Group items tagged

an account of using diigo vs. evernote

Thanks Leah, I have been playing with diigo this week and am sure that eventually it will become a "go to" site, as Evernote currently is for me. Unfortunately, I am not tech savvy, such as the people who write these commentaries, rather I am like the "old dog" who has mastered "one bone". Having become familiar with my "bone" no matter how chewed-up it is, and how old it is... it is comfortable. In this lies perhaps my biggest challenge with technology - I am not comfortable jumping from one platform to the next and transforming my "work" into new platforms at what appears to be constant speed! Is this type of classroom rendering perhaps more appropriate for younger generations??

I think it might be just like buying a car: Most will get you where you want to go, but you have to take it for a test drive to feel if it is right for you. I've not used Evernote, but now I will certainly kick the tires on it to see how it compares. When designing sound for theatrical productions, I often use Audacity, a free program, over more sophisticated programs such as Amadeus and Logic, because it is quicker to move through the interface. It cannot do as much as the other programs, but the comfort level is higher with the "get you where you need to go" mantra. And then I use the more sophisticated programs as necessary.

Matthew Guterl writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the alternative of open curriculum. It is a nice opinion piece in our discussion of Heutagogy.

I really like this piece, David, thanks for sharing. The conclusion asks some pretty good questions: Parents need to think about the interior work of the curriculum and understand that what is learned in pursuit of a college degree is more than the sum of courses taken. And faculty members and administrators need to be asking themselves: What sort of student emerges from our curricula? A student who can follow a map, or a student who can make one? Because we sorely need more of the latter. And, as much as I love teaching at this place, they shouldn't all come from Brown.

Resources for Web 2.0 technologies and composition pedagogy From Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects By Kristin L. Arola, Jennifer Sheppard, & Cheryl Ball

This article investigates the gap between instructional training and technology training when it comes to second language teachers.

Broken up into skills: speaking, writing, working collaboratively, this site identifies tools to assist in the learning process

Good to help learners "hear their writing" . English Text To Speech Online: English, Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, German, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese voices.

Yes, yes, I know, the title suggests that this webtext is only relevant for a few people, perhaps only Jane and myself. However, if you browse this webtext - it is indeed not an article, but like all work published in Kairos, a multimedia artifact or well, a webtext - you will find a lot of important insights on student-professor-staff interactions in an online environment. The webtext highlights, for example, the importance of the lack of physical cues in an online class, a facet of online instruction that may necessitate a higher awareness of the effect our formulations, terms, and even typed characters can have in any written communication such as blog posts, emails, chats, and messages. We thus learn quite a bit about communicative techniques and etiquette in an online class (and in a virtual environment more generally). Another webtext in the same Kairos issue reflects upon teaching graduate students how to teach online: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.1/praxis/bourelle-et-al/pedagogycourse.html. Leah, this webtext might be interesting for you - but it should be interesting for others as well because it also addresses questions about assignments and exercises in online classes. By the way, Kairos is an important open-access online journal that has existed since 1996. It publishes scholarship that "examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media." ("The Kairos Style Guide", n.d.)

It seems to me that instructional design and course design models presume that every student in the class has to pursue the same objectives and should be taught in the same fashion; yet, as universal design ideas suggest, we may need to occasionally use different assignments and allow different learning approaches. And maybe, to take this idea a step further, learning in general should be personalized and course designs become more flexible. At least that's what some educational pioneers from Silicon Valley have declared. What follows is the introductory passage of a very recent New Yorker article, an article which is ultimately quite skeptical of the new models and of the role of technology in the classroom: "Seen from the outside, AltSchool Brooklyn, a private school that opened in Brooklyn Heights last fall, does not look like a traditional educational establishment. There is no playground attached, no crossing guard at the street corner, and no crowd of children blocking the sidewalk in the morning."

As the article goes on to highlight, the founders of the company AltSchool intend to break with traditional educational models. In the older model, the founder Max Ventilla asserts, the teacher is "an artisanal lesson planner on the one hand and disciplinary babysitter on the other hand." Not just that, the teacher also creates, following Common Core for example, standards and objectives for his or her class; one teacher quoted in the article claims that "by looking for standards to pull everyone up we are forgetting to address what the individual needs." This is where the AltSchool idea intervenes. This new school's approach "acknowledges and adapts to the differences among students: their abilities, their interests, their cultural backgrounds." How so? By monitoring students and collecting as much data about each student as possible, thus personalizing plans and projects for students (sound familiar? Ventilla worked for Google before founding AltSchool). While I think the idea of personalized learning is compelling, I also read with interest about the mixed results of AltSchool and other similar institutions - plus, the schools seem to be very utilitarian, focusing on what the student purportedly needs to succeed in the workplace (languages are supposedly rather useless, for example, because everyone will carry an electronic, speaking dictionary in 20 years from now). On a slightly different - and final - note, I was also intrigued by a quote from Daniel Willingham, education scholar at UV: "The most common thing I hear is that when you adopt technology you have to write twice the lesson plans. You have the one you use with the technology, and you have the backup one you use when the technology doesn't work that day." Congratulations! If you read this sentence, you have survived the challenge of reading this epic post.