Group items tagged

"There is already evidence that teachers are using social media as part of teaching strategies, with the aim of encouraging students to view social networks as less of a pleasurable distraction, and more as something that can be used in projects and for personal expression in a medium they prefer. Steven Anderson has recently proposed a comprehensive set of general approaches to integrating social media into the classroom, and focuses on the need to carefully review existing teaching strategies and understandings of social media before making changes."

As they are acquiring, students take notes, make drawings, make videos of their own, voicethreads, blog posts, Google Docs and sometimes they even use Post-It notes. I may require students to use a particular medium for a follow-up assignment or assessment, but letting them choose what they are going to use gives them more ownership of their learning and naturally moves them on to higher order thinking skills.

"The tension seems to lie between admissions and learning, and the pressure that surrounds students forces them to choose admissions more often than not."

"I see social proof as integral to producing the most legitimate content of whatever medium today. We now have the ability to obtain social proof at every stage of the creative and publishing processes; we must therefore integrate social proof into those stages (and be more critical of any content that ignores it)."

"Two apps were demo'ed at this tech mega-conference, one to help users share photos of themselves sneaking peeks at women's breasts, and the other giving users points for mimicking male masturbation. Both "Titstare" and "Circle Shake" were displayed in front of a mixed crowd that included teens from BlackGirlsCode and even a nine-year-old hacker, there to present her own site. Yesterday morning, I awoke to find a tweet from Pax in my stream, claiming that TechCrunch should apologize to the TitStare founders for calling them misogynists."

"Perhaps the easiest visual medium for most communicators to grasp and use is photography. There is a growing school of thought that with an iPhone or Nexus smartphone, a communicator is well equipped to meet the needs of the visual thirsty stakeholder. Don't kid yourself. Every communicator needs a real camera."

"Use of in-class concept questions with clickers can transform an instructor-centered "transmissionist" environment to a more learner-centered constructivist classroom. To compare the effectiveness of three different approaches using clickers, pairs of similar questions were used to monitor student understanding in majors' and nonmajors' genetics courses. After answering the first question individually, students participated in peer discussion only, listened to an instructor explanation only, or engaged in peer discussion followed by instructor explanation, before answering a second question individually. Our results show that the combination of peer discussion followed by instructor explanation improved average student performance substantially when compared with either alone. When gains in learning were analyzed for three ability groups of students (weak, medium, and strong, based on overall clicker performance), all groups benefited most from the combination approach, suggesting that peer discussion and instructor explanation are synergistic in helping students. However, this analysis also revealed that, for the nonmajors, the gains of weak performers using the combination approach were only slightly better than their gains using instructor explanation alone. In contrast, the strong performers in both courses were not helped by the instructor-only approach, emphasizing the importance of peer discussion, even among top-performing students."

"I think the best way to approach this would be to break it down by social media network and the observations/viewpoints I've gathered over the years."

"Digital literacy, by this definition, encompasses a wide range of skills, all of which are necessary to succeed in an increasingly digital world. As print mediums begin to die out, the ability to comprehend information found online becomes more and more important. Students who lack digital literacy skills may soon find themselves at just as much of a disadvantage as those who cannot read or write."

"Comics are also great at abstracting away details so that readers uses their imagination to focus on what they want. You draw a character simply so that the readers can insert themselves or someone they know and relate to the character. This abstracted style of art also leaves room for comics to be incredibly expressive. Whether it's a smiley face, the dynamic motion of a superhero, or Charlie Brown missing a football, the medium communicates a lot with very little."

"In the case of Breaking Tweets, it was a personal blog that I started for fun on Jan. 31, 2009. I had just witnessed the power of Twitter for news as mainstream media highlighted it covering the Hudson Plane Crash on Jan. 15, 2009 and many (including myself) live tweeted Barack Obama's Inauguration at the National Mall on Jan. 20, 2009."

""Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web.""

"In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and, above all, to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world."

"The evaluation of the factors leading to the digital divide can be summarised as the gap between 1) older generation and the digital natives, 2) level of education, and 3) high income - low income groups. These factors are further influenced by the geographical location Rural-urban divide, and Governmental policies. All these factors determine the level of skills of an individual and the quality of access of ICTs which determines their position in the digital divide."

"If one studies the interest publishers have shown in the OPM market, one sees the desire for them to create this revenue envelope by being the one-stop shop for aggregating everything their customers need: from content, to technology to program design and marketing. Even thought McGraw's next CEO, Cengage's Michael Hansen, declared recently that the company would stay away from "the business of recruiting students to schools," I would be shocked if the new McGraw Hill were not in some way equipping schools to build their own OPM capability - much the way John Katzman's Noodle is set up."

"Today we are launching a challenge, seeking the best ideas worldwide for how to align our postsecondary educational ecosystem to the future of work and life. We are looking for bold ideas that reimagine how we learn across our lifetimes, ideas that expand opportunity for all members of our society and foster equity. We hope to uncover ideas and seed the development of tools that will ensure that all learners, especially low-income students, can draw on a diverse array of educational opportunities that provide them the skills they need to find the opportunities to work and live meaningful and economically stable lives."

"Just over ten years ago, Karl Fisch wrote a blog post that has stuck with me through the years. In it, he asked if it was OK to be a technologically illiterate teacher. Even though we've learned greatly in the last decade about the merits of using technology to replace teachers, I think Karl's arguments back then are even more relevant today."

"What will online education look like if students' access to the internet is more compounded by their structural inequalities than it is already? How can we, in good conscience, use online technologies to increase access to higher education if the cost of using the internet rises while corporate control of the internet increases?"

"Our eyes are weird and often mislead us. But if you know the peculiarities of human vision, you can construct better designs. Not only do type designers utilize optical tricks for creating readable and well-balanced fonts, but it's also helpful for designers, who craft user-computer interaction."