Skip to main content

Home/ Diigo In Education/ Group items tagged number sense

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Nigel Coutts

Number Talks for Number Sense - The Learner's Way - 7 views

  •  
    "Number Talks" is an approach to the teaching and learning of Number Sense. Rather than relying on the rote-memorisation of isolated number facts achieved through drills of "table-facts", Number Talks aim to build confident, number fluency, where learners recognise patterns within and between numbers and understand the properties of numbers and operations. Number Talks are a "mind on" learning task that engages students in an active learning process as they search for patterns, decompose and recompose numbers and develop a flexible understanding.
Nigel Coutts

Insights into the true power of Number Talks - The Learner's Way - 5 views

  •  
    Number Talks are a wonderful way to see where our students are with their mathematical thinking. As a part of a daily routine, a Number Talk promotes number sense and mathematical reasoning. In this post, I revisit what a Number Talk can reveal about our students' understanding of mathematics, and how they might be used to promote a fresh perspective. In addition, I examine a success criteria for Number Talks that is more expansive and recognises their true power.
Martin Burrett

Number Sense by @digicoled - 24 views

  •  
    3 activities to support developing number sense with children. All can be used across KS1 or KS2 with differentiation and difficulty all adaptable by the teacher.
Misha Miller

Using Groups Effectively: 10 Principles » Edurati Review - 50 views

  •  
    "Conversation is key . Sawyer succinctly explains this principle: "Conversation leads to flow, and flow leads to creativity." When having students work in groups, consider what will spark rich conversation. The original researcher on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found that rich conversation precedes and ignites flow more than any other activity.1 Tasks that require (or force) interaction lead to richer collaborative conceptualization. Set a clear but open-ended goal . Groups produce the richest ideas when they have a goal that will focus their interaction but also has fluid enough boundaries to allow for creativity. This is a challenge we often overlook. As teachers, we often have an idea of what a group's final product should look like (or sound like, or…). If we put students into groups to produce a predetermined outcome, we prevent creative thinking from finding an entry point. Try not announcing time limits. As teachers we often use a time limit as a "motivator" that we hope will keep group work focused. In reality, this may be a major detractor from quality group work. Deadlines, according to Sawyer, tend to impede flow and produce lower quality results. Groups produce their best work in low-pressure situations. Without a need to "keep one eye on the clock," the group's focus can be fully given to the task. Do not appoint a group "leader." In research studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an equal, listening and allowing the group's thoughts and decisions to guide the interaction. Keep it small. Groups with the minimum number of members that are needed to accomplish a task are more efficient and effective. Consider weaving together individual and group work. For additive tasks-tasks in whicha group is expectedtoproduce a list, adding one idea to another-research suggests that better results develop
Benjamin Light

The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views

  • First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      SO true!
    • Terie Engelbrecht
       
      Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
  • Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
  • Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.
  • the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
  • 1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.
  • intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
  • 2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
  • they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
  • 3. Students tend to think less deeply.
  • 4. Students may fall apart when they fail.
  • 5. Students value ability more than effort
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
  • They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
  • When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
  • It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
  • But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
  • just smart
  • luck:
  • tried hard
  • task difficulty
  • It bodes well for the future
  • the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
  • In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
  • When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
  • And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
  • The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
  • the problem with tests is not limited to their content.
  • if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
  • As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
  • Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
  • the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
  • The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
  • The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
  • But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
  • Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
  • grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
  • research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
  • Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
    • Benjamin Light
       
      I wonder how the MAP test is set?
  •  
    The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
  •  
    Excellent summary!
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
  •  
    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
  •  
    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Jim Tiffin Jr

Numberphile's Channel - YouTube - 14 views

  •  
    A channel dedicated to sharing wonderful, amazing, and sometimes surprising, characteristics of numbers. Perfect for using as a possible hook in math lessons, or as an FYI for the number-curious amongst us.
Martin Burrett

Sum Sense - addition game - 0 views

  •  
    A flash based maths game where players arrange numbers to make addition questions make sense. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
Martin Burrett

