We must also expand our ability to think critically about the deluge of information now being produced by millions of amateur authors without traditional editors and researchers as gatekeepers. In fact, we need to rely on trusted members of our personal networks to help sift through the sea of stuff, locating and sharing with us the most relevant, interesting, useful bits. And we have to work together to organize it all, as long-held taxonomies
of knowledge give way to a highly personalized information
environment.
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NoodleTools : MLA / APA Bibliography Composer, Notecards, Free Research Tools - 2 views
www.noodletools.com/index.php
all_teachers apa-style bibliography citation copyright curriculum edu_newapp la-style note-taking notecards research research_tools study_skills web_2.0_tools writing_process
shared by Danielle Klaus on 09 Jul 08
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NoodleTools provides innovative software that teaches students and supports teachers and librarians throughout the entire research process. *Search intelligently *Assess the quality of results *Record, organize and synthesize information using online notecards *Format your bibliography in MLA or APA style
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Thinking Blocks - Model and Solve Math Word Problems - 14 views
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Thinking Blocks is a suite of learning tools designed to help students solve math word problems accurately and efficiently. Using brightly colored blocks, students model mathematical relationships and identify known and unknown quantities. The model provides students with a powerful image that organizes information and simplifies the problem solving process. By modeling increasingly complex word problems, students develop strong reasoning skills which will facilitate the transition from arithmetic to algebra.
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COMMUNIA Facebook about page - 1 views
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"COMMUNIA Non-Profit Organization Basic Information Founded 1 September 2007 Company Overview COMMUNIA ("commons" in Latin) is the European thematic network on the digital public domain funded by the European Union in the context of the eContentPlus programme. The project will end on 28 February 2011. Mission Building a network of organisations that shall become the single European point of reference for high-level policy discussion and strategic action: on all issues related to the public domain in the digital environment and on related topics, Products Three major conferences and eight thematic workshops on the many aspects of the digital public domain. Website http://communia-project.eu"
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World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others | Edutopia - 0 views
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What Will suggests here is rising complexity, but for this to succeed we don't need to fight our genetic heritage. Put yourself on the Serengeti plains, a hunter-gatherer searching for food. You are thinking critically about a deluge of data coming through your senses (modern folk discount this idea, but any time in jobs that require observation in the 'wild' (farming comes to mind) will disabuse you rather quickly that the natural world is providing a clear channel.) You are not only relying upon your own 'amateur' abilities but those of your family and extended family to filter the noise of the world to get to the signal. This tribe is the original collaborative model and if we do not try to push too hard against this still controlling 'mean gene' then we will as a matter of course become a nation of collaborative learning tribes.
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Collaboration in these times requires our students to be able to seek out and connect with learning partners, in the process perhaps navigating cultures, time zones, and technologies. It requires that they have a vetting process for those they come into contact with: Who is this person? What are her passions? What are her credentials? What can I learn from her?
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Aye, aye, captain. This is the classic problem of identity and authenticity. Can I trust this person on all the levels that are important for this particular collaboration? A hidden assumption here is that students have a passion themselves to learn something from these learning partners. What will be doing in this collaboration nation to value the ebb and flow of these learners' interests? How will we handle the idiosyncratic needs of the child who one moment wants to be J.K.Rowling and the next Madonna. Or both? What are the unintended consequences of creating an truly collaborative nation? Do we know? Would this be a 'worse' world for the corporations who seek our dollars and our workers? Probably. It might subvert the corporation while at the same moment create a new body of corporate cooperation. Isn't it pretty to think so.
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technical know-how is not enough. We must also be adept at negotiating, planning, and nurturing the conversation with others we may know little about -- not to mention maintaining a healthy balance between our face-to-face and virtual lives (another dance for which kids sorely need coaching).
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All of these skills are technical know how. We differentiate between hard and soft skills when we should be showing how they are all of a piece. I am so far from being an adequate coach on all of these matters it appalls me. I feel like the teacher who is one day ahead of his students and fears any question that skips ahead to chapters I have not read yet.
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The Collaboration Age comes with challenges that often cause concern and fear. How do we manage our digital footprints, or our identities, in a world where we are a Google search away from both partners and predators? What are the ethics of co-creation when the nuances of copyright and intellectual property become grayer each day? When connecting and publishing are so easy, and so much of what we see is amateurish and inane, how do we ensure that what we create with others is of high quality?
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Partners and predators? OK, let's not in any way go down this road. This is the road our mainstream media has trod to our great disadvantage as citizens. These are not co-equal. Human brains are not naturally probablistic computer. We read about a single instance of internet predation and we equate it with all the instances of non-predation. We all have zero tolerance policies against guns in the school, yet our chances of being injured by those guns are fewer than a lightning strike. We cannot ever have this collaborative universe if we insist on a zero probability of predation. That is why, for good and ill, schools will never cross that frontier. It is in our genes. "Better safe than sorry" vs. "Risks may be our safeties in disguise."
