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Mark Swartz

Role and Function of Theory in Online Education Development and Delivery - 3 views

  • According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old, acquire meaningful knowledge, and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy and not the technology tha
  • According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old, acquire meaningful knowledge, and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy and not the technology that influences the quality of learning.
  • However, it is not the computer per se that makes students learn, but the design of the real-life models and simulations, and the students' interaction with those models and simulations. The computer is merely the vehicle that provides the processing capability and delivers the instruction to learners (Clark, 2001).
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  • Online learning allows for flexibility of access, from anywhere and usually at anytime—essentially, it allows participants to collapse time and space (Cole, 2000)—however, the learning materials must be designed properly to engage the learner and promote learning.
  • Cognitive psychology claims that learning involves the use of memory, motivation, and thinking, and that reflection plays an important part in learning.
  • The development of effective online learning materials should be based on proven and sound learning theories.
  • Early computer learning systems were designed based on a behaviorist approach to learning. The behaviorist school of thought, influenced by Thorndike (1913), Pavlov (1927), and Skinner (1974), postulates that learning is a change in observable behavior caused by external stimuli in the environment (Skinner, 1974).
  • Therefore, before any learning materials are developed, educators must, tacitly or explicitly, know the principles of learning and how students learn.
  • Constructivist theorists claim that learners interpret information and the world according to their personal reality, and that they learn by observation, processing, and interpretation, and then personalize the information into personal knowledge (Cooper, 1993; Wilson, 1997).
  • The design of online learning materials can include principles from all three. According to Ertmer and Newby (1993), the three schools of thought can in fact be used as a taxonomy for learning. Behaviorists' strategies can be used to teach the “what” (facts), cognitive strategies can be used to teach the “how” (processes and principles), and constructivist strategies can be used to teach the “why” (higher level thinking that promotes personal meaning and situated and contextual learning).
  • The behaviorist school sees the mind as a “black box,” in the sense that a response to a stimulus can be observed quantitatively, totally ignoring the effect of thought processes occurring in the mind.
  • Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so that they can set expectations and can judge for themselves whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online lesson. 2.  Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have achieved the learning outcome. Online testing or other forms of testing and assessment should be integrated into the learning sequence to check the learner's achievement level and to provide appropriate feedback. 3.  Learning materials must be sequenced appropriately to promote learning. The sequencing could take the form of simple to complex, known to unknown, and knowledge to application. 4.  Learners must be provided with feedback so that they can monitor how they are doing and take corrective action if required.
  • Cognitivists see learning as an internal process that involves memory, thinking, reflection, abstraction, motivation, and meta-cognition.
  • Online instruction must use strategies to allow learners to attend to the learning materials so that they can be transferred from the senses to the sensory store and then to working memory.
  • Online learning strategies must present the materials and use strategies to enable students to process the materials efficiently.
  • information should be organized or chunked in pieces of appropriate size to facilitate processing.
  • Use advance organizers to activate an existing cognitive structure or to provide the information to incorporate the details of the lesson (Ausubel, 1960).
  • Use pre-instructional questions to set expectations and to activate the learners' existing knowledge structure.
  • Use prerequisite test questions to activate the prerequisite knowledge structure required for learning the new materials.
  • To facilitate deep processing, learners should be asked to generate the information maps during the learning process or as a summary activity after the lesson (Bonk & Reynolds, 1997).
  • The cognitive school recognizes the importance of individual differences, and of including a variety of learning strategies in online instruction to accommodate those differences
  • The Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) (Kolb, 1984) looks at how learners perceive and process information, whereas the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1978) uses dichotomous scales to measure extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception. In the following discussion, we consider the Kolb Learning Style Inventory.
  • Attention: Capture the learners' attention at the start of the lesson and maintain it throughout the lesson. The online learning materials must include an activity at the start of the learning session to connect with the learners. Relevance: Inform learners of the importance of the lesson and how taking the lesson could benefit them. Strategies could include describing how learners will benefit from taking the lesson, and how they can use what they learn in real-life situations. This strategy helps to contextualize the learning and make it more meaningful, thereby maintaining interest throughout the learning session. Confidence: Use strategies such as designing for success and informing learners of the lesson expectations. Design for success by sequencing from simple to complex, or known to unknown, and use a competency-based approach where learners are given the opportunity to use different strategies to complete the lesson. Inform learners of the lesson outcome and provide ongoing encouragement to complete the lesson. Satisfaction: Provide feedback on performance and allow learners to apply what they learn in real-life situations. Learners like to know how they are doing, and they like to contextualize what they are learning by applying the information in real life.
  • Online strategies that facilitate the transfer of learning should be used to encourage application in different and real-life situations.
  • Constructivists see learners as being active rather than passive.
  • it is the individual learner's interpretation and processing of what is received through the senses that creates knowledge.
  • “the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action” (p. 12).
  • Learning should be an active process. Keeping learners active doing meaningful activities results in high-level processing, which facilitates the creation of personalized meaning. Asking learners to apply the information in a practical situation is an active process, and facilitates personal interpretation and relevance.
  • Learners should construct their own knowledge rather than accepting that given by the instructor.
  • Collaborative and cooperative learning should be encouraged to facilitate constructivist learning (H
  • When assigning learners for group work, membership should be based on the expertise level and learning style of individual group members, so that individual team members can benefit from one another's strengths.
  •   Learners should be given control of the learning process
  • Learners should be given time and opportunity to reflect.
  • Learning should be made meaningful for learners. The learning materials should include examples that relate to students, so that they can make sense of the information.
  • Learning should be interactive to promote higher-level learning and social presence, and to help develop personal meaning. According to Heinich et al. (2002), learning is the development of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes as the learner interacts with information and the environment. Interaction is also critical to creating a sense of presence and a sense of community for online learners, and to promoting transformational learning (Murphy & Cifuentes, 2001). Learners receive the learning materials through the technology, process the information, and then personalize and contextualize the information.
  • Figure 1-6. Components of effective online learning.
  • Behaviorist strategies can be used to teach the facts (what); cognitivist strategies to teach the principles and processes (how); and constructivist strategies to teach the real-life and personal applications and contextual learning. There is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from the information presented during the online sessions. The use of learning objects to promote flexibility and reuse of online materials to meet the needs of individual learners will become more common in the future. Online learning materials will be designed in small coherent segments, so that they can be redesigned for different learners and different contexts. Finally, online learning will be increasingly diverse to respond to different learning cultures, styles, and motivations.
  • Online instruction occurs when learners use the Web to go through the sequence of instruction, to complete the learning activities, and to achieve learning outcomes and objectives (Ally, 2002; Ritchie & Hoffman, 1997).
  •  
    From:  FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL THEORY FOR ONLINE LEARNING
Misha Miller