Sum Sense - subtraction game - 77 views

  •  
    A flash based maths game where players arrange numbers to make subtraction questions make sense. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/maths
taconi12

fractions idea bank - 141 views

  • Fractions are as easy as pigs
  • One way to help students to understand the basics of adding and subtracting fractions (denominators must be the same; add/subtract the numerators; DO NOT add/subtract the denominators) is to teach the students what the parts of a fraction really are: numbers and names. This also helps combat the frequently-taught but incorrect idea that a fraction and a ratio are the same. A ratio may look like a fraction, but it is not a fraction.
  • FRACTIONS ARE AS EASY AS PIGS What is 2 pigs plus 3 pigs? 5 pigs (Write as a fraction: 2/pigs + 3/pigs = 5/pigs) Notice, we do not end up saying the answer is 5 horses.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The top of a fraction is a NUMBER: 1, 2, 3, etc. The bottom of a fraction is a NAME: half, third, fourth, etc. We can add and subtract numbers. We cannot add and subtract names.
  • Fraction Blackjack
  • Ask each student their "denominator." Don't give it away. Ask each one until one finally says their name. Continue through the room... Their name is their denominator. When you practice adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators, actually say "pigs" instead the fraction name. Then say, "Instead of pigs, we are using ..." and let them answer with the appropriate denominator. It is fun when doing subtraction to say, "If we have 5 pigs and eat 3 pigs, besides a stomachache, what is left?"
  • The transition to unlike denominators is automatic. If the names are not the same, you can't add the fractions. 2/pigs + 3 horses is still 2/pigs and 3/horses (unless we discover a "common denominator" -- a common name: farm animals). Once the students know they must have a common name (denominator) in order to add or subtract, they have a reason to learn about common denominators. By the way, I always begin common denominators without worrying about the Least Common Denominator (LCD). Once they can find a common denominator (multiply the denominators), add or subtract, and then reduce, they can be led to finding "easier" denominators to work with. Students who have too much difficulty with LCD can still get the correct answer; they just have more reducing to do. Those who can find a lower common denominator have less reducing. This is a very basic rendering of "Fractions are as easy as pigs." AWP, 10/12/00 on teachers.net math board
  • Denominate means: to name Political parties nominate (name) their candidates. Religious denominations are identified by their names. The denominations of money are the names of the coins and bills.
  • One game that my students enjoy the challenge of is Blackjack 1. You need a set of fraction cards per student (or you can make them from index cards.) The same rules as Blackjack apply. Instead of trying to get to 21, they want to try and get close to 1 without going over. With this game they practice addition and comparing -- it's great. You can also make it more challenging or bring in mixed numbers with Blackjack 2 or Blackjack 3. (Blackjack 2 means to try to get as close to 2 as possible without going over.) I am not sure where to buy fraction cards. I have one set that I received when I took over a classroom. However, I have always had the students create their own sets and we used them for several games. I gave each students a set of index cards (3 1/2 X 5) and they wrote the fractions in pencil so they couldn't be seen through the cards. These are the fractions we included: all fractions with a denominator of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12. (To challenge the students you may want to use the 7, 9, and 11 denominators as well.) I also had the students include 2 0's such as 0/3 and 0/4 and two 1's such as 3/3 and 4/4. Each game required two sets of cards, so I had the students write their initials in the corner of their set so they would get a complete set back after the game.
  • games
  • I remembered some
  • other
  • Fraction War Fraction War with the fraction cards: It is just like the card game of War, but with the fraction cards instead. This game helps students to compare fractions and encourages them to use number sense in comparison before using the algorithm of making equivalent fractions. Memory Memory with the fraction cards: It is just like the traditional "Memory" game, but any equivalent fractions are considered a match so 1/2 would be a match with 2/4. This game helps them to identify equivalent fractions. You can also play this game with fraction to decimal equivalence by making a set of decimal cards too. Fraction/Decimal Bingo Fraction/Decimal Bingo: The students have game boards with decimals on them. You call out fractions and if they have the decimal equivalence they can mark it on the board. Kimberly, 5/31 and 6/1 on teachers.net math board
Mr. Eason

