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by Derek Bruff, November 6, 2011. The best justification of the Innovation Lab premise that I have seen. "Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."" Often our students engage in what Ken Bain, vice provost and a historian at Montclair State University, calls strategic or surface learning, instead of the deep learning experiences we want them to have. Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient-they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning. Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community. My students might not see the beauty and power of mathematics, but they can look forward to participating in a community effort to learn about math. Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

"In fact, one of the benefits of the assessment movement is that rigorous analysis of data about student engagement and learning is showing precisely what works and what doesn't. For example, data from the National Survey of Student Engagement have led to the identification of 10 "high-impact practices" that demonstrably increase student engagement, retention, and graduation rates. They are: first-year seminars and experiences; common intellectual experiences; learning communities; writing-intensive courses; collaborative assignments and projects; undergraduate research; diversity/global learning; service and community-based learning; internships; and capstone courses and projects."

By Richard DuFour, published in Educational Leadership, May 2004, V. 61, N. 8, p 6-11. Educational Leadership is a publication of ASCD. Author discusses the concepts of Professional Learning Communities, the ideas behind their core principles and how the principles guide schools' efforts to sustain the professional learning community model until it becomes inherent in a school's culture.

by Ron Tanner, November 6, 2011 This article echoes some of what Geoff ? said several years ago. When I began teaching a course called "Writing for the Web," three years ago, I pictured myself scrambling to keep up with my plugged-in, tech-savvy students. I was sure I was in over my head. So I was stunned to discover that most of the 20-year-olds I meet know very little about the Internet, and even less about how to communicate effectively online. The media present young people as the audacious pilots of a technological juggernaut. Think Napster, Twitter, Facebook. Given that the average 18-year-old spends hours each day immersed in electronic media, we oldsters tend to assume that every other teenager is the next Mark Zuckerberg. Aren't kids crazy about downloading music, swapping files, sharing links, texting, and playing video games? But video games do not create savvy users of the Internet. Video games predate the Internet and have little to do with online culture. When games are played online, the computer is no longer an open portal to the world. It is an insular system, related only to other gaming machines, like Nintendo and Xbox. The only communication that games afford is within the closed world of the game itself-who is on my team? At their worst, games divert children from other, more enriching experiences. The Internet's chief similarity to video games is that both siphon off audiences from television, which will soon reside exclusively on the Internet. As a delivery system for television, film, and games, the Internet has proved itself a premier source of entertainment. And that's all that most young people know about it. Why wouldn't we educate students in sophisticated uses of the Internet, which is commanding an increasing amount of the world's time and attention? I'm not talking about a course on "How to Understand the Internet" or an introduction to searching for legitimate research-paper sources online (although that is useful, obviously

Fascinating must read on how "attention blindness" prevents us from seeing the bigger world and how unstructured charges to students on finding academic uses of iPods they had been given as Duke first year students led to interconnected learning, innovation, etc. Excerpt: 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? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? 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. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent-not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

This research is why I was encouraging host ambassadors to upload their pictures and profiles--they can be far more successful than I at engaging their peers in Polilogue-learning prior to the Conference.

"The relationship between innovation and learning is about finding a relationship between what is familiar and what is strange. Creativity and imagination are both maps that allow us to do that. Imagination is a quality we all have, and it is an unlimited resource. The goal of education, training, and innovation spaces is to create and structure an environment where imagination can flourish. Those environments need to possess three qualities: A Space to Ask "What If" In order for imagination to flourish, there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective. The imagination has to reconcile what is imagined within the boundaries of what is actual and therefore must understand how the world would have to change in order to make what is imagined a reality. Tools and Technique to Re-Imagine Context The work of imagination only has a payoff if it can be put into practice. That means that the context needs to be shaped and articulated in a meaningful way. In the 21st century we are surrounded by tools that allow us to reshape and re-imagine context all the time. From social network sites, to video and music distribution, to web design and production, we are surrounded by opportunities not just to create new content, but literally to transform the context in which that content has meaning. A Network of Imagination Imagination can only flourish when there is a networked collection of people to share that imaginative vision, embellish it, and develop it. What we have elsewhere called "networks of imagination" are shared tools of communication and in some cases co-presence that allow groups of people to construct those imagined realities in practical and concrete ways. Today's networked technology is more than just a conduit to communicate info

Great presentation on how to use Adobe Connect for synchronous learning by K-8 students and Encarde, a way to communicate with students and parents and keep them responding to deadlines on projects without using email, that most people read late or not at all. This virtual model could also work for SLI.

With the tagline "people learning math together" and a claim to be "... the leading online resource for improving math learning, teaching, and communication since 1992." The math forum provides resources, math help, and a "puzzles & problems" tab.

By Kevin Carey in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Issue #15, Winter 2010. In this editorial, Carey (policy director of think tank Education Sector) argues that colleges are not fulfilling their mission to students: costs are rising and students are not learning (or even graduating). He argues for transparency and studies of the effectiveness of teaching and learning, and warns of the education-related lobbies that keep the rest of us in the dark about higher education.

Excellent article on creating online learning environments that embody autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Purpose has three elements: opportunity for user to contribute to training, opportunity to influence others, and opportunity to be recognized for their efforts.

Website from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. "...the social organization of the research enterprise is badly broken and a very different alternative is needed. " Part of a series on "networked improvement community" that "creates the purposeful collective action needed to solve complex educational problems."

"Communities of practice are bridges between the work being done and the diversity of social networks." Hypothesis: If you agree with this statement, facilitation is the means to building the bridge between work and learning that most organizations cannot do without outside support.

The NTSA Learning Center is an online open community with forums ranging from Elementary Science to Research in Science Education.

ALP--accelerates basic writing students through their developmental writing course and ENG 101 in one semester. Builds on strengths of earlier approaches such as mainstreaming, studios, learning communities, and bridge programs. Showing great promise.

On blip.tv. A series of websites and other technology that aid the teaching and learning process. The resources are are curated by instructional designers at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Mission is "to foster educational and social equity by empowering all people involved with schools to work collaboratively in reflective democratic communities that create and support powerful learning experiences for everyone."

MCNC Edgecombe Early College High School students are making boats out of cardboard and learning about business models and investments in the process.

From the home page, "Welcome to the knowledge and learning community committed to college completion, where you can share and collaborate across stakeholders, learn about innovative projects, and read current college completion news."