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Students are growing networks without us, writing Harry Potter narratives together at FanFiction.net, or trading skateboarding videos on YouTube. At school, we disconnect them not only from the technology but also from their passion and those who share it.
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The complexities of editing information online cannot be sequestered and taught in a six-week unit. This has to be the way we do our work each day.
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The process of collaboration begins with our willingness to share our work and our passions publicly -- a frontier that traditional schools have rarely crossed.
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Look no further than Wikipedia to see the potential; say what you will of its veracity, no one can deny that it represents the incredible potential of working with others online for a common purpose.
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Anyone with a passion for something can connect to others with that same passion -- and begin to co-create and colearn the same way many of our students already do.
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I believe that is what educators must do now. We must engage with these new technologies and their potential to expand our own understanding and methods in this vastly different landscape. We must know for ourselves how to create, grow, and navigate these collaborative spaces in safe, effective, and ethical ways. And we must be able to model those shifts for our students and counsel them effectively when they run across problems with these tools.
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ITFORUM Paper 1 - 0 views
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In fact, it is difficult, if not impossible, to isolate the effects of the affordances of technologies.
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Rather than using technologies by educational communications specialists to constrain the learners' learning processes through prescribed communications and interactions, the technologies are taken away from the specialists and given to the learner to use as media for representing and expressing what they know.
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Cognitive tools actively engage learners in creation of knowledge that reflects their comprehension and conception of the information rather than focusing on the presentation of objective knowledge.
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Constructivist models of instruction strive to create environments where learners actively participate in the environment in ways that are intended to help them construct their own knowledge, rather than having the teacher interpret the world and insure that students understand the world as they have told them.
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Computers support reflective thinking, Norman contends, when they enable users to compose new knowledge by adding new representations, modifying old ones, and comparing the two. Those are the purposes of cognitive tools.
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In other words, when students work WITH computer technology, instead of being controlled by it, they enhance the capabilities of the computer, and the computer enhances their thinking and learning. The results of an intellectual partnership with the computer is that the whole of learning becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
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Learners should be responsible for recognizing and judging patterns of information and then organizing it, while the computer system should perform calculations, store, and retrieve information.
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Digital Web Magazine - The Principles of Design - 11 views
www.digital-web.com/...principles_of_design
deign bestpractices usability reference web webdesign principles balance art
shared by Adrienne Michetti on 01 Feb 10
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concepts that can that make any project stronger without interfering in the more technical considerations later on
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tend to have a greater sense of visual tension. Asymmetrical balance is also known as informal balance.
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Gestalt theories of visual perception and psychology, specifically those dealing with how the human brain organizes visual information into categories, or groups
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Closure is the idea that the brain tends to fill in missing information when it perceives an object is missing some of its pieces.
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Continuance is the idea that once you begin looking in one direction, you will continue to do so until something more significant catches your attention
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Items of similar size, shape and color tend to be grouped together by the brain, and a semantic relationship between the items is formed.
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In addition, items in close proximity to or aligned with one another tend to be grouped in a similar way.
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Contrast addresses the notion of dynamic tensionÔthe degree of conflict that exists within a given design between the visual elements in the composition.
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The objects in the environment represent the positive space, and the environment itself is the negative space.
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The rule of thirds is a compositional tool that makes use of the notion that the most interesting compositions are those in which the primary element is off center.
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The visual center of any page is just slightly above and to the right of the actual (mathematical) center.
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The principles of design are the guiding truths of our profession, the basic concepts of balance, rhythm, proportion, dominance and unity. Successful use of these core ideas insures a solid foundation upon which any design can thrive.
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KONY 2012: Is the Viral Campaign a Scam? - 4 views
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Many of the negative critiques have been targeted at Invisible Children’s practices as an organization, not whether Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is a war criminal.
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“In response to this explosion of interest about the Kony 2012 film, there have been hundreds of thousands of comments in support of the arrest of Joseph Kony and the work of Invisible Children.
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This is called slacktivism - the self-deluding idea that by sharing, liking, or retweeting something you are helping out.
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Gristmill: How to talk to a climate change skeptic - 0 views
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The Knowledge Sharing Place - LiveBinders - 12 views
livebinders.com
reference education literature science collaboration web2.0 portfolio sharing organization productivity techintegrator digitalcitizenship
shared by Ted Sakshaug on 09 Mar 10
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Multiple Intelligences - Implications - 13 views
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Have the person analyze how different people speak - what inflections they use, how they vary the pitch of their voice, e
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WikiCards - Information - 23 views
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Many Schools Teach Engineering in Early Grades - NYTimes.com - 6 views
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“Just giving kids an engineering problem to solve doesn’t mean it will lead to learning,” said Janine Remillard, an associate education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is not opposed, but believes that good teaching is essential to making any curriculum work well.