Educational Leadership:Reading: The Core Skill:The Challenge of Challenging Text - 131 views

  • The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina.
  • higher-order thinking in reading depends heavily on knowledge of word meanings.
  • Students' ability to comprehend a piece of text depends on the number of unfamiliar domain-specific words and new general academic terms they encounter.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • If students are to interpret the meanings such complex sentence structures convey, they need to learn how to make sense of the conventions of text—phrasing, word order, punctuation, and language.
  • Students who are aware of the patterns authors use to communicate complex information have an advantage in making sense of text.
  • maintaining understanding across a text.
  • Students' background knowledge, including developmental, experiential, and cognitive factors, influences their ability to understand the explicit and inferential qualities of a text.
  • building skills, establishing purpose, and fostering motivation.
  • even students who have basic decoding skills sometimes struggle to deploy these skills easily and accurately enough to get a purchase on challenging text. To help these students develop reading fluency, teachers should give them lots of practice with reading the same text, as well as instruction to help them develop a stronger sense of where to pause in sentences, how to group words, and how their voices should rise or fall at various junctures when reading aloud.
  • A final determinant of text difficulty, however, depends on the reader's prior knowledge.
  • pair repeated readings of the same text with questions that require the student to read closely for detail and key ideas.
  • Ongoing, solid vocabulary instruction
  • also on general academic words.
  • also explore the connections among words,
  • In contrast, in reading history and literature, readers need to be concerned with not just the causes of events, but also the human intentions behind these causes.
  • teachers should not convey so much information that it spoils the reading or enables students to participate in class without completing the reading; rather, they should let students know what learning to expect from the reading.
  • Teachers may be tempted to try to make it easier for students by avoiding difficult texts. The problem is, easier work is less likely to make readers stronger.
  • You need to create successive successes.
  • Students experience success in the company of their teacher, who combines complex texts with effective instruction.
  •  
    What makes text difficult and how to teach skills for successful comprehension.
Char Shryock

Math and our number sense | Science News for Kids - 50 views

  • Studies with teenagers show that students who excel at estimating quantities also did well on standard math achievement tests, going as far back as kindergarten.
    • Char Shryock
       
      Main Idea for further research
kathy adkisson

Developing Number Sense - 69 views

  •  
    includes links to research, videos, etc.
Martin Burrett

Sum Sense - multiplication game - 1 views

  •  
    A flash based maths game where players arrange numbers to make multipication questions make sense. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
Martin Burrett

Online Touch Typing Program - 153 views

  •  
    A good typing tutorial site with lessons, games and test for a number of international keyboard layouts. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
Wendy Arch

ollie-afe-2019: Educational Leadership: The Quest for Quality--article - 2 views

  • t also helps them assign the appropriate balance of points in relation to the importance of each target as well as the number of items for each assessed target.
    • Wendy Arch
       
      At first when looking at this test plan, I questioned how an English teacher who gives very few "tests" in favor of application essays would create a test plan. However, then I realized that each of the learning targets is really just a criterion on a rubric. Instead of having a certain number of questions, each category is worth a different weight. That makes the test plan idea make much more sense in my mind.
  • minimizing any bias that might distort estimates of student learning.
  • Will the users of the results understand them and see the connection to learning?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • From a formative point of view, decision makers at the classroom assessment level need evidence of where students are on the learning continuum toward each standard
anonymous

