different learning styles or allowing the user to change the font size and background color; it is the placing of the control of learning itself into the hands of the learner
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  • creation, communication and participation playing key roles
  • The breaking down of barriers has led to many of the movements and issues we see on today's Internet. File-sharing, for example, evolves not of a sudden criminality among today's youth but rather in their pervasive belief that information is something meant to be shared. This belief is manifest in such things as free and open-source software, Creative Commons licenses for content, and open access to scholarly and other works. Sharing content is not considered unethical; indeed, the hoarding of content is viewed as antisocial [9]. And open content is viewed not merely as nice to have but essential for the creation of the sort of learning network described by Siemens [10].
  • "Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into "microcontent" units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we're looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways"
  • Web 2.0 is not a technological revolution, it is a social revolution.
  • It also begins to look like a personal portfolio tool [18]. The idea here is that students will have their own personal place to create and showcase their own work. Some e-portfolio applications, such as ELGG, have already been created. IMS Global as put together an e-portfolio specification [19]. "The portfolio can provide an opportunity to demonstrate one's ability to collect, organize, interpret and reflect on documents and sources of information. It is also a tool for continuing professional development, encouraging individuals to take responsibility for and demonstrate the results of their own learning" [20].
    • Michael Johnson
       
      Also a place to receive and give feedback. I believe that one of the things that learners need to have to be prepared for learning in this space (social media or web 2.0) is the ability to evaluate, to give good feedback. Additionally, to be able to receive feedback constructively.
  • In the world of e-learning, the closest thing to a social network is a community of practice, articulated and promoted by people such as Etienne Wenger in the 1990s. According to Wenger, a community of practice is characterized by "a shared domain of interest" where "members interact and learn together" and "develop a shared repertoire of resources."
  • Yahoo! Groups
  • Blogging is very different from traditionally assigned learning content. It is much less formal. It is written from a personal point of view, in a personal voice. Students' blog posts are often about something from their own range of interests, rather than on a course topic or assigned project. More importantly, what happens when students blog, and read reach others' blogs, is that a network of interactions forms-much like a social network, and much like Wenger's community of practice.
    • Michael Johnson
       
      So, I believe he is saying that virtual communities of practice that form naturally are more real and approach what Wenger was talking about better than contrived "communities" put together in classes. That may be true. but does it have to be? If people come together to with a common purpose and the instructor allows the students freedom to explore what is important to them then I would hope that this kind of community can develop even in formal educational settings. Relevance is a key issue here!
  • "We're talking to the download generation," said Peter Smith, associate dean, Faculty of Engineering. "Why not have the option to download information about education and careers the same way you can download music? It untethers content from the Web and lets students access us at their convenience." Moreover, using an online service such as Odeo, Blogomatrix Sparks, or even simply off-the-shelf software, students can create their own podcasts.
  • The e-learning application, therefore, begins to look very much like a blogging tool. It represents one node in a web of content, connected to other nodes and content creation services used by other students. It becomes, not an institutional or corporate application, but a personal learning center, where content is reused and remixed according to the student's own needs and interests. It becomes, indeed, not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications—an environment rather than a system.
  • Web 2.0 is not a technological revolution, it is a social revolution. "Here's my take on it: Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It's about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts"
  • This approach to learning means that learning content is created and distributed in a very different manner. Rather than being composed, organized and packaged, e-learning content is syndicated, much like a blog post or podcast. It is aggregated by students, using their own personal RSS reader or some similar application. From there, it is remixed and repurposed with the student's own individual application in mind, the finished product being fed forward to become fodder for some other student's reading and use.
    • Michael Johnson
       
      I like the idea of students passing on their work to be fodder for someone else's learning. In this way we change to from a learner to a learner/teacher! (See Dillon Inouye's work and Comments from John Seeley Brown)
  • More formally, instead of using enterprise learning-management systems, educational institutions expect to use an interlocking set of open-source applications. Work on such a set of applications has begun in a number of quarters, with the E-Learning Framework defining a set of common applications and the newly formed e-Framework for Education and Research drawing on an international collaboration. While there is still an element of content delivery in these systems, there is also an increasing recognition that learning is becoming a creative activity and that the appropriate venue is a platform rather than an application.
    • Michael Johnson
    • Michael Johnson
       
