Group items tagged

"What's neat about this is that I didn't have to use any special software while I was writing to make this "video" possible. I was working in plain old vanilla Google Docs. And to show you this one paragraph I liked, I didn't have to present you with the whole document (all 39,154 revisions of it) - I could extract bits and pieces that I thought were interesting, and interleave them in a blog post. Imagine what a high school English teacher could do with that. Imagine what you could do with that if instead of a minor effort by ol' Somers here you had, say, a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I've always wanted to watch how TNC writes. If he's ever used Google Docs, it's now possible.)"

I love this: "I worry that most people aren't as good writers as they should be. One thing is that they just don't write enough. Another is that they don't realize it's supposed to be hard; they think that good writers are talented, when the truth is that good writers get good the way good programmers get good, the way good anythings get good: by running into the spike. Maybe folks would understand that better if they had vivid evidence that a good writer actually spends most of his time fighting himself."

"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."

""We were initially torn between collaborating with universities and working outside the world of college," Thrun tells me. The San Jose State pilot offered the answer. "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," he says. "It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit.""

"After reading our classes popcorn poem I realized that a good portion of the class is amazed by how we were able to construct poetry to social media. I myself am one of those people. We've always considered poetry to be something containing a higher meaning with vocabulary words we wouldn't use on a daily basis, but as of last friday we created poetry where the stanzas were replaced with tweets by different account users, and the theme of the poem was spread through the us of a twitter timeline, and retweets. With using my new definition of a genre of poetry I see these popcorn poems as multiple authors, viewing the potential of poetry in the social media realm, were so used to seeing poem being on paper containing X amount of stanzas, but now we see people's different first impression on what poetry via internet is like. For the most part each student was surprised, and had a good feeling about what this could be going forward with the more assignments we get that involve us doing popcorn poems. "

""Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design." This implies, for one, that good documentation does not excuse bad design. You can ask people to RTFM, but it is folly to assume they have read everything and memorized every detail. The clarity of examples, and the software's decipherability and debuggability in the real world, are likely far more important. Form must communicate function."

"Students find most of our classes - especially large lecture classes - extremely boring and (at least to some extent) obsolete. That's not the same as saying that we are all boring necessarily. I used to love listening to good history lectures when I was an undergraduate, but this is a new era"

"For example, Jaclyn is the underlying reason that I've had something of a change of heart about online classes. While I've been making a substantial contribution to my daughter's tuition and living expenses, Jaclyn decided in her sophomore year to get a job so that she could afford to move off campus and live a little better than she would if she stayed in the dorms. In the process, she took some online classes that fit her work schedule better than the traditional courses. Before my daughter started college, I couldn't see much reason for students at a bricks-and-mortar college to take online classes. Now I realize why those courses make so much sense for students who work - either out of necessity or by choice. It was Jaclyn who made it very clear to me that some online courses are much better than others. Good online classes have taught her much more than bad survey courses in the traditional format with 400 students in them. Her experiences were what inspired me to create what I hope will be a quality online class of my own."

Interesting guy to talk to etc. at some point. "In the 17th century, scholar-publishers created the first scientific journals, revolutionising the communication and practice of scholarship. Today, we're at the beginning of a second revolution, as academia slowly awakens to the tranformative potential of the Web.   I'm interested in both pushing this revolution forward, and in studying it as it happens. I'm investigating altmetrics: measuring scholarly impact over the social web instead of through traditional citation. I'm also interested in new publishing practices like scholarly tweeting, overlay journals, alternative peer review forms, and open access. These slides give a good idea of what I've been up to lately; my CV links to other recent publications and talks. "

A nice breakdown of Twitter search methodology we might parallel in other contexts. "You probably skipped right over the most important word used by the five sources above. It's everyone's favorite word, and one you should add to any Twitter search that's seeking personal experiences: Me. (And its close cousin "my.") Most people relating a personal experience - aka, good sources - will use it. Most people observing from afar - aka, useless sources - won't. Let's look again at those five sources, and this time pay attention to the words they used that enabled us to find them. There's another word variation they all have in common."

Bet you never thought of the adjective "cool" when writing your syllabus. In case you want to start, this syllabus is very cool. I will be following this class as they publish their writing openly. I am optimistic that the teaching & learning will be pretty cool.

" This course is not one in which an instructor feeds you information and you regurgitate it for a good grade. You (the student) and I (the instructor) are almost certainly going to disagree on some things, and that's just fine (see the Grading section below). It's probably easiest to think of this course as a small, independent publication/think tank focused on the concept of 'cool'. Your job is to look carefully and thoughtfully at the world around you, and produce a series of essays that would help a potential reader understand your stance on what 'cool' means to you. You'll be using the process of writing and editing to help you define, and refine, that stance for yourself. You're also responsible for helping your fellow writers do the same. " h/t Stan

Not in agreement with the 'taskmaster' element but I have similar concerns about teaching evaluations. "Michele Pellizzari, an economics professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, has a more serious claim: that course evaluations may in fact measure, and thus motivate, the opposite of good teaching. "

Very good: "Web Design: The First 100 years" http://t.co/wu8jzT6Pq6 (although "the web" is not the right frame, but, details.)

"There's no shortage of crises to attend to. But by providing new technology and tools, Refugee Open Ware might make refugee camps a space where those at the epicenter of a crisis can send out shock waves of good."

Another good article on assessment

Good guidelines/advice on writing blogging comments.