“In developing this ‘personal cyberinfrastructure’ through the Domain of One’s Own initiative, UMW gives students agency and control; they are the subjects of their learning, not the objects of education technology software.
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Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It? | EdSurge News - 2 views
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Gaining ownership over the data is vital—but until students see this domain as a space that rewards rigor and experimentation, it will not promote student agency
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Traditional assignments don’t necessarily empower students when they have to post them in a public space
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ut the assignments must be framed by a conversation about audience and the way the ‘domain’ represents the author to that audience.
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Against 'Distributed Cognition' - 2 views
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A journal article that seeks to rebut a certain view of distributed cognition. Distributed cognition is a view of cognition often connected in various ways with networked learning. It expands cognition beyond the human mind into the connections it makes with elements of the socio-cultural context in which it is located. This is perhaps a bit beyond what you might consider in your work, but it is related and the issues/arguments discussed here may be useful
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The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences d... - 2 views
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This paper raises questions on levels of learner autonomy, presence, and critical literacies required in active connectivist learning.
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In e-learning, two major traditions have been prevalent: one where connections are made with people and the other where they are made with resources (Weller, 2007)
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since the emergence and proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their increasing encroachment on everyday life, boundaries between settings in which people learn and in which they use technology for other activities have blurred, and perspectives such as connectivism have emerged
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From observations on PLENK it seems that for networked learning to be successful, people need to have the ability to direct their own learning and to have a level of critical literacies that will ensure they are confident at negotiating the Web in order to engage, participate, and get involved with learning activities.
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People also have to be confident and competent in using the different tools in order to engage in meaningful interaction. It takes time for people to feel competent and comfortable to learn in an autonomous fashion, and there are critical literacies, such as collaboration, creativity, and a flexible mindset, that are prerequisites for active learning in a changing and complex learning environment without the provision of too much organized guidance by facilitators
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Let's Talk about MOOC (online) Education--And Also About Massively Outdated Traditional... - 0 views
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Amnesimooc - 0 views
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Ethics of teaching with social media - 0 views
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PDF of paper presented at ACEC 2014 which appears to be of relevance to some of you. Abstract follows. This paper goes beyond the commonly held concerns of Internet safety, such as cyberbullying. Instead, it explores the ethical dilemmas we face as teachers when using social media, in particular social networks, in the classroom. We believe old ideas of respect and culture of care for children and young people need to be reconstructed around new media. This paper draws on the authors' experience in teaching with, and researching students' use of, social media in the classroom. In this paper we explore the ethical issues of consent, traceability, and public/private boundaries. We tackle the complex issue of the rights around virtual identities of the students followed by a discussion on the ethics of engaging students in public performance of curriculum and their lives. Finally we discuss the ethical dilemma involved in recognising and responding to illicit activity. While we reflect on our own response to these dilemmas and propose a dialogic process as the way forward, we also return to the argument that these ethical choices are dilemmas in which most, if not all, options are unpalatable or impracticable
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Why It's Too Easy To Dismiss Technology Critics: Or, The Fallacies Leading A Reviewer T... - 0 views
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One recurring strategy to invalidate a technology critic’s observations is to frame an issue in terms of overly simplistic comparisons. Then, all you need to do is allege the critic is blind to obvious advantages and makes a mountain out of a molehill by dramatizing small problems.
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If you’re not taking deep pause to consider what’s lost if drones create material conditions that lead to moral hazards, whether sufficient oversight will ensure robotic cars can make appropriate moral decisions, and if banging the security drum too loudly unfairly stacks the deck against privacy, then you’re looking past significant issues.
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European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning - 3 views
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The three generations of technology enhanced teaching are cognitive/behaviourist, social constructivist and connectivist.
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tools can be used and optimized to enhance the different types of learning that are the focus of distance education theory and practice.
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Indeed, though the authors of this paper are not in complete agreement about this, it is possible to think of pedagogies (considered as the processes and methods used in an attempt to bring about learning) as technologies, integral parts of a technological assembly that must work together with all of the other technologies to bring about a successful outcome
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We will see that the ubiquitous capacity of the Internet is creating very profound opportunities for enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of all three pedagogical models.
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From behaviourist pedagogy emerged the cognitive learning theories that focus on how processing within the individual brain effects comprehension, understanding, storage and retrieval of information. Cognitive pedagogies arose partially in response to a growing need to account for motivation, attitudes and mental barriers that may only be partially associated or demonstrated through observable behaviours – yet they are directly linked to learning effectiveness and efficiency.
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Methods that relied on one-to-many and one-to-one communication were really the only sensible options because of the constraints of the surrounding technologies.
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The model begins with designers selecting instructional goals. Instructional designers identify goals in discussion with subject matter experts with an eye to finding deficiencies in learners’ behaviour that can be rectified by new learning.
