Group items tagged

"The idea behind Open Lab Hours is simple: create a space for students interested in journalism and technology to gather and work on projects. All are welcome. Some students come with the most basic questions, like "What's the internet?", while more advanced students come to debug projects, or hack on interactive and data stories for student publications. The key has been to create a community for people who want to learn. With a safe space for beginners, rookies and advanced folks to work together, relationships are naturally formed between students with varying skill levels. These relationships help newbies learn while providing more advanced students with the capacity to teach and develop new project ideas."

What we're trying to do with Agora: "The idea behind Open Lab Hours is simple: create a space for students interested in journalism and technology to gather and work on projects. All are welcome. Some students come with the most basic questions, like "What's the internet?", while more advanced students come to debug projects, or hack on interactive and data stories for student publications. The key has been to create a community for people who want to learn. With a safe space for beginners, rookies and advanced folks to work together, relationships are naturally formed between students with varying skill levels. These relationships help newbies learn while providing more advanced students with the capacity to teach and develop new project ideas."

"We are a 501c3 charitable organization that was formed in 2010 to fill a void with initial refugee resettlement.  We collaborate with resettlement agencies, residential property owners, educators, faith communities and other organizations to ensure that every refugee resettled in Richmond has the opportunity to establish roots and build community."

An online focus group was used to investigate the experiences of nine individuals with cerebral palsy who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and social media. Information was gathered related to (a) advantages of social media, (b) disadvantages of social media, (c) barriers to successful use, (d) supports to successful use, and (e) recommendations for other individuals using AAC, support personnel, policy makers, and technology developers. Participants primarily chose to focus on social media as a benef cial tool and viewed it as an important form of communication. The participants did describe barriers to social media use (e.g., technology). Despite barriers, all the participants in this study took an active role in learning to use social media. The results are discussed as they relate to themes and with reference to published literature.

1. For complex written assignments that require synthesis of material from the entire semester, divide the assignment into phases and have students submit interim deliverables for feedback. 2. Use rubrics to guide student activity on the discussion board as well as in written assignments. 3. For courses that teach dense, technical material, self-check quizzes can be very effective to oblige students to complete the required reading and help them (and instructors) gauge their understanding of the material. 4. Make use of synchronous technologies, where appropriate. Many of the challenges instructors face when teaching online are the result of the distant, asynchronous nature of most online learning. Web conferencing and telephone conferencing can help "close the gap" that asynchronous communication introduces. 5. Explore the use of peer-assessment strategies to foster community development and give students chances to learn through analyzing and critiquing the work of others. Rubrics are a must for this kind of activity. 6. Look for appropriate opportunities to address the entire class so as to reduce the time spent giving the same feedback to multiple students. After a big assignment, post an announcement summarizing some of the trends in the submissions, along with recommendations for next steps. Maintain a "Q&A" discussion board to which students can post questions for everyone to see. Monitor the board regularly, but also urge students to assist one another when appropriate.

" In such times Dada objects amuse everybody, and since these objects are (mostly) made collectively, they are a strong community bond. Amusement (of oneself and others) and the making of art communities are the goals of Dada. Dada is a priori against everything, including goals and itself, but this creative negation is very amusing and is meant to be shared. For one whole century, Dada has delighted in uncovering and using contradictions, paradoxes, and negations, the most important of which are: 1. most people read signs, Dadas make signs, and 2. most people are scared of scary faces, Dada makes scary faces." "

"The concept of meta-communication suggests that the form of the communication, its nonverbal elements, begin to define the teacher-student relationship. So what relationship do I want with my students? What kind of first impression am I interested in making through my syllabus?"

What a great resource, and yes, the all important first impression is the syllabus. A good way to look at it.

The Kress Foundation funded research to help clarify perceptions on digital scholarship and art history! I can only imagine the creative community being equally aghast and confused about earth art, conceptual art and performance art (among others). Wild to think about. We keep marching forward. "The findings reveal disagreements in the art history community about the value of digital research, teaching, and scholarship. Those who believe in the potential of digital art history feel it will open up new avenues of inquiry and scholarship, allow greater access to art historical information, provide broader dissemination of scholarly research, and enhance undergraduate and graduate teaching. Those who are skeptical doubt that new forms of art historical scholarship will emerge from the digital environment. They remain unconvinced that digital art history will offer new research opportunities or that it will allow them to conduct their research in new and different ways."

"I believe in the professorial mandate, the deep commitment we must have to giving back knowledge because we get the privilege of being able to spend our days thinking. But that isn't just a matter of toiling in our worlds and then throwing knowledge out of the ivory tower. It's not just about making material open and hoping people will come. It's about actively engaging the very people that we seek to understand, contributing to the communities we spend time analyzing. To treat them respectfully and to understand our moral and ethical responsibility to them."

Community engagement

Assessment: What are students really learning?

"Three types of courses make up the CopyrightX Community: - a residential course on Copyright Law, taught by Prof. William Fisher to approximately 100 Harvard Law School students; - an online course divided into sections of 25 students, each section taught by a Harvard Teaching Fellow; - a set of affiliated courses based in countries other than the United States, each taught by an expert in copyright law."

"Studies suggest there's real value in learning and maintaining this ancient skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting's demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice." Tie in with ECAR findings writeup

This is what community can look like online.

"Today, it's in vogue to talk about how Slack is going to replace email. As someone who has seen this play out a dozen times now, let me give you a little spoiler: Slack is not going to replace email. But Slack isn't the problem here, either. It's just another communication tool. The problem of email overload is both ancient and persistent. If the problem were really with "email", then, presumably, one of the nine million email apps that dot the app-stores like mushrooms sprouting from a globe-spanning mycelium would have just solved it by now, and we could all move on with our lives. Instead, it is permanently in vogue1 to talk about how overloaded we all are. "

"These constructive quotes communicate that mistakes are desirable, which is a positive message and part of what we want students to learn. An appreciation of mistakes helps us overcome our fear of making them, enabling us to take risks. But we also want students to understand what kinds of mistakes are most useful and how to most learn from them. "