      Jon Mott has some cool ideas related to this paragraph.
  • he most important learning skills that I see children getting from games are those that support the empowering sense of taking charge of their own learning. And the learner taking charge of learning is antithetical to the dominant ideology of curriculum design
  • game "modding" allows players to make the game their own
  • Words are only meaningful when they can be related to experiences," said Gee. If I say "I spilled the coffee," this has a different meaning depending on whether I ask for a broom or a mop. You cannot create that context ahead of time— it has to be part of the experience.
  • A similar motivation underlies the rapidly rising domain of mobile learning [24]—for after all, were the context in which learning occurs not important, it would not be useful or necessary to make learning mobile. Mobile learning offers not only new opportunities to create but also to connect. As Ellen Wagner and Bryan Alexander note, mobile learning "define(s) new relationships and behaviors among learners, information, personal computing devices, and the world at large"
  • "ubiquitous computing."
  • what this means is having learning available no matter what you are doing.
  • The challenge will not be in how to learn, but in how to use learning to create something more, to communicate.
    • Michael Johnson
       
      I still think part of the challenge is how to learn. How to wade through a sea of all that is out there and "learn from the best" that is available. Find, organize, evaluate, analyze, synthesize, as well as create. I agree with Chris Lott (@fncll) that creativity is vital! (I am just not so sure that it is a non-starter to say that we should be moral first...though it could be argued that we should become moral through the creative process).
  • And what people were doing with the Web was not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they could get their hands on. And this became, and looked like, and behaved like, a network.
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    Stephen Downes' take on eLearning and what the future holds
David Wetzel

Project Based Learning Viewed Through a Digital Lens - 0 views

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    Often we search for meaningful ways to integrate digital technology in project based learning activities given to our students. We also would like our students to develop a thorough understanding of the concepts underlying the work - after all this is the purpose of the project. Giving students the opportunity to complete and present their project through a digital lens has one great advantage - student engagement. This in turn causes students to develop a more in depth understanding of concepts.
Sarah Eeee

Wikipedia Comes of Age - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

shared by Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Not all information is created equal. The bottom layers (the most ubiquitous, whose sources are the most ephemeral, and with the least amount of validation) lead to layers with greater dependability, all the way to the highest layers, made up mostly of academic resources maintained and validated by academic publishers that use multiple peer reviews, trained editors, and scholarly reviewers.
  • Most of the nearly 2,500 students who responded said they consult Wikipedia, but when questioned more deeply, it became clear that they use it for, as one student put it, "pre-research."
  • Wikipedia is comprehensive, current, and far and away the most trustworthy Web resource of its kind. It is not the bottom layer of authority, nor the top, but in fact the highest layer without formal vetting.
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  • That such a high percentage of students in the study indicated they do not cite Wikipedia as a formal source, or admit to their professors they use it, confirms that they are very aware of the link it represents in the information-authority chain.
    • Sarah Eeee
       
      Optimistic view...what evidence does this author have that students don't plagarize from Wikipedia - i.e. use its information without citing it, or attributing the information found to a more acceptable source?
  • Today, when starting a serious research project, students are faced with an exponentially larger store of information than previous generations, and they need new tools to cut through the noise. Intuitively they are using Wikipedia as one of those tools, creating a new layer of information-filtering to help orient them in the early stages of serious research.
  • . One scholar issued a challenge: Wikipedia is where students are starting research, whether we like it or not, so we need to improve its music entries. That call to arms resonated, and music scholars worked hard to improve the quality of Wikipedia entries and make sure that bibliographies and citations pointed to the most reliable resources.
  • To go further, while I do agree that teaching information literacy is important, I do not agree with those who argue that the core challenge is to educate students and researchers about how to use Wikipedia. As we have seen, students intuitively understand much of that already.
  • The key challenge for the scholarly community, in which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources that have been created and maintained by the academy.
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    Concise and interesting opinion piece about the role of Wikipedia in research. The author argues that many students use Wikipedia for 'pre-research,' and that it serves a valuable and valid step towards finding the best evidence. Ultimately, this article calls for scholars to increase the links between peer-reviewed authoritative sources and Wikipedia articles.
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    Does a 'harm control' approach to research seem like the best option to you? What role do teachers at all levels of education have to play? Librarians?
Ninja Essays

Youth Time magazine - 12 Useful Websites and Apps for Students - 0 views

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    A lot of students asking me every day what kind of websites do I use for university to get some extra information or just aids for classes. Today, options for students to expand their knowledge have become way easier. Out there are many websites and applications that will help gain knowledge and also improve skills to manage time, improve writing, socialize with other students and so on. Here is the list of the most important of them.
David Wetzel

5 Benefits for Creating a Classroom Environment for Student Blogs - 0 views

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    Benefits for creating a classroom environment for student blogging begin with establishing a foundation for their success. Why is this important? Integrating blogs transforms a classroom into a learning community where students become self-directed learners and thinkers. This in turn, causes students to use higher order thinking skills as they create and post entries in their blogs, along with commenting on other student's blogs.
Sarah Eeee

