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maureen greenbaum

The Future of Learning: An Interview with Alfred Bork - 82 views

  • nteraction should be frequent
  • as in human conversation
  • active environment maintains student interest for a long period of time, even with difficult learning material.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • the computer, keeping detailed records on student performance and using these records in making decisions about what is next to be presented to the student.
  • In our traditional learning environments, some students learn and some do not. It is this second group of students that we want to help.
  • problem of almost all modern learning is the lecture, a noninteractive way of learning
  • , on a moment-to-moment basis, just what the student knows and just what learning problems are occurring
  • It begins immediately with a question, with no preceding text.
  • experience the joy of discovery.
  • tutorial approach to learning makes it possible for everyone to learn.
  • critical factor is that we can react to individual student problems
  • key concept for structuring highly interactive learning experiences is the Benjamin Bloom concept of mastery learning.
  • goal is for everyone to learn everything to the mastery level, grades will no longer be useful
  • A student who has not learned in one way probably needs a different approach, rather than another go-round with the material that was not previously successful in assisting learning.
  • In such an environment, learning and evaluation are no longer separate activities but are part of the same process, intimately blended. So the student is not conscious of taking tests, and we avoid the problems of cheating.
  • highly interactive learning is intrinsically motivating. Motivation is particularly important in a distance-learning environment, since none of the "threats" of the classroom, such as low grades, are available.
  • mastery-based computer segment could also offer human contact. Small groups could work together, either locally or remotely via electronic communication.
  • existing authoring systems. Since they were, and still are, mostly directed toward supplying information, these were inadequate for creating highly interactive software.
  • Bertrand Ibrahim at the University of Geneva,
  • omputer stores much of the information as the students progress through the material.
  • Teaching faculty, in the sense that we know them today, may cease to exist, except for in smaller, advanced courses. But their skills and experiences will be important in the design of learning modules.
  • High costs of development can lead to low costs per student, if many students use the material.
  • $30,000 per student-hour of high-quality learning material
  • highly effective highly interactive distance-learning courses would have a large potential market, making them much cheaper per student than current courses, and if well developed, they will be much superior for almost all students
  • The typical approach is to give some released time to faculty and to give limited support for programming and media production. It is unlikely, almost impossible, that good learning material will be developed this way.
  • Universities are too stuck in their current ways of doing things to be able to compete with well-developed material from "outside." Most university faculty and administrators do not appreciate the current problems of learning and so are not prepared for these future directions.
Kate Pok

iAnnotate PDF Vs. GoodReader for reading and annotating - MacRumors Forums - 118 views

    • Kate Pok
       
      Goodreader or iannotate - I currently have iAnnotate.
  • IMHO iAnnotate is far superior. There are a couple of areas GoodReader excels (like in the automatic page fit, having two up, etc), but by and large iAnnotate does everything else more effectively. These are just a few reasons why it suits my workflow better than GoodReader: - Tabs. It speaks for itself, but having several documents open with the ability to flick between them is useful. - Sharing features. The ability to email or paste to clipboard a summary of all notes/highlights/annotations you've made is just brilliant, and makes light work of noting the most poignant areas in an academic article. - Annotation tools. They are far quicker to access than in GoodReader. If you want to highlight something in iAnnotate, you just tap the icon in the toolbar and drag it over the text (as much as you want – you can scroll through the document even with the highlight tool selected) before confirming your selection. You can set as many different colour highlighters up as you want. By contrast, in GoodReader you must tap-and-hold, drag the handles to select a continuous chunk of text, then tap highlight from the popup. If you want to change the colour of the highlight you need to tap, choose colour, confirm your choice; using multiple colours is just too time consuming. I prefer the behaviour of notes in iAnnotate too, for reviewing and revision purposes. Tapping every note in GoodReader is tiresome.
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).
  •  
    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
icemanmelb

FAQ - Diigo help - 44 views

shared by icemanmelb on 11 Jan 10 - Cached
sabirshakir liked it
  • effectively utilize the vast array of information that resides on the internet and who are capable of processing the information collaboratively
  • superior to traditional classroom teaching alone
    • tariqy
       
      Important quote
  • skills
    • Sheri Stahler
       
      How to write comments directly on web pages and how to use easyblogs
    • toni holmberg
       
      Is there a way to disallow students from joining other groups. My students are young and I would rather have them just interacting with me and each other.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Toni, you should set them up in the teacher console without a full profile.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • finding,
  • organizing
  • synthesizing
  • presenting information
  • facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves. 
  • Teacher can setup separate accounts - one is for their professional / personal usage, and one to be used for instruction with their students.  That way, there is less concern of mingling these.
  •  
    The more I work with this tool the more I love it. This tells you how to set up student accounts even if your students don't have email.
  •  
    Diigo's page for using it in education.
  •  
    Sounds like a requirement
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.
  •  
    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
  •  
    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
  •  
    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.
meghankelly492

