Group items tagged

"I've come to believe that most professors who cling to the lecture format do so because they crave being the center of attention - even when their audience is indifferent or hostile. Faculty get so little respect these days outside the classroom that it seems only natural for us to covet whatever respect we can garner from within it."

"If online learning is to succeed as not only as a legitimate option for learning but as a respected platform within an institution, leadership has to build that respect through calculated risks and building multi-departmental relationships."

"In essence, inclusive and open pedagogies are rooted in empathy and require that we take a humanistic approach in creating learning experiences. Empathy creates room to value multiple viewpoints. And when learners are not treated as "others," trust can be established. As empathy, trust, and respect become more prevalent, learners find the confidence to increasingly participate, engage, and take more ownership of their development and their learning. In this way, inclusive pedagogy is open, and open pedagogy is inclusive."

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"

"If you don't have a resume, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you? Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up? Some say, "well, that's fine, but I don't have those." Yeah, that's my point. If you don't have those, why do you think you are  remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don't have those, you've been brainwashed into acting like you're sort of ordinary."

Most of us recognize that schools should be helping students learn how to do deep, rich, technology-infused knowledge work that prepares them for future citizenship, college, work, and other life needs. Many principals and superintendents, however, are struggling to balance the need to technologically empower students with countervailing organizational concerns regarding safety, respectful behavior, and the law. In my conversations with school administrators about Internet safety and student technology usage, I use many of the talking points below. Use some of them to spark a conversation with your local educators and community.

If wanted to take a mooc - do you have any recommendations on what to avoid? I am interested in digital storytelling and all things video game (and gamification).

"Under current law there is no recognized right to privacy in a student's or applicant's social networking site passwords and account information. This Bill makes it unlawful for a public or nonpublic academic institution to mandate that a student or applicant disclose password or account information granting the academic institution access to the student's or applicant's social networking profile or account. This Bill also prohibits academic institutions from requesting that a student or applicant log onto their respective social networking site to provide the academic institution direct access to the student's or applicant's social networking site profile or account. It is acknowledged by the General Assembly that new technological advances in internet use and social networking require new approaches to protecting reasonable expectations of privacy in personal information."

"A better approach is positive general principles. Tell students what you want them to do. My favorite model is the four Tribes agreements that are displayed prominently in my class and discussed and practiced every day: Attentive Listening- Pay close attention to what others are saying. Check for understanding Appreciation Only- Treat each other kindly, don't use put-downs. Right to Pass- Choose when and how much you participate. It's acceptable to simply observe. Mutual Respect- Affirm the value and uniqueness of everyone."

I used TRIBES while a principal in Camden, it does change school culure. Thanks for sharing.

"Universities quietly maintain the fiction that student work is mostly evaluated by people in a structural position to assess it both independently and generously. Independently, because they are tenured: when they call good work good and bad work bad, they do so because their dispassionate judgments have no bearing on their continued employment.  Generously, because they themselves enjoy consolations of time, resources, and respect that redound to their evaluative practice: they sit in quiet private offices, attentively marking a reasonable volume of student work, and have no fundamental reasons to resent the students they teach nor the institutions which employ them."

"I'm not a radical, or anti-establishment - I've loved and respected working at every university I've joined. I just happen to have moved into a different learning delivery model because I knew it would give me greater flexibility to continue with my academic interests and spend more time with my family. It's a model that fits around my life. That's something I share in common with my students. They aren't unusual either. They just choose to study online because the flexibility suits them. Online higher education means students can combine education with employment - often fast-tracking their careers as a result - or fit study around family commitments."

Antioch University is the first US institution to receive approval from Coursera to offer college credit for specified Coursera MOOCs (massive open online courses). Through this new partnership, Antioch University and the Antioch University Los Angeles campus can reduce student costs to complete a four-year degree and expand course offerings through free online courses offered by the highly respected universities that have partnered with Coursera.

Very cool! Maybe college debt will start to go down for students of the future. Higher levels of education for less money :) I know I will paying back my school loans until I am dead.

"If you want humans to fear and respect their robot overlords you have to start early. Elementary school children in Korea in the cities of Masan and Daegu are among the first to be exposed to robotic teachers. "

"Both movies - Bruno and District 9 - made over 14 million dollars on opening night. On the second day, Bruno fell to meager 8.7 million, while District made a respectable 12.6 million dollars. Has Twitter had anything to do with it?"

"Google Maps is the most popular mobile app, used by 54% of the global smartphone population last month, according to a recent survey by GlobalWebIndex. However, the mobile apps for YouTube and Google+ were used by 35% and 30% of smartphone users respectively, which means that Google owns three of the four most widely used apps"

"Now that the Valley's companies are increasingly competing against traditional businesses, society is not so quick to give us a pass on this behavior. Take Airbnb and Uber again, both of which have attempted to avoid regulations and taxes in their fields (hotel taxes and taxi and license commission regulations, respectively). The tech press often writes these up as "disrupting" unwieldy government regulations, and to a degree, this is accurate (the best writers also mention that many of these laws were designed with consumers in mind, back when cabs and hotels were far less safe than they are now)."

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.

What happens to the printed book in the 1-to-1 classroom? Klein: I think the printed textbook should be given a respectful and decent burial. I think it should be gone... There is no reason you can't give kids a digitized version of the textbook. I actually think the textbook itself is going to become anachronistic. The teaching experience that has curriculum and textbook elements integrated is the way of the future.

" instead of professors and students, there's facilitators and participants, instead of one-directional lectures, you have discussions, and instead of tests and quizzes you create projects and artifacts. If it all sounds too squishy and feel-good, make no mistake, this is serious learning, tackling the amazingly heady topic of feminism and technology and created by bona fide, longtime professors in their fields. It's rigorous, complex and in San Antonio, you don't need to be a college student (past or present) or even own a computer to access it. That's the new international network FemTechNet in a nutshell, one of those ideas that seems to have suddenly arrived fully formed, like Athena springing out of Zeus' head. Obviously a lot more work went into it than that, but the actual creation timeline for the Network took a little more than a year-and-a-half according to co-creators Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, Dean of the New School's Media Studies program and professor of media studies at Pitzer College, respectively."

A new bill introduced in the U.S. Senate seeks to tackle the rising cost of textbooks by giving states an incentive to experiment with open educational resources. The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken, Democrats of Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, would create a grant program that would fund the creation of new textbooks -- as long as they are made available for free online.

""What's the next new thing in strategy?" a senior executive recently asked Phil Rosenzweig, a professor at IMD,1 in Switzerland. His response was surprising for someone whose career is devoted to advancing the state of the art of strategy: "With all respect, I think that's the wrong question. There's always new stuff out there, and most of it's not very good. Rather than looking for the next musing, it's probably better to be thorough about what we know is true and make sure we do that well.""