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This is particularly salient when applied to a new generation of large scale MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)
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ext and usually multi-media learning content. The effort and cost of “developing and selecting instructional
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creation of brainstorming lists of possible goals, documentation of subject matter priorities, flow charts, gathering of lists
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Today each of the instructional design activities (see figure Figure 1) is enhanced by a host of Web 2.0 tools.
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As importantly, collaborative work and negotiation is not confined to text. Collaborative graphic tools, concept and mind mapping tools allow graphic representations of ideas and processes.
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Low cost distributed project management tools allow teams to design, create, produce and distribute content at costs much lower than in pre internet days.
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gh quality content defines CB models of distance education, its effective management and control is extremely important
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Perhaps of deeper concern is the reluctance of distance educators to consume and customize content already created by others.
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Many content developers define and pride themselves on the production of quality content – not by the consumption and customization of works that they did not produce.
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The final affordance of the net – with tremendous, if as yet little demonstrated capacity to improve CB distance education pedagogy – is learning analytics.
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mining information about patterns of behaviour in order to extract useful information about learning which can then be applied to improve the experience.
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In this model, CB pedagogy may be adapted to service the unique learning needs, style, capacity, motivation and goals of the individual learner.
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strive to create instructional designs that change and morph in response to individual learner’s needs and behaviours.
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Open Learning Models (Bull & Kay, 2010; Kay & Kummerfeld, 2006) increase learner control and understanding of the system. Open models can also be used by teachers and other support staff to better understand and respond to individual learner needs, although there are potential and as yet unresolved issues with making such models intuitive to understand and control effectivel
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important source of data to constructing the model is the user’s current and past activities with content in the learning context.
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data mining
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Note: Data mining provides an opportunity to identify patterns of student behaviour. This can be used to help teachers better tailor learning and resources to the student. I can see that online tools providing access to metadata, tools for running site-access reports, and and even tagging, might be relevant in this context.
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From the brief examples above we can see how technologies and especially the Net afford multiple ways in which CB pedagogies and related instructional designs are enabled, enhanced and made more cost effective.
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CB models are inherently focused on the individual learner. While there is a tradition of cognitive-constructivist thinking that hinges on personal construction of knowledge, largely developed by Piaget and his followers (Piaget, 1970), the roots of the constructivist model most commonly applied today spring from the work of Vygotsky (1978) and Dewey (1897), generally lumped together in the broad category of social constructivism.
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Social-constructivism does not provide the detailed and prescriptive instructional design models and methodologies of CB driven distance education.
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efines social constructivist learning contexts as places “where learners may work together and support each other as they use a variety of tools and information resources in their guided pursuit of learning goals and problem-solving activities
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eachers do not merely transmit knowledge to be passively consumed by learners; rather, each learner constructs the means by which new knowledge is both created and integrated with existing knowledge.
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New knowledge as building upon the foundation of previous learning Context in shaping learners’ knowledge development Learning as an active rather than passive process, Language and other social tools in constructing knowledge Metacognition and evaluation as a means to develop learners’ capacity to assess their own learning A learning environment that is learner-centred and recognises the importance of multiple perspectives Knowledge needing to be subject to social discussion, validation, and application in real world contexts (Honebein, 1996; Jonassen, 1991; Kanuka & Anderson, 1999).
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Social-constructivist models only began to gain a foothold in distance education when the technologies of many-to-many communication became widely available,
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Time constraint issues are especially important to distance students, most of whom are juggling employment and family concerns in addition to their formal course work.
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ata mining and learning analytics are not only used to support independent study based on CB models but are being utilized to support and enhance group work.
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extract patterns and other information from the group logs and present it together with desired patterns to the people involved, so that they can interpret it, making use of their own knowledge of the group tasks and activities” (Perera et al., 2009).
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Constructivist pedagogies use the diversity of viewpoints, cultural experiences and the potential for divergent opinion that is best realized through interactions with group members from other cultures, languages and geographies.
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Naturally, technological affordances of most relevance to constructivist pedagogies focus on tools to support effective establishment, operation and trust building within groups. The technologies that support rich social presence, including full range of audio, video and gestures, are associated with enhanced trust development and increasing sense of group commitment
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learning is the process of building networks of information, contacts, and resources that are applied to real problems.
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Connectivist learning focuses on building and maintaining networked connections that are current and flexible enough to be applied to existing and emergent problems.
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capacity to find, filter and apply knowledge when and where it is needed
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The crowd can be a source of wisdom (Surowiecki, 2005) but can equally be a source of stupidity
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iticism of connectivism as being merely an extension constructivist pedagogy and those who argue that it is not really a complete theory of learning nor of instruction
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gain high levels of skill using personal learning networks that provide ubiquitous and on demand access to resources, individuals and groups of potential information and knowledge servers. The second is the focus on creation, as opposed to consumption, of information and knowledge resources.
