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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Vanessa Vaile

Vanessa Vaile

A school in the cloud: Sugata Mitra accepted the TED Prize at TED2013 - 0 views

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    Sugra Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiment. SOLE - a self-organized learning environment, based on a curriculum of questions that set curiosity free, varying forms of peer assessment and certification without examination.
Vanessa Vaile

#etmooc Session 1: Idea Burrs « Beyond These Walls - 1 views

  • Open Movemen
  • 5 (Connected Learning, Digital Storytelling, Digital Literacy, and Digital Citizenship) thatwe will be exploring further in #etmooc
  • Larry’s blog
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  • Ted Talks
  • Where do ideas begin and end? Can ideas be ever completely “owned” as we do we property? Does it all come down to control of resources as a means to be powerful
  • Maybe ideas are like DNA, that can change and evolve, mutate and be of someone but never completely “theirs”. Maybe ideas, as DNA evolve in spite of us, rather that because of us.
  • This reminded me of  Kirby Ferguson’s Embracing the Remix
Vanessa Vaile

Why We Seek the New: A History and Future of Neophilia | Brain Pickings - 2 views

  • how hard-wired our affinity for novelty is
  • explores the evolutionary, biological, psychological, and cultural forces that drive our deep-seated neophilia
  • how our ability to respond to change saved us from extinction some 800,000 years ago to neophilia’s basic mind-body mechanisms to the profound ways in which the information age has altered our relationship with novelty
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  • tug-of-war between our need for survival, which relies on safety and stability, and our desire to thrive, which engenders stimulation, exploration, and innovation.
  • The three affective foundations underpinning neophilia — surprise, curiosity, and interest — are referred to as “knowledge emotions,
  • why the filter bubble exists
  • why the Internet is wired to give us more of what we are already looking for, rather than surprise us with something we didn’t know existed but might find infinitely interesting
Vanessa Vaile

Complexity, self-organization, and #Change11: reactions to Siemen's presentation on onl... - 1 views

  • presentation from George Siemens on Self-Organization in Online Courses (embedded below) that addressed some aspects of learning complexity (through the context of a MOOC)
  • we need to sift through the chaos to create signal, perhaps even a pattern language
  • I liken this process to language itself and the alphabet. The alphabet developed to take a series of meanings and weld it to one symbol (a process more pronounced in Chinese and ancient Egyptian perhaps) that everyone might recognize and accept.
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  • It reduces the complexity, yes, but more importantly it provides a starting point for a common process. Without it, we would be lost in theory. 
  • The same holds for learning to some degree. We look for structure, but if none exists on sight, we combine things until some structure emerges. That structure can be represented in a single symbol, but its foundation might shift as new understanding emerges. Occasionally, there is need to ditch the symbols or invent a new one altogether as emerging learning dictates. That is a healthy and complicated process. The MOOC captures this process a bit and adheres to an open structure to allow pattern language to emerge, a shared vocabulary, a knowledge construct (however ephemeral).
  • Feedback as friction as forces interact. A spark, a collision, waste, and occasionally a nova. A big (learning) bang. This makes me think a learner's responsibility (among many others) is to be open to this collision of actors, agents, feedback, waste, noise, and then, ideally, pattern, understanding. The only way out is through.
  • Disturbing- an ontological disturbance, an unknown, an uncanny sense of veering through uncharted, potentially treacherous waters. It is a good place to be as a learner, but it requires a strength and confidence that only an empowered learner could put forth. But in that disturbance, that mess, there is the friction, that meat-grinder of understanding.
  • This is learning as curiosity and sometimes it can be quite scary. 
  • Often we seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge (anyone subjected to my endless banal history lessons will understand this), but I do believe that most learning is action oriented. To learn not only to get a job, to live in a world, to subsist, but rather for acting as best as we can. For improvement, for progress, for self-actualization.
  • disaggregated, emotive, functional machine of interaction. One that has to be tinkered with constantly. 
  • self-actualization (the development of self) can only be realized through sharing, group interaction
Vanessa Vaile