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

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    "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
Daniel Spielmann

Emergent Learning Model « The Heutagogic Archives - 41 views

  • Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLE)
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      What is the difference between SOLEs and PLEs?
  • The Open Context Model of Learning is a way of thinking about the relationships of learning such that a (teacher) develops both a subject understanding as well as an ability in the (learner) to take forward their learning in that subject.
  • What I hoped to do below with the ELM is to show how all learning can be complementary and, given that everyone wants to learn, how we can design learner-responsive resources, institutions and networks.
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  • three part structure of ELM
  • in our free time outside of institutions
  • comes from our own interests
  • interests of individuals
  • ocial process of learning
  • designs the pre-condition for social processes to emerge, which is the essence of informal learning
  • Informal Learning is the social processes that support self-organised learning in any context
  • structured learning opportunities without formal learning outcomes’
  • identified a process of resource creation that responded to learners interests
  • n adaptive model of resource creation
  • content creation toolkits
  • structuring of learning opportunities through resources
  • as the key process in non-formal learning
  • institutionalisation of processes surrounding learning
  • education as a system, rather than learning as a process
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      What if they aren't? What's the system's answer to that then?
  • What formal learning, or education, has really become specialised in is maintaining itself as a set of institutions and buildings.
  • Formal learning is the process of administering and quality assuring the accreditation of learning and the qualifications
  • Non-formal learning is structured learning resources without formal learning outcomes.
  • So what ELM aims to do is to replace the notion of learning as being a process of accreditation, that occurs within an institutionally constrained and hierarchical system, with a series of processes that better matches how people actually learn, following interests, collaborating and finding resources.
  • more about meeting the needs and interests of human beings
  • we should start with the social processes of everyday life, and design a system that enables learning to naturally emerge
  • a) education; is a process organized by institutions who offer qualifications based on set texts to be used by learning groups in classes to meet accreditation criteria. Teachers provide resources and broker these educational processes. b) learning; is a process of problem-solving carried out by people individually or collaboratively by finding resources and discussing the emerging issues with trusted intermediaries.
  • People + Resources = Learning
JD Pennington