(PDF) A Systematic Review of Treatments for Music Performance Anxiety - 2 views

  • Four other studies (three of which are dissertations) assessed behavioral treatments forMPA on music students. Grishman (1989) and Mansberger (1988) used standard musclerelaxation techniques, Wardle (1969) compared insight/relaxation and systematic desensi-tisation techniques, and Deen (1999) used awareness and breathing techniques
  • A systematic review of all available treatment studies for music performance anxiety was undertaken.
  • reported that 24% of musicians frequently suffered stage fright, defined in this study as themost severe form of MPA, 13% experienced acute anxiety and 17% experienceddepression.
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  • 59% of musicians in symphony orchestras reported performance anxiety severe enough toimpair their professional and/or personal functioning.
  • A recent study indicated that MPA is not limited to orchestralmusicians, showing that opera chorus artists are also prone to high levels of performanceanxiety
  • However, since not allperformers suffer the same degree of MPA, or indeed report the same levels of occupationalstress, individual differences in a range of psychological characteristics are likely to accountfor variations in the degree to which musicians experience symptoms
  • A large number of treatment modalities (e.g., behavioral, cognitive, pharmacological andcomplementary) has been developed for music performance anxiety (MPA)
  • However, areview of this literature indicates that the field is still in its infancy with respect to theconceptual and theoretical formulations of the nature of MPA and its empiricalinvestigation.
  • Anxiety may be triggered by conscious,rational concerns or by cues that trigger, unconsciously, earlier anxiety producingexperiences or somatic sensations.
  • These findings suggest that multi-modal interventions are needed toaddress the multiple difficulties experienced by test anxious individuals.
  • with some focusing on behavioral change, some on cognitivechange, others on reduction of physiological symptoms through the use of pharmacotherapy,and some on idiosyncratic formulations
  • For drug studies, the keywords were beta-blocker [Beta blockers block the effect ofadrenaline (the hormone norepinephrine) on the body’s beta receptors. This slows downthe nerve impulses that travel through the heart. As a result, the resting heart rate is lower,the heart does not have to work as hard and requires less blood and oxygen
  • Brodsky (1996) and Nube´(1991) were most useful.
  • The interventionsassessed included systematic desensitization, progressive muscle relaxation, awareness andbreathing and behavioural rehearsal
  • In summary, behavioral treatments do appear to be at least minimally effective in thetreatment of MPA, although the heterogeneity of the treatment approaches employedmakes it difficult to isolate consistent evidence for the superiority of any one type ofbehavioral intervention
  • Two studies (see Tables II and IV) assessed the therapeutic effect of cognitive techniquesalone on MPA.
  • A dissertation by Patston (1996) reported a comparison of cognitive (e.g.positive self-talk, etc.) and physiological strategies in the treatment of MPA. No significantimprovements on vocal and visual manifestations of performance anxiety were found foreither treatment or control groups. However, the sample consisted of only 17 operastudents who were not specifically selected on the basis of their MPA severity, and theintervention was conducted by the author, a singer and teacher, who had no training inpsychology.
  • Three studies (see Table III) assessed the therapeutic effect of cognitive-behavioralstrategies on MPA. Harris (1987), Roland (1993), and Kendrick et al. (1982) all reportedthat standard CBT techniques were effective in the treatment of MPA in studentsspecifically selected for study because of the severity of their MPA.
  • Harris (1987) and Roland(1993) reported that CBT led to reductions in state anxiety as measured by the STAI,although Kendrick et al. (1982) failed to find a significant difference between treatment andcontrol groups on this measure.
  • The evidence for improvements in MPA following CBT is quite consistent, althoughfurther studies with larger samples are needed to confirm this evidence.
  • Beta-blockers have become increasingly popular among performers in recent years. Forexample, Lockwood (1989), in a survey of 2,122 orchestral musicians, found that 27% usedpropranolol to manage their anxiety prior to a performance; 19% of this group used thedrug on a daily basis.
  • Nube´ (1991) identified nine studies examining the effects of various beta-blockers(Atenolol, Metopolol, Nadolol, Oxprenolol, Propranolol, Pindolol) on MPA.
  • The findings regarding the effects of beta blockers on otheroutcome measures were less conclusive.
  • A rigorous definition of MPA is needed to advance treatment. However, defining MPA as asocial anxiety (social phobia) using criteria set out in DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000) as theinclusion criteria may be too restrictive, particularly if the musician presenting for treatmentexperiences MPA as a focal anxiety (ie does not meet other criteria for social anxiety).
  • Few ofthe intervention studies reviewed acknowledged that performers need a certain amount ofarousal or anxiety to maximise their performance.
  • None of the studies could be pooled in a meta-analysis primarily because too fewprovided sufficient data to calculate effect sizes, use of diverse subject groups andtreatments, duration and intensity of treatment, and use of disparate outcome measures
  • In conclusion, the literature on treatment approaches for MPA is fragmented, incon-sistent, and methodologically weak. These limitations make it difficult to reach any firmconclusions about the effectiveness of the various treatment approaches reviewed. Forsignificant progress to be made, future research will require a clear definition of MPA,consistency and strength in methodology, and the development of robust and appropriateoutcome measures.
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