Group items tagged

Yes, students are distracted by media, especially their mobile technologies. As I wrote in a previous ProfHacker post, the answer to this problem, however, is not to ban or ignore these technologies. The answer is to incorporate them.

"Last month in a blog post titled "Better Than a Textbook?", I noted that some faculty find it easier to think about the massive open online courses (MOOCs) provided by vendors like Coursera as "super-textbooks" than as actual courses. Earlier this month, Vanderbilt computer science professor Doug Fisher wrote a guest post for the blog ProfHacker titled "Warming up to MOOCs," in which he described his experiments in using MOOCs in this fashion."

In Fall 2011, Stanford announced three, free massively open online courses, or MOOCs. Two of these courses, database and machine learning, corresponded to spring 2012 courses that I would be teaching at Vanderbilt University. I recognized that I could use the lecture materials from these classes to "flip" my own classes by having students view lectures before the class meeting, which then could be used for other learning activities.

"Last year, based on our departmental assessment procedures, I determined that I wanted a more subjective way to give feedback to my students. To me, programming is more than just right or wrong code; I want students to develop good habits and styles of programming that use the tool to communicate the process of problem solving, not just the final answers. And I felt that that would be better achieved by giving students consistent verbal feedback, in addition to simple rubric scoring of their work."

After working with a tool for a while, you forget all the familiarity you've built up, all the muscle memory, all the ways that the tool is useful to you. Instead, all you see are the annoyances. But on the other hand, all you see about a new tool are the shiny new features, and you can't see all the hours and days you'll spend learning and adapting, fiddling and breaking the new tool.

"the report also says that students prefer that faculty themselves provide instruction in how to use technology, rather than rely on the help desk or online-only documentation, which suggests that for the foreseeable future, faculty who incorporate technology in interesting or significant ways will need to continue to budget class time to cover how to use the tech."

"Even before evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller hit "send" on his idiotic Tweet, I'd been thinking about asking people what kind of social media policy might be in place on their campus."

A graphical display of this information might be helpful. Below is a graphic that depicts the student learning outcomes for a course I taught last year, a course for preservice teachers and the teaching of writing in K-12 schools.

This is right on target for what I am trying to pull together for my major project for my program. Mat, when you designed your Fall 13 course - did Canvas have advantages over SAKAI when it came to the mechanics of assessing your students' work?

in the three years I've been teaching mobile video in a course titled "Information 3.0," even those students who initially say they are very familiar with video later admit that they learned a lot from repeated practice and application of video production skills. In other words, shooting and uploading video to YouTube alone does not a videographer make, at least not in my class of sixty undergraduates who come from any major on campus.

In order to fulfill the task of analyzing and presenting their Twitter activity, students would need to use an alternative to Storify. Unfortunately, I did not have a backup plan (i.e. a selection of other curation tools for them to use.) So we took this list of 40 curation tools, divided it up among the students in the class (each student tackled 2 of the items on the list), and quickly evaluated each one to see if it would fit our needs. If you'd like to take a look at the results of this evaluation, you can view the GoogleDocs spreadsheet that resulted from my students' work.

"one of the reasons he chose a wiki format for the site is because it forces students to collaborate, listen, relate, prioritize, and compromise. Rather than the "stream" web we are so used to (with blogs and various social media platforms), the wiki format provides an opportunity for students not just to learn critical digital literacy and research skills, but also how to work together in an online environment."

when I carry my tablet I don't do all that much reading. Instead, I check my email, check Facebook, check Twitter, or-perhaps worst of all-play Words with Friends.

Don't have the Tweetstream running live on a projection screen. I've tried it both ways-having the Tweetstream run on a screen that everyone can see, versus on students' devices. The former is ultimately distracting for participants, who tend to focus more on the screen than the in-person discussions. Having the backchannel show up on personal devices, on the other hand, adds to the effect of creating another outlet for discussion that does not overpower the face to face setting.

"I am ecstatic that one of my articles has been made officially free-to-access. I am excited that a publisher is willing to promote my article that challenges much of mainstream academic publishing. And I respect that a publisher already has systems in place to allow some form of openness (in the form of author manuscripts made open) beside the model that brings them money, and that moreover, they choose some articles to make them open access from their own site, at no cost to the author."