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Christine Marsden

Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views

  • science of attention
  • When the tape stopped, the philosopher asked how many people had counted at least a dozen basketball tosses. Hands went up all over. He then asked who had counted 13, 14, and congratulated those who'd scored the perfect 15. Then he asked, "And who saw the gorilla?"
  • I raised my hand and was surprised to discover I was the only person at my table and one of only three or four in the large room to do so
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and I believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity
  • Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them.
  • our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us
  • Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.
  • So we relented and said any student could have a free iPod—just so long as she persuaded a professor to require one for a course and came up with a learning app in that course. Does that sound sneaky? Far be it from me to say that we planned it.
  • When we gave a free iPod to every member of the entering first-year class, there were no conditions. We simply asked students to dream up learning applications for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty.
  • Pod experiment
  • In the iPod experiment, we were crowdsourcing educational innovation for a digital age. Crowdsourced thinking is very different from "credentialing," or relying on top-down expertise. If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer.
  • The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion
  • Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible
  • crucial part of our brain on the Internet
  • Students who had grown up connected digitally gravitated to ways that the iPod could be used for collective learning. They turned iPods into social media and networked their learning in ways we did not anticipate.
  • iPod experiment back into the classroom. I decided to offer a new course called "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," a title that pays homage to Daniel J. Levitin's inspiring book This Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006)
  • his class was structured to be peer-led, with student interest and student research driving the design. "Participatory learning" is one term used to describe how we can learn together from one another's skills. "Cognitive surplus" is another used in the digital world for that "more than the sum of the parts" form of collaborative thinking that happens when groups think together online.
  • "collaboration by difference." Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness.
  • I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse
  • But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college—the term paper—and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process?
  • Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers
  • They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the new modes of assessment on the Internet—like public commenting on products and services and leaderboards (peer evaluations adapted from sports sites)—
  • Almost instantly, students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure.
  • I also liked the idea of students' each having a turn at being the one giving the grades. That's not a role most students experience, even though every study of learning shows that you learn best by teaching someone else
  • and mine was simply to extend the concept of peer leadership to grading
  • That says to me that we don't believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will "count on the test."
  • If you give people the means to self-publish—whether it's a photo from their iPhone or a blog—they do so. They seem to love learning and sharing what they know with others
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    Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age By Cathy Davidson Cathy talks about attention blindness, and that it's the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, she believes that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity. Her take is different from that of many neuroscientists. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because the digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time. Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.
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    Sorry guys...didn't realize the annotations were posted too!...quite a lot!
Susan Hersey

Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age by Mitchel Resnick - 0 views

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    In the article, "Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age", Mitchel Resnick compares digital media with the creative interactive aspects of fingerpaint rather than the passive absorption of television. Like Eleanor Duckworth's article, "Helping Students Get to Where Ideas Can Find Them" he states, " that learning is an active process... people don't get ideas; they make them". To do this, he says we need to rethink how people learn with new technologies to take advantage of what these technologies can offer that older technologies could not. Learners need opportunities to become fluent with these new technology tools so that they can construct and create with them. He speaks about Computer Clubhouses as places that offer learners mentors to support them in a project based learning environment focused on the learner's interests. The creative process is the structure that uses new technology tools to actualize a significant creation. The Computer Clubhouse approach has clear connections to the two-fold approach mentioned in Duckworth 's article as well. Resnick recognizes that everything evolves; even new technologies are changing more to reflect the users of them and the purposes for them. The programable bricks sold as MindStorms is an example. He continues with stating the need to reform education with cross-curricular subject integration, grouping students by project interest rather than by age, changing the segmentation of the school day into longer blocks of time for deeper learning, as well as learning becoming not just a daylong but a lifelong experience. He concludes with the need for education to be teaching learners to be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial with strategies and new evolving technological tools to discover the knowledge they need to create what they imagine.
Kendra Spira

