Group items tagged

""Describe your preparation for and participation during discussion: note-taking, responding to e-mailed discussion questions and prompts, office hours, addressing or raising questions during discussion. How would you like your own participation to change, develop, or continue?"" I encounter a version of this "you didn't inform us" from students and teachers who can't find items in the top two topic blocks of their community. I don't know how to redesign the community to achieve more clarity. Maybe the answer lies in having "open office hours online" to offer digestible (i.e., not too long) explicit orientations to the community.

Paper by Garrison and Anderson on online college student discussions that are part of formal education settings but could be adapted for bridged formal-informal learning situations such as Innovation Lab.

"I'm teaching a writing class this summer, and I recently stumbled upon an effective method for encouraging students to discuss each others' drafts. It involves their thumbs. Allow me to explain . . ."

Slideshare net presentation on Social Media Explained Visually, a 2 minute look at how social media enables people to create, share, discuss, repurpose, ...

Organization aimed at "building, strengthening, and empowering communities committed to college access and success..."

National College Access Network listserv

Member benefits include NCAN Daily E-Briefing and Discussion Listserv, Advisor Discussion Listserv, access to webinars, and more.

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.

By Amanda Ripley in The Atlantic, January/February 2010. This article looks at effective teaching in several ways: it profiles several highly effective teachers, and also discusses over ten years of data about effective teaching that the organization Teach for America is preparing to release.

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!

How a professor of media studies uses Facebook in and outside of class to engage his students in discussions, share resources, brainstorming, understanding privacy settings and how Facebook may be used constructively for our different selves depending on the groups we interact with, etc.

Blog on high school economics and 4th grade collaboration on Lawn Boy book that focuses on economic principles that guide a young boy's lawn mowing practice into a money maker. I like that because it takes sophisticated principles and presents them within an interesting story that grabs 4th graders and high school students. Then through a collaboration online between the two age groups, they discuss the book together through a series of Skype interviews/interactions.

"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 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.

Presented by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, this page discusses such shared characteristics as core principles, college-wide commitment to the EC partnership, and adopting strategies that are research-based.

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