Group items tagged

"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."

""Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about," [Richard] Feynman later explained. "The trouble with computers is you play with them." - George Dyson, describing the beginning of the Manhattan Project's computing effort in Turing's Cathedral. "

As new technologies allow digital lessons to be tailored to various learning styles, a growing number of programs are evolving to enable students with disabilities to take online courses created with their needs in mind.

"virtual students will visit the campus on occasion for "intense immersions" to learn skills such as, say, suturing wounds. Online students would visit the campus during the first week or two of the program as well as at the end of their first year to learn clinical skills-training that for on-campus students happens over the course of the year. The online students would also visit the campus at the end of the clinical year to do testing and have the option of doing a rotation at the Yale New Haven Hospital, according to Van Rhee."

I could have written this (absent email arguments). "I could have written that yesterday. I've learned a ton more about programming and databases; I've spent time getting the basics of computer science; and it's all to just keep doing the same damn things over and over again, and then forgetting I did them, and repeating them. Like a version of Groundhog Day about making Groundhog Day. "

I wonder how often this opportunity is there but the person isn't . . . seems like the very definition of computational thinking. "In the end, the tool was very crude but accomplished something very useful: It had a flow that ensured all the reports required by people on the ground, and above, were sent in a timely and orderly manner. Each step of that flow was almost entirely automated. Each button filled a template and put the text in the clipboard for copy-pasting in the chat. Events were timed automatically. Distances and time of travel were computed automatically. A dropdown menu facilitated entering common values. Big warning signs were visible when a time critical step was ongoing, or some important data was missing."

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.

"Beauty and Joy of Computing" - inspiration for arts/comp sci VCU course that's being developed

"This past year, Davidson College introduced "A Domain of One's Own" to a portion of the student body through faculty willing to use it in their teaching. I saw two styles of 'Domains' rise out of the initiative. The first type of 'Domain' took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn't necessarily empower. The problems with the second approach can be wrapped up into two key questions beginning with: Why post an assignment online if…"

Also related to the distinction between having an eportfolio program and creating a domain of one's own; very different creatures that sometimes get discussed as if they're the same thing.

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce 17 awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our September 2014 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 232 grants just announced by the NEH. Congratulations to all the awardees for their terrific projects!

I don't know if the NEH is a bellwether or not, but this is pretty darn exciting!

These accessibility tips are focused on ensuring individuals who are blind can use your resources, yet they can improve the experience of anyone using it!

link to ECAR findings