Group items tagged

"Traditional courses have long focused on tools and techniques for the presentation of content. Traditional concerns from faculty focused on covering the material, getting through the book and meeting expectations so that faculty in other courses won't muse and wonder,  "Didn't you learn these concepts from faculty X?"   And "Didn't you study the work and contributions of  ____ (Fill in your favorite who)"  A major drawback with designing for content as a priority is that it focuses attention on what the faculty member is doing, thinking and talking about and not on the interaction and engagement of students with the core concepts and skills of a course. The new focus on learners encourages a focus on learners as a priority. The new focus on the learner is to develop a habit of asking, what is going on inside the learner's head? How much of the content is being integrated into their knowledge base? How much of the content and the tools can he/she actually use? What are students thinking and how did they arrive at their respective positions? Additionally, we are seeing a shift to looking at the student no only as an individual, but as an individual within the learning community. Other questions that we are now considering include: How is the learner supporting the community of learners and contributing to the overall growth of the group? "

"Meet Diigo Outliner - the best way to structurally organize your information and thoughts "

Certainly true for me in a variety of areas of learning . . . "Programming was taught to me in a similar way - and for students to attain true understanding, this doesn't feel like it's the best way to learn. There is a literal learning curve to programming, and once you hit the inflection point of that curve you become somewhat self reliant. You know what to ask Google, you know the process of debugging, and you start to realize you're capable of accomplishing anything by yourself. But if you haven't hit that point yet, it can feel like you may never hit that point. Traditional methods of testing and gauging progress among students who are at different points in their capacity to learn programming don't feel quite fair, and I believe this discourages many (particularly underrepresented minorities) from continuing to learn how to code."

Certainly true for me in a variety of areas of learning . . . "Programming was taught to me in a similar way - and for students to attain true understanding, this doesn't feel like it's the best way to learn. There is a literal learning curve to programming, and once you hit the inflection point of that curve you become somewhat self reliant. You know what to ask Google, you know the process of debugging, and you start to realize you're capable of accomplishing anything by yourself. But if you haven't hit that point yet, it can feel like you may never hit that point. Traditional methods of testing and gauging progress among students who are at different points in their capacity to learn programming don't feel quite fair, and I believe this discourages many (particularly underrepresented minorities) from continuing to learn how to code."

From another institution-- scorecard breaking down popular instructional design metrics (e.g. Quality Matters) with SACSCOC online/blended best practices for compliance.

"By being up-front with my students about what I'm asking them to do outside of class, and-most essentially-why I have ordered things in that manner, I'm asking them to be co-owners of their learning experience. By making it clear that I'm doing my level best to value their time, they see my investment in their success."

"Which of Newton's Laws (First, Second or Third) says that an object will move in a straight line at a constant speed without a net force? This is a terrible question for the following reasons: Does it really matter which law is First, Second, and Third? Technically, both the First and Second Law would be correct answers. It misses the main point about forces and motion and instead gives some type of recall-based question. I just think we can do better. Just because most physics textbooks (but not all) have been very explicit about Newton's Laws of Motion, this doesn't mean that is the best way for students to learn."

"Harry: "I just can't say "Find an avenue" because he's gonna say "you're not teaching me anything!" Bill: "Well, maybe that's the way to teach though. Maybe if you say "you must find an avenue. Next week, I'll show you an avenue, but this week, find an avenue!""

"Many years ago I spoke of Bill Evans and his great appreciation of simplicity, and his capacity for tremendous amplification through honest simplification. Recently I stumbled upon a rare, 45-minute interview from the 1960s which Bill Evans did along with his brother-also a wonderful pianist-Harry Evans. If you can find time to sit down and watch the entire interview, it may be the best thing you see all week. But to give you a feel of the message, let me place the videos here and highlight the key points along with my comments."

