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Nils Peterson

HASTAC welcomes Howard Rheingold for a discussion on participatory learning | HASTAC - 0 views

  • I was eager to hear Howard Rheingold's thoughts on participatory learning and to learn more about his new course. In the video thread above, Howard goes into detail about the ways that "student-led collaborative inquiry and involvement... enlists their enthusiasm in ways that even very good lectures and texts don't." He details a loose set of what he calls meta-skills, which include: critical inquiry, pathfinding, balancing individual and collective voice, and attention-to-attention.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      I was looking for stuff on Participatory Learning in HASTAC and came across this. The meta-skills Rheingold cites are an interesting list
  • In a follow up video, Howard bemoans the quickness with which students tend to ask the question "what will be on the test?" His solution has increasingly been to have students decide collaboratively what material is important enough to merit this distinction. Here, the ability to make decisions collectively about the accountability of a group seems to call forth another meta-skill: balancing individual and collective voice.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Here Rheingold seems to miss the mark, he has students learning things that are tested in class, rather than being tested in the world.
Theron DesRosier

Linux, Learning, and Sugar Kids | HASTAC - 0 views

  • Like many of the conversations we have here at HASTAC, this project focuses on learning through collaboration, experimentation, and pleasure. For example, rather than applications or tools, each program is called an activity and runs at full-screen, two design choices that derive from this pedagogical orientation. Collaboration is also assumed by the OS; you can invite friends to just about any activity (like writing, painting, web browsing), and everyone who joins will see the same thing.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      collaboration, experimentation and pleasure -- sound more like group play which is a theme running through some of the other HASTAC stuff I have been reading.
    • Theron DesRosier
       
      Thanks Nils, I like the way the interface zooms to different levels of community participation. It assumes and supports collaborative work. Toward the end of the "short video of it in action" (link above), it shows how the system collects everything you do in your "Journal". The Journal identifies the collaborators you worked with on the project along with other information.
Nils Peterson

Open Access or Close It? Two Views | HASTAC - 2 views

  • Now here is the irony:   this morning, in the wake of the Publisher's Weekly article, I really wanted to be able to give all of my HASTAC readers a url so they could go right to my article.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      so, her disciplinary and departmental affiliation rewards her for publishing in a closed community rather than for working in a world community and then when she wants to engage a world community she can't
  • My larger point?  We are in a confusing and damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't moment for publishing.  Scholarly publishing loses money.  Scholars who do not publish (at present) lose careers.  How do we balance these complex and intertwined issues in a sane way?  That is our question.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      publishing reputation is a surrogate for reputation in community
Nils Peterson

How To Crowdsource Grading | HASTAC - 0 views

  • My colleagues and I at the University of Maine have pursued a similar course with The Pool, an online environment for sharing art and code that invites students to evaluate each other at various stages of their projects, from intent to approach to release.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      This is feedback on our Harvesting Gradebook and Crowdsourcing ideas. The Pool seems to be an implementation of the feedback mechanism with some ideas about reputation.
  • Like Slashdot's karma system, The Pool entrusts students who have contributed good work in the past with greater power to rate other students. In general students at U-Me have responded responsibly to this ethic; it may help that students are sometimes asked to evaluate students in other classes,
    • Nils Peterson
       
      While there is notion of karma and peer feedback, there does not seem to be notion of bringing in outside expertise or if it were to come in, to track its roles
Nils Peterson

Reasons Facebook Beat MySpace | HASTAC - 0 views

  • To prove her point, Oshiro offers a couple of nice graphs that show a strong correlation between the introduction of Facebook Connect and a rapid migration from MySpace to Facebook. A closer look at the charts, however, suggests that while the API likely did hasten the shift, it was one that was already taking place. One notable conclusion we can draw from this data, however, is that Facebook's decision to open up user data to third parties did, indeed, have a strong measurable effect on popularity. As more applications became available that could integrate with Facebook, the site became more useful to users. Oshiro writes, "Facebook moved from being a College forum site to a full scale lifestyle platform. Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system."
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Pointing to the open API of Facebook as an aid to its popularity is interesting, but its a technical consideration to interoperate with other systems. My question is, does increased interoperation facilitate more collaboration and open the potential for collaboration by difference. What if Geo Hotz had used Twitter & FB rather than Blogger. Could he? Would it have made a difference? I am finding that having my blog linked to FB is getting me a little (very little) more attention and commenting than without it. But my friends only comment on things I say about Health Care; they don't seem interested in explorations of rubric-based assessment of learning.
Peggy Collins

How to Outlive the Profession of English: Research and Methods (Syllabus) | HASTAC - 0 views

  •  
    from a academic in TX this link to an interesting syllabus for an English course
Nils Peterson

