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Andrew Barras

globecampus.ca ~ University lectures: Why they're not the best way to learn - 0 views

  • The lecture format is an institution at most universities and as money gets tight, it’s also is a favourite way for schools to spread thin resources. Despite its long history, University of Guelph business dean Julia Christensen Hughes argues the traditional lecture is not the best way to learn, pointing to decades of research.
  • What’s wrong with lectures?
  • When the lecture model began, the Internet didn’t exist or even the printing press. It was an oral tradition for transferring knowledge. Now information is ubiquitous. If you are curious about something you just Google it.
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  • So are you calling for the death of the lecture?
  • Not at all.
  • A lecture done well can be motivating or energizing if the faculty member is communicating their passion.
  • What are common problems?
  • We try to stuff too much in a lecture.
  • If it doesn’t work, why are universities and professors so fond of the format?
  • it is important to recognize this challenge has been going on for more than 100 years.
  • What’s the answer?
  • You have to look at the education of faculty.
  • they haven’t been taught anything about how people learn.
  • Is it realistic to expect change when universities are scrambling to balance budgets?
  • Given the cost of university, the expectations of students and their families are shifting, as well. They want to know there is a rich learning environment.
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    Article about why university lectures aren't effective
Andrew Barras

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

  • While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.
  • This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies.
  • Our physical structures were built prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple with the emerging possibilities.
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  • Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room.
  • The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
  • Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.
  • Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
  • Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.
  • Wikipedia has taught us yet another lesson, that a networked information environment allows people to work together in new ways to create information that can rival (and even surpass) the content of experts by almost any measure.
  • Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.
  • It is like continuously working with thousands of research associates around the world.
  • Unfortunately, many teachers only see the disruptive possibilities of these technologies when they find students Facebooking, texting, IMing, or shopping during class.
  • We have had our why's, how's, and what's upside-down, focusing too much on what should be learned, then how, and often forgetting the why altogether.
  • All of this vexes traditional criteria for assessment and grades. This is the next frontier as we try to transform our learning environments.
  • Content is no longer king, but many of our tools have been habitually used to measure content recall.
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    Great article about the abundance of information
chris deason

Why Do Formal Education? « Education Stormfront - 0 views

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    Why Do Formal Education? « Education Stormfront
chris deason

Why Literacy? | Mighty Writers - 0 views

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    "It's a national crisis. "Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading," an April 2010 report from Carnegie Corporation of New York (published by the Alliance for Excellent Education), states that the consequences of poor reading and writing skills not only threaten the well-being of individual Americans, but the country as a whole."
Andrew Barras

Getting Faculty Buy-in for the LMS -- Campus Technology - 0 views

  • According to Jeff King, in 10 years people are going to have a new understanding about the true value of the learning management system (LMS)--as a tool for keeping track of learning outcomes.
  • If it's so great, why do only 80 percent of the faculty at Texas Christian use the LMS? Why not all of them? King wants to do all he can to get those one in five holdouts into the fold, short of a mandate by the faculty senate. That effort involves a multi-pronged effort encompassing faculty training, excellent technical support, a pedagogical refocus on learning outcomes, and ultimately allowing students to pressure faculty to use the LMS.
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    Interesting story about ways to get staff involved using an LMS
chris deason

Action research - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

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    "Jack Whitehead's Living Theory and Jean McNiff's Action Research approaches In generating a living educational theory [http://www.actionresearch.net Living Theories; Whitehead, 1989), most recently explained in Whitehead and McNiff (2006), individuals generate explanations of their educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations. They generate the explanations from experiencing themselves as living contradictions in enquiries of the kind, 'How do I improve what I am doing?' They use action reflection cycles of expressing concerns, (saying why you are concerned in relation to values), imagining possibilities in developing action plans, acting and gathering data, evaluating the influences of action, modifying concerns, ideas and action in the light of the evaluations. The explanations include life-affirming, energy-flowing values as explanatory principles."
Andrew Barras

News: Mixing Work and Play on Facebook - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Mixable, is positioned as an e-learning environment that empowers students, and can be used as a little study room and course library inside Facebook.
  • Drawing on course registration data, Mixable invites students in virtual rooms with classmates in each of their courses. Once there, it lets them post and start comment threads about links, files, and other materials that might be relevant to the course — or not. The point is, there is no administrative authority determining what should (or must) be posted or discussed, and students are free to abstain from participating — just like on Facebook. Professors can join in, but they don’t run the show. And students can choose to make posts viewable by some classmates and not others. “In essence, the conversation is owned by the student,” says Kyle Bowen, the director of informatics at Purdue.
  • Purdue CIO Gerry McCartney says it made sense to position it as an application within Facebook. He cites the quote attributed to the bank robber Willie Sutton who, asked why he robbed banks, said "because that’s where the money is." Says McCartney: “So why go to Facebook? Because that’s where the students are.”
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  • In short, it is a learning-management system — though not the kind that is likely to supplant existing learning-management systems, its creators say. Mixable is a different breed: more an optional study group than a classroom.
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    Mixing Facebook and the SIS
Andrew Barras

Why We Switched to Sakai -- Campus Technology - 0 views

  • Pepperdine University has made the decision to adopt Sakai as the single, university-wide learning management system (LMS), effective Jan. 1, 2011.
  • because of the significant cost savings that will accrue as a result of this adoption, our decision highlights an approach for proactively dealing with the economic uncertainty arising from the "new normal" that now affects all higher education institutions.
  • Although the LMS often comprises the "third rail" of our technology services, a very large majority of our faculty and students not only support this change, but are applauding it.
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  • Five findings led to our decision:
  • Our research suggests that the potential of the LMS to transform teaching and learning is diminishing quickly. While the LMS is vitally important, in the same sense that commodity services such as e-mail, bandwidth, and disk storage are, the LMS by itself can no longer be considered strategic. Rather, it is the mash-up of different types of collaborative technologies, such as blogs, tweets, wikis, social networking sites, online media, and document sharing systems, together with the LMS, that appears to have the greater potential to transform our technology and learning practices.
  • The LMS is important, but is no longer transformative
  • Students prefer Sakai
  • As a part of our planning process, beginning in the summer of 2009, Pepperdine began running Sakai in parallel with our existing LMS.
  • Greater numbers of student respondents preferred Sakai over our current LMS when comparing the following features: announcements, assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, quizzes and tests, dropboxes, and blogs.
  • So do our faculty
  • Faculty respondents preferred Sakai to our current LMS when comparing the following features: assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, and dropboxes.
  • Our IT staff members find Sakai much easier to support
  • Overall, our IT staff finds that supporting Sakai is a remarkable improvement over our current LMS.
  • The financial savings is equivalent to the salaries of two faculty members
  • Our planning process involved the participation of hundreds of faculty and students, required presentations at dozens of meetings, and necessitated buy-in from our faculty and approval by the provost and deans. Serving as a change advocate regarding the effective delivery and use of technology, particularly in the technology and learning space, is an increasingly important role for our IT organization.
  • My words of advice for other IT leaders contemplating similar initiatives include the following:
  • Don't shy away from this type of challenge: Lead
  • Let faculty be your advocates
  • Use data to break the ice with difficult change initiatives
  • resistance to LMS change efforts is often based on closely held myths that sometimes fall apart under scrutiny. Properly used benchmarks and other measures are effective tools in any change initiative.
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    Good article about changing LMS technologies
Tom Lucas

Dropbox Tips for Teachers: Why You Must Get Dropbox! - 0 views

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    Free online file storage and sharing
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