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Nils Peterson

The End in Mind - 0 views

www.jonmott.com/blog

shared by Nils Peterson on 31 Jul 09 - Cached
  • A rapidly growing number of people are creating their own personal learning environments with tools freely available to them, without the benefit of a CMS. As Christensen would say, they have hired different technologies to do the job of a CMS for them. But the technologies they’re hiring are more flexible, accessible and learner-centered than today’s CMSs. This is not to say that CMSs are about to disappear. Students enrolled in institutions of higher learning will certainly continue to participate in CMS-delivered course sites, but since these do not generally persist over time, the really valuable learning technologies will increasily be in the cloud.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 31 Jul 09
       
      Jon Mott thinking about the Bb World, CMSes in general and Innovator's Dilemma.
  • Both administration and pedagogy are necessary in schools. They are also completely different in what infrastructure they require. This (in my opinion) has been the great failing of VLEs – they all try to squeeze the round pedagogy peg into the square administration hole. It hasn’t worked very well. Trying to coax collaboration in what is effectively an administrative environment, without the porous walls that social media thrives on, hasn’t worked. The ‘walled garden’ of the VLE is just not as fertile as the juicy jungle outside, and not enough seeds blow in on the wind.
Nils Peterson

Face to Face: Alan Kay Still Waiting for the Revolution | Scholastic.com - 0 views

content.scholastic.com/...article.jsp

shared by Nils Peterson on 02 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.
  • the point of school is to teach all those things that are inventions and that are hard to learn because we're not explicitly wired for them. Like reading and writing.Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 03 Jun 09
       
      Ouch. This hits hard
  • Gary Brown on 02 Jun 09
     
    Alan Kay, developer of the mouse, still lamenting the failure of imagination of adults/educators.
  • Gary Brown on 02 Jun 09
     
    Matthew spotted this a while back. Great read.
Theron DesRosier

performance.learning.productivity: ID - Instructional Design or Interactivity Design in... - 1 views

charles-jennings.blogspot.com/...d-instructional-design-or.html

learning design

shared by Theron DesRosier on 01 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The vast majority of structured learning is content-rich and interaction-poor. That’s understandable in the context of a 20th century mindset and how learning professionals have been taught to develop ‘learning’ events. But it simply isn’t appropriate for today’s world.
  • Dr Ebbinghaus’ experiment revealed we suffer an exponential ‘forgetting curve’ and that about 50% of context-free information is lost in the first hour after acquisition if there is no opportunity to reinforce it with practice.
  • The need to become Interactivity Designers. That’s what they need to do.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We need designers who understand that learning comes from experience, practice, conversations and reflection, and are prepared to move away from massaging content into what they see as good instructional design. Designers need to get off the content bus and start thinking about, using, designing and exploiting learning environments full of experiences and interactivity.
  • Theron DesRosier on 01 Jun 10
     
    "Dr Ebbinghaus' experiment revealed we suffer an exponential 'forgetting curve' and that about 50% of context-free information is lost in the first hour after acquisition if there is no opportunity to reinforce it with practice."
Nils Peterson

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine - 0 views

www.wired.com/...1

shared by Nils Peterson on 18 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back. This development — a familiar historical march, both feudal and corporate, in which the less powerful are sapped of their reason for being by the better resourced, organized, and efficient — is perhaps the rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the Internet Age. After all, this is a battle that seemed fought and won — not just toppling newspapers and music labels but also AOL and Prodigy and anyone who built a business on the idea that a curated experience would beat out the flexibility and freedom of the Web.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Aug 10
       
      An interesting perspective, goes along with another piece I diigoed in Educause Review that was exploring the turning of the tide against EduPunk. What is problematic with the graphic at the lead of this article is that it does not account for the volume of traffic, its all scaled to 100%. So while web's market share is falling as a percent of total packets, and video market share is growing, its not clear that web use (esp for tasks related to learning) is declining.
  • You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.
  • This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software
  • But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the Web as a worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, Wired published a now-infamous “Push!” cover story, which suggested that it was time to “kiss your browser goodbye.”
  • “Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of interactive media — increasingly, the center of gravity of all media — is moving to a post-HTML environment,” we promised nearly a decade and half ago. The examples of the time were a bit silly — a “3-D furry-muckers VR space” and “headlines sent to a pager” — but the point was altogether prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be less about browsing and more about getting.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 18 Aug 10
       