Half an Hour: Open Source Assessment - 0 views

  • When posed the question in Winnipeg regarding what I thought the ideal open online course would look like, my eventual response was that it would not look like a course at all, just the assessment.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      I remembered this Downes post on the way back from HASTAC. It is some of the roots of our Spectrum I think.
  • The reasoning was this: were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.
  • In Holland I encountered a person from an organization that does nothing but test students. This is the sort of thing I long ago predicted (in my 1998 Future of Online Learning) so I wasn't that surprised. But when I pressed the discussion the gulf between different models of assessment became apparent.Designers of learning resources, for example, have only the vaguest of indication of what will be on the test. They have a general idea of the subject area and recommendations for reading resources. Why not list the exact questions, I asked? Because they would just memorize the answers, I was told. I was unsure how this varied from the current system, except for the amount of stuff that must be memorized.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      assumes a test as the form of assessment, rather than something more open ended.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • As I think about it, I realize that what we have in assessment is now an exact analogy to what we have in software or learning content. We have proprietary tests or examinations, the content of which is held to be secret by the publishers. You cannot share the contents of these tests (at least, not openly). Only specially licensed institutions can offer the tests. The tests cost money.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      See our Where are you on the spectrum, Assessment is locked vs open
  • Without a public examination of the questions, how can we be sure they are reliable? We are forced to rely on 'peer reviews' or similar closed and expert-based evaluation mechanisms.
  • there is the question of who is doing the assessing. Again, the people (or machines) that grade the assessments work in secret. It is expert-based, which creates a resource bottleneck. The criteria they use are not always apparent (and there is no shortage of literature pointing to the randomness of the grading). There is an analogy here with peer-review processes (as compared to recommender system processes)
  • What constitutes achievement in a field? What constitutes, for example, 'being a physicist'?
  • This is a reductive theory of assessment. It is the theory that the assessment of a big thing can be reduced to the assessment of a set of (necessary and sufficient) little things. It is a standards-based theory of assessment. It suggests that we can measure accomplishment by testing for accomplishment of a predefined set of learning objectives.Left to its own devices, though, an open system of assessment is more likely to become non-reductive and non-standards based. Even if we consider the mastery of a subject or field of study to consist of the accomplishment of smaller components, there will be no widespread agreement on what those components are, much less how to measure them or how to test for them.Consequently, instead of very specific forms of evaluation, intended to measure particular competences, a wide variety of assessment methods will be devised. Assessment in such an environment might not even be subject-related. We won't think of, say, a person who has mastered 'physics'. Rather, we might say that they 'know how to use a scanning electron microscope' or 'developed a foundational idea'.
  • We are certainly familiar with the use of recognition, rather than measurement, as a means of evaluating achievement. Ludwig Wittgenstein is 'recognized' as a great philosopher, for example. He didn't pass a series of tests to prove this. Mahatma Gandhi is 'recognized' as a great leader.
  • The concept of the portfolio is drawn from the artistic community and will typically be applied in cases where the accomplishments are creative and content-based. In other disciplines, where the accomplishments resemble more the development of skills rather than of creations, accomplishments will resemble more the completion of tasks, like 'quests' or 'levels' in online games, say.Eventually, over time, a person will accumulate a 'profile' (much as described in 'Resource Profiles').
  • In other cases, the evaluation of achievement will resemble more a reputation system. Through some combination of inputs, from a more or less define community, a person may achieve a composite score called a 'reputation'. This will vary from community to community.
  •  
    Fine piece, transformative. "were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources."
Theron DesRosier

Participatory Learning and the New Humanities: An Interview with Cathy Davidson | Acade... - 0 views

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    "Participatory Learning includes the ways in which new technologies enable learners (of any age) to contribute in diverse ways to individual and shared learning goals. Through games, wikis, blogs, virtual environments, social network sites, cell phones, mobile devices, and other digital platforms, learners can participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another's projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Participatory learners come together to aggregate their ideas and experiences in a way that makes the whole ultimately greater than the sum of the parts."
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    Theron helped me keep up with developments at HASTAC by socially sharing this bookmark and excerpt in the CTLT and Friends Group. I add this comment to acknowledge his contribution to my ongoing professional development. The comment function also gives me a link (perma?) to his bookmark.
Nils Peterson

THEN: Journal - 0 views

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Fourth, an observation: Schools tend to pose problems to students in the form of puzzles far more than in the form of games. This can result in students being taught to think that there is an answer to every question, a solution to every problem. There is an endless array of secrets that others know and you don’t. When students leave school they frequently find that problems in the “real world” tend not to have “once and for all” solutions. Many problems seem to have no solution at all. People create problems themselves and solve problems created by others. They begin to think in terms of strategies for coping with their problems, strategies that serve their ends but can be expected to conflict with other people’s goals. Therefore a puzzle-based education might not prepare people for life after school as well as a game-based education might.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      posted as a response to the HASTAC conversation, it is an interesting exploration of a dichotomy -- puzzles (closed-ended problems) vs games (open-ended problems) and the impact on learning on using one vs the other
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