Group items tagged

"The Louisiana Bicentennial Commission asked students to design a promotional plan for a Louisiana tourist attraction and use emerging technologies and social media to promote it. They could not use traditional forms of advertising." While your class may not have the backing of the Tourism Board for your city/county/state or even a statewide competition, it doesn't mean you cannot give the same assignment to your class with the same general guidelines.

To make the most out of this link, you'll want to explore beyond the first page because the entire website is a product. This website seems to stress the importance of doing cooperative learning that has much more structure than collaborative learning. In emphasizing the role structure plays in group dynamics, I am starting to see the differences between these "C" words more clearly.

Melissa, You are right, going into the links made this post even more interesting. I found value in the difference between this theory and other learning techniques being the fact that students work together. I love this! When my students work together they learn so much more. Kids have a way of explaining things to each other that is amazing. I found the link about using it in conjunction with other techniques a little vague. Maybe I should sign up for the workshop. I know I could use the information. Thanks for sharing.

This is an amazing resource! The videos and transcripts in the demonstration section are really good referents to define what specific behaviors we're looking for in terms of student collaboration. The exploration creates some guidance about how to look at and discuss the topics - I can totally imagine using this resource to work with a group of teachers on designing lessons that take advantage of cooperative groups.

This article provides a definition and description of communities of practice. A community of practice is a social way to learn and share a common practice/activity/topic. Three implications are identified for learning: learning occurs through relationships, educators need to facilitate these communities for their students, and experience and activity lead to knowledge.

As learners, we can learn most, if not best, through our interactions and relationships with others. Co-participation in groups and/or activities are viewed equally as valuable as content delivered in traditional methods. Educators should strive to get students to include themselves in communities to learn through doing.

This article concludes by focusing on the implications for educators. It does not provide solutions but rather questions and ideas to consider.

This link downloads an article by Antonio Calvani from the University of Florence. He gives his take on whether connectivism is a legitimate learning theory or just a re-branding of the traditional three. He comes to the conclusion that digital access requires that we must re-think learning theories based on tools that were un-imaginable when those said theories were created.

Calvani, A. (2009). Connectivism: new paradigm or fascinating pot-pourri?. Journal of E-learning and Knowledge Society, 4(1). This article is a little hard to swallow at times. In what seems to be a love affair for his own writing he denounces, disagrees, and argues against the text Knowing Knowledge, By Siemens. I am all for disagreeing and arguing but not at the expense of the writer's own opinion where he cannot incorporate any research that supports his position. The author argues that many are too quick to adopt "isms" as a new learning theory and web 2.0 buzzword. He seems to jump from Connectivism as an unfinished theory and being incomplete, again though with no research backing up his own opinion and claim. Just when I thought he was done speaking about anything that I could connect with, Mr. Calvani did illicit a head nod. "A wild transfer of Connectivism to school would lead to think that putting students on the net is enough to produce knowledge, thus consolidating that widespread harmful cliché according to which the more technologies we use, anyway we do it, the better it is for learning".(Calvani,) As an alternative viewpoint to Connectivism he does draw some interesting end points, albeit at the sake of providing actual research for his own defense.

This article discusses communities of practice from a business perspective, which I found interesting because CoPs truly to exist in all professions; they aren't strictly and education trend. The merit of CoPs, according to the author, is that people share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to solving problems. They discuss the various benefits of CoPs and then examine why they aren't more prevalent, concluding that though the concept has been around for centuries, it hasn't been widely accepted yet and therefore companies (and education) haven't spent a long time cultivating them and helping people learn to effectively develop them. They refer to CoPs as the new frontier and predict that they will become a more and more important part of knowledge acquisition for professionals in the future.

This is a great resource that focuses specifically on the use of communities of practice in business environments. However, the information is easily transferred to other areas of industry or academia. It addresses the fact that CoPs are different than the traditional approach of working in teams in that their success and usefulness can be difficult to measure. The author gives tips for how to evaluate the success of a CoP through the sytematic gathering of anecdotal evidence.

This is a great resource for businesses to gain insights into the use of Communities of Practice. In this article, Wenger and Snyder discuss Communities of Practice and their value for organizations.

Summary: Although the paper identifies three challenges to Connectivist Learning (self-directed, presence and critical literacies) the findings, based on Kop's research, suggest that social networked learning does work. The paper includes students responses, both positive and negative, about their learning experiences. I found that aspect of the paper fascinating.