      While the mode is different, does that mean that the independent creation of content and the peer-communities go away because the browser does? Perhaps, because the app is a mechanism to monetize and control content and interaction.
Gary Brown

Ranking Employees: Why Comparing Workers to Their Peers Can Often Backfire - Knowledge@... - 2 views

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm

ratings feedback

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Aug 10 - Cached
  • We live in a world full of benchmarks and rankings. Consumers use them to compare the latest gadgets. Parents and policy makers rely on them to assess schools and other public institutions,
  • "Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive -- to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens," says Barankay, whose previous research and teaching has focused on personnel and labor economics. "Workers can become complacent and de-motivated. People who rank highly think, 'I am already number one, so why try harder?' And people who are far behind can become depressed about their work and give up."
  • mong the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Nothing is more compelling than data from actual workplace settings, but getting it is usually very hard."
  • Instead, the job without the feedback attracted more workers -- 254, compared with 76 for the job with feedback.
  • "This indicates that when people are great and they know it, they tend to slack off. But when they're at the bottom, and are told they're doing terribly, they are de-motivated," says Barankay.
  • In the second stage of the experiment
  • it seems that people would rather not know how they rank compared to others, even though when we surveyed these workers after the experiment, 74% said they wanted feedback about their rank."
  • Of the workers in the control group, 66% came back for more work, compared with 42% in the treatment group. The members of the treatment group who returned were also 22% less productive than the control group. This seems to dispel the notion that giving people feedback might encourage high-performing workers to work harder to excel, and inspire low-ranked workers to make more of an effort.
  • The aim was to determine whether giving people feedback affected their desire to do more work, as well as the quantity and quality of their work.
  • top performers move on to new challenges and low performers have no viable options elsewhere.
  • feedback about rank is detrimental to performance,"
  • it is well documented that tournaments, where rankings are tied to prizes, bonuses and promotions, do inspire higher productivity and performance.
  • "In workplaces where rankings and relative performance is very transparent, even without the intervention of management ... it may be better to attach financial incentives to rankings, as interpersonal comparisons without prizes may lead to lower effort," Barankay suggests. "In those office environments where people may not be able to assess and compare the performance of others, it may not be useful to just post a ranking without attaching prizes."
  • "The key is to devote more time to thinking about whether to give feedback, and how each individual will respond to it. If, as the employer, you think a worker will respond positively to a ranking and feel inspired to work harder, then by all means do it. But it's imperative to think about it on an individual level."
  • Gary Brown on 23 Aug 10
     
    the conflation of feedback with ranking confounds this. What is not done and needs to be done is to compare the motivational impact of providing constructive feedback. Presumably the study uses ranking in a strictly comparative context as well, and we do not see the influence of feedback relative to an absolute scale. Still, much in this piece to ponder....
Gary Brown

Brainless slime mould makes decisions like humans | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discov... - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...ld-makes-decisions-like-humans

learning

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • These results strongly suggest that, like humans, Physarum doesn’t attach any intrinsic value to the options that are available to it. Instead, it compares its alternatives. Add something new into the mix, and its decisions change.
  • But how does Physarum make decisions at all without a brain?  The answer is deceptively simple – it does so by committee. Every plasmodium is basically a big sac of fluid, where each part rhythmically contracts and expands, pushing the fluid inside back-and-forth. The rate of the contractions depends on what neighbouring parts of the sac are doing, and by the local environment. They happen faster when the plasmodium touches something attractive like food, and they slow down when repellent things like sunlight are nearby.
  • It’s the ultimate in collective decision-making and it allows Physarum to perform remarkable feats of “intelligence”, including simulating Tokyo’s transport network, solving mazes, and even driving robots.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Aug 10
     
    This probably also apples to change theory....
Nils Peterson

Half an Hour: Open Source Assessment - 0 views

halfanhour.blogspot.com/...open-source-assessment.html

Downes learning2.0 outcomes_assessment learning_community end_of_LMS

shared by Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10 - Cached
  • 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
      Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10
       
