Skip to main content

Home/ educators/ Group items matching "believe" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Ed Webb

What's Wrong With the American University System - Culture - The Atlantic - 6 views

  • it's awfully difficult to say, "Here's knowledge we don't need!" It sounds like book burning, doesn't it? What we'd say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done.
  • Those people were teachers, in the true sense of the word. They were just as knowledgeable about their fields as anyone, but they had playful, imaginative minds. They could go on TV—Carl Sagan could talk about science, John Kenneth Galbraith could talk about economics. They weren't dumbing down their subjects. In fact, they were actually using their brains. The more you rely on lingo—"regressive discourses," "performativity"—the less you have to really think. You can just throw terms around and say, "Look, Ma, I'm a theorist!"
  • We believe the current criteria for admissions—particularly the SAT—are just so out of whack. It's like No Child Left Behind. It really is. It's one of the biggest crimes that's ever been perpetrated. I mean, you took the SAT! It's multiple choice, a minute and quarter per question. What does it really test? It tests how good you are at taking tests! At a big university like Berkeley, where there are going to be 30,000 applications, here's what they do. On top of each folder, without even reading through it, they write your SAT score. That's the first winnowing. So the 1600s get looked at first, and then down from there.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • One of the things that I find scariest at the moment is that so many bright people have no conception at all of life for any people but those in the upper middle class and above. They live a sheltered suburban life, go to college with other sheltered suburban kids, and assume that everyone's life has been like theirs. Some years ago a relative of mine graduated from Cambridge. I asked what his classmates would be doing after graduation and he said "management consulting." These were very bright people with zero experience in the business world who had spent the last three years barely able to manage their binge drinking, let alone manage any business. I'd trust the high school grad who rose through the ranks way more than these bright young things.
  • www.highereducationquestionmark.com
Brendan Murphy

Education Week: Merit Pay Found to Have Little Effect on Achievement - 2 views

  • She anticipated that teachers might work even harder over the short term to win bonuses
    • Brendan Murphy
       
      I think that is the point that teachers already do work as hard as they can.
  • how incentives change the teaching corps through entrance and exits,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a professor of economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “The study has nothing to say about this.”
  • t remains unclear how far the findings can be extrapolated to incentives with more features, such as professional development, differentiated roles, or a new teacher-evaluation system.
    • Brendan Murphy
       
      I believe there have been studies saying if we incentivise actions that we know make people better then they will do those actions. I think it was the Time article earlier in 2010 when they reviewed the incetives for students. Giving student money for an A didn't help, but giving students money to do homework or not disrupt the class did help.
Brendan Murphy

#PassionDriven Conversations: Guest Blogger-Franki Sibberson | Angela Maiers Educational Services, Inc. - 4 views

  • “"While there is often talk about making school 'fun', the real trick is to challenge our students with work that they can deeply believe in, work that matters and gives them a chance to make an impact on the world around them
Terry Elliott

World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others | Edutopia - 0 views

  • 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.
    • Jeff Richardson
       
      Good reason for teaching dig citizenship
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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.
  • 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?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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.
  • Likewise, we must make sure that others can locate and vet us.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • 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).
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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.
  • 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?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      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."
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The process of collaboration begins with our willingness to share our work and our passions publicly -- a frontier that traditional schools have rarely crossed.
  • 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.
  • The technologies we block in their classrooms flourish in their bedrooms
  • 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.
  • 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.
  •  
    Article by Wil Richardson on Collaboration
Dave Truss

injenuity » Fire in the Kitchen! - 0 views

  • If we go back to my cooking analogy, the implications are that providing teachers with a recipe, or a general overview of Web 2.0 tools, is not going to lead to success in the classroom or with administration.  Teachers need to understand the basic foundations of these tools, what they can do, why they are important, and how to locate the appropriate tool for individual learning scenarios.  I believe this basic premise is true regardless of the technological or pedagogical proficiency of the instructor.
  • Most importantly, I want to emphasize as much as I can, that we need to not promote Web 2.0 as the future of education or learning.  In fact, it is highly likely Web 2.0 will not even exist when today’s junior high students enter college or the work force.  There are many many web-based tools that can greatly enhance learning today, but need to be used with consideration of how that application affects learning.  When I see people state learners need to use these tools because they will experience them in the work place, I just cringe. They may use them in the work place, or they may not.  If they do, employers typically want to train them on their own systems.  An employer is much more interested in an employee able to communicate proficiently, locate and critically evaluate information, and build strong internal and external customer relationships.  Employers and universities don’t care if a student knows how to use a wiki or make a youtube video.  General literacy is much more important than knowledge of specific web platforms.  Some of the skills we promote as 21st century literacies will not exist five years from now.  There are some excellent frameworks for promoting literacy and I’m excited to see them promoted more fully.
  •  
    a general overview of Web 2.0 tools, is not going to lead to success in the classroom or with administration.
Todd Suomela