The Magic of Higher Education - Old School, New School - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • When we view faculty as labor and students as customers, we do not see magic; we see expenses and revenue on a profit-and-loss sheet. We would be better off selling tickets to a magic show.
  • When we present the university as a corporation, the faculty as labor, and the students as customers, we lose sight of our core mission of teaching and learning. Just as the corporate analogy distracts, the customer analogy detracts. Presenting the student as a customer rather than as a partner in learning is condescending at best. It is a short-run view that focuses on interactions with students as a series of financial transactions rather than a network of human relationships. When we view education as consumption, administrators are forced to side either with faculty at the expense of the students or with students at the expense of the faculty. When our focus is on learning as a form of development, we can spend our energy on finding ways to support the creativity and growth of both partners in this relationship.
  • But the reality is that those of us who labor in academe range from part-time work-study students to outsourced janitors and food-service workers, to campus police, librarians, doctors, legal counsel, and a myriad of student counselors, among others. Many of the working conditions that affect professors also affect the rest of us. Much more is to be gained by seeing the conditions we have in common than by painting a picture of faculty as uniquely oppressed. Building bridges between faculty and administration is a necessary step in creating a campus culture that values teaching and learning and that is oriented toward the success of both students and faculty.
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  • Professors seem to have a strange sort of tunnel vision when it comes to defining labor on campus. Apart from their fellow faculty members, their view rarely includes those outside of the line on the organizational chart that links themselves to their presidents. They seem to look through their chairs, deans, and provosts to their most senior leaders.
  • Academic discussions of the corporatization of higher education frame the institution as a corporation and the faculty as the labor oppressed by this structure. But academics need to realize that the corporate model dehumanizes everyone on campus, not just the faculty.
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    How can we be inspirational teachers at a distance? How do we achieve this 'magical' element, rather than just replicate the base demands of the corporate university?
li li

As a university student: - 0 views

Play college football cheap soccer shirts is an amazing experience. It is a great honor to represent your team in the game and schools. Memories more than a college athlete career and the lessons ...

competitivenes,footbal,training,jerseys

started by li li on 15 Jul 13 no follow-up yet
Chris Herbert

Benefits of teaching writing online - 0 views

  • Encourages contact between students and faculty
  • Offers collaborative peer review,
  • 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
  • Encourages active learning
  • from both teachers and other students
  • Places emphasis on practice and on revision and peer review for continued improvement
  • 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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    Outlines how teaching writing online helps students and educators teach and learn.
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    Online teaching and the benefits to students and teachers.
Clif Mims

National Lab Day - 4 views

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    An initiative to build local communities of support that will foster ongoing collaborations among volunteers, students and educators. Volunteers, university students, scientists, engineers, other STEM professionals and, more broadly, members of the community are working together with educators and students to bring discovery-based science experiences to students in grades K-12. When an educator posts a project, our system will help them get the resources needed to bring that project to fruition.
Rhondda Powling

EIA Energy Kids - What Is Energy? - 6 views

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    Energy Kids is a website produced by the US Energy Information Administration for the purpose of educating students about energy and its many forms. Energy Kids provides a wealth of easily accessible information about energy which students can use to play games, solve riddles, and take quizzes about energy. Some of the games students will find include Energy Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and riddles. Energy Kids also provides students of all ages with ideas and outlines for science fair projects around the energy theme. The science fair projects are available as free PDF downloads.
David Wetzel

Top 10 Online Tools for Teaching Science and Math - 2 views

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    Why use Web 2.0 tools in science and math classes? The primary reason is they facilitate access to input and interaction with content through reading, writing, listening, and speaking. These tools offer enormous advantages for science and math teachers, in terms of helping their students learn using Web 2.0 tools. For example: * Most of these tools can be edited from any computer connected to the Internet. Teachers can add, edit and delete information even during class time. * Students learn how to use these tools for academic purposes and, at the same time, can transfer their use to their personal lives and future professional careers. * RSS feeds allow students to access all the desired research information on one page. * Students learn to be autonomous in their learning process.
Dennis OConnor