Diigo in College/University - 253 views

Some questions: Is it possible to get an RSS feed of group annotated links that are no longer live pages, but are instead highlighted static pages? This way I can get a feed of a the links that ...

education diigo

Shannon Smith

Need resources to assist in creating a 21st century learner training/ professional deve... - 133 views

Thank you! This is great information! James McKee wrote: > Shannon, > > I was recently referred to this video of Michael Wesch who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. He ...

professional development 21st century learners technology

robert morris

Education Theory/Constructivism and Social Constructivism - UCD - CTAG - 56 views

  • Deep roots classical antiquity. Socrates, in dialogue with his followers, asked directed questions that led his students to realize for themselves the weaknesses in their thinking.
    • Manuel Condoleon
       
      Good link to Socrates
    • robert morris
       
      I think this is the essence of teaching and learning - asking questions, for nothing is really true.
  • Emphasis is on the collaborative nature of learning and the importance of cultural and social context.
    • robert morris
       
      I agree - context, and culture play a very important role. And this might change from corner to corner, it can change quickly, neighbours etc
  • Believed that constructivists such as Piaget had overlooked the essentially social nature of language and consequently failed to understand that learning is a collaborative process.
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  • Constructivist learning environments provide multiple representations of reality
  • Multiple representations avoid oversimplification and represent the complexity of the real world
  • Constructivist learning environments emphasize authentic tasks in a meaningful context rather than abstract instruction out of context.
  • Constructivist learning environments provide learning environments such as real-world settings or case-based learnin
  • Constructivist learning environments encourage thoughtful reflection on experience.
  • Constructivist learning environments support "collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotiation, not competition among learners for recognition.
  • Jonassen (1994)
  • There is no absolute knowledge, just our interpretation of it. The acquisition of knowledge therefore requires the individual to consider the information and - based on their past experiences, personal views, and cultural background - construct an interpretation of the information that is being presented to them.
  • Teaching styles based on this approach therefore mark a conscious effort to move from these ‘traditional, objectivist models didactic, memory-oriented transmission models’ (Cannella & Reiff, 1994) to a more student-centred approach.
  • Students ‘construct’ their own meaning by building on their previous knowledge and experience. New ideas and experiences are matched against existing knowledge, and the learner constructs new or adapted rules to make sense of the world
  • John Dewey (1933/1998) is often cited as the philosophical founder of this approach
  • while Vygotsky (1978) is the major theorist among the social constructivists.
  • Bruner (1990) and Piaget (1972) are considered the chief theorists among the cogn
  • Dewey
  • Piaget
  • John Dewey rejected the notion that schools should focus on repetitive, rote memorization & proposed a method of "directed living" – students would engage in real-world, practical workshops in which they would demonstrate their knowledge through creativity and collaboration
  • Piaget rejected the idea that learning was the passive assimilation of given knowledge. Instead, he proposed that learning is a dynamic process comprising successive stages of adaption to reality during which learners actively construct knowledge by creating and testing their own theories of the world.
  • A common misunderstanding regarding constructivism is that instructors should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This is actually confusing a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of knowing. Constructivism assumes that all knowledge is constructed from the learner’s previous knowledge, regardless of how one is taught. Thus, even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge.
  • social interaction lay at the root of good learning.
  • Bruner builds on the Socratic tradition of learning through dialogue, encouraging the learner to come to enlighten themselves through reflection
  • Careful curriculum design is essential so that one area builds upon the other. Learning must therefore be a process of discovery where learners build their own knowledge, with the active dialogue of teachers, building on their existing knowledge.
  • Social constructivism was developed by Vygotsky. He rejected the assumption made by Piaget that it was possible to separate learning from its social context.
    • robert morris
       