This paper highlights current theories of learning and gives a critical analysis of connectivism ""within the context of its predecessors" in a attempt to establish whether this theory is indeed anything new to offer for teaching and learning in the digital era.

This article looks at the challenges that could be faced by using PLEs and Connectivisim in social networking. The article breaks down the challenges to Connectivist learning and then explains the research methodology behind their findings.

This Edutopia article explains what a PLN is, how they develop through thought, that PLNs are collaborative, what PLNs can do for you, and how to build a PLN. The article brings up three deterrents of PLNs for educators: PLN is a mindset, there is an overwhelming amount of techno-babble, and requires more digital literacy than a Google search. A good quote from this article is, "We must remember that lifelong learning requires effort." The article ends with a list of resources on PLNs.

Edutopia's article defines PLN and provides concrete ways for educators to establish one. While it addresses the barriers for mass adoption of PLN, the focus is to highlight the collaborative nature of PLN. It is this collaboration that allows for personal and professional growth.

This is yet another great and practical article. I especially like how the author outlined how we can each develop a PLN in 20 min/ day and gave some great suggestions for what we should do with those 20 minutes. 20 min/day feels very doable, even to someone new to PLNs or social media.

George Siemens and Stephen Downs were offering a free course to the first 2200 people to discover connectivism and study its principals. They chose a free online course format to illustrate connectivism.

I love the explanation of connectivism at the beginning. The explicitness with which they say it's not about the content but the process is refreshing and true to my experience in the classroom as well. There are many days when I know the student will never remember the content I taught but they will remember how they found it and the way that they discussed, dissected, and applied it to their selves.

I think out of all the articles I read about connectivism, this one was the easiest for me to understand and truly grasp the meaning of connectivism. The author gave clear examples of how learning happens through connectivism and that the course he was providing truly used this theory in helping the learners. This article helped me solidify how important I think schooling is for school aged children and the connections they make with their peers academically and socially. They are using this theory without even thinking about it, and in connecting with others ideas they are learning on their own without a teacher telling them facts, dates or formulas.

This article really just digs in to what connectivism is and analyzes the different ways it is implemented in post secondary online courses. The author considers the use of technology in education and makes the claim that online enrollment has increased due to the recent boom in technology. The article goes on to explain how students with technology involvement in their courses tended to outperform students taking more traditional courses.

The study problem is focused in finding out the influence of using multimedia in teaching computer & its uses in education on the female students' academic achievement, especially the female students of the Education College at King Saud University, in comparison with their colleagues who benefit from this curriculum through traditional education.

The authors of the paper postulate that traditional learning theories do not adequately cover the use of mobile technologies, particularly phones in a learning context. This paper looks at a class of native Arabic speaking students learning English as a second language through the use of mobile phones and facebook. They conclude that in this context, connectivism fully accounts for the interactions that their students naturally gravitated towards when interacting in english thus furthering their study of interest.

This is a great site to get started understanding the benefits of PLN's. In particular, I like the fact that when discussing the benefits of PLN's the author, Education in America, brings up the fact that even though teachers are surrounded by students and colleagues, teaching can be an isolating experience. I've been there, and I know that having a PLN has not only made me feel connected, but also it has helped me share ideas in a more personal way.

I liked the fact that this site recognizes that "teaching can be an isolated profession"! Very interesting article.

I have to agree with the statement in this article about teaching being an isolated profession. I felt that many times and often wished that I had the remedy. In hindsight, I think a better network would have been helpful. Most of my time spent in a traditional classroom setting (face to face instruction) was as a lone teacher in a very small school. A better PLN would have been very helpful.

Stephen Downes shares, among other ideas, the notion that the self is expressed as a network of connections (when we use the web) and that this self should be at the center of the learning experience. Slides 12 and 13 compare the traditional view of learning with the "community of networks" view of learning, with the self at the center.

Authors present communities of practice (CoP) as groups with a common desire for change, as providing opportunities for collaboration and reflection, and as catalysts for development of societal products and tools. They note that CoP transcend traditional barriers/demographics and reach groups formed by individual selection. CoP, while also focused on collaboration and dialogue as well as the development desired outcomes, are more open to sharing with the broader community than other collaborative models. Discussion of use of CoP in context of early childhood intervention.

Great article comparing traditional writing versus using a computer along with the effect of keyboarding.