Group items tagged

Posted by Melissa Terras in her eponymous blog, April 3 2012. Terras, a scholar in the Digital Humanities in the UK first uploaded her published papers to her school's digital repository and then blogged and tweeted about the papers. She has seen great growth in the download rate for these papers, though not across the board. To wit, she's increased her prominence (and that of her papers), but some of her papers are of greater interest than others. In future, she hopes to track her citation index over time, though it's too soon to measure at present.

This nicely summarizes Terras's lessons learned: "If (social media interaction is often) then (Open access + social media = increased downloads)."

Mendeley is both a (free) reference manager and an "academic social network." Users can import papers they are using for research, highlight, annotate, and tag them. Mendeley will provide an appropriately formatted citation for the paper. Additionally, users can search the citations (and descriptions) of papers that others have contributed to Mendeley, as well as creating and joining groups with like-minded researchers.

This is the "Education Policy" topic from the larger collection of working papers published by Harvard's Kennedy School (HKS). This collection includes "works-in-progress" and the education policy papers cover a range of topics (K-12 as well as post-secondary) in the U.S. and abroad.

Paper by Reuven M. Lerner, Dept. of Learning Sciences, Northwestern University, Sharona T. Levy, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa and Uri Wilensky, Depts. of Learning Sciences and Computer Science, Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University. Paper describes underlying principles of the Modeling Commons, a community for NetLogo modelers to share and collaborate.

Design principles for fostering public sharing and collaboration: Focus on artifacts; provide multiple entry points; be forgiving; maximize findability; provide flexible permissions; keep users informed.

By Karim R. Lakhani, Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Lohse, and Jill A. Panetta, Harvard Business School Working Paper, published 2007. This paper looks at applying the open source (software) model to solve scientific problems.

By Paul G. West and Lorraine Victor, prepared for The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, May 2011. This paper appears to be an excellent resource for collections of OER, both in the US and around the world.

Published by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), March 2012. This paper argues that, based on two recent studies, "job-embedded PD can be highly effective, but only when there is a sufficient infrastructure in place to support it." NIET's own program, TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement, is such a program. Cited studies: Biancarosa, G., Bryk, A.S., & Dexter, E.R. (2010, September). Assessing the value-added effects of Literacy Collaborative professional development on student learning. The Elementary School Journal, 111(1), 7-34. -- and -- Saunders, W.M., Goldenberg, C.N., & Gallimore, R. (2009, December). Increasing achievement by focusing grade-level teams on improving classroom learning: A prospective, quasi-experimental study of Title I schools. American Educational Research Journal, 46(4), 1006-1033

While this analysis seems somewhat biased (clearly written in support of NIET's own program), many of the characteristics of their program match work that KPI has done in PD.

From About page: "InnoCentive is the open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer that enables organizations to solve their key problems by connecting them to diverse sources of innovation including employees, customers, partners, and the world's largest problem solving marketplace." Innocentive works with corporations, non profits, government, etc. *See Resources section for white paper and webinar.

By Aliya Holmes, Barbara Signer and Antoinette MacLeod, Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, vol 27 (2) , n.d. This paper looks at a 5-week distance learning course offered for K-12 in-service teachers.

By Janet Macdonald and Anne Campbell in European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning [n.d.] Open University (UK) tutors work from home. This paper describes a case study of an OU initiative where the tutors received their professional development in online communities. To date, some 2000 tutors have been thus trained.

By Elinor Mills in the InSecurity Complex column of CNET News, posted July 15, 2010. Mills presents a variety of password storage solutions, from the "old school" (on a scrap of paper in your wallet) to desktop, web-based, and USB-based solutions. There are links to many of the key players, as well as to earlier CNET articles.

By Andy Lapham, Faculty of the Arts, Thames Valley University, London, UK. This paper from the Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on e-Learning includes literature review and presents a cognitive analysis of tagging.

By Carl May in Institute of Health and Society, July 7, 2006. This paper presents a normalization model that enables analysis of conditions necessary to support the introduction of complex interventions.

By CC (Community College) Times, published April 21 2010. This article reports on Bill Gates's visit to Foothill College to observe the Math My Way program. From the article, "Math My Way groups cohorts of students who have similar math skill levels." Students then work in small groups, and one-on-one with instructors, as well as using both computer and paper drills and games.

By Debbie Garber, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, vol 5 (2), August 2004. This paper goes beyond technology to look at "the social process on which an online learning community if it is to flourish and be useful." Also stresses "importance of nurturing the community's health, and the natural life cycle of a virtual community...."

By Richard Schwier, Proceedings of EMEDIA 2009, Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education, June 2009. Schwier works out of the Virtual Learning Communities Research Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan, and this paper looks at some of their key findings.

Pronounced "haystack," this is the website for the Humanties, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. The site has all sorts of interesting features, including online groups (by topic) with open membership, notices of a wide variety of calls for papers and interesting blog posts and events. One of HASTAC's founders is Cathy Davidson (follow davidson tag for more). Membership is free and open to all.

Article by Peter Chepya (professor of instructional design at Post University in CT) in 2005 on E-Personality: The Fusion of IT and Pedagogical Technique, how to create the 'there" on line. The excerpt below speaks to the transformation that occurs with Jam newcomers as they move from text-based exchange to passionate dialogue online. We need to figure out how to convey this in a Jam video. Excerpt: My online teaching relies on the "human element," expressed in features such as companionability and presence. The cumulative effect creates an atmosphere I call "presence learning" as opposed to the outdated misnomer "distance learning" often used with Internet courses. Presence learning creates a palpable connection between the instructor and the student, engaging students in "reality," not "virtual reality"--another outdated aphorism. Once while delivering a paper at a conference of online educators, I was challenged by a participant who thought my online course (being projected onto a screen) was "heavy on the text." Upon learning that the questioner's field was American literature, I asked hi if he thought Moby Dick was "heavy on the text." If the work is compelling, the medium disappears and the experience becomes actual. ...We came to accept the telegraph as "real" communication, as we then did the telephone, radio, recorded music, television, and cinema. We forgot the medium in each case.

"Unlike most traditional academic conferences, sessions at an unconference don't consist of one or three or five people delivering papers to an audience. Instead, they might feature project demonstrations, discussions, creative work sessions, or other formats that build on the knowledge and expertise of whoever attends. For the Texas THATCamp (and I think this is fairly typical at others), participants posted session ideas beforehand on the website, followed by a 45-minute scheduling process as THATCamp began. Topic headings generated by those initial session ideas were posted on the walls of a large meeting room, and participants circulated through the space to meet up with others interested in similar topics. After some productive chaos (which admittedly tested my structure- and schedule-loving personality a bit) the group developed a schedule of sessions that represented not only a variety of interests but also the desire to cluster certain topics into tracks. Like any conference, I frequently wanted to be in two places at once - which I see as one marker of the event's success."

By Thomas Bailey & Sung-Woo Cho and published by the Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, October 2010. This Issue Brief was presented as part of President Obama's White House Summit on Community College (October 2010) and looks at the integral role effective developmental education will play in improving community college completion rates.