AAUP: Free Higher Education - 0 views

  • Deeper loan debt means more profits for the financial sector, particularly suppliers of student loans. Executives of SLM Corporation, the giant student loan company known as Sallie Mae, have said that the rising costs of education will swell its bottom line for some time to come. Sallie Mae, as a quasi-federal agency, was supposed to make money available so that college would be affordable. But under the Clinton administration, Sallie Mae became a private corporation, and it is profiting.
  • This state of affairs is unacceptable and an affront to any reasonable notion of a fair and democratic society. We believe that the appropriate response is to articulate, and mobilize in support of, a clear vision of how a fair and just society should provide access to higher education. We propose that all academically qualified students who desire an education should be able to get one—without constraint by cost or the need to amass crippling debt
Dave Truss

Pearson Presents: Learning to Change - Practical Theory - 0 views

  • I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world -- just like they do on Facebook or MySpace -- and the kids will learn. There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world.
  • is there much of an honest discussion of just how hard implementation of these ideas actually is.
  • And the problem is that our entire structure has to change to make it easier. You can't teach 150 kids a day this way... you can't have traditional credit hours... you have to find new ways to look at your classroom. Everything from school design to teacher contracts to class size and teacher load to curriculum and assessment -- everything we do in schools -- has to be on the table for change if we are to achieve the kind of schools that video is speaking about. The only thing that shouldn't be on the table, and that the video actually hints that it should be, is the need for teachers in their day to day lives-- the adults who can make a deep profound impact in kids' lives.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Because nowhere in that talk
  • "If we just change it all up, the kids will all suddenly just start learning like crazy" when that misses several points -- 1) we still have an insanely anti-intellectual culture that is so much more powerful than schools. 2) Deep learning is still hard, and our culture is moving away from valuing things that are hard to do. 3) We still need teachers to teach kids thoughtfulness, wisdom, care, compassion, and there's an anti-teacher rhetoric that, to me, undermines that video's message.
  • We cannot pretend these ideas "save" our schools, they create different schools -- better ones, I believe -- but very, very different ones, and that's the piece I see missing.
  •  
    I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world.... There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world.
Emily Vickery

2008 Kids & Family Reading Report - 0 views

  • KIDS AGE 5-17 BELIEVE TECHNOLOGY WILL SUPPLEMENT – NOT REPLACE – BOOK READING AND SAY THEY WILL ALWAYS WANT TO READ BOOKS PRINTED ON PAPER Tweens and Teens who Participate in Online Activities Are More Likely to Read Books for Fun Daily
  •  
    From Scholastic
Nancy White

ALA TechSource | The Digitally Re-Shifted School Library: A Conversation with Christopher Harris - 0 views

  • I also believe that a very important step lies in getting library boards, school boards, and other trustees/governing bodies on board with Web 2.0 ideas as well as the changes we are discussing here.
    • Nancy White
       
      Not just the tools - but how they can trasform learning in the classroom.
  • I think school libraries will also need to work to firmly re-establish themselves as the foundation of instructional practice. The library space will become more flexible, perhaps moving toward the idea of a university-like information commons with mainly digital non-fiction and reference collections, but still possessing high-quality fiction and picture-book sections. School libraries can work to embrace new technologies and become the iPod content hubs as well as the place for books. The school librarian will also become more flexible – moving in and out of the library and classrooms as a curriculum and instructional pedagogy-consultant teacher. As education works to meet the needs of the so-called "21st-century learners," school librarians will have a key role in supporting an increased demand for information literacy and knowledge management throughout the content areas.
    • Nancy White
       
