Blogging the Learning Process
Just as blogs can help foster conversation among students and faculty, instructors are discovering that they can also serve a more personal role, as a tool of reflection and self-appraisal. “The blog’s biggest strength is in the development and authentication of the student voice in learning,” notes Ruth Reynard, associate professor of education and the director of the Center for Instructional Technology at Trevecca Nazarene University (TN).
Reynard uses blogs as a way to get students to reflect on their coursework–essentially by keeping an online journal in which they track their learning. As opposed to a traditional journal that is read only by the instructor, student
When used as a tool for reflection, blogs allow students to write at length about their own experiences as learners, and to read and comment on the insights posted on their classmates’ blogs. This type of public, shared self-reflection is difficult to achieve in other forms of collaborative online writing, such as discussion boards. “If the
Reynard has also found that blogs are a great tool for helping her graduate students learn to write academically. She requires her graduate students to embed hyperlinks to online sources that are influencing their thinking in their reflective blog posts.
The most popular complaints about online learning are lack of engagement, slow response time from the instructor, and a loss of the sense of community.
Anxiety is the enemy of learning. Students need to know their teacher, environment, and peers. In a virtual environment, you can only rely on your user interface to do this for you.
proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
inductive reasoning
Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
fellow edu-nauts
Lectures are banned
attending class on Apple laptops
Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
“Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
“hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
My class is learning about Diigo now. They are enjoying it so far.
Diigo lets you do more than just bookmark web pages online. For instance, if you
install the Diigo toolbar, or toolbar button, you have the ability to highlight
text and pictures in a variety of colors,
or add sticky notes to a bookmarked page.
The real bonus of using social bookmarking with your class is the ease that you can work on project based learning tasks. Teachers can share annotated bookmarks with a class to research a given topic. Students can perform their own research, and share a useful website with the class. Bookmarks can be accessed just as easily at home, as at school, and online discussions can be had over the merit of a suggested site, or its usefulness to the class project.
On a blog, the main author is on a pedestal, and blogs tend to favor posts which
reflect the self-importance of the blogger or comments which tend toward
extremism
What makes social networking for professional development so powerfu
not geographically or physically bounded
takes place 24X7
llows for asynchronous contribution
contribution by those who would never previously have written an article for a
journal or made a formal presentation
Comments on the founding of Classroom 2.0 and how teachers who were not previously participating in online social networking were more comfortable using the Classroom 2.0 site than maintaining and otherwise participating in blogs
NSDL recently underwent a reorganization into discipline subsections with intense work by degree candidates. One of them from WCU was denied credit for work and publication because there were no page numbers. The head of the project called her advisor and fixed the problem, but they rethought the model and added separate online journals for contributors. At this point, the chemistry portal is a model of how the whole thing should turn out. http://chemdl.org
It has moodle modules, a textbook, lessons, virtual labs. I will link to a google spreadsheet with all URIs in a few days. Right now my kids are putting it together. ;-) Bob
There are several ways we can use Twitter in education and here is briefly a set of some of the most important ones that you need to keep in your mind while using this social network.
Hold after class discussions
Create an online community of students
Ask questions relevant to course materials
Start backchannel talks
Create a classroom hashtag
Use it for class announcements
Get feedback from students
Share interesting online materials
Pass on information about events
Have a Twitter account for each class
Reward participation
Integrate Twitter into Syllabus
Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.
It is possible for a given Wikipedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular Wikipedia articles are more accurate than ones that receive little traffic, because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. Wikipedia articles may also suffer from issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information
Although the majority of edits attempt to improve the encyclopedia, vandalism is frequent.
If an anonymous or relatively new user changes a statistic or date by even a little bit, without justifying their edit, they are particularly likely to raise a red flag. If an individual continues to vandalize after being warned, then they may even be blocked from further editing.
keeps a full history of every change to every article
It is for this reason that readers must be particularly diligent in verifying Wikipedia against its external sources, as discussed above. It is also a good idea, if you feel uncomfortable about an article, to check its history for recent "bad-faith" edits. If you find a piece of uncorrected vandalism, you might even decide to help future users by correcting it yourself. That's a great feature of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia can be an excellent starting place for further research.
Students can compare information in Wikipedia with information in other encyclopedias or books in the library. As a general rule, contributors to Wikipedia are encouraged to cite their sources, but, of course, not all do. For the sake of verifiability, it is advisable to cite an article that has listed its sources. Most of our better articles have sections such as "References," "Sources," "Notes," "Further reading," or "External links," which generally contain such information.
The 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a selection of 5,500 articles deemed suitable for school children and has been checked and edited for this audience and protected against editing or vandalism. It contains about the equivalent content to a 20 volume encyclopaedia organized around school curriculum subjects, and is available online and as a free download for use by schools.
Educators can use Wikipedia as a way of teaching students to develop hierarchies of credibility that are essential for navigating and conducting research on the Internet.
Wikipedia's objective is to become a compendium of published knowledge about notable subjects.