      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
      Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10
       
      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
      Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10
       
      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.
  • Nils Peterson on 13 Sep 10
     
    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."
Gary Brown

Comments on the report - GEVC Report Comments - University College - Washington State U... - 2 views

universitycollege.wsu.edu/...default.aspx

general education

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • My primary concern rests with the heavy emphasis on "outcomes based" learning. First, I find it difficult to imagine teaching to outcomes as separate from teaching my content -- I do not consider "content" and "outcomes" as discrete entities; rather, they overlap. This overlap may partly be the reason for the thin and somewhat unconvincing literature on "outcomes based learning." I would therefore like to see in this process a thorough and detailed analysis of the literature on "outcomes" vs content-based learning, followed by thoughtful discussion as to whether the need to focus our energies in a different direction is in fact warranted (and for what reasons). Also, perhaps that same literature can provide guidance on how to create an outcomes driven learning environment while maintaining the spirit of the academic (as opposed to technocratically-oriented) enterprise.
  • Outcomes are simply more refined ways of talking about fundamental purposes of education (on the need for positing our purposes in educating undergraduates, see Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, ch. 3). Without stating our educational purposes clearly, we can't know whether we are achieving them. "
  • I've clicked just about every link on this website. I still have no idea what the empirical basis is for recommending a "learning goals" based approach over other approaches. The references in the GEVC report, which is where I expected to find the relevant studies, were instead all to other reports. So far as I could tell, there were no direct references to peer-reviewed research.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I do not want to read the "three volumes of Pascaralla and Terenzini." Instead, I would appreciate a concise, but thorough, summary of the empirical findings. This would include the sample of institutions studied and how this sample was chosen, the way that student outcomes were measured, and the results.I now understand that many people believe that a "learning goals" approach is desirable, but I still don't understand the empirical basis for their beliefs.
Theron DesRosier

Disaggregate power not people - Part two: now with more manifesto @ Dave's Educational ... - 2 views

davecormier.com/...rt-two-now-with-more-manifesto

cormier Personal learning environments social networking

shared by Theron DesRosier on 12 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 12 Oct 10
     
    "Definition 2 - disaggregating power There is a very different power relationship between being given a space which 'enables contexts' and 'allows supports' for a user and a space that you build and support for yourself. It dodges those institutionally created problems of student mobility, of losing the connections formed in your learning and gives you a professional 'place' from which you can start to make long term knowledge network connections that form the higher end of the productive learning/knowing that is possible on the web. The power is disaggregated in the sense that while attending an institution of learning you are still under the dominance of the instructor or the regulations surrounding accreditation, but coming to your learning space is not about that dominance. The power held (and, i should probably add, that you've given to that institution in applying for accreditation/learning it's not (necessarily) a power of tyranny) by the institution only touches some of your work, and it need not impede any work you choose to do. Here's where I get to the part about the 'personal' that's been bothering me The danger in taking definition two as our definition for PLE is that we lose sight of the subtle, complex dance of person and ecology so eloquently described by Keith Hamon in his response to my post. Maybe more dangerously, we might get taken up as thinking that learning is something that happens to the person, and not as part of a complex rhizome of connections that form the basis of the human experience. Learning (and I don't mean definitions or background) and the making of connections of knowledge is something that is steeped in complexity. At each point we are structured in the work (written in a book, sung in a song, spoken in a web session) of others that constantly tests our own connections and further complexifies our understanding. This is the pattern of knowledge as i understand it. It is organic, and messy, and su
Theron DesRosier

SIMILE Project - 0 views

simile.mit.edu

web2.0 semanticweb semantic web mit tools

shared by Theron DesRosier on 16 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 16 Dec 08
     
    SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets. Learn more about the SIMILE project.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Peggy Collins on 12 Feb 09
     
    Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets. Learn more about the SIMILE project.
  • Theron DesRosier on 12 Feb 09
     
    SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets. Learn more about the SIMILE project.
  • Theron DesRosier on 12 Feb 09
     