"A recent Twitter conversation that cast doubt on the conclusions of a genomics study has revived a debate about how best to publicly discuss possible errors in research. Yoav Gilad, a geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, last month wrote on Twitter that fundamental errors in the design and data analysis of a December 2014 study2 led to an unfounded conclusion about the genetic similarities between mice and humans."

"And his tweets, some of them uncomfortably raw, struck a nerve. Fellow journalists, technology writers and countless others spent the past several days monitoring Twitter, hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. An online community that is so often dismissed for being quintessentially banal - think of the proverbial tweet of what someone had for breakfast - embraced Scott's grief in a way we rarely see play out in public. "

Education research has shown that an effective technique for developing problem-solving and critical-thinking skills is to expose students early and often to "ill-defined" problems in their field. An ill-defined problem is one that addresses complex issues and thus cannot easily be described in a concise, complete manner. Furthermore, competing factors may suggest several approaches to the problem, requiring careful analysis to determine the best approach.

Like the SBG stuff from Shawn Cornally (think, thank, thunk). Be nice to see more of this in higher ed. "Probably the biggest gains came after we let students start developing learning objectives based on the standards. We would actually give the students the standards and ask them, 'What would you have to be able to do show mastery of this?' The students themselves developed learning objectives. The key point is it became student friendly [in] language."

"Think of yourself as someone who sells aspirin. And realize that the best customer for your aspirin is someone who is in pain. Not a lot of pain. Not a migraine. Just a little. Piaget called that pain "disequilibrium." Neo-Piagetians call it "cognitive conflict." Guershon Harel calls it "intellectual need." I'm calling it a headache. I'm obviously not originating this idea but I'd like to advance it some more. One of the worst things you can do is force people who don't feel pain to take your aspirin. They may oblige you if you have some particular kind of authority in their lives but that aspirin will feel pointless. It'll undermine their respect for medicine in general."

"The bottom line? According to multiple, peer-reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success. In the chart, the further to the right you go toward a closed network, the more you repeatedly hear the same ideas, which reaffirm what you already believe. The further left you go toward an open network, the more you're exposed to new ideas. People to the left are significantly more successful than those to the right. In fact, the study shows that half of the predicted difference in career success (i.e., promotion, compensation, industry recognition) is due to this one variable."

"As we venture into the 21st century, we as a society, are faced with more innovation and challenge than ever before. We now live in an interconnected world, where the Internet and global communications are simultaneously uniting and isolating us as a society. How do we raise critical thinkers to best face the challenges that face our modern society? What changes in education methods should be implemented to  create a better learning environment for these budding minds? "

"In this portfolio, there are only four pieces so far. I plan on adding to the collection and changing the format of the site around as I get used to blogging like this. I decided the best pieces to showcase how I started out would be the first few things I wrote and then some of the last things I did. So, I posted the first journal we did: Preliminary Self-Analysis. Upon reading it now, I remember how I decided just go for the "type like I talk" format just to see what would happen. It doesn't look too bad, but I can tell I overdid it a little. "

Agency? "Digital literacy is less about following the rules... and more about manipulating them." https://t.co/oK0kKUrwfH #moocmooc - ℳąhą Bąℓi مها بالي (@Bali_Maha) February 1, 2015

FYI, Coursera's "University Teaching 101" is just starting. Basic SOTL, best practices, know your students, developing instruction plan, working in small groups, teaching online.

"The best performing teacher in the whole system was a woman named Zenaida Tan. Up until that report, she was completely unheralded. The skills she possessed were invisible. Meanwhile, less important traits were measured on her evaluations (three times she was late to pick up students from recess). In part, Lemov is talking about the skill of herding cats. The master of cat herding senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education. This raises an important point. As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today's loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks. People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation - willing to listen 70 percent of the time"

"I'm blaming the people who've decided that the lack of a single online system is a problem that somehow needs to be fixed - as if having a hundred professors teaching the same subject a hundred different ways was a problem that they ever would have thought of fixing during the pre-Internet age. Well, I want to break free, and I think that it's best for education if as many other faculty members as possible break free with me. "