      On Vgotsky`s side here - I don`t think you can forget the role of "social learning", peer to peer learning and the role of social interaction.
  • The basic tenet of constructivism is that students learn by doing rather than observing.
  • By the 1980s the research of Dewey and Vygotsky had blended with Piaget's work in developmental psychology into the broad approach of constructivism
  • 1. Discovery Learning (Bruner) In discovery learning, the student is placed in problem solving situations where they are required to draw on past experiences and existing knowledge to discover facts, relationships, and new information. Students are more likely to retain knowledge attained by engaging real-world and contextualised problem-solving than by traditional transmission methods. Models that are based upon discovery learning model include: guided discovery, problem-based learning, simulation-based learning, case-based learning, and incidental learning.
Christophe Gigon

elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age - 17 views

  • Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn.
    • Rose Molter
       
      I aggree that as teachers we need to realize that technology has changed instruction and the way that our students learn and the way that we learn and instruct.
    • Orlando Gonzalez
       
      Technology has always changed the way we live. How did we respond to changes in the past? One thought is that some institutions, some businesses disappeared, while others, who took advantage of the new tech, appeared to replace the old. It will happen again and we as educators need to lead the way.
    • Maureen Curran
       
      With technology our students brains are wired differently and they can multi-task and learn in multiple virtual environments all at once. This should make us think about how we present lessons, structure learning and keep kids engaged.
    • Mike Burnett
       
      Rubbish. The idea that digital native are adept at multitasking is wrong. They may be doing many things but the quality and depth is reduced. There is a significant body of research to support this. Development of grit and determination are key attributes of successful people. Set and demand high standards. No one plays sport or an instrument because it is easy rather because they can clearly see a link between hard work and pleasure.
  • Information development was slow.
  • Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime.
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  • Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience.
  • Learning is a continual process, lasting for a lifetime.
  • Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains.
  • Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.
  • Principles of connectivism:
  • Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions. Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. Learning may reside in non-human appliances. Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill. Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities. Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.
    • Rose Molter
       
      I think it is important for us to realize the importance of connections.
  • The organization and the individual are both learning organisms.
  • Classrooms which emulate the “fuzziness”
    • Maureen Curran
       
      So what does this look like? I feel that when I attempt this, evaluators and administrators don't necessarily understand. They want a neat, quiet, well-managed, orderly classroom.
    • Maureen Curran
       
      If new learning approaches are required, then why are we still being evaluated in a linear way?
  • John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few.
  • The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.
  • Knowledge is growing exponentially
  • amount of knowledge
  • is doubling every 18 months
  • To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.”
  • (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
  • know-where
  • learning
  • a persisting change in human performance or performance potential…[which] must come about as a result of the learner’s experience and interaction with the world”
  • Learning theories are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the value of what is being learned.
  • The ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill.
  • knowledge is no longer acquired in the linear manner
  • What is the impact of chaos as a complex pattern recognition process on learning
  • An entirely new approach is needed.
  • Chaos is the breakdown of predictability, evidenced in complicated arrangements that initially defy order.
  • Meaning-making and forming connections between specialized communities are important activities.
  • Chaos, as a science, recognizes the connection of everything to everything.
  • If the underlying conditions used to make decisions change, the decision itself is no longer as correct as it was at the time it was made.
  • principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected to create an integrated whole.
  • Connections between disparate ideas and fields can create new innovations.
  • Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual
  • decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations
  • The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital.
  • Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism do not attempt to address the challenges of organizational knowledge and transference.
  • The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends on effective nurturing of information flow.
  • This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.
  • This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism.
  • Diverse teams of varying viewpoints are a critical structure for completely exploring ideas
  • An organizations ability to foster, nurture, and synthesize the impacts of varying views of information is critical to knowledge economy surviva
  • As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.
    • BalancEd Tech
       
