Group items tagged

"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. "

"I believe that words mean things and the names we attach to the things we care about serve as little icons that can tell a very brief story about the things themselves. I think flipped learning is at the point now where it's past the point of being the Next Big Thing in Education, and the first order of business, it seems to me, in moving the conversation about flipped learning forward is just figuring out what story we want to convey by way of the terminology we use."

"These days, Irvine's massive courses typically run on their own. It's easier for everyone that way, says Mr. Matkin. "What we learned is you try to present a MOOC for what it is," says the dean. "It's a free course, with relatively little interaction with faculty members.""

"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."

Fun little mashup activity...

" In the news media, MOOCs had gone from being higher education's savior to a bust in a little more than a year."

"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"."

"There's solid research behind the idea. Most famously, MIT professor Thomas Allen's work has emphasized how important face-to-face interaction is for creativity, and found that people rarely even speak to coworkers who sit as little as 60 feet away from them in a traditional office. "

"Think of yourself as someone who sells aspirin. And realize that the best customer for your aspirin is someone who is in pain. Not a lot of pain. Not a migraine. Just a little. Piaget called that pain "disequilibrium." Neo-Piagetians call it "cognitive conflict." Guershon Harel calls it "intellectual need." I'm calling it a headache. I'm obviously not originating this idea but I'd like to advance it some more. One of the worst things you can do is force people who don't feel pain to take your aspirin. They may oblige you if you have some particular kind of authority in their lives but that aspirin will feel pointless. It'll undermine their respect for medicine in general."

A group of renowned disability studies scholars are seeking to clarify what makes a book accessible with a set of guidelines that authors can use to help publishers make their books readable by anyone.

The guidelines, a one-page template letter, read a little like an ultimatum. The letter opens by asking a would-be publisher to confirm in writing that print books and accessible formats will be made available simultaneously, then launches into an explanation of how publishers should handle everything from digital rights management to authoring software.

Lennard J. Davis, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the letter is meant less to threaten a boycott and more as a public service announcement. Some authors may not budge from the demands in the letter, he said, but others are likely to use it as a way to spread awareness about accessibility.

nice little video on what is an ePortfolio; good examples from this page, too.

"So give me an A-, because my dreams overshot my constraints, and my vision for the final project didn’t come in on time. But I came to class prepared for every discussion, and led it in fact. I read every assigned reading, and listened to the commentary of my classmates. I did the blogs that were required, and I wrote every paper on time and with gusto. I stopped wasting my time and I stopped wasting the classes time, of which I am also proud. And I opened myself to the possibility that I am wrong sometimes, which unbelievably only took me 22 years. I want an A, and I believe I just explained why I deserve as much. But I realize only after having done the work required to become an A thinker how little an A really means to me, and how much better I feel knowing that."

"In this portfolio, there are only four pieces so far. I plan on adding to the collection and changing the format of the site around as I get used to blogging like this. I decided the best pieces to showcase how I started out would be the first few things I wrote and then some of the last things I did. So, I posted the first journal we did: Preliminary Self-Analysis. Upon reading it now, I remember how I decided just go for the "type like I talk" format just to see what would happen. It doesn't look too bad, but I can tell I overdid it a little. "

"Now, I realize in saying this I am merely expressing my Old Fartdom. "Why, in my day, there were groups and not all these little networks of people with their twittering and their facial books."" I think this is a pretty important distinction. And, groups are dead... mostly.

Little p-value What are you trying to say Of significance? — Stephen Ziliak, Roosevelt University economics professor How many statisticians does it take to ensure at least a 50 percent chanc…

"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."

"Of course, I am little disappointed that the students aren't all actually reading Plato. But I'm also impressed with their ability to find and use the content they need, just when they need it. It is still pretty early in the semester so they haven't yet realized that spewing facts does nothing to improve their overall grade. Soon, they will be confused to discover that I don't assess according to one's ability to retain information. It will take them a while to adjust, most have over a decade of schooling that has systematically conditioned them to believe in the value of isolated proofs."

What we're seeing most recently, and what I'm very excited about, is going from that linear model to a much more non-linear idea. The digital learning experience is becoming really a collection of inter-related learning nuggets, that you might take very different paths through, depending who you are and what your needs are, and how you learn most effectively.

" [This approach] is really not trying to mimic what we would do in the physical world, but starting from an entirely digital form, and really being very thoughtful about what the learning outcomes are that we're trying to achieve, and how can the technology enable us to achieve those outcomes. There are many things that are very different about how you would design learning and work, if you really are doing it from a digital-first standpoint. In trying to do the latter, what are some of the principles you keep coming back to? "