Mobile learning at the tipping point - 2 views

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    This article covers a wide variety of issues surrounding mobile technologies in the classroom and delves into how mobile technologies will affect society as a whole. It discusses how and why educators are gradualists at heart and why many are hesitant/resistant to introducing mobile technologies in the classroom. It also discusses how mobile technology is unstoppable and is changing the learner. "Our current educational system is obsolete and we as educators will become obsolete if we do not realize that we must embrace the changes that are upon us in how, where and why students learn." "Learners through the use of mobile learning, blended learning, and e-textbooks in socially-based, un-tethered, and digitally rich learning are being educated without us as the TEACHER." The article discusses how our job as educators is to Enable, Engage, and Empower students and defines some responsibilities for us as educators around developing the "rules" around how and when students, and therefore society, uses mobile technology. An interesting discussion of how digital citizenship is impacted by mobile technology is also contained. Interestingly enough the article also acknowledges the burdens and issues that mobile technology is placing directly on teachers both financially and with respect to their workload. Overall a thorough overview of the impact of mobile technology on the future of education. Having issues with annotations in diigo so I annotated it in Google Read & Write.
David Ogilvie

international children's digital library - Google Search - 1 views

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    Great multi-language children's web-site.
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    Looking forward to using this one. Does is have any books in Urdu?
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    I will share this with other teachers at school, this is great!
Amanda Berry

Web 2.0 Tools and Teacher Education - 1 views

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    This article is a PDF, and for some reason Diigo wouldn't let me highlight as I read. So here I am posting some of the main points: -Web 2.0 technology can be seen as "an ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of static websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving Web applications to end users. This includes applications such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, and social networking. -Example: A wiki is a Web 2.0 application that can be defined as a collaborative Web space where users can add and edit content to be published on the Internet. -Students do not have to be passive recipients of information but can become equal partners in the learning process as they collaborate and create knowledge in a social manner -mention of TPCK - content, pedagogy, and technology. There are also concrete examples of TPCK being implemented with students! Good to read (starting on Pg 228)! The examples revolve around the students creating their own Digital Flexbook, which are free, nonlinear, highly customizable and easy-to-use nature of open source textbooks. -Creation process happened along five distinct phases: awareness, analysis, collection, design, and reflection. Each of these phases was unique to the process but did not occur in isolation.
David Ogilvie

ICDL - International Children's Digital Library - 1 views

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    Great multi-lingual children's on-line library
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    Ok this one!!
Cindy Brown-Leigh

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version) - YouTube - 1 views

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    Video: The machine is using us. This video is a visual timeline that explains how the use of technology has changed since 1996. It demonstrates the difference between HTML which was designed to define the structure of a web document. When people were first creating websites, they had to understand and imput the computer code that supported the website, you had to be knowledgeable beyond what everyday users (such as myself) saw on the screen. Form and content were dependent on each other. Today, xml or digital text is used so the data can be formatted without having to know complicated code. It lets users create blogs and websites and edit wikipedia without having to understand the process behind their creations. This has made information much more accessible and changes the way people use and interact with "facts" and stories and any type of information we can think of. In other words, Web 2.0, which is really what this video is about, has redefined how we use our machines and it has become inextricably linked with the sharing of information in our world.
David Ogilvie

PBL Guide_Project-Based Learning - 1 views

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    This document is a resource produced for Instructors and Coordinators related to the National Academy Foundation. It is a comprehensive overview of PBL that highlights the difference between activities vs. projects. It clarifies what PBL is vs. other forms of learning, and identifies what needs to be in place in order to complete technology-based projects. The use of Project-based Learning in the classroom also allows for the promotion of 'best practices' for classroom instruction as identified by the Foundation. The article clearly distinguishes between projects vs. activities. Types of work are presented, along with best opportunities to use PBL. The importance of many conditions being in place to support PBL cannot be underemphasised; as these may include the classroom and school environments, the community as well as parent involvement. The article presents published evidence and research that support Project-based Learning and the inquiry process. Many of the resources presented also include links to various groups and agencies that promote PBL, including The Buck Institute and the George Lucas Educational Foundation mentioned by Peter Skillen during our course on January 18th. The article discusses good project design including six powerful features of PBL (The Six A's) that should be present in all good projects, and concludes with a page of key student scaffolds to ensure project delivery. An aseptic, fact based article, but full of good, clear examples and links.
Rebecca Mottin

7 habits of highly effective tech teachers - 0 views

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    A good visual demonstrating some similar characteristics of teachers who use technology including starting with the WHY, being adaptable and willing to embrace change.
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