Isn't this a summary of what some of us have to go through?
It's kind of a role-conflict at the organizational level. The (manifest) function of university education has shifted away from learning toward giving credit for a set of skills. More than universities being vocational schools, it's about universities focusing on evaluation.
Are there still learning institutions, out there?
Just as the Internet has helped blow down the doors of the music industry, newspapers, and the travel-agent business, it will eventually do the same to higher education.
This may be too big a leap, for a number of people. But it has the advantage of making the problem visible. In fact, in contexts through which "information" and "education" are associated with democracy, what has been happening to newspapers is more likely to convince university people that there might be a problem than anything about the music industry. Especially if we think about the obsession with "intellectual property" which seeped into university contexts and is only being challenged now.
Sounds like a specialized version of the so-called "80-20 rule." And it's one which sounds very unconvincing for many people in the Ivory Tower. In a way, it's like talking about having "a little bit of grace."
A few more places left for the November, 2011 6-week workshop on how to administrate your Moodle. Participants will receive free ongoing support for as long as they wish during and after the workshop. The workshop costs $150: http://www.integrating-technology.org/course/view.php?id=300
I like the idea that really good teachers could be challenged to change the way they think about learning and put their talents to work finding new ways to structure learning environments that can handle the ever-expanding population of students with widely varying backgrounds.
information is not synonymous with understanding, and delivery is not synonymous with education
Learning means focusing attention on the key concepts in a topic.
Learning means making connections with a learner’s prior knowledge.
Learning means actively processing the incoming information, digesting it, working with it, summarizing, paraphrasing, applying it.
Learning also requires that the learners’ attempts receive guiding feedback.
There are ways of providing electronic feedback to this kind of active learning. Our solution was to provide examples of answers that would fit the task and let the learners compare theirs. Not totally satisfying and sometimes not totally accurate.
One is the “community of learners”
possibilities
a more elaborate version of peer feedback, where the large group of learners respond to one another’s ideas in hopes of finding some kind of consensus.
I think this probably works in an informed community of participants where there is a distribution of prior knowledge that can be drawn on.
I think a community of novices still needs the guidance of a more informed individual or group of individuals.
the essence of deep learning is in the interaction with others as we grapple with what we think we know versus what we really know. That’s the kind of online learning I’d like to see us build.
Svinicki posits what learning means, and the kinds of guided feedback necessary, especially for "deep learning . . . [through] interaction with others as we grapple with what we think we know versus what we really know" (¶8).
VocabularySpellingCity provides the following sets of correlations to standards:
U.S. Standards by State
Common Core Standards for each States' Implementation
Australian Standards by State
Canadian Standards by Province
English National Curriculum Standards
VocabularySpellingCity has a new summer word study program that allows children to sharpen academic skills as they play. These simple assignments are a daily workout for the brain, building literacy skills such as vocabulary, spelling, and writing.
Two New Free Games!
Just in time for the Holiday Season - two brand new games! Test-N-Teach (TNT) is our new spelling game and Read-A-Word is our first-ever reading game. Both games are available to everyone!