Group items tagged

A form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills -- Jon Mueller "...Engaging and worthy problems or questions of importance, in which students must use knowledge to fashion performances effectively and creatively. The tasks are either replicas of or analogous to the kinds of problems faced by adult citizens and consumers or professionals in the field." -- Grant Wiggins -- (Wiggins, 1993, p. 229). "Performance assessments call upon the examinee to demonstrate specific skills and competencies, that is, to apply the skills and knowledge they have mastered." -- Richard J. Stiggins -- (Stiggins, 1987, p. 34).

"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"."

"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."

"But there's a couple of problems with the disciplinary focus on teaching and learning. It reinforces the belief that teaching in a particular field is unique, and if you don't know the field you can't possibly know anything about how to teach it. Certainly the content-how knowledge of it advances, how it's organized, what counts as evidence, for example-has implications for how it's taught. Teaching problem solving and teaching themes from a novel are not the same. But there are many aspects of teaching and learning that transcend disciplinary boundaries-you wouldn't be reading this blog if you didn't believe that"

"But that will not happen unless countries and states make very large investments in their teachers. Not, I might add, to teach them how to use technology.  That will get us nowhere. Their lack of knowledge about how to use technology has never been the problem. It is their lack of deep knowledge about the doors that the technology can open that is the problem."

Via Stephen Downes's recent post; a nice accessible summary discussion for non-techies about how technology is changing teaching. Good teaching resource, I think.

dataviz project for ECAR stats

This would be a tremendous addition alongside the Campus Learning Center, the Writing Center, etc.

"the "active" in "active use of technology" we are referring to is what is happening in the mind of the child. Active use for young children occurs when they use technologies in generative ways, that is, when they are generating insights, associations between new and existing knowledge, or creating their own content. This encourages more active cognitive processing that leads to deeper, longer lasting learning."

"Digital Foreigners in Charge"

"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:"

Will Sullivan's Engelbart's scholars blog

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.

"The emerging digital media ecology is opening/will open indeterminate capacities for thought and action that will shift (again, in a non-determining way) practices of rhetoric/communication, social institutions, the production of knowledge, and our sense of what it means to be human." PONDER THAT FOR A MOMENT...

Maxine Greene (1995) writes:

"The role of the imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve.  It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected" (p. 28)

In this age of constant information and busy lives, it's difficult to get teachers and parents to read large amounts of research, or to understand the importance of boycotts, resolutions or petitions. The information we wish to share regarding the ill purpose and effects of corporate ownership of education must be expressed using all of the senses, in our bodied actions-instantaneously and with the emotion it warrants. As Nick Sousanis considers, we have to remember that conception (i.e as what we believe, what we think of as "real") largely comes through our perception (i.e what we see with our eyes and how we construct meaning).

Greene writes that through the "art of knowing"-"The experience and knowledge gained  by this way of knowing opens new modalities for us in the lived world; it brings us in touch with our primordial landscapes, our original acts of perceiving" (p. 149).

We need to redesign the social landscape with new images, new stories, new ways of understanding what corporate reform "is" and how it works.  What we need is action-creative action collectively inspired in local communities and through national organizing-to UNFLATTEN our worlds.

"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 . . .

"ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized!"

"Experts were realizing that disciplinary expertise and research prowess were no guarantee that a professor could teach. Some colleges were devising alternatives to rote learning, helping students integrate knowledge from different subjects, or challenging them with courses on contemporary problems. Teaching was finally going to matter."

"Distributed cognition is a theory of mind that argues that cognition does not occur exclusively in individual brains but is distributed across an environment - an interlocking system consisting of tools, persons, and specific knowledge and tasks. One of the insights of this approach was to recognize that the deep interconnections of these cognitive ecologies have a profound impact on how people use and understand tools. As Edwin Hutchins puts it, a tool that is "easy to use" is simply a tool that fits into a particular cognitive ecology."

"The findings of this study indicated that when teachers described their successful practices, they often linked them to their changing roles and new representation of their "selves" within an online environment. Their portrayal of the teacher self, both built on a plethora of previous experiences and reformed with the affordances and limitations of the online environment, went through a process whereby teachers were constantly challenged to make themselves heard, known, and felt by their students. This study showed that it was critical to listen to teachers' voices and give them a participatory role in the creation and use of their knowledge and experience in order to form their online teacher personas. As a result, programs that prepare faculty to teach online may need to encourage teachers to reflect on their past experiences, assumptions, and beliefs toward learning and teaching and transform their perspectives by engaging in pedagogical inquiry and problem solving."