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I think it goes deeper than leading to "learning" in the sense of curriculum. It's more that students are learning to learn. Far too often we assume that students actually know how to learn. We know how to plan learning experiences and disseminate information, but how often do we stop to think whether or not a student has developed the skill to learn?
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Good point, Brian. I think more than anything the iterative process builds the skills of a learner that are applicable far beyond whether they learn "engineering." Process matters.
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“You’re not really learning what I would call engineering fundamentals,” he said of such programs. “You’re really learning about engineering.”
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Betrayed - Why Public Education Is Failing: Why administrators don't listen - 21 views
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In April and May, I asked district administrators for the research and data that support their continued use of reform curricula. Despite several formal requests for public information and a friendly phone call, I’ve received no data and no research. I was told that supporting research was tossed with yesterday’s meatloaf. No, I was actually told it wasn’t kept on hand. (The meatloaf is still there.) I don’t know why the research wouldn’t be kept because administrators keep referring to it (as in “research shows” and “according to the research”). Instead, I was given the names of three organizations and two types of tests, and I was invited to the central office to look over their “great number of materials on the subject of effective instruction in mathematics.” Technically, this is not “data” or “research.” Technically, I think this is called “skating.”
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The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online - NYTimes.com - 10 views
www.nytimes.com/...09privacy.html
facebook socialmedia socialnetworking socialresponsibility presentation parents
shared by Dave Truss on 10 May 10
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Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.
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Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister’s, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister’s lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn’t want the show’s producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ,” Ms. Liu said. Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University, said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.
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He has learned to live out loud mostly by trial and error and has come up with his own theory: concentric layers of sharing.
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Like my "Worlds Collide" post: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/google-buzz-and-george-costanza-worlds-collide/ but I still think there is too much of a perception that you can have 'private' or 'hidden' digital lives (which you can't) rather than thinking about it as being appropriate to your audience, and always "appropriate" and thoughtful about your image.
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The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.
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more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry. They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves.
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In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves.
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QlipBoard - Voice anything. Share anywhere. - 21 views
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Multimedia online note taking tool. Students can capture screen images, make audio recordings for notes, or write text notes to accompany drawings. These different media can then be organized into videos! I envision it being similar to Evernote with more interaction capabilities and with the great addition of being able to create videos of the information gathered. I like this tool!
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Progressive Education - 0 views
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As Jim Nehring at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell observed, “Progressive schools are the legacy of a long and proud tradition of thoughtful school practice stretching back for centuries” — including hands-on learning, multiage classrooms, and mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”
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Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good learners but also good people
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Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children — separate selves at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning. Interdependence counts at least as much as independence
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Progressive schools are characterized by what I like to call a “working with” rather than a “doing to” model.
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A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the classroom; indeed, students are helped to locate themselves in widening circles of care that extend beyond self, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group, and beyond their own coun
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“What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to continue reading, thinking, and questioning?”
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Alfred North Whitehead declared long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.” Facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines
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students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been
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Each student is unique, so a single set of policies, expectations, or assignments would be as counterproductive as it was disrespectful.)
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what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct their own understanding of ideas.
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A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy
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A truly impressive collection of research has demonstrated that when students are able to spend more time thinking about ideas than memorizing facts and practicing skills — and when they are invited to help direct their own learning — they are not only more likely to enjoy what they’re doing but to do it better.
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Regardless of one’s values, in other words, this approach can be recommended purely on the basis of its effectiveness. And if your criteria are more ambitious — long-term retention of what’s been taught, the capacity to understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems, a desire to continue learning — the relative benefits of progressive education are even greater.[5]
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Students in elementary and middle school did better in science when their teaching was “centered on projects in which they took a high degree of initiative.
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For starters, they tell me, progressive education is not only less familiar but also much harder to do, and especially to do well. It asks a lot more of the students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to play the game in traditional classrooms — often succeeding by conventional standards without doing much real thinking. It’s also much more demanding of teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want their students to “make sense of biology or literature” as opposed to “simply memoriz[ing] the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.”[12] But progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to facilitate learning. The belief that anyone who knows enough math can teach it is a corollary of the belief that learning is a process of passive absorption —a view that cognitive science has decisively debunked.
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apophenia: spectacle at Web2.0 Expo... from my perspective - 11 views
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only learned about the Twitter feed shortly before my talk. I didn't know whether or not it was filtered. I also didn't get to see the talks by the previous speakers so I didn't know anything about what was going up on the screen.
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Had I known about the Twitter stream, I would've given a more pop-y talk that would've bored anyone who has heard me speak before and provided maybe 3-4 nuggets of information for folks to chew on. It would've been funny and quotable but it wouldn't have been content-wise memorable.
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But why why why spend thousands of dollars to publicly objectify women just because you can? This is the part that makes me angry.