      I agree - T-L as instructional consultant will become a more important role in using the AASL Learner Standards and helping to guide teachers toward more relevant, inquiry-based instruction that integrates 21st century tools and skills.
Reggie Ryan

Collaboration and Community Constituents: An investigation into the key elements that build, nurture and sustain a collaborative learning community in networked spaces - 0 views

  • They see the broad difference between the two as being the amount of self-determination or self-direction; with cooperative learning being very much teacher-controlled and collaborative learning being learner-controlled.
  • However, experientially I believe that what distinguishes collaboration from cooperation comes down to exactly what is shared. When cooperating, it is only physical resources (objects, time, money) or intellectual resources (knowledge, expertise) that are shared. Whereas when collaborating, in addition to these shared physical and intellectual resources, are shared goals, responsibilities, values, beliefs and attitudes. Some of these intellectual resources (both cognitive and affective) may become shared through the practice of cooperation but with collaboration they are factored in from the start. From this collaborative sharing comes synergy which adds value by producing something new and unique.
  • There is another important area that needs to be addressed with collaborative learning software which is related to communication; namely knowledge construction. It has been noted by researches that threaded discourse, of the type found in Lotus Notes and the majority Web-based conferencing software, actually works against convergent thinking processes over time (Hiltz, 1986; Harassim, 1990; Eastmond, 1994). It is found that this can have "a negative effect both on the learner's efforts to synthesize ideas, and on collaborative processes which become increasingly fragmented as discussion threads and individual interests diverge." (Hewitt, 1997).
  • ...1 more annotation...
    • Reggie Ryan
       
      Commenting on threaded discussions and their inability to foster creative thinking. This leads to using wikis instead.
  •  
    Collaboration versus Cooperation in networked environment.
Wade Ren

diigo? | Alex's reflecting pool - 0 views

  • I believe there is something very powerful  in this tool. I am in the process evaluating it for instructional and professional development purposes. So far these are my thoughts: I think I can easily mark up online student work with this tool. I think online students can mark up each other’s online work with this tool. and discuss. One of the course activities is to use a rubric to evaluate an online course that the students will each be building as the main project for the course. The course review, I think, can be done using diigo. I think… not sure yet. Online students can easily create annotated bibliographies of web resource in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term. In addition, for webenhanced courses, this is an awesome, easy, slick, cool way to incorporate some very cool online enhancements to a f2f course that completely bypasses all the extra unnecessary flotsam you get with a full on CMS/LMS. you get a lot of functional features bang for the “buck” in this tool. It is a slick tool with a lot of functionality to suport interaction/collaboration, etc. When i have my university administrator’s hat on i also see great potential as a tool to facilitate and enhance community and for professional development. I have an extended staff of 50-100 online instructional designers that i could use this tool with to aggregate links and info and resources and networking. We have over 3,000 online faculty that we could use this with to support them with info and resources and networking - differenciating between the needs of new online faculty and experienced online faculty… there is potential for discipline specific resources and info for online faculty… and it goes on.
Dave Truss

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: The Five Phases of Flattening a Classroom - 0 views

  •  
    "I've outlined what I believe are the five phases I take my classes through to prepare them for independent, self-directed levels of collaboration. I suspect these ruminations will evolve."
Vicki Davis

Home - Microsoft Popfly - 0 views

  •  
    Using mashups is going to become an essential skill, I believe. Students should understand what they are.
  •  
    Microsoft Popfly lets you make mashups and build web pages without knowing code. I am to the point I don't teach the detailed web site creation coding I used to. I teach RSS, embedding, creating wikis, uploading media of all kinds, but I just don't know how important coding is any more at the basic level. I want to spend some time tinkering with this.
Ed Webb

East Stroudsburg U. Suspends Professor for Facebook Posts - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 7 views

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Feb 10 - Cached
  • On Monday the professor posted this update: "Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ..." In another comment, on January 21, she wrote: "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman, it's been that kind of day."
    • Ed Webb
       
      I'm as concerned or more so that Prof Gadsden apparently doesn't know the difference between 'discrete' and 'discreet'
  • a way of venting to family members and friends, who she mistakenly believed were the only ones who could view the postings.
Michael Walker

Three Ways to Increase the Quality of Students' Discussion Board Comments - 15 views