    Peg found this but had trouble adding it to our list.
Jayme Jacobson

Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge ... - 0 views

209.85.173.132/search

core skill s 21st century learning transmedia navigation distributed cognition

shared by Jayme Jacobson on 11 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Participatory culture: 21st Century Media Education “We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:
  • Complex relations of “informal” and “formal” learning
  • We need far more knowledge on the development of learning interests and learning pathways over time and space - and their influences.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Play — the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solvingPerformance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discoverySimulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processesAppropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media contentMultitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacitiesCollective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goalJudgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sourcesTransmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalitiesNetworking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate informationNegotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.”
  • The power of the social: How do learners leverage social networks and affiliative ties? What positionings and accountabilities do they enable that matter for learning? The power of the setting: How do learners exploit the properties of settings to support learning, and how do they navigate the boundaries? The power of imagination: What possible courses of action do learners consider, as they project possible selves, possible achievements, and reflect on the learning they need to get there?
  • We have spent too much time in the dark about these issues that matter for learning experiences and pathways.
  • Jayme Jacobson on 11 Mar 09
     
    This is a great list of core competencies. Should use (cite) in forming the participatory learning strategies.
  • Theron DesRosier on 13 Mar 09
     
    Hey Jayme, Nice list. Another skill you talked about earlier was translation. Where does that fit? Is it a subskill of Negotiation?
Jayme Jacobson

The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center » Blog Archive... - 1 views

life-slc.org/?p=831

highlight visualization informal timeline eportfolio

shared by Jayme Jacobson on 11 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Jayme Jacobson on 11 Mar 09
     
    This looks like it might be something we would want to follow up on. would like to see this in action.
Theron DesRosier

It's All Happening at the Zoo School: Innovative Education with Practical Applications ... - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/its-all-happening-zoo-school

theme based school environment

shared by Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08
     
    It's All Happening at the Zoo School: Innovative Education with Practical Applications At Minneapolis's School of Environmental Studies, learning is about becoming an expert and solving real problems.
Theron DesRosier

School of Environmental Studies: Taking Class Outdoors | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/ses-video

theme based school environment

shared by Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08
     
    School of Environmental Studies: Taking Class Outdoors At this Minnesota school focused on problem solving, the academic program and the architecture were designed to promote interdisciplinary project-based learning. More to this story.
Nils Peterson

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

www.academiccommons.org/...knowledgable-knowledge-able

wesch web2.0 learning

shared by Nils Peterson on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
Cheryl Welsch liked it
  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them. Radical experiments in teaching carry no guarantees and even fewer rewards in most tenure and promotion systems, even if they are successful. In many cases faculty are required to assess their students in a standardized way to fulfill requirements for the curriculum. Nothing is easier to assess than information recall on multiple-choice exams, and the concise and “objective” numbers satisfy committee members busy with their own teaching and research.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 11 Mar 09
       
      Do we think this is true? Many?
  • In a world of nearly infinite information, we must first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there.
  • Theron DesRosier on 09 Mar 09
     
    "Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative."
  • Nils Peterson on 11 Mar 09
     
    Connect this to the 10 point self assessment we did for AACU comparing institutional vs community-based learning https://teamsite.oue.wsu.edu/ctlt/home/Anonymous%20Access%20Documents/AACU%202009/inst%20vs%20comm%20based%20spectrum.pdf
Theron DesRosier

Didn't I tell you that? - 0 views

portal.acm.org/citation.cfm

theme based school environment

shared by Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08
     
    Chamberlain High School is small inner-city school within a school in a large urban district. Over its five years of existence, Chamberlain administrators have enlisted the aid of outside partners to help them realize the vision of an interdisciplinary environmental science theme based school. Partners include many university-based groups, as well as groups such as National Public Radio's Living on Earth, the Urban Ecology Institute (a non-profit university-based organization), and a local environmental literacy program. This study was undertaken to understand some of the dynamics behind those partnerships. Using activity theory as an analytical lens we found a set of tensions that drove many of the changes that have occurred between the school and its partners. In this paper we document these tensions so others who are working in similar situations will be able to leverage our experience and findings to support urban school change.
Joshua Yeidel

