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Vanessa Vaile

Getting Students to Do the Reading: Pre-Class Quizzes on Wordpress - ProfHacker.com - 1 views

  • learning as a two-step process: First there’s the transfer of information (from a source of knowledge, like an instructor, to the student), then there’s the assimilation of that information by the student
  • students need to have their first exposure to the course material happen some other way—like reading their textbook
  • in all fields, there’s still the challenge of motivating students to actually do the pre-class readings
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  • short, online reading quizzes consisting of open-ended questions that are due several hours before class starts to do the job.  Most of the quiz questions are meant to help students focus on and make some sense of key concepts
  • Students submit answers to these questions online before class, and I grade their quizzes on effort.
  • pre-class reading quizzes allow me to practice what is often called “just-in-time teaching.”
  • pre-class reading quiz questions as a clicker question during class,
  • how do I implement these quizzes?
  • local course management system, but I found the system to cumbersome
  • I find it much easier to post course documents to a WordPress blog, and I like that it makes my course more open to those not enrolled in it. 
  • I create a Facebook fan page for each of my courses
  • that pulls in the course blog content via RSS
  • So I now post my pre-class reading quizzes on my course blogs, tagged with a “PCRQ” for easy locating
  • default comments feature on WordPress to have students reply to them.  This meant that students could read each other’s answers, which, for these questions, only enhanced the learning experience
  • So I looked around for a way to have students comment on posts semi-privately—where I could see their comments but they couldn’t see each other’s comments.  I found a WordPress plug-in called, appropriately, Semi-Private Comments!  (Plug-ins—yet another reason I prefer WordPress to a course management system.) 
  • he main limitation is that it doesn’t help me grade those quizzes
Vanessa Vaile

The Ning Thing.docx - 0 views

  • good source for information on Ning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning_(website)
  • Ning was a free-form platform for the development and hosting of open-source social applications
  • Ning pricing structure is three-tiered, as explained here: http://blog.ning.com/2010/05/introducing-ning-pro-ning-plus-and-ning-mini.html
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  • ompelling affordances for group collaboration
  • Participants can sign up or sign in and set up profiles for any particular Ning, parts of which carry over to other Nings, achieving familiarity with minimal repetition of data entry
  • crucial components of many educators’ PLNs
  • Nings have c
  • Webheads in Action used to enroll participants in its free bi-annual WiAOC international online conferences in a Moodle, but for the last one, moved the community over to a Ning (http://webheadsinaction.ning.com/). This Ning now has over 350 members.
  • Because Nings were free and robust for collaboration, they were an ideal tool for educators seeking to jump-start communities on little or no funding.
  • Alec Couros sees this kind of thing happening more and more in the crystal ball future and suggests that schools and educators would be better off investing in self-hosting using FOSS, free and open source software (Couros, 2010).
  • general consternation
  • a number of issues
  • One is for how long Internet users can expect free services
  • other side of the coin is the nature of teaching, where hard-pressed teachers with little time and less budget tend to cobble together whatever resources they can muster
  • Monetization is rarely a consideration for teachers and educational technology specialists
  • , whose main aim is to find platforms that will support learning through sharing.
  • The immediate concern following an announcement such at the one issued by Ning April 16 is simply preservation of content stored at the free site
  • sponsorship is available only for “Ning Networks focused on North American K-12 and Higher-Ed ... including Ning Networks that facilitate learning in a classroom, best practices, educator-to-educator collaboration, or parental support,”
  • Pearson, who have offered to sponsor Nings for educators at the Mini level, the lowest level of Ning
  • almost all continents on the planet are excluded from the deal
  • Kevin Hodgson has been writing some interesting posts about the Ning thing.
  • the only reliable alternative to Ning is to host your community yourself, or at a trusted institution
  • http://tinyurl.com/alternatives2ning).  This document remains the most comprehensive source of advice on what to do about replacing Ning that exists anywhere on the Internet
  • Alec Couros (2010) decided to crowdsource some answers
  • back up your Ning
  • there are a number of sites offering Ning-like look and feel which will (attempt to) import your content, or some of your content, from Ning
  • Grou.ps
  • Grouply
  • designed to work as a social-network portal for Yahoo and Google Groups.
  • see: http://webheads.grouply.com/
  • A tool that works well for capturing blog content is Posterous
  • Spruz
  • Wackwall
  • Good and Bazzano (2010) have a good rundown of many of the options listed here
  • another free site that lets you set up a Portal with features similar to those of Ning.
  • another social networking portal which will do much the same thing
  • Other sites encourage you to restart your community afresh
  • Stevens, V. (2010). The Ning thing. TESL-EJ, Volume 14, Number 1. Retrieved on today’s date from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/.
  • Posterous Targets Ning
  • Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning theory for the digital age. Elearnspace. Retrieved June 27, 2010 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.
  • Good, R. and Bazzano, D. (2010). Ning Alternatives: Guide To The Best Social Networking Platforms And Online Group Services. MasterNewMedia May 3rd, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2010 from http://www.masternewmedia.org/ning-alternatives-guide-to-the-best-social-networking-platforms-and-online-group-services/.
  • If you wish to write anonymously on a Ning thing document, you can do so at Alec Couros’s crowdsourced Google Doc here: http://tinyurl.com/alternatives2ning
  • Multiliteracies
Vanessa Vaile