How do you manage your information? - 0 views

  • Managing resources is one of the most important skills for students (people!) to master. I started blogging in 2000 and have spent a significant amount of time trying to devise an information management system that I can use to make sense of a topic or discipline. I've attached an image below that highlights the process and tools that I use.
  • This system has a few weaknesses
  • 1. It fails to account for trend development and dissipation
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  • 2. Too many aspects of my sensemaking system are manua
  • Information is not something that has value in itself. We use it to do something
  • What tools do you use? Eric von Stackelberg Profile Edit profile icon Following Followers Market Posts Poll Pages Blog Files Photo Albums I have moved to fewer tools with the intention of increasing the depth of data held in those tools while reducing duplication.
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    The Landing: George Siemens's blog:
Vanessa Vaile

Rather Random | How to participate in an open online course - 0 views

  • The first few weeks of an open online course are the most disorienting. As a learner, you approach the course with expectations that have been defined by previous learning experiences.
  • Let go of those expectations
    • Vanessa Vaile
       
      yes, I might (not will) encounter that node again; on the other hand I might not or it might be years later
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  • You contribute to shaping and defining the course.
  • steps to participating in a MOOC:
  • first orient yourself to the environment and space of learning
  • wayfinding - learning the cues, markers, and spaces
  • Secondly, you have to orient yourself to the course content.
  • 5. Think about how you’ll manage course informatio
  • 1. Somewhat define your goals.
  • A MOOC is a network. If a node of information is truly important, you’ll encounter it again.
  • 2. Declare/Define yourself
  • 3. Plan your interaction habits
  • 4. Build your network through participation and interaction with others
  • comment on course participant blogs, share ideas with them, connect on Twitter
  • where can people find you?
  • 6. Create and share
  • 7. Fix what’s missing
  • 8. Manage you expectations.
  • 9. Persistence
Vanessa Vaile

Giving Feedback on Student Writing: An Innovative Approach - Faculty Focus | Faculty Focus - 1 views

  • British journal, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education involving the use of something called interactive cover sheets. First-year students in an outdoor studies degree program took a two-semester, six module course which required preparation of a number of written assignments. After preparing their papers, students attached an interactive cover sheet on which they raised questions about the paper they had just completed, thereby identifying the specific areas for feedback.
  • The goal was to overcome the one-way communication that occurs when teachers write comments on student papers
  • Students also tell stories about feedback received on their papers
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  • Does this idea of having students frame questions about their papers and writing offer a solution? The faculty who tried the approach found that students struggled mightily with the task
  • It’s pretty easy to understand why students would find this task challenging. Most (especially beginning students) have little or no experience assessing their own work and then to have to frame a question that would elicit feedback helpful to improving your next paper—that’s a pretty complicated task. But it’s such a good one.
  • that’s a really useful skill
  • I wonder if there might be some ways to reframe the task that would make it easier initially. Maybe students need guidelines early on: Identify the part of the paper you had the most trouble with and ask a question about it. Identify the part of the paper you think turned out best and explain why you feel good about it
  • a potentially promising idea with the dual benefits of developing a great self-assessment skill and directing feedback
  • The 5 questions that I ask are: 1) What are you trying to say here (what's the thesis/main point)? 2) Why is what you are trying to say important? 3) What is working in the piece and why? 4) What is not working in the piece and why? 5) What questions do you have for me?
  • If students feel that they are graded on the writers that they currently are rather than the writer that they are trying to be, many will be hesitant to open an honest dialogue.
  • dialogical cover sheet dates back to the expressivist movement in composition studies in the 1980s. I first came across it through Peter Elbow's writing
  • scaffolding the feedback process by offering students the opportunity to identify aspects of the paper or parts of the paper they would like their instructor to respond to is empowering pedagogy
  • The challenge is making the cover sheet simple enough
Vanessa Vaile

Blog U.: Reforming Higher Education: To What End? - University of Venus - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    column by Lee Skellerup Bessette on problems of change in higher ed, educators vs accountability by analytics & design by algorithm
Vanessa Vaile

#cck11: Connectivism and Social Constructivism - what's the difference? | Life through ... - 0 views

  • what distinguishes a connectivist perspective from social constructivism
  • similar principles
  • complexity
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  • technology
  • ‘complex’ phenomena as different from ‘complicated’ phenomena
  • Connectivism acknowledges the complexity of knowledge and learning in a way that social constructivism cannot. A central tenet of social constructivism is the definition of knowledge as the result of consensus. The connectivist perspective allows for a greater diversity of opinions, and acceptance of transience and unpredictability of knowledge.
  • dependence on a large number of ‘weak ties’ in knowledge networks
  • connectivist notion of knowledge and learning existing outside the individual human brain
  • web of nodes and connections
  • Bonkers.
  • transient content
Vanessa Vaile

