Group items tagged

"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"

"Our organizational cultures need to embrace online learning as unique. We need to be supporting faculty by immersing them in engaging, meaningful online classes as part of their preparation to becoming great online instructors. When our organizational practices convey a hierarchy between face-to-face and online classes, that hierarchy will translate into the attitudes of the instructors who teach those classes."

love me some serendipitous learning!

This is awesome. I love this.

"Student feedback about the use of Twitter was uniformly positive. Only one student suggested an improvement and requested more frequent study tweets. Examples of student evaluation comments included: "I LOVED the Twitter questions! It was something that kept me studying all semester." "I really liked the Twitter 'snack learning.' I only wish there were more 'tweets' covering more topics. It was a nice review to go over to prepare for comps. . . . Twitter is a good way to reach students during the day to give us something to think about.""

"Sometimes a mistake is so embarrassing, it cycles all the away around the shame circle and becomes kind of awesome. Today's case in point: Kyrzbekistan, a country accidentally invented by a New York Times piece that meant to reference the Central Asian nation Kyrgyzstan."

You have to love the plasticcosmonauts URL and the title.

Lovely post by an ED PSY 607 student "We talked in class about the importance of connections or clues and how the more connections and clues a student can develop towards a new idea, the better that new idea or concept is understood and processed, or moved to long term memory. "

""Thank you," he wrote. "I love it when people are able to change their grammar based on a logical argument. I'm like that - in fact, I actually enjoy learning and adopting new grammar-but I frequently run into people so emotionally attached to their grammar that they will defend what 'sounds right' to the death.""

" 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."

Embrace imperfection. Makers are more interested in learning and experimenting rather than perfection and that's OK. They try (and fail) often to perfect their projects and to make lots of small bets which eventually lead them to THE BIG IDEA. Makers do it for the fun first and iterate and refine as they go.

Love the process. A focus on trusting the process rather than outcome is essential to the Maker mentality. Creativity and making is an ongoing rhythm, a lifestyle which is more a way of being than a hobby or isolated event.

Other thoughts on this interesting link. Writing a grant focused on the iterative process of improving health care this is exactly what the funders are looking for. How to set up teams (with the 'right' mix of individuals) that are working in an environment where they can fail (without hurting anybody) and improve processes both for the team and the rest of the organization. The later is much harder - how to disseminate good processes that others can then improve upon in complex organizations. But yes the goal is to always work on the process improvement (the makers mentality as it is called in this piece).

"Digital literacy is getting a sense of your networks. It's like learning a new city, invisible but beautiful, and baffling when you don't know how a new city works. But then, as you roam around, it can start to make sense. You get more comfortable, and in time, your rhythms come together with its, and you can feel the city. You can cross the street safely and get what you need from the city. You can make friends there, and find safety, and love, and community. We all live in this common city now, and we just need to learn to see it. We live in an age of networks, and it's an amazing age."

Yin Wah Kreher says: February 13, 2015 at 8:10 pm Edit I love how you are thinking. I can see your thoughts connecting from "I used to think…" to "Now I think…" There is also other dimensions of comparative thinking going on here. Keep on thinking and sharing your thoughts!

"In short, says Stahl, "[infants] take surprising events as special opportunities to learn." This theory, that we're born knowing certain rules of the world, isn't new. We see evidence of it not only in humans but in lots of others species, too. What's new is this idea: that core knowledge seems to motivate babies to explore things that break those rules and, ultimately, to learn new things."

"When I first began teaching, I assumed my anxiety in each of these domains would eventually dissipate. I was certain that there had to be an approach to grading that was simultaneously meaningful, moral, and manageable, and that, with enough time and experimentation, I would eventually discover it. Yet the more I tried to get a handle on anxiety in one domain, the more I seemed to increase my anxiety in another. [1] I came to believe that the system was stacked against us. It had trapped us into a corner where, at best, we could maximize two goals at the expense of the third. Mirroring the "fast, good, cheap" meme that designers love so much, my pessimistic grading meme might look something like this:"

"Another way to look at Wikipedia's influence: Wikipedia reaches almost one-third of the total mobile population each month, according to Knight's analysis, which used data from the audience-tracking firm Nielsen. "

"Smile Suggest hints at a future where apps make decisions for us, taking cues from our latent desires."

Suli Breaks critique of schooling.

Ah, this is so interesting. Over lunch I announced that I love how Twitter is being used in OLE. I can see integrating it in a similar way that OLE is: As a way to announce that assignments (or makes) are complete. Given that 'ah hah' moment with me, and this article, it's pretty clear that there's a lot you can do with it, on many levels. Knowing your audience and making sure it meshes with the parameters and goals of the course are key.

"They were so busy hating Twitter they didn't realize how much they were learning or how much they were thinking critically."