Social bookmarking. When you save a Web site as a favorite
or bookmark, it's added to a list that stays within that browser. Use another
computer, and you don't have access to that bookmark. When you use a
social-bookmarking service, you save your bookmarks on that server, making them
available to you wherever you access the Web, and allowing you to share them
with others.
Ask your students to create accounts on a social-bookmarking service and to
bookmark Web sites, news articles, and other resources relevant to the course
you're teaching. Create a unique "tag" for your course and have your students
use it, so that their bookmarks can be easily found. Ask students to apply
multiple tags to the resources they bookmark, as a way to help them locate their
bookmarks quickly and to prepare them for the kind of keyword searching they'll
need to do when using library databases. If you're teaching a face-to-face or
hybrid class, be sure to spend some class time having students share their
latest finds, so they can see the connections between this work outside class
and classroom discussions.
Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them
to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook
every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the
class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's
learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and
share.
Research based assessment of the use of online forums to improve participation in class, great to read the student comments as well as the research analysis
You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results
older students tend to cheat less frequently than younger students
If you are interested in this topic, look for the interesting edited book called Student Plagiarism in an Online World: http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7031&v=tableOfContentsI wrote a chapter called, "Expect Originality! Using Taxonomies to Structure Assignments that Support Original Work." In it I discuss the complexities of plagiarism in the context of a digital culture of sharing and suggest that it is rarely black and white. I propose a continuum with intentional academic dishonesty on one end and original work on the other, with gradations in between. Based on my own research and teaching experience, I believe the instructional design and style of teaching can either make it easy-- or very difficult-- to cheat.
By all accounts, the iPad will be running current iPhone OS 3.1 which does allow you to listen to music while doing other things...the rub will be creating a presentation in Keynote for iPad without direct access to the web for photos...or having to shut down Safari to check your Twitter client, etc.
I think a big miss on this article is any discussion of content creation capabilities of netbooks and iPad. Kindle and Dead Tree books don't allow extensive content creation, the iPad has limited capabilities, but netbooks open up a whole range of creative possibility. Also, it's obvious this article is geared toward college students, not middle or high school.
E-learning is a growing trend at community colleges, according to survey results from the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) and Hewlett-Packard (HP).
E-learning is already used at 47 percent of community colleges and is expected to increase to 55 percent within two years. The survey of 578 community college faculty was conducted by Eric Liguori, an assistant professor at California State University.
Eighty-four percent of respondents believe e-learning is a valuable educational tool.
The top five benefits of e-learning identified by respondents are:
It increases access through location and time-flexible learning.
More resources and information are available to students 24/7.
Teachers can use a wide variety of tools and methods for teaching.
It is a good supplement to face-to-face curriculum.
It can lead to a richer learning experience if integrated correctly, freeing up class time for more engaging activities. This experience is often referred to as “flipping the classroom.”
When asked about the barriers to adopting online learning, faculty cited such concerns as doubt about its capability and reliability, acceptance by students and teachers, and lack of resources, such as time and technical support.
Twenty-three percent of respondents said the effectiveness of e-learning depends on the resources available, including the format and features of courses. For example, e-learning is best when teachers are adequately trained to use it, there is high-quality content and curriculum design, it’s used in conjunction with real-world situations and there is opportunity for student-teacher interactions, discussion boards and collaborative projects.
“Our survey looked at how community college faculty members are using e-learning as a cost-effective means” to increase completion rates and ensure that “students walk away with credentials that are meaningful in the workplace and that they are prepared for the careers they hope to pursue, including, for many, the start of entrepreneurial endeavors,” said NACCE President and CEO Heather Van Sickle.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
Maggie Tsai, co-founder of Diigo and her special guest, Jennifer Dorman, will demo and discuss the first phase of "Diigo Educator Account:" a suite of features that makes it easy for teachers to get their entire class of students or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo's web annotation and social bookmarking technology. For reference: Peggy Steffens - "Diigo ~ 21st Century Tool for Research, Reading, and Collaboration" http://www.amphi.com/~technology/techtalks/online/nov08/bestpract.htm
Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 5:00 PM Pacific / 8:00 PM Eastern / 1:00 AM GMT (on Friday)
If you are already using Diigo and like to learn more about the new educator features or join us to share your classroom experiences, or if you are new to Diigo, and want to learn why you might consider doing so and how to get started, come join us at on Nov. 20 evening.
Following on from the results of our online poll, #UKEdChat this week will focus on Good Behaviour Strategies used in schools. Whether in the Early Years, Primary, Secondary or beyond, the behaviour of students can positively or negatively impact the rest of the class as well as interfere with teaching and learning.
The session will release six questions (see below), so join the session on Twitter from 8pm via the #UKEdChat hash-tag.
Questions:
What student behaviours to you find to be the most annoying when teaching?
Where do you go for support when you are finding student behaviour a problem?
What has been the most positive intervention made in helping build a positive classroom behaviour?
What are the foundations in ensuring positive pupils behaviour in any classroom?
What are the most effective consequences used when dealing with disruptive behaviour?
Think back to when you were a school pupil. What was the worst behaviour you displayed?
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