Group items tagged

"Integrating a complex set of technological tools in delivering a class results in "digital pain" as the professor talks, brings up video, monitors live chat, and performs a number of other tasks simultaneously, often without support. Responding to technical problems experienced by individual students is not possible in real time during the classes. Dr. Matrix does provide extensive one-on-one technical support before and after classes."

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.

"She won't have that problem anymore, thanks to a new Web tool called Unbaby.me, which replaces the baby pictures on Facebook feeds with things that people prefer to see, like photos of cats, sunsets and bacon."

"Twitter and Facebook might soon replace traditional professional development for teachers. Instead of enduring hours-long workshops a few times a year, teachers could reach out to peers on the Internet in real time for advice on things like planning a lesson (or salvaging a lesson that's going wrong), overcoming classroom management problems, or helping students with disabilities."

As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally-our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don't know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

"Problem: You need to provide textbooks for 1500 students in CITY NOT FOUND schools. But because the textbook you currently use costs $80, once you buy a textbook you hold on to it for 7 years before replacing it. This translates into both (1) out-of-date textbooks and (2) textbooks that students are not allowed to actively study with - they can't write, highlight, or take notes in their books because another 6 years worth of students after them have to use the books, too."

"Christopher Brinton at Princeton University and a few pals offer their view. These guys have studied the behaviour in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs). And they have depressing news. They say that participation falls precipitously and continuously throughout a course and that almost half of registered students never post more than twice to the forums. What's more, the participation of a teacher doesn't improve matters. Indeed, they say there is some evidence that a teacher's participation in an online discussion actually increases the rate of decline."

I am increasingly of the opinion that we don't have to find "the solution" to "this problem." The question of what students are learning and how they have created the work that they submit is one that is as old as teaching, and the change in technology in many respects introduces only an incremental change in how we must approach this. If we are to be effective as instructors we have to be thinking hard about what students know and how we know it, and these are not things that are dependent on technology.

"This kind of learning can't be scaffolded or too-carefully architectured but must be discovered in the act. In A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown write, "Our understanding comes not through a linear progression, in which each step confirms that you are on the right path. Rather, it arises through approaching the problem from many angles and ultimately seeing its logic only at the end" (98)."

Part of the reason for that is that we might consider someone skilled if they need little or no documentation to accomplish a certain task. A skilled chef can make a meal without requiring a recipe, for instance, and a skilled network admin can make major changes to production switches and routers without calling up a CLI reference guide to check syntax. A talented chef, on the other hand, may think along different lines and construct an entirely unique dish for which there is no recipe. A talented system administrator may do much the same, assembling various tools in a unique way and devising a method around a problem that hadn't been attempted before. This may require some research and reference instead of rote knowledge, but the end result is something that wouldn't have otherwise existed, and is something for which there are no guidelines.

But there's a big downside to this Android growth: Severe fragmentation in the Android market means that startups must tune and debug their apps against a whole range of official Android versions, carrier tweaks, internal smartphone hardware, and external screen dimensions. Pundits have warned about this for years, but now the problem has come home to roost.

Imagine how transformative it would be if we could combine self-paced, self-directed postsecondary learning (which has been around in one form or another for millennia) with online delivery of content that has embedded in it both the sophisticated assessment of learning and the ability to diagnose learning problems, sometimes even before the learner is aware of them, and provide just-in-time interventions that keep the learner on track. Add to that the opportunity for the learner to connect to and participate in groups of other learners, and, to link directly to the faculty member and receive individualized attention and mentoring. What you would have is the 21st-century version of do-it-yourself college, grounded in but well beyond the experienced reality of the thousands of previous DIYers such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Edison.

This session will address online course design using the How People Learn framework for high level learning outcomes that involve collaboration, reflection, and problem solving.

"One's views about digital technology and "digital people"--even what one identifies as questions, problems, issues, advantages, worries, etc.--will depend upon one's other assumptions and values. Here, I want to talk about two different philosophical systems or stances: humanism and posthumanism."

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.

"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."

"The problem is that we get interrupted frequently in the modern workplace. Rituals become habits, and that means we run through the transition cycle every time we stop doing what we're doing. One famous 2007 study found that when people responded to email or instant messaging alerts, it took them 10 to 15 minutes beyond time spent on the interruption to really get back into their original tasks. Those 10 to 15 minutes of headline checking add up."

"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."

"For example, there's a lot of overlap in the processes of reading and the processes used for understanding speech - processes that assign syntactic roles to words. Do we see any evidence that people are having a harder time understanding spoken language? Or does the problem lie in the mental processes that build understanding of larger blocks of language, as when we're comprehending a story? If so, habitual Web users should have a hard time understanding complex narratives not just when they read, but in television and movies. No one should have watched The Sopranos, with its complicated, interweaving plotlines."

"Not Photoshop proficient? No problem! With the right apps - you can create the perfect Instagram image in a snap!"