Emerald | The loneliness of the long distance researcher - 1 views

  • cross a threshold in their understanding
    • anonymous
       
      being part of a writing group may necessitate a change in how the person thinks about their writing or themselves as a writer
  • acilitate a speedy response from a peer audience
  • factors of a CoP or CoW is the development of trust
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • willingness to share knowledg
  • CoW break down the walls of these rooms and provide an open space or arena for collaboration?
  • virtual CoPs need to make good use of internet standard technologies and users need to possess ICT skills.
  • CoW members would need to develop a sense of belonging
  • After initial enthusiasm, where a number of co-authors introduced themselves, things fell quiet, and I myself was as guilty as anybody else in not checking the forum any more after a few weeks of inactivity
  • – the collaborative writing of the final chapter – was moved to Google docs,
  • used a blog and wiki to write a 1,500 word essay in her discipline online and in real time.
  • http://anessayevolves.blogspot.com/
  • On the wiki, topic-related material was explored and drafts were constructed
  • In the online environment contributions were overwhelmingly supportive, non-hierarchical and candid.
  • wiki as a framework to create a comprehensive online knowledge base which covers the entire veterinary curriculum.
  • As part of the wiki, students maintain a personal profile which allows them to reflect on the experience
  • COPYEDITING-L (https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A0=COPYEDITING-L)
  • How would their writing contributions – often practice based – fit in a CoW inhabited by academics writing for scholarly publications?
  • . Firstly, the need to find a medium for your CoW that works, that is widely used, and with which the would-be participants are familiar and comfortabl
  • ow is a CoW initiated? Can it be self-perpetuating or does it need leaders/mentors to drive it?
  • degree of intervention.
  •  
    Development of online writing communities, hosted by libraries. Covers emotional aspects of writing as well as technical
Celia Emmelhainz

» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky - 1 views

    • Celia Emmelhainz
       
      And we've done all of that with education!
  • An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price
  • Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning.
    • Celia Emmelhainz
       
      Which is why I think amazing lectures and lecture-notes followed by in person discussion could be powerful. Like a reading group (aka english class) but for video.
  • he very things the US News list of top colleges prizes—low average class size, ratio of staff to students—mean that any institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list.
  • hese are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.
  • a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education
  • That’s because the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it.
  • OOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies. Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible
  • n the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it.
  • Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better.
Michelle Ohanian

Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
    • tom campbell
       
      This is an important paragraph - most of this research is beyond K-12. It doesn't diminish the promise that 2.0 and future techs can assist in creating individualized learning opps - and it soundly heralds the death of "learning by lecture" - an approach that has both failed and bored generations of students!
  • More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said.
    • Cindy Dean
       
      This only makes sense. Research continues to support collaborative learning and student-centered classrooms.
    • Michelle Ohanian
       
      I agree that it needs to be more personal and not about checking off a task as complete. In 2 online courses I took this summer, the discussion board comments were mostly insipid. I wish the teacher had thought about how to facillitate the online discussion to push our thinking. Perhaps to redirect false comments into real analysis and reflection of the questions posted.
  • ...1 more annotation...
    • Michelle Ohanian
       
      This leaves out many special populations of students. My English Language Learners need exposure and modeling in how to negoticate online course. My school district discourage them from taking the summer courses. I can't think of an example in which my student knew more than I did about web2.o.
  •  
    Peer teaching is a powerful learning tool. Technology can help enlarge the number of peers.
Stan Golanka

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 49 views

  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Core discussion topic? From this, I see a few discussion issues: 1. Do we prize "mash-ups" more than original work? Who is "we" in this? 2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then the next question is: is this good or bad? 3. Finally, if the answer is "bad" to #2, what place do "mash-ups" have, and how do we help our students see the value in original work?
  • Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise;
    • Stan Golanka
       
      How do teachers help students rise above this "digital forest of mediocrity"?
  • Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      If Johnson's predictions are true, is this necessarily bad? How much of this concern is "nostalgia"? What would be lost from an academic p.o.v, and what migh be gained?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Should teachers "fight" this, or embrace it? Can summaries/sound bites ever be appropriate for academic discussions?
  • And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
  • Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Can teachers moderate this attitude? Does our (adults) use/non-use of technology help breed this attitude?
  • authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Does this ring true to educators? Are social concerns and literary conerns opposites? How does web publishing affect "literary" publishing, as opposed to "non-literary" publishing?
  • However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television,
1 - 20 of 27 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page