MOOC newbie Voice - Week 2 Big Data… must be important… it's big! » Dave's Ed... - 0 views

  • we are increasingly at the mercy of the data that is out there
  • Week 1 skimming
  • The Telegraph article on the 10 ways data is changing how we live
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  • Notes on some of the other resources
  • This one... a gonzo style interview with a dude who’s been in the industry
  • “more is different” it’s a classic. it says that… uh… more is different. Is short and approachable.
  • http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/the-data-science-venn-diagram/ A beginners guide to figuring out what the charts might mean
  • This week’s presentation – Ryan S.J.d Baker
  • a sense of what they actually do with the testing
  • This week’s activity SNAPP is uh… kind of a snap.
Vanessa Vaile

What is the unique idea in Connectivism? « Connectivism - 0 views

  • what is the unique idea in connectivism?
  • a new idea is often an old idea in today’s context.
  • what is the new idea in constructivism? That people construct their own knowledge? Or the social, situated nature of learning? Or that knowledge is not something that exists outside of a knower? (i.e. there is no “there” out there)
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  • What is new with constructivism today is that these principles are being (have been) coupled with existing calls for educational reform
  • calls for increased learner control
  • From whence does connectivism originate?
  • 1. Tools augment our ability to interact with each other and to act.
  • “carriers of patterns of previous reasoning”
  • all technology carries an ideology.
  • 2. Contextual/situated nature of learning.
  • 3. Social learning theory
  • 4. Epistemological views: all learning theory is rooted in epistemology
  • concept of rhizomatic knowledge and community as curriculum
  • Stephen Downes’ work on connective knowledge valuable.
  • Dave Cormier has been advancing the
  • 5. Concept of mind.
  • 6. We also find a compatible view of connectivism in the work of new media theorists such as McLuhan
  • 7. We also find support for connectivism in the more nebulous theories of complextiy and systems-based thinking
  • 8. Network theory
  • The Unique Ideas in Connectivism
  • Concepts like small worlds, power laws, hubs, structural holes, and weak/strong ties
  • Networks are prominent in all aspects of society, not just education. This prominence is partly due to the recognizable metaphor of the internet…but networks have always existed. As Barabasi states, networks are everywhere. We just need an eye for them.
  • 1. Connectivism is the application of network principles to define both knowledge and the process of learning.
  • 2. Connectivism addresses the principles of learning at numerous levels – biological/neural, conceptual, and social/external
  • 3. Connectivism focuses on the inclusion of technology as part of our distribution of cognition and knowledge.
  • 1) cognitive grunt work in creating and displaying patterns
  • 2) extending and enhancing our cognitive ability
  • 3) holding information in ready access form
  • 4. Context. While other theories pay partial attention to context, connectivism recognizes the fluid nature of knowledge and connections based on context
  • 5. Understanding. Coherence. Sensemaking. Meaning.
  • These elements are prominent in constructivism, to a lessor extent cognitivism, and not at all in behaviourism.
  • But in connectivism, we argue that the rapid flow and abundance of information raises these elements to critical importance.
  • Connectivism finds its roots in the climate of abundance, rapid change, diverse information sources and perspectives, and the critical need to find a way to filter and make sense of the chaos.
Vanessa Vaile

Half an Hour: What Connectivism Is - 0 views

  • in connectivism, there is no real concept of transferring knowledge, making knowledge, or building knowledge.
  • a pedagogy that (a) seeks to describe 'successful' networks (as identified by their properties, which I have characterized as diversity, autonomy, openness, and connectivity) and (b) seeks to describe the practices that lead to such networks,
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.
Vanessa Vaile

What We Do - OpenStudy - 1 views

  • OpenStudy is a social learning network where students ask questions, give help, and connect with other students studying the same things. Our mission is to make the world one large study group, regardless of school, location, or background.
  • AI recommendation engines to match students, and really real-time technologies to facilitate online interaction
Vanessa Vaile

