Group items tagged

I/we need to consider this with our team and education more broadly. "Theory 1: Nothing we "know" about software development should be assumed to be true. Most of our tools, our mental models, and our practices are remnants of an era (possibly fictional) where software was written by solo practitioners, but modern software is a team sport. Theory 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it. Great technology is the product of a great culture. Culture gives us the ability to act in a loosely coupled way; it allows us to pursue a diversity of tactics. Uncertainty is the mind-killer and culture creates certainty in the face of the yawning shapeless void of possible solutions that is software engineering. Culture is what you do, not what you say. It starts at the top. It affects everything. You have a choice about the culture you promote, not about the culture you have. Theory 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness. If you aren't shipping, you aren't learning. If it slows down shipping, it probably isn't worth it. Maturity is knowing when to make the trade off and when not to. I had some experience with this at Flickr, and I wanted to see how far you could scale it. My private bet was that we'd make it to 50 engineers before things broke down. Theory 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying. Theory 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change. Invest in your people and your ability to ask questions, not your current answers. Your current answers are wrong, or they will be soon. "

"Stephen Downes, a co-creator of the first Connectivist learning environments, offers an even more radical framing: he argues that the content is a MacGuffin, the plot device in a Hitchcock movie that starts the story but ultimately proves unimportant. "

"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."

Well, except enrollments *are* down slightly at VCU...

"If your students worship grades, they won't complete assignments without knowing how many points it's worth. If they worship stickers and candy, they won't work without the promise of those prizes. If you say a prayer to the "real world" every time you sit down to plan your math lessons, you and your students will never have enough real world, never feel you have enough connection to jobs and solar panels and trains leaving Chicago and things made of stuff. If you instead say a prayer to the atomic sensation of being puzzled and the catharsis that comes from being unpuzzled, you will never get enough of being puzzled and unpuzzled."

"The way to "beat" this set of endless staircases is to turn around. Turning around will not take you back down the hallway that you used to get to the stairs; it will take you to a new room entirely. In most videogame-and in, y'know, actual rooms in real life-turning around will take you back to the place you just were. In Antichamber, going backwards often results in discovering a totally new area. "

"In 1998, a National Science Foundation report made a remark that begins to hit the mark a little closer: "It is important to understand how individuals assess their own knowledge of these subjects. For many purposes … it is the individual's self-assessment of his or her knowledge that will either encourage or discourage a given behavior." This starts to tear down the wall of judging people based on how "well-informed" or "attentive" they are (terms that permeate these statistics reports) to science, and instead places more significance on an individual's assessment of themselves. To go further, I'd argue that "knowledge" isn't as telltale of a measurement as "experience"."

"Kim Thanos goes to work each day with one not-so-modest goal: "Take $1 billion out of the textbook industry and give it back to students.""

Really need to think about how to do more with this internally for some of the routine support stuff. "It's no secret that newsrooms are increasingly using bots to cut down on busy work. Software now routinely churns out quarterly earnings stories for The Associated Press and earthquake alerts for Los Angeles Times, freeing reporters to pursue more in-depth projects. And while no bot can write 3,000-word investigative stories, it can assist reporters by alerting them to new data and filtering the information for them."

"But imagine for a moment that you didn't have to rely on maps to navigate the unknown-that your memory, instincts, and knowledge of the environment sufficed. This is the art of Polynesian wayfinding." The metaphor breaks down but I think it's close to navigation vs maps . . . skills & understanding vs step by step. One is a path to freedom- the other a kind of shackle masquerading . . .

" I am fortunate to be teaching a course this semester that I have successfully taught before and I have always loved to teach. I must admit that when it comes to my course rotation roster, I am always happy when it is time to teach this one. But, this semester, my new approach feels like I am hanging on a limb. I am uncertain. I feel vulnerable. I fear my experiment will fail. (Despite the fact that I know we really need to rethink this notion of failure.) So why do this? Because somewhere down in my gut I know that vulnerability is the heart of learning, and I know I need to learn too."

"He concluded that, other than the raw cognitive ability of the child herself, only one variable really counts: "What teachers do, know and care about." The evidence suggests that a child at a bad school taught by a good teacher is better off than one with a bad teacher at a good school. The benefits of having been in the class of a good teacher cascade down the years; the same is true of the penalty for having had a bad teacher."

"I'd say the biggest observation I've come across in the last couple weeks, is that the online co-learning model breaks down the barriers of the traditional teacher/student relationship. Collaborating, sharing, and building ideas and understanding through open discuss instead bland lecture (here's the information, learn it, regurgitate it for a test). Creating the open platform to express ideas, and then expand upon them with easy reference to the information on the web (i.e., youtube videos, spotify, etc.). The responsibility then lies with each of us (student and teacher) to clearly express our meaning, intention, interpretation, and understanding of material, and back it up with an openness to build on criticism, and defend our viewpoint. And as we've discussed, they, the students, have full ownership of their work, so they may use it for future reference, when needed. In a way, it's like what Beethoven, Debussy, and punk rock have done with music. Each in their own right said, screw the "rules" I'm going to create the music I feel is necessary. The music inside me." h/t to Joyce

"Later in his commentary Ragusea touches on transparency: "just trust me I know what I'm talking about doesn't work anymore, even if you are trustworthy and you do know what you're talking about," he says. "It's like math problems in school: it is not enough to get the right answer you have to show your work." Since at least 2011 in journalism developer circles show your work has been a mantra, and it is slowly spreading to other parts of the newsroom. Ragusea argues that Thompson's idea of discovery is important not because "people enjoy watching their hero sleuth chase down a mystery" but because nobody will believe you anymore when you "report a bunch of facts, even if you explain where you got them from. You have to show how you got them." Show, don't tell. It's writing 101 and it is the basic idea of active versus passive transparency. I like putting the emphasis on active transparency, in part, because it reinforces the idea of journalism as a process not a product."

" also share a lot of your concerns about specifics, but I think I've found a way to work my brain around it. You're absolute right; we've been conditioned to think in terms of exact numbers. We're used to being told our posts should be 200 words with 4 paragraphs and exactly 8 links to external sources, so that's how we've learned to function. I think this class has been great for me to retrain my brain to think creatively rather than within the confines of instructions. For length, I just make sure I answer the question. I ask myself if I feel that my answer is appropriate, or if I should go into more detail. It helps me if I stop focusing on the grade (as hard as that is) and instead focus on the assignment itself. If I can answer the question with detail in two sentences, I feel like two sentences is a perfectly fine entry. Most of the time, my entries are 2-3 paragraphs. I just write down what I'm thinking, rather than trying to filter through "Is this what Dr. Becker wants to see?" I think my work looks a lot better when I'm focused on what I think looks respectable, rather than trying to mold myself to what I think others may expect of me." h/t Jon

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

""We find that students doing more activities learn more than students watching more videos or reading more pages. We estimate the learning benefit from extra doing (1 SD increase) to be more than six times that of extra watching or reading." "

Do millenials like to read? That is my question. My nephew doesn't.

The original Pew study's worth a look; much more nuance, especially breaking down the Millennials into three distinct groups. And this interesting finding: "Millennials' lives are full of technology, but they are more likely than their elders to say that important information is not available on the internet."