What does this teach us about the nature of the education beast? Yelling won't always work even if you have a big stick. On the other hand, adapting to your environment, not backing down and giving up on your students will promote your own survival.
First, we think research, broadly defined, is a valuable part of an
undergraduate education. Even at a rudimentary level, engaging in research
implicates students in the creation of knowledge. They need to understand
that knowledge isn’t an inert substance they passively receive, but is
continually created, debated, and reformulated—and they have a role to
play in that process.
we recognize that research is situated in disciplinary frameworks and needs
to be addressed in terms of distinct research traditions.
research is a complex and recursive process involving
not just finding information but framing and refining a question, perhaps
gathering primary data through field or lab work, choosing and evaluating
appropriate evidence, negotiating different viewpoints, and composing some
kind of response, all activities that are not linear but intertwined.
learning to conduct inquiry
is itself complex and recursive. These skills need to be developed throughout
a research project and throughout a student’s education.
the hybrid nature of libraries today requires students
to master both traditional and emerging information formats, but the skills
that students need to conduct effective inquiry—for example, those mentioned
in your mission statement of reading critically and reasoning analytically—are
the same whether the materials they use are in print or electronic.
Too often, traditional research paper assignments defeat
their own purpose by implying that research is not discovery, but rather
a report on what someone else has already discovered. More than once I’ve
had to talk students out of abandoning a paper topic because, to their
dismay, they find out it’s original. If they can’t find a source that says
for them exactly what they want to say—better yet, five sources—they think
they’ll get in trouble.
In reality, students
doing researched writing typically spend a huge percentage of their time
mapping out the research area before they can focus their research question.
This is perfectly legitimate, though they often feel they’re spinning wheels.
They have to do a good bit of reading before they really know what they’re
looking for.
she has students seek out both primary and secondary sources, make choices
among them, and develop some conclusions in presentations that are far
from standard literary criticism. One lab focuses on collecting and seeking
relationships among assigned literary texts and other primary sources from
the second half of the twentieth century to illuminate American society
in that time period.
For this lab, groups of students must find ten primary
sources that relate in some way to literary texts under discussion and
then—here’s the unusual bit—write three new verses of “America the Beautiful”
that use the primary sources to illuminate a vision of American society.
Instead of amber waves of grain and alabaster cities, they select images
that reformulate the form of the song to represent another vision of the
country. At the end of the course, her final essay assignment calls upon
all of the work the previous labs have done, asking students to apply the
skills they’ve practiced through the semester. While students in this course
don’t do a single, big research project, they practice skills that will
prepare them to do more sophisticated work later.
What are our assumptions about how students get research done in the humanities? How do those assumptions affect our instruction, and what really is our students' approach to research?
At a quantum scale, the motion of electrons and protons is completely and genuinely random, since it doesn’t follow a clear path of cause and effect. You basically have no idea what’s going to happen. If you can measure this somehow, than you’ve got yourself an absolutely random value.
“If you want to defeat an adversary who is trying to hack into your system, basically you need large quantities of random numbers,” Sussman said.
“…a truly random number generator will provide impenetrable encryption for communications — be they military transmissions, secure banking, or online purchasing — that underpin the modern connected world.”
The researchers used pulses of laser light, which only last a trillionth of a second, that were directed through a diamond. The light comes and goes through the diamond, however when it exists it’s changed, since it has to pass through quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space. Scientists can measure these pulses of light that emerge from the experimental set-up, measurements which are the truly random.
So you will take risks, and you will have failures. But it’s what happens afterward that is defining. A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it—will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?—because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue.
So why do I use Diigo?
I like its ability to enhance my bookmarking with highlights and sticky notes, that are retained with the page when I go back to it.
I like that you can highlight and publish easily from Diigo to you blog or an email, and a reference appears automatically along with the posting.
I like the ability to create lists on specific topics that can be shared.
I like the ability to create groups to pool resources for specific subjects. I recently joined a few Diigo groups and have had some very useful sites brought to my attention.
I like that you can access and search the bookmarks anywhere by full-text and tags.
I like to search for the most popular bookmarks on a particular subject.
I like the different ways to share and aggregate information that Diigo offers. I have set it up so that a list of my new bookmarks appears on this blog on a weekly basis but this is just one option. You can now choose to automatically
The tool bar is easy to download and makes it easy to use and aspect of Diigo whenever you are on line.
Of course you can keep things private if you choose to but that is really defeating the purpose of Diigo in the first place.
Diigo also began offering, on Sept 19th, a Diigo Education Account Facility. I haven’t investigated this yet but a post about it was put onto the SLAV Bright Ideas blog. It is worth looking at. From Diigo
‘The Diigo Educator Accounts offer a suite of features that makes it incredibly easy for teachers to get their entire class of students or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo’s powerful web annotation and social bookmarking technology.’
For an educator account, you do have to apply and fill out how/why you want to use Diigo in your school.
The kind of product I shall pick on here has the form of a game: the player
gets into situations that require an appropriate action in order to get on to
the next situation along the road to the final goal. So far, this sounds like
"tainment." The "edu" part comes from the fact that the actions are schoolish
exercises such as those little addition or multiplication sums that schools are
so fond of boring kids with. It is clear enough why people do this. Many who
want to control children (for example, the less imaginative members of the
teaching profession or parents obsessed with kids' grades) become green with
envy when they see the energy children pour into computer games. So they say to
themselves, "The kids like to play games, we want them to learn multiplication
tables, so everyone will be happy if we make games that teach multiplication."
The result is shown in a rash of ads that go like this: "Our Software Is So Much
Fun That The Kids Don't Even Know That They Are Learning" or "Our Games Make
Math Easy."
What is worst about school curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge into
little pieces. This is supposed to make learning easy, but often ends up
depriving knowledge of personal meaning and making it boring. Ask a few kids:
the reason most don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it
is utterly boring.
game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum
designers. They have to. Their livelihoods depend on millions of people being
prepared to undertake the serious amount of learning needed to master a complex
game. If their public failed to learn, they would go out of business. In the
case of curriculum designers, the situation is reversed: their business is
boosted whenever students fail to learn and schools clamor for a new curriculum!
watching kids work at mastering games confirms what I know from my own
experience: learning is essentially hard; it happens best when one is deeply
engaged in hard and challenging activities.
The preoccupation in America with "Making It Easy" is self-defeating and cause
for serious worry about the deterioration of the learning environment.
I have found that when they get the support and have access to suitable software
systems, children's enthusiasm for playing games easily gives rise to an
enthusiasm for making them, and this in turn leads to more sophisticated
thinking about all aspects of games, including those aspects that we are
discussing here. Of course, the games they can make generally lack the polish
and the complexity of those made by professional designers. But the idea that
children should draw, write stories and play music is not contradicted by the
fact that their work is not of professional quality. I would predict that within
a decade, making a computer game will be as much a part of children's culture as
any of these art forms.
I like the idea of concentrating on one thing -- let the kids know what I'm looking for during the week. Eg. on the board it could say "conference focus"
Gradual Release of Responsibility: Student learns to do heavy lifting
Ask another adult to give feedback.
defeated. Here you will find 20 ideas and techniques on how to give effective learning feedback that will leave your students with the feeling they can