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Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education - 1 views
wwwdev.ncte.org/...fairusemedialiteracy
medialiteracy bestpractices copyright fairuse 5 principles 2008 digitalcitizenship
shared by Caroline Bucky-Beaver on 12 Nov 08
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Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances -- especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question -- as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.
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guide identifies five principles that represent the media literacy education community’s current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials
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code of best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights. Instead, it describes how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations.
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Media literacy education distinctively features the analytical attitude that teachers and learners, working together, adopt toward the media objects they study. The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that: All media messages are constructed.Each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction.Media messages are produced for particular purposes.All media messages contain embedded values and points of view.People use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages.Media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process. Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one’s own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.
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Lack of clarity reduces learning and limits the ability to use digital tools. Some educators close their classroom doors and hide what they fear is infringement; others hyper-comply with imagined rules that are far stricter than the law requires, limiting the effectiveness of their teaching and their students’ learning.
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Educators and learners in media literacy often make uses of copyrighted materials that stand far outside the marketplace, for instance, in the classroom, at a conference, or within a school-wide or district-wide festival. Such uses, especially when they occur within a restricted-access network, do enjoy certain copyright advantages.
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Law provides copyright protection to creative works in order to foster the creation of culture. Its best known feature is protection of owners’ rights. But copying, quoting, and generally re-using existing cultural material can be, under some circumstances, a critically important part of generating new culture.
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In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions: Did the unlicensed use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original? Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use? If the answers to these two questions are "yes," a court is likely to find a use fair. Because that is true, such a use is unlikely to be challenged in the first place.
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Both key questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner. Courts have told us that copyright owners aren’t entitled to an absolute monopoly over transformative uses of their works.
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Another consideration underlies and influences the way in which these questions are analyzed: whether the user acted reasonably and in good faith, in light of general practice in his or her particular field.
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Through its five principles, this code of best practices identifies five sets of current practices in the use of copyrighted materials in media literacy education to which the doctrine of fair use clearly applies. These practices are associated with K–12 education, higher education, and in classes given by nonprofit organizations. When students or educators use copyrighted materials in their own creative work outside of an educational context, they can rely on fair use guidelines created by other creator groups, including documentary filmmakers and online video producers.
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The principles concern the unlicensed fair use of copyrighted materials for education, not the way those materials were acquired.
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where a use is fair, it is irrelevant whether the source of the content in question was a recorded over-the-air broadcast, a teacher’s personal copy of a newspaper or a DVD, or a rented or borrowed piece of media. Labels on commercial media products proclaiming that they are “licensed for home [or private or educational or noncommercial] use only” do not affect in any way the educator’s ability to make fair use of the contents—in fact, such legends have no legal effect whatsoever. (If a teacher is using materials subject to a license agreement negotiated by the school or school system, however, she may bebound by the terms of that license.)
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fairness of a use depends, in part, on whether the user tookmore than was needed to accomplish his or her legitimate purpose.
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In materials they wish to share, curriculum developers should beespecially careful to choose illustrations from copyrighted media that are necessaryto meet the educational objectives of the lesson, using only what furthers theeducational goal or purpose for which it is being made.
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Students should be able to understand and demonstrate, in a mannerappropriate to their developmental level, how their use of a copyrighted workrepurposes or transforms the original. For example, students may use copyrightedmusic for a variety of purposes, but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simplyto establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songssimply to exploit their appeal and popularity.
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If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existingmedia content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wideaudiences under the doctrine of fair use.
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Educators and learners in media literacy often make uses of copyrighted works outside the marketplace, for instance in the classroom, a conference, or within a school-wide or district-wide festival. When sharing is confined to a delimited network, such uses are more likely to receive special consideration under the fair use doctrine.
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Especially in situations where students wish to share their work more broadly (by distributing it to the public, for example, or including it as part of a personal portfolio), educators should take the opportunity to model the real-world permissions process, with explicit emphasis not only on how that process works, but also on how it affects media making.
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This code of best practices, by contrast, is shaped by educators for educators and the learners they serve, with the help of legal advisors. As an important first step in reclaiming their fair use rights, educators should employ this document to inform their own practices in the classroom and beyond
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MYTH: Fair Use Is Just for Critiques, Commentaries, or Parodies. Truth: Transformativeness, a key value in fair use law, can involve modifying material or putting material in a new context, or both. Fair use applies to a wide variety of purposes, not just critical ones. Using an appropriate excerpt from copyrighted material to illustrate a key idea in the course of teaching is likely to be a fair use, for example. Indeed, the Copyright Act itself makes it clear that educational uses will often be considered fair because they add important pedagogical value to referenced media objects.
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So if work is going to be shared widely, it is good to be able to rely on transformativeness. As the cases show, a transformative new work can be highly commercial in intent and effect and qualify under the fair use doctrine.