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elies on the ubiquity of networked connections – between people, digital artefacts, and content, and thus can be described as a network centric pedagogy and thus may be the first native distance education pedagogy, without previous instantiation in classrooms.
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Effective connectivist learning experiences demand that learners have the tools and the competencies necessary to effectively find, sort, evaluate, filter, reformat and publish content on the net.
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hese capacities rely on effective tools, high skill levels and a developed sense of network efficacy.
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individuals and groups are helped to create and continuously augment, adapt and use a personal learning environment (PLE)
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second key defining characteristic of connectivist pedagogy is the import placed on creating, sharing and publishing learner artefacts.
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Connectivist learning designs, like constructivist ones, often involve collaborative or cooperative work between many learners. However, contribution often grows beyond the group to further encourage collaboration across time and space.
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eyond the tools of creation instantiated within a PLE is an understanding of the technical and legal means to distribute work, while maintaining appropriate privacy levels and not infringing on the copyright nor plagiarizing the work of others.
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The only solution to the privacy dilemma is to let each student and teacher set the level of access that they feel is most appropriate for them and more explicitly for the nature of the content being distributed.
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Connectivist designs also involve the discovery of and contribution to new learning communities.
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Learners are encouraged to make themselves, their contributions and their personal learning environment accessible to others. T
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hat others find useful, document their learning accomplishments via blogs, and share their discoveries and insights via micro blog feeds. In this manner they create and sustain learning networks that begin at the course level, but grow and evolve as the course of studies ends.
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the emphasis is far more on the individual’s connections with others than with group processes designed to enhance or engender learning.
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arder to apply analytics than in the more contained contexts of CB and social constructivist models.
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There is no central course, few common materials, no central binding point where interactions can be observed apart from each individual learner.
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The bottom three of Blooms original levels of learning – acquiring knowledge, coming to understand something or some process and applying that knowledge to a context – are clearly within the domain of CB pedagogies.
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Moving up to the analysis, synthesis and evaluation levels brings us to the need for social perspective. This is often acquired through group and networked interactions characteristic of constructivist and connectivist pedagogical models.
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Creation can be entirely original or as is more usual, creation involves the building upon, reinterpretation and contextualized application of older ideas to new contexts. Creation, the highest level of cognitive functioning usually requires mastery of the lower levels but, in addition, requires at least a small flame of creativity and insight.
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Obviously the focus of connectivism with its inherent demand for students to create and distribute for public review and augmentation, fits well with the final creation level of the revised taxonomy.
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here are many domains of knowledge in which creation of new knowledge is of much less importance than remembering and being able to apply existing knowledge.
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No single generation has provided all the answers, and each has built on foundations provided by its predecessors rather than replacing the earlier prototype (Ireland, 2007).
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As new technological affordances open up, it becomes possible to explore and capitalize on different aspects of the learning process.
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from the student-content interactions of cognitive-behaviourist models to the critical role of student–student interaction in constructivism, and finally, to the deeply networked student–content-teacher interrelationship celebrated in connectivist pedagogie
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Connectivism is built to some degree on an assumption of a constructivist model of learning, with the learner at the centre, connecting and constructing knowledge in a context that includes not only external networks and groups but also their own histories and predilections.
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he late Boston scholar Father Stanley Bezuska assembled a series of humorous quotes (see http://www.slideshare.net/committedsardine/funny-predictions-throughout-history) illustrating the doomsday predictions of teachers as they have been forced to deal with educational technologies.
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This particular set of quotes has since been identified as a hoax - but an illustrative one. http://boston1775.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/the-myth-of-students-today-depend-on.html
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Why Do Americans Love to Blame Teachers? - The Atlantic - 1 views
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America hates teachers.
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programs like Teach for America are promoted as a kind of missionary calling, in which young fresh-faced college graduates replace lazy, stubborn, unionized teachers.
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That single class of people is then systematically demonized, as politicians and pundits present "worst of the worst" cases as emblematic of the whole.
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In fact, I think you could argue (though Goldstein does not quite) that moral panics do more than demonize a group of people. They serve in part to create a group of people—to delimit or describe a particular identity and mark it as deviant.
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Moral panics create identities in order to regulate them.
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value-added measures all have a wide margin of error, and are quite sensitive to manipulation (such as teaching to the test).
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the good teacher/bad teacher dichotomy is predicated on the idea that the bad teachers are already in place and must be driven out by the good teachers. The dream, from Beecher to today, seems to be that if only our schools could get rid of the career educators and install angels instead, the millennium would arrive.
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long-term profession
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more responsibilities
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There are bad accountants, but we don't define "accountant" as an identity to be policed in order to solve our nation’s economic woes. There are bad doctors, but even at a time when medical malpractice suits are frequent, the idea of replacing doctors isn’t at the center health care reform.
