Group items tagged

"Why do practitioners in higher education, student affairs, and students services always go to the "tool" question first? Why do we want to know what's "hot" with the digital, social technologies?"

"In recent posts I've written about how course instructors can support online learners, how to consider the needs of the learner and guide them through phases of dependency to independence. Yet what is the responsibility of the learner? What role does the online student play in his or her learning? And how can this be communicated to him or her? In this post I discuss learning models that assign responsibility to the learner, how these principles can be applied to online learning, and finally describe how instructors and institutions can hand over responsibility to the student."

As I'm reflecting on the #eci831 experience and actually thinking about something like a grade for my participation, I realize that I may not have been as good a student as I thought. Not that I didn't do a lot of wandering around the interwebs, connecting myself, exploring spaces of education, learning about digital learning theories, examining how others were using these theories, and determining what, of all of this, would be useful to me and to the analogue educators I am closest with. I certainly did that, but I didn't capture all that here. Why is that a problem? Because if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen.

This must be the educator in you talking. Metacognitively speaking => the ability to discuss what you have learned is one of the great opportunities of the web 2.0. And a great way to reinforce your learning, so this idea of "if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen" is an interesting idea for educators. I have a link to post about this.

The strategy Think-Pair-Share, along with a variety of twists, is a versatile strategy that can be used before, during or after a reading, viewing or listening activity. It incorporates elements of strategies that are known to increase learning (summarizing, comparing/contrasting, restating an idea, collaboration, think time, and using different learning modalities).

""Cheating" is defined in different ways but for the purpose of this blog, I would like to use the following definition as it applies best to the field of education.   Cheating is to break a rule or law usually to gain an advantage at something.  Did I get that right?  It really doesn't sound that horrible except for the breaking a rule or law part, right?"

"The advantage of the flipped classroom is that the content, often the theoretical/lecture-based component of the lesson, becomes more easily accessed and controlled by the learner. "

"If educators wish to keep students in high school and in college, they must plant a better attitude in the former, while recognizing the intransigence of the curriculum in the latter. Boredom is not always something to be avoided. It is to be accepted and worked through."

"The Open Access Button is a browser-based tool that lets users track when they are denied access to research, then search for alternative access to the article.  Each time a user encounters a paywall, he simply clicks the button in his bookmark bar, fills out an optional dialogue box, and his experience is added to a map alongside other users.  Then, the user receives a link to search for free access to the article using resources such as Google Scholar. The Open Access Button initiative hopes to create a worldwide map showing the impact of denied access to research."

"These plugins also offer range of options for the online educators who want to teach through the modern methods of e-learning. These plugins can be integrated into Learning Management System (LMS) to enable the educators teach more and manage less. Here I will inform you about key plugins that can improve the usability of your website and at the same time make you more accessible to your target audience."

"Most of the conversations were about the pitfalls of producing MOOCs. I wanted to talk more about how universities that may use other schools' MOOCs might consume them. Most of the people here are from disciplines outside of the humanities, so I tried to explain that what works in math or CS will not necessarily work for history, especially history survey classes. While everyone seemed interested in improving pedagogy, there was a kind of disturbing assumption underlying all my discussions that any class that doesn't use technology is somehow broken by definition."

"As part of a university system that has delivered online courses, programs and degrees for a very long time, I am troubled by what appears to be the inseparable link between online education and massive online education-that is, that "massive" is THE way to deliver online programs.  Most online degree programs are not MOOP(rograms)s. "

"There is strong, if not overwhelming evidence that behaviour patterns of students, educators, employees and professionals are moving towards the use of social tools for learning, working and teaching. Collaborating seamlessly face-to-face and at a distance, bringing the human element to virtual interactions, and personalized learning will prevail in 2014; each facilitated by technology. But it's not going to be about the technology, it will be about making connections by voice and/or visual, contributing to new knowledge, and learning with and from others-all mediated through social media. It will be the behaviours of students, lifelong learners and educators-their use of technology, specifically social media applications that will influence education in the upcoming year."

"So as you can see, a varied view about the presence of CTA's emerges from the comment, but most seem to agree that their presence was indeed required, and people would have actually preferred if they had been informed about the presence of the CTAs. As it turns out, there was a thread on the Coursera forums introducing the CTAs, but I think there is a problem with that. I have already voiced my view on Coursera's forums - they are not very user friendly and a thread like this can easily be missed there. Honestly speaking, I prefer the social spaces as compared to the forums on Coursera."

"If technology is seen as the problem in driving the culture too fast for education to adjust and keep up, it may also be seen as a solution to that very same problem. If relationships are the stuff of better learning, then let technology provide better ways to relate. It is technology that can expand an educator's relationships beyond the limits of a school, or district, or state, or even a country. Relationships with other educators, without the expense of taking costly courses are made possible."

"Until we address the scarcity in children's lives and schools, addressing teacher quality is a futile distraction, just as continuing to change standards and tests is a futile distraction. Instead of labeling, ranking, and then firing teachers, our first best step would be to end the cult of high-stakes testing because the problems of education are mostly systemic (social and educational) and not the adults who choose to teach or the children we seek to serve."