      Access is not enough. Prior knowledge and understanding is needed. Processing is needed. Evaluation of processing and outputs is needed. Feeding that back into the "system" is needed.
  • learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity
  • learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity
Thieme Hennis

About « OERRH - 19 views

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    "The Open Educational Resources Research Hub (OER Research Hub) provides a focus for research, designed to give answers to the overall question 'What is the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices?' and identify the particular influence of openness. We do this by working in collaboration with projects across four education sectors (K12, college, higher education and informal) extending a network of research with shared methods and shared results. By the end of this research we will have evidence for what works and when, but also established methods and instruments for broader engagement in researching the impact of openness on learning. OER are not just another educational innovation. They influence policy and change practices. In previous research (OpenLearn, Bridge to Success and OLnet) we have seen changes in institutions, teacher practice and in the effectiveness of learning. We integrate research alongside action to discover and support changes in broader initiatives. Our framework provides the means to gather data and the tools to tackle barriers. The project combines: A targeted collaboration program with existing OER projects An internationalfellowship program Networking to make connections A hub for research data and OER excellence in practice The collaborations cover different sectors and issues, these include: the opening up of classroom based teaching to open content; the large-scale decision points implied by open textbooks for community colleges; the extension of technology beyond textbook through eBook and simulation; the challenge of teacher training in India; and the ways that OER can support less formal approaches to learning. By basing good practice on practical experience and research we can help tackle practical problems whilst building the evidence bank needed by all."
trisha_poole

QUT | Journal of Learning Design - 4 views

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    Designing active and authentic learning experiences The Journal of Learning Designis an educational journal which moves beyond a focus on technological applications in educational settings, to encourage more critical analysis of approaches to the design of learning environments and the extent to which they result in enhanced learning outcomes for learners. Traditional, didactic, delivery-focussed models of teaching in higher education are still common, whether in the lecture theatre or in the online environment. The Journal of Learning Designaims to raise awareness beyond such transmission models of education, to the design of more active, collaborative, authentic and engaging learning experiences. The Journal of Learning Designaims to provide a forum for critical debate and professional exchange about models, theoretical positioning and best practice in learning design.
Maureen Greenbaum

L3D Philosophy - 36 views

  • uture is not out there to be "discovered": It has to be invented and designed.
  • Learning is a process of knowledge construction, not of knowledge recording or absorption. Learning is knowledge-dependent; people use their existing knowledge to construct new knowledge. Learning is highly tuned to the situation in which it takes place. Learning needs to account for distributed cognition requiring knowledge in the head to combined with knowledge in the world. Learning is affected as much by motivational issues as by cognitive issues.
  • previous notions of a divided lifetime-education followed by work-are no longer tenable.
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  • Professional activity has become so knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral and inseparable part of "adult" work activities.
  • require educational tools and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced from meaningful and personalized activity.
  • current uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should be about in the next century
  • information technologies have been used to mechanize old ways of doing business‹rather than fundamentally rethinking the underlying work processes and promoting new ways to create artifacts and knowledge.
  • important challenge is that the ?ld basic skillsº such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, once acquired, were relevant for the duration of a human life; modern ?asic skillsº (tied to rapidly changing technologies) will change over time.
  • We need computational environments to support "new" frameworks for education such as lifelong learning, integration of working and learning, learning on demand, authentic problems, self-directed learning, information contextualized to the task at hand, (intrinsic) motivation, collaborative learning, and organizational learning.
  • Instructionist approaches are not changed by the fact that information is disseminated by an intelligent tutoring system.
  • Lifelong learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring and applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic, self-directed problems.
  • ubstantial empirical evidence that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that they are not well motivated to learn.
  • Most of what any individual "knows" today is not in her or his head, but is out in the world (e.g., in other human heads or embedded in media).
  • technology should provide ways to "say the 'right' thing at the 'right' time in the 'right' way
  • challenge of whether we can create learning environments in which learners work hard, not because they have to, but because they want to. We need to alter the perception that serious learning has to be unpleasant rather than personally meaningful, empowering, engaging, and even fun.
  • making information relevant to the task at hand, providing challenges matched to current skills, creating communities (among peers, over the net), and providing access to real practitioners and experts.
  • What "basic skills" are required in a world in which occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather than decades?
  • reduce the gap between school and workplace learning
  • How can schools (which currently rely on closed-book exams, the solving of given problems, and so forth) be changed so that learners are prepared to function in environments requiring collaboration, creativity, problem framing, and distributed cognition?
  • problem solving in the real world includes problem framing calls into question the practice of asking students to solve mostly given problems.
  • teachers should see themselves not as truth-tellers and oracles, but as coaches, facilitators, learners, and mentors engaging with learners
Maggie Tsai