Moving to Moodle: Reflections Two Years Later (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...47088

educause moodle lms

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 07 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 07 Nov 08
     
    A good article about a transition from an in-house LMS to Moodle. Though the environment is somewhat different, lessons learned about the process are relevant to us.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 07 Nov 08
     
    The lack of time to prepare was the main source of problems and undermined the effectiveness of CTET as a change agent.
Joshua Yeidel

So how could we use this forum? - 2 views

This is a god place to have discussions among Diigo members who are interested in our topics. If we want to center on Diigo as a locale for forming a community around us, we should be getting invi...

question

started by Theron DesRosier on 11 Mar 09 1 follow-up, last by Joshua Yeidel on 16 Mar 09
Nils Peterson

Innovating the 21st-Century University: It's Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 4 views

www.educause.edu/...195370

educause university2.0

shared by Nils Peterson on 06 Feb 10 - Cached
  • change is required in two vast and interwoven domains that permeate the deep structures and operating model of the university: (1) the value created for the main customers of the university (the students); and (2) the model of production for how that value is created. First we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created.
  • Research shows that mutual exploration, group problem solving, and collective meaning-making produce better learning outcomes and understanding overall. Brown and Adler cite a study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education: "Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students' success in higher education . . . was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own."
  • Second, the web enables students to collaborate with others independent of time and geography. Finally, the web represents a new mode of production for knowledge, and that changes just about everything regarding how the "content" of college and university courses are created.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • As Seymour Papert, one of the world's foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, put it: "The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery."14 Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have — to "construct" new knowledge structures and meaning.
  • Universities need an entirely new modus operandi for how the content of higher education is created. The university needs to open up, embrace collaborative knowledge production, and break down the walls that exist among institutions of higher education and between those institutions and the rest of the world.To do so, universities require deep structural changes — and soon. More than three years ago, Charles M. Vest published "Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University" in EDUCAUSE Review. In his concluding paragraph, Vest offered a tantalizing vision: "My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university — a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure." Vest wrote that the meta-university "will speed the propagation of high-quality education and scholarship. . . . The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the Web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials, scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, teleoperation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a noble and global endeavor."17
  • Used properly, wikis are tremendously powerful tools to collaborate and co-innovate new content. Tapscott wrote the foreword for a book called We Are Smarter Than Me (2008). The book, a best-seller, was written by Barry Libert, Jon Spector, and more than 4,000 people who contributed to the book's wiki. If a global collaboration can write a book, surely one could be used to create a university course. A professor could operate a wiki with other teachers. Or a professor could use a wiki with his or her students, thereby co-innovating course content with the students themselves. Rather than simply being the recipients of the professor's knowledge, the students co-create the knowledge on their own, which has been shown to be one of the most effective methods of learning.
  • The student might enroll in the primary college in Oregon and register to take a behavioral psychology course from Stanford University and a medieval history course from Cambridge. For these students, the collective syllabi of the world form their menu for higher education. Yet the opportunity goes beyond simply mixing and matching courses. Next-generation faculty will create a context whereby students from around the world can participate in online discussions, forums, and wikis to discover, learn, and produce knowledge as networked individuals and collectively.
  • But what about credentials? As long as the universities can grant degrees, their supremacy will never be challenged." This is myopic thinking. The value of a credential and even the prestige of a university are rooted in its effectiveness as a learning institution. If these institutions are shown to be inferior to alternative learning environments, their capacity to credential will surely diminish. How much longer will, say, a Harvard undergraduate degree, taught mostly through lectures by teaching assistants in large classes, be able to compete in status with the small class size of liberal arts colleges or the superior delivery systems that harness the new models of learning?
  • As part of this, the academic journal should be disintermediated and the textbook industry eliminated. In fact, the word textbook is an oxymoron today. Content should be multimedia — not just text. Content should be networked and hyperlinked bits — not atoms. Moreover, interactive courseware — not separate "books" — should be used to present this content to students, constituting a platform for every subject, across disciplines, among institutions, and around the world. The textbook industry will never reinvent itself, however, since legacy cultures and business models die hard. It will be up to scholars and students to do this collectively.
  • Ultimately, we will need more objective measures centered on students' learning performance.
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