Diigo In Education

To me “sound pedagogy” isn’t a guarded gateway through which all things must pass before becoming true learning, it’s an ideal that should permeate and inform everything.

the perpetual conflict between the educational technology unit and the learning and teaching unit

The educational technologist are seen to be tech-obsessed, light on pedagogy and prone to obscure abbreviations; while the academics are stereotyped as waffley anti-technologists with a love of chalk-and-talk. Adding to this complexity, each sphere tends to be characterised by a distinct culture and common language. Often times the divisions are so clearly delineated that, despite units merging on paper, the two spheres operate largely independently of one another.

“Instead of getting an A, they make an A,” he said. “Similarly, if they make a lesser grade, it is not the teacher’s fault. Attributing the outcome of a failure to someone else is a common problem.”

if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place.

The web opens up an array of options for teaching, learning, and connecting, but we need to remember that learning should be organized around the needs of the student/learner. The cost of joining a website should not be complete loss of control over your content, and as technology advocates we need to become more aware of the ramifications of data control and data portability within networked learning environments. In short, learners deserve better than the terms offered at StudyBlue, Facebook, Ning, etc. Why should a prerequisite of social learning be the loss of control over how your work is used/reused? By promoting sites that are predicated on an intellectual land grab of learner-created content, we perpetuate the lie that this is acceptable behavior.

Get a Diigo.com account. Diigo.com is a social bookmarking tool, similar to the popular Del.icio.us service, but Diigo also centralizes various learning possibilities. The social aspect of learning is important, especially with our increasing focus on conversations that add value to what we are learning. Diigo lets you bookmark Web sites and have online conversations about them.

Although economic downturns tend to push more students to enroll in online education programs, enrollment in University Without Walls remains well shy of where it would need to be for the program to break even

The Skidmore Faculty Senate will vote at the end of February on whether to recommend to the Board of Trustees that the program be phased out. The board is expected to make the final decision when it convenes in May.