iLearn Technology » Education Diigo - 2 views

  • What it is:  Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts!  The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related.  If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web.  Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.  
  • Education Diigo is an outstanding place for students to solve problems together.  Provide students with a problem and send them on a web scavenger hunt to find the answer, students can post their findings and notes about their findings on Diigo.  Students can collaborate online to solve the problem.  Education Diigo is also a great place for “teachers to highlight critical information within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.”  This feature makes Education Diigo a great place to create webquest type lessons and virtual field trips around the web.    Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselve. Education Diigo is a must for students who are learning to complete web-based research!
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.
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  • 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).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Steven Engravalle

MediaShift . How Twitter is Reinventing Collaboration Among Educators | PBS - 85 views

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    "Before the advent of Twitter, most educators I know had limited opportunities to collaborate with colleagues outside their building. Some subscribed to listservs or participated in online forums, but these outlets lacked critical mass; teachers also networked at in-person conferences and training sessions, but these isolated events didn't provide ongoing support. Enter Twitter. I've heard many educators say that Twitter is the most effective way to collaborate and that they've learned more with Twitter than they have from years of formal professional development."
Adrienne Michetti

Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC): Advancing education through v... - 2 views

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    Advancing learning through videoconferencing and other collaborative technologies. For teachers looking for collaborative projects for their classes, but also for online Professional Development.
Frederick Eberhardt

Powerful Learning: Studies Show Deep Understanding Derives from Collaborative Methods |... - 85 views

  • In essence, students must learn how to learn, while responding to endlessly changing technologies and social, economic, and global conditions.
  • students learn more deeply if they have engaged in activities that require applying classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems.
  • developing inquiring minds
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  • Studies of problem-based learning suggest that it is comparable, though not always superior, to more traditional instruction in teaching facts and information. However, this approach has been found to be better in supporting flexible problem solving, reasoning skills, and generating accurate hypotheses and coherent explanations.
  • design challenges need to be carefully planned, and they emphasized the importance of dynamic feedback.
  • When students have no prior experience with inquiry learning, they can have difficulty generating meaningful driving questions and logical arguments and may lack background knowledge to make sense of the inquiry.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Absolutely true. I discovered this when I used inquiry-based methods with my students in Qatar who were used to rote learning. They truly did not know where to start. They first needed to learn *how* to be inquisitive.
  • Requiring students to track and defend their thinking focused them on learning and connecting concepts in their design work
  • All the research arrives at the same conclusion: There are significant benefits for students who work together on learning activities.
  • groups outperform individuals on learning tasks and that individuals who work in groups do better on later individual assessments.
  • In successful group learning, teachers pay careful attention to the work process and interaction among students.
  • "It is not enough to simply tell students to work together. They must have a reason to take one another's achievement seriously.
  • She and her colleagues developed Complex Instruction, one of the best-known approaches, which uses carefully designed activities requiring diverse talents and interdependence among group members.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Interesting... worth checking out.
  • They require changes in curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices -- changes that are often new for teachers and students.
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    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
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    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
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    Vocational Education meets Research in the dynamic classroom of Linda Darling-Hammond, 2008. The students are doing the research, teaching and learning. They control their own destiny and they are taking the world by storm! They are not waiting to be taught, they are teaching each other and themselves as teams of researchers. Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Powerful learning: what we know about teaching for understanding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Jennie Snyder

