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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.

Absolutely fabulous video (6 minutes) on Connected Learning and how we must change the outcomes based focus of education to awaken the curiosity of each learner and engage with them in learning how to learn given the distribution of resources, ideas, experts, etc. while preserving the learners' autonomy, access to diversity, openness to others for learning, interactivity with similar and diverse co-learners, etc. Film by Nic Askew at Soulbiographies.com interviewing McArthur Foundation person and two professors of education

"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."

The Learning Network Blog on NYTimes.com. For two years, students, teachers, parents and others have posted and commented on this blog. Daily lessons for subjects across curriculum based on Times content are offered. Suggestions are given for using the The Learning Network posts in the classroom. The Learning Network is accessible without a digital subscription, as are the articles linked from Learning Network posts.

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.)

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

Published in Spectrum > Mobile Learning, Libraries, And Technologies, March 12, 2009. "MLE-Moodle is an out-of-the-box mobile Learning (mLearning) system, designed for mobile phones." With MCNC in particular, we've discussed how it might be helpful to be able to engage students/faculty/administrators in Polilogue via mobile phone in addition to computer.

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 basis for using digital media for learning on campus and off. The introduction to a book.

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.

very interesting article on Forsyth County schools in GA (I just drove through there the other day and had no idea of their innovativeness!) encouraging students to bring their own technology to classrooms to use in project and inquiry based learning. Amazing!

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.

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.

The National Staff Development Council is now known as Learning Forward. This organization believes not just in professional development, but also in educators' "effective professional learning" as the bridge to student achievement.

The truth about how to create sustainable conditions for powerful teaching and learning is bred in the bones of schools rather than the brains of researchers or policy-makers. Motivated by this belief, new and restructuring schools that aim to incorporate the CES Common Principles forge connections with other Coalition schools. They rely on each other for support, mutual learning, and perspective.

Facebook usage in academic work is going up! Excerpt: "The idea of students wanting professors to integrate more technology use into the classroom was a common takeaway from the survey. After e-mail, learning-management systems and e-textbooks were the two technologies that students wanted instructors to use more frequently, according to the survey. Learning-management systems are used by 73 percent of students, and e-books or e-textbooks by 57 percent."

Curt Bonk is an amazing instructional design professor at Indiana University. Here he has 27 videos (about 10 minutes long each) covering everything from discussion forums (I learned a lot!) to Blended Learning to wiki uses and applications. All free!

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.

W.R. Drexler video (5 minutes) on 21st century students--3 days a week in class, two days online. Teacher is a facilitator of students building their personal learning network to learn and assess information, gather ideas, organize them, make meaning of them, and share with others.