#PLENK2010 PLEs and learner autonomy « Jenny Connected - 0 views

  • PLE is a counter concept arising from discontent with centralised course management.
  • they have always been around, it’s just that the wide range of open source tools available at the moment, means that learners now have greater opportunity to learn independently and autonomously than ever before.
  • Sebastian was concerned that we focus only on the personal learner model for adults – which he suggested was one where adults are self-functioning, self-co-ordinating, self-controlling (self monitoring), self-developing and self-projecting.
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  • personal learner model for adults can apply just as well to young children, who can be taught to be self-functioning, self-co-ordinating, self-controlling (self monitoring), self-developing and self-projecting and in small ways can achieve all of these.
  • High Scope approach
  • In this approach children planned their own daily curriculum. Their choices were of course monitored. If they were choosing to play in the sand every day without doing any other types of activities, then they would be gently steered to make more balanced choices, but they were beginning to work as autonomous learners.
  • Which brings us to the question of what we mean by autonomy.  
  • further work is needed to define what we mean by learner autonomy in relation to PLEs.
  •  
    PLE is a counter concept arising from discontent with centralised course management
Maria Rosario Di Mónaco

Why blog? « The Daily Post - 0 views

  • So why use a blog? I suggested at the beginning of this post that a blog is basically a publishing platform. As I have been preparing it I have become more aware of the variety of ways in which I have used them, and I am also aware that there are many facilities offered by blog platforms, commonly used by others, that I have not even tried using yet. So let’s rephrase the question: Why use a publishing platform? Why use a platform that can enable you to write what you like, when you like, how you like, to whom you like? That you can edit and re-edit at will, as often as you like? That you can use to publish to a select group or to the whole world?  Where you can display your own or others’ text, documents, images, audioclips, videos, slideshows, charts, maps and Google Street View tours? That you can link from to anything on the big wide web? That you can organise and style in a variety of ways? That you can tag so that others can find it? That others can post comments to? That your students can use in as many or as few of these ways as you, or they, see fit? Or your Granny, likewise? Why, indeed?
Vanessa Vaile

Reflections on the Knowledge Society » Gravity rules the MOOC LAK11 - 0 views

  • Discussions spread in ever-which way. Participants migrate between discussions and platforms (or shall we say “bounce”?).
  • ‘open space’ conference
  • A MOOC follows the same principles but is entirely virtual.
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  • impossible to follow every discussion
  • gravitational fields that people follow, and where they group together
  • Centres of gravity are: platforms (Facebook, Netvibes, Moodle, Twitter, Diigo, and many more), topics, and people (certain people attract a greater following simply by being there).
  • fluidity of people between nodes
  • fixed points of stimulating weekly keynote presentations
  • strategy to manage my approach of accessing the knowledge spread across the course.
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