Group items tagged

"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."

"If Freire Made a MOOC: Open Education as Resistance"

"We better first check to see if that is trash or a piece of art."

There is in his syllabus no compromise with expediency, no taking for granted of power structures, nothing but rigorous honesty and tireless interrogation; there is some feeling or hope that if you could put every single thing under the sun into words you can head off sorrow, frustration, resentment, missed communication, thwarted ambition. Wallace refuses the habitual patterns and usual fictions that govern a classroom. His syllabus warns: "If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they're due, running them quickly through the computer's Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them 'because the ideas are good' or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one's ideas and the quality of those ideas' verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding."

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."

""We recommend that the assistant secretary require the Higher Learning Commission to reevaluate competency-based education programs previously proposed by schools to determine whether interaction between faculty and students will be regular and substantive," the report said, "and, if not, determine whether the programs should have been classified as correspondence programs.""

"Students presented their work. They had about 30 seconds. A few students served as a panel (if we're sticking with "Shark Tank", these are your Mark Cubans, your Mr. Wonderfuls, etc.). The teacher had prepared a few scripted questions, which the panel asked psuedo-randomly. The presenters knew these questions ahead of time and had to be prepared to answer them. Students responded to the questions that were selected. The panelists convened with their groupmates to discuss the presenters' responses and to develop deeper, more probing questions. The presenters also had a couple minutes to regroup and confer. After convening, the panelists return to their station and ask the questions that they and their group came up with. The presenters respond. From this point, it becomes semi-conversational as all the panelists are interested in getting their question answered.he presenters then answered those questions, which were generally more specific in nature and based on the initial responses of the presenters."

"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. "

"So if we know that there are methods superior to lecturing, why are we lecturing at all?"

"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."

"It's not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideas with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don't have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name. When I need the title of a novel someone recommended, I just scroll back to the day we were at the bookstore together. Looking through my photo stream, there is a caption about Thomas Jefferson smuggling seeds from Italy, which I want to research; a picture of a tree I want to identify, which I need to send to my father; the nutritional label from a seasoning that I want to re-create; and a man with a jungle of electrical cords in the coffee shop, whose picture I took because I wanted to write something about how our wireless lives are actually full of wires. Photography has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write. Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return."

"How many colleges and universities are integrating MOOC content into new and/or existing credit-bearing courses in academic programs? If so, what is the impact on the course, program and institution?"

""One of the things I learned about the world of art," Teller says, "is there are people who really want to believe in magic, that artists are supernatural beings-there was some guy who could walk up and do that. But art is work like anything else-concentration, physical pain. Part of the subject of this movie is that a great work of art should seem to have magically sprung like a miracle on the wall. But to get that miracle is an enormous, aggravating pain." To see Vermeer as "a god" makes him "a discouraging bore," Teller went on. But if you think of him as a genius artist and an inventor, he becomes a hero: "Now he can inspire." "

"In this "nothing left to take away" version, the LMS becomes the smooth, brown, plastic oval of Mr. Potato Head. All of the traditional "features" of the LMS are independent, swappable components that plug in via LTI - the way Mr. Potato Head's happy eyes are swappable for his angry eyes. Or, if you prefer a more technical analogy, the LMS becomes an operating system like iOS (but hopefully WAY more open) and all previous system features become apps that you can install and uninstall as you will."

"The Science of Online Discussions Our working knowledge regarding distance education suggests that productive discussions are essential to learning in an asynchronous online environment. Online discussions effectively take the place of face-to-face classroom discussion. It has even been suggested that, if well facilitated, online discussions may allow for more in-depth and thoughtful learning than is possible in a face-to-face setting (Hawkes, 2006). Gao, Wang, and Sun (2009) contend that in a productive online discussion, it is essential for participants to embrace the following four dispositions:"

"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."

The Web promised openness. Open access. Open knowledge. A wide open space for creativity. Collaboration. Distribution. Instead what we have today is a mass of information silos and content farms. What we have today, if we're honest with ourselves, are old hierarchies hard-coded onto new ones.

At the end of each day, I sit and I think about everything that I had learned from morning till night and I transform it into a "Daily Doodle." By combining studying and drawing, each doodle acts as a learning tool and a creative exercise. Please note that I am still in the learning process and that my doodles may not be accurate. If you find any errors, please send me an email so that I can learn from my mistakes! (michiko.maruyama@gmail.com)

Built on shorthand.com . Interesting example of assembling text, images, GIFs, and video in one space--all with a strong narrative element. What if course "modules" were presented this way? Traditional narrative structure, but multimedia elements.