  • Generation of class norms by the students:
  • Having ownership of the norms that govern the course discussions will certainly affect the climate of collaborative learning in an online class by providing an impetus for students to post more constructive and meaningful messages
  • The employment of Grice’s maxims for self-evaluation:
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Quantity: make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more, or less, than is required. Quality: do not say that which you believe to be false or for which you lack evidence. Relation: be relevant. Manner: avoid ambiguity and obscurity; be clear, brief, and orderly.
  • Retrospective analysis of posted responses:
  • self-critique and reflect on their performance and comment on their perceptions concerning the quality of their responses may make them revisit their learning and, more important, initiate them into rethinking about their postings to improve their talk quality.
  •  
    Study shares good, basic ideas for comments to discussion boards and blogs.
Ed Webb

News: Who Really Failed? - Inside Higher Ed - 10 views

  • "I believe in these students. They are capable,"
  • "We are listening to the students who make excuses, and this is unfair to the other students," she said. "I think it's unfair to the students" to send a message that the way to deal with a difficult learning situation is "to complain" rather than to study harder.
  • the university's learning management system allowed superiors to review the grades on her first test in the course
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • scores on the second test were notably better than on the first one, suggesting that students were responding to the need to do more work
  • while her dean authorized her removal from teaching the course, she said, he never once sat in on her course
  • she may include "too many facts" on her tests
  • the incident "raises serious questions about violations of pedagogical freedoms."
  • many other comments about the course standards were positive, with several students specifically praising Homberger's advice that they form study groups. One student wrote: “My biggest AHA‐reaction in this course is that I need to study for this course every night to make a good grade. I must also attend class, take good notes, and have study sessions with others. Usually a little studying can get me by but not with this class which is why it is my AHA‐reaction."
  •  
    This is a travesty
Ty Hoggins

Qwiki - 10 views

  •  
    Qwiki's goal is to forever improve the way people experience information. Whether you're planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family Google TV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that's quintessentially human - via storytelling instead of search. We are the first to turn information into an experience. We believe that just because data is stored by machines doesn't mean it should be presented as a machine-readable list. Let's try harder.
  •  
    an online encyclopedia complete with sounds, beautiful images...
  •  
    Great new tool - Facebook, meets Google, meets Wikipedia
anonymous

Google Moderator This I Believe about Learning - 0 views

  •  
    Google Moderator Demonstration: Nine Beliefs about Learning Drawn from Stephanie Pace Marshall's The Power to Transform
Dennis OConnor

John Quincy Adams, Twitterer? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • They may be two centuries old, but, written with staccato-like brevity, entries from one of Adams’s diaries resemble tweets sufficiently that they began appearing Wednesday on Twitter.
  • The diary, which Adams maintained until April 1836, is a rarity among the many he kept, in that the description for each day is no more than one line long. Historians believe he used the descriptions as references to longer entries in other journals.
  • Word spread, and the society decided to tweet the entries. They average 110 to 120 characters, below the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, and there is nary an LOL or BFF among them.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The posts will link to maps that, using the latitude and longitude coordinates from his entries, pinpoint his progress across the ocean. There will also be links to the longer entries of other Adams diaries, which can be found on the society’s Web site, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/.
  • The idea appears to be working. As of Wednesday evening, only nine hours after the first entry was Twittered, the post had more than 4,800 followers, and Mr. Dibbell said the number was climbing.
  •  
    Clever use of social networking tech. The initial take on twitter was that it just broadcast mindless sort personal observations. This use turns that idea around. Interesting way to teach a bit of history. What if we started tweeting Basho & Issa, the great Japanese haiku poets? Hmmm sounds like a fun lit project doesn't it?
Ed Webb

The Wired Campus - Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe not. - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results
  • older students tend to cheat less frequently than younger students
  • If you are interested in this topic, look for the interesting edited book called Student Plagiarism in an Online World: http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7031&v=tableOfContentsI wrote a chapter called, "Expect Originality! Using Taxonomies to Structure Assignments that Support Original Work." In it I discuss the complexities of plagiarism in the context of a digital culture of sharing and suggest that it is rarely black and white. I propose a continuum with intentional academic dishonesty on one end and original work on the other, with gradations in between. Based on my own research and teaching experience, I believe the instructional design and style of teaching can either make it easy-- or very difficult-- to cheat.
« First ‹ Previous 101 - 120 of 129 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page