Lydia Dobyns: A '21st Century' Education Is SO Last Century - 34 views

  • We can't know what the classroom will look or feel like. We do know, however, that most school districts are organized to deliver education that inhibits rather than encourages innovation. That needs to change.
  • like "Deeper Learning" as a way to convey both the acquisition of knowledge and the transference/application of knowledge along with developing skills employers find valuable -- collaboration, communications and critical thinking
  • t's time to move on and work together to develop education systems that meet students where they live and provide a relevant education to develop cognitive and non-cognitive skills
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  • Of course, schools and classroom practices need to be current -- what teacher or district leader would say that we should continue to teach the way we did back in the "good ol' days?" Can you show me a successful organization or business that prides itself on keeping things exactly the way they were?
  • We need to believe the adults delivering education services are capable of being innovative, adaptive and collaborative and welcome being accountable for student outcomes. Then we need to invest in this belief by providing both the professional development and the infrastructure to make this belief a reality for all students and all teachers.
  • Ultimately, it is about delivering core education in today's world by today's standards of success.
  • I believe this is the basic approach: Education needs to be more relevant and rigorous for students. Educational institutions need to be more engaging and empowering for teachers. A high school diploma needs to be more directly applicable and valued in the economy. These are attainable goals; all education investments should be measured against these objectives.
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    Lydia Dobyns: A '21st Century' Education Is SO Last Century http://t.co/fieSUgnj #deeperlearning #edleader21
Mr. Eason

Educational Leadership:Teaching for the 21st Century:21st Century Skills: The Challenge... - 119 views

  • the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
  • Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history
  • What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills
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  • Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.
  • some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
  • First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills
  • Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained
  • inally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks
  • Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined.
  • In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.
  • At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.
  • if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
  • The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges
  • first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training
  • Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
  • But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
  • We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.
  • education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.
  • teachers don't use them.
  • Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method
  • these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers.
  • These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.
  • constant juggling act
  • greater collaboration among teachers.
  • But where will schools find the release time for such collaboration?
  • professional development is a massive undertaking.
  • Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.
  • The first challenge is the cost.
  • measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.
  • When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.
Florence Dujardin

Looking to the future: M-learning with the iPad - 1 views

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    Might Apple's new iPad gain unprecedented traction in education, or is just another example of the over-hyping of new devices in a time of technological determinism (Postman, 2000)? This paper explores the potential affordances and limitations of the Apple iPad in the wider context of emergent mobile learning theory, and the social and economic drivers that fuel technology development. Against the background of effective teaching and learning, the functionality offered by the iPad, and its potential uses for learning, are discussed. A critical review of the way the iPad may support learning, that draws on learning theory, contemporary articles and e-learning literature, suggests that the device may offer an exciting platform for consuming and creating content in a collaborative, interactive way. However, of greater importance is that effective, evidence-driven, innovative practices, combined with a clear-sighted assessment of the advantages and limitations of any product, should take priority over the device itself.
tapiatanova

A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of High... - 98 views

  • Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
    • trisha_poole
       
      Very important - social pedagogies for authentic tasks - a key for integrating SNTs in the classroom.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      Agreed, for connectivism see also www.connectivism.ca
  • External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
    • tapiatanova
       
      yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
  • 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.
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  • back-channel conversations
  • While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
    • trisha_poole
       
      An effective use of Twitter that can be translated to classrooms.
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      All classrooms?
    • John Dorn
       
      classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
  • Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
  • A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
  • Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
  • Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
  • Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
  • The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
    • Daniel Spielmann
       
      Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
  • Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
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    A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
Nigel Coutts

Rethinking Mathematics Education - The Learner's Way - 32 views

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    What becomes clear, as you dive further into the emerging research that connects what we know about learning, mindsets, dispositions for learning and the development of mathematical understandings, is that a new approach is required. We need to move away from memorisation and rule based simplifications of mathematics and embrace a model of learning that is challenging and exciting. We can and should be emerging all our students in the beauty and power of mathematics in learning environments full of multiple representations, rich dialogue and collaborative learning. 
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