Education Week Teacher: High-Tech Teaching in a Low-Tech Classroom - 20 views

  • How can we best use limited resources to support learning and familiarize students with technology?
  • get creative with lesson structure
  • Take advantage of any time that your students have access to a computer lab with multiple computers.
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  • Relieve yourself from the pressure of knowing all the ins and outs of every tool. Instead, empower your students by challenging them to become experts who teach one another (and you!) how to use new programs.
  • "Pass it On" Buddy Method
  • Students assist one another in creating digital products that represent or reflect their new learning. It’s a great way to spread technological skills in a one-computer classroom.
  • Group Consensus Method
  • Small groups of students engage in dialogue on a particular topic, then a member uses a digital tool to report on the group's consensus.
  • Rotating Scribe Method
  • Each day, one student uses technology to record the lesson for other students.
  • Whole Class Method
  • Teachers in one-computer classrooms often invite large groups of students to gather around the computer. Here are a few suggestions for making the most of these activities
  • When we are faced with limited resources, it is tempting to throw up our hands and say, "I just don't have what I need to do this!" However, do not underestimate your ability to make it work.
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    Might help create a blended classroom, even when you have to share the blender.  Common sense advise for the real world of underequipped classrooms and stretched thin teachers.
Christopher Pappas

12 YouTube Videos Every Online Educator Should View - 0 views

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    12 YouTube Videos Every Online Educator Should View What are the benefits for the teacher and learner in the context of open education and OER? How does a blended-learning school boost student achievement? How can we design the schools for 21st Century Learning? How will be the classroom of tomorrow? What are the tools and resources for the 21st Century Educator? At the 12 YouTube Videos Every Online Educator Should View you will be able to answer the above questions and even more. You will get an idea of what your students are capable of and what are expecting from you. Do not forget that educational technology is the median and it is hear to help you achieve better learning outcomes. It is in your hand how effectively you will use it since we are the digital immigrants and our students/learners are the digital natives! http://elearningindustry.com/subjects/concepts/item/395-12-youtube-videos-teacher-educator-should-view
Ninja Essays

Top Productivity Tools for Students at College - 0 views

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    The contemporary educational system is largely influenced by technology. Students attend online courses and use the Internet as the main source of information for their projects and learning goals. In addition, college students can find many tools and apps that will increase their productivity and help them meet all deadlines imposed by their professors.
Barbara Lindsey

NSBA T+ L News - NSBA announces this year's '20 to Watch' - 0 views

  • According to the organization, this list encompasses the most dynamic group of leaders they’ve ever recognized: from the director of technology for the Zuni Tribe’s school district to the first librarian to be mentioned on the list, all have helped students reach 21st-century educational goals.
  • “This list is really for the people who haven’t yet emerged on the national stage,”
  • Participants must be nominated by their peers or supervisors, and each applicant must describe a tech-related initiative that his or her nominee is involved with, why the nominee is an emerging leader, and how the nominee’s curiosity with new technology is implemented in education.
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  • “I feel it is so important that school librarians are recognized as educators who are often on the cutting edge of using new technology with K-12 students,” said Kay Hones, librarian for Stevenson Elementary School in San Francisco and one of this year’s honorees. “As a school librarian, I am often the first to try a new technology and quickly find a way to use it with all students.”
  • “I believe test scores and literacy rates will improve when all students have equitable access to high-quality library programs, including books, media, electronic, and primary resources that support student interest as well as curriculum,” she said.
  • Cynthia Trujillo, director of technology for Zuni Public School District, agrees that equitable access to technology is a key to students’ future success.
  • “The community also didn’t have the ability to connect, so I worked with the local phone company, CenturyTel, to provide everyone access,” said Trujillo. “By being able to connect to the internet, we’ll be able to share our culture with others, and vice versa.”
  • Recognizing the lack of discretionary funds for teachers, Henke—who was nominated by CoSN’s chief executive, Keith Krueger—launched www.grantwrangler.com, a free online listing service of grants and awards for teachers and students. This fall, an offshoot of the project, www.mygrantwrangler.com, will be the first social-networking site for both grant seekers and grant givers to share insights and experiences, she said.
Jenny Davis

OER Commons: Open Educational Resources - 8 views

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    OER Commons is all about sharing open educational resources. Subject areas include: Arts, Business, Humanities, Mathematics & Statistics, Science & Technology and Social Sciences. Over 16 different types of course materials are provided. You can search OER Commons by subject area, grade level, material type, media format and conditions of use or by selecting a relevant tag.
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    The Internet is rich with open educational resources that both educators and students might want to use. However, finding those resources is often time-consuming. The OER Commons website was created to help educators, students, and lifelong learners find Open Educational Resources that are already posted somewhere on the Internet. OER Commons is not a search engine (like Google) and it is not a list of links. This site is a structured database of links to high-quality resources found on other websites. OER Commons provides a single point of access through which educators, students, and all learners can search,browse, evaluate, and discuss over 30,000 high-quality OER.
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