Artifacts of sensemaking | Learning and Knowledge Analytics - 2 views

  • sensemaking attempts include: blog posts, summary Moodle forum posts, images, analysis of discussion forum activity, social network analysis, etc.
  • Creating and sharing artifacts of sensemaking is an important activity in open online courses.
  • filtering (or forming sub-networks/groups/discussion clusters) happens once the course is underway
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  • learners are a diverse group
  • uniformity of university program tracks masks the differences of learners.
  • In an open course, participants aren’t filtered in the same way.
  • Higher education generally homogenizes learners through pre-requisites or subject streams (programs).
  • we begin to connect with those who respond favorably, we gravitate toward those who we find interesting (but not so interesting that we feel no connection),
  • One of the primary ways of connecting with others in an open course is through creating and sharing artifacts of sensemaking.
  • When our learning is transparent, we become teachers.
  • Essentially, we form small sub-networks that connect (lattice-like) to other sub-networks
  • fluidity of interaction across novice-intermediate-expert networks is one of the main points of value in open courses.
Vanessa Vaile

All too much | The Economist - 0 views

  • QUANTIFYING the amount of information that exists in the world is hard. What is clear is that there is an awful lot of it, and it is growing at a terrific rate (a compound annual 60%) that is speeding up all the time.
  • data from sensors, computers, research labs, cameras, phones and the like surpassed the capacity of storage technologies in 2007. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, generate 40 terabytes every second—orders of magnitude more than can be stored or analysed.
  • scientists collect what they can and let the rest dissipate into the ether.
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  • What about the information that is actually consumed?
  • households were bombarded with 3.6 zettabytes of information (or 34 gigabytes per person per day)
  • In terms of bytes, written words are insignificant
  • half of all bytes are received interactively
  • “information created by machines and used by other machines will probably grow faster than anything else,”
  • ‘database to database’ information
  • “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information,” quipped Oscar Wilde in 1894.
  • Only 5% of the information that is created is “structured”, meaning it comes in a standard format of words or numbers that can be read by computers.
  • changing as content on the web is increasingly “tagged”, and facial-recognition and voice-recognition software can identify people and words in digital files.
Vanessa Vaile

Reflections on Open Courses: Curation, Ombuds, and Concierges | Learning and Knowledge ... - 0 views

  • Part of the focus in LAK11 is to explore how we can better use data to make sense of complex topics such as:
  • How students interact
  • patterns of activity
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  • How knowledge is “grown” as individuals interact with others
  • How individual learners develop their conceptual understanding of a topic
  • How teams solve complex problems
  • tools and activities that are most effective
  • How individual learners “eliminate” unneeded or irrelevant ideas and concepts
  • explore various methods for analyzing data
  • tools that aid that analysis.
  • limitations of an algorithmically-defined world of education
  • Google’s search algorithm has been ruined
  • Reflections on Open Courses: Curation, Ombuds, and Concierges
  • focus in LAK11 is to explore how we can better use data
  • methods for analyzing data produced by learners and numerous tools that aid that analysis
  • Google’s search algorithm has been ruined argues
  • What’s the solution? Well, a return to curation, of course.
  • What does this have to do with LAK11?
  • over the last five years, social networks and social media have taken over the web
  • Google is driven by the mission to organize the world’s information. Facebook is driven by the mission to “help you connect and share with the people in your life”. The two companies are on a collision course: is the future informationally or socially based? Eventually, social bleeds into informational. And vice versa.
  • We trust people we like, people with whom we feel a connection
  • All social interactions are information. Many information interactions are social.
  • urators – they present their views and spin existing stories within the framework of their beliefs
  • “temporary centres”.
  • problem of how to create temporary centres
  • ome commentary or facilitator posts
  • LAK11, we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve retained similar course design elements to previous open online courses (OOCs – I’m starting to think that M=Massive part of MOOCs is misleading or even off-putting
  • What we gain in our decision to run this course on various sites, using more or less accessible tools, is the demonstration that anyone with an interesting topic/idea and a willingness to experiment can open up a course for a broader audience.
  • What we lose – and I’m still uneasy about this trade off – is the integrated archive of activity in the course.
  • Complexity cannot be understood solely through algorithms
  • Curation is an important component in the process
  • data mining, visualization
  • wayfinding and sensemaking in social systems
  • human aspect of data, sensemaking, curation, and trust
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