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Taylor & Francis Online :: Literacy, literacies and the digital in higher education - T... - 1 views
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Abstract This paper is a critical review of some recent literature around the 'literacies of the digital' in schools and higher education. It discusses the question: 'what does the conjoining of the terms "digital" and "literacy" add to our understanding of teaching and learning in higher education'? It explores the continuing role of critical literacy in relation to the idea that digital literacies are transformative for pedagogy in this sector.
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The Challenges (and Future) of Networked Learning ~ Stephen's Web - 2 views
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Presentation from Stephen Downes (slides and audio) - the abstract A conversation about challenges (and future?) of networked learning. A broad understanding of the meaning and potential of networked learning can help educational institutions to rethink their role beyond the provision of LMS and centralized information systems. What skills are needed? What happens if we don't develop them? What kind of technology supports the development of said skills? What's the relation between this and issues of information property and citizenship in a digital context (POSSE models, Indie web movement)?
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Connectivism: Learning theory of the future or vestige of the past? | Kop | The Interna... - 1 views
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To what extent do existing learning theories meet the needs of today’s learners, and anticipate the needs of learners of the future?
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If connectivism is to build on older theories, how is the integration of the old and new theories to be conducted?
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The wide range of approaches and learning paths that are available to redesign curricula cause friction for educators and instructional designers who are required to deliver course materials in accordance with learning outcomes prescribed and mandated by educational institutions.
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Connectivism stresses that two important skills that contribute to learning are the ability to seek out current information, and the ability to filter secondary and extraneous information. Simply put, “The capacity to know is more critical than what is actually known” (Siemens, 2008, para. 6)
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The developmental implications of Downes’ definitions of learning and knowledge are far-reaching. If learning transpires via connections to nodes on the network, then it follows that the maximization of learning can best be achieved through identifying the properties of effective networks, which is precisely what Downes sets out to achieve in Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge.
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Siemens (2006b) highlights other factors that may inform the development of a new learning theory, namely “how we teach, how we design curriculum, the spaces and structures of learning, and the manner in which we foster and direct critical and creative thought in our redesign of education” (p. 6).
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roponents of connectivism are “exploring a model of learning that reflects the network-like structure evident in online interactions,” (p. 12) but is this enough to constitute its formulation as a new learning theory, and does connectivism have anything new to offer?
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the way in which global networks and communities of interest are currently being formed through emerging technologies is encouraging young people, in particular, to develop new, creative, and different forms of communication and knowledge creation outside formal education
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his will undoubtedly cause friction in institutions and class rooms, particularly as (adult) educators themselves do not always feel comfortable with the new developments because they have not been shown adequately, or explored for themselves, how the new and emerging technologies could enhance their working practice.
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A paradigm shift, indeed, may be occurring in educational theory, and a new epistemology may be emerging, but it does not seem that connectivism’s contributions to the new paradigm warrant it being treated as a separate learning theory in and of its own right. Connectivism, however, continues to play an important role in the development and emergence of new pedagogies, where control is shifting from the tutor to an increasingly more autonomous learner.
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In Connectivism, No One Can Hear You Scream: a Guide to Understanding the MOOC Novice -... - 0 views
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I’m not a Constructivist, Behaviourist, Cognitivist, or Connectivist. This is not a call for a return to an older theory. I’m a pragmatist, like many educators. I flirt outrageously with every theory that will have me. I’m ideologically promiscuous.
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Education in the information age: is technology making us stupid? - 2 views
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A recent study suggests that our modern lifestyles are making us “less intelligent” than our ancestors, at least at a genetic level.
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When it takes a mere few seconds to find information about almost any topic, the value of knowledge and expertise is being devalued as information becomes cheaper and more accessible.
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Our relationship with and understanding of knowledge and expertise has struggled to keep pace with the rapid democratisation of information.
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Although there is little conclusive evidence to support some of the more outrageous claims being made, there is at least a distinct possibility that while information is everywhere, knowledge is declining and technology is to blame.
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So perhaps what is more important is not whether technology is making us stupid but if educational systems need to shift from teaching us what to think, to showing us how to think
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In terms of what this means for education, psychologist Robert Bjork and his team at UCLA have been investigating what they call “desirable difficulties”. A desirable difficulty is a feature of a learning situation that is deliberately made more challenging to enhance learning.
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Kahneman’s research on dual process theory suggests we mostly rely on what he calls “system one” thinking. That is thinking that is fast, efficient, mostly automated, and very good at detecting patterns, relying on short cuts or heuristics wherever possible. “System two”, on the other hand, requires slow, deliberate thought and is much more taxing of cognitive resources. System two is where the heavy lifting is done.