Group items tagged

"A protest bot is a bot so specific you can't mistake it for bullshit"

"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."

"Students appreciated the MOOC's ability to support structured, self-paced learning. Students often watched the short (10-to-15-minute) lecture videos at double speed with the captions turned on, at times that fit the students' schedules. Students described Andrew Ng as a highly effective lecturer, which added to the value of the lecture videos. Students did not actively participate in the discussion forums provided by the MOOC, choosing instead to use each other and Professor Fisher as resources when they needed help with the material. Occasionally, a student with a specific question would check to see if that question had already been asked and answered in the forums. It often was, and so the forums were a study resource for the students even if they didn't post to the forums themselves. Doug's students appreciated the in-class active learning facilitated by the "flipped" approach. By shifting explanatory lectures outside of class, class time was made available for more discussion, interaction, and application of that material. The students described Doug's role as "facilitator," guiding class discussions and making sure that every student understood the material. The biggest challenge identified by the students was a misalignment between the MOOC material and the additional readings Doug provided. These readings took the students beyond the introductory ideas presented in the MOOC, focusing on recent and seminar research in the field. The readings weren't designed for novices in the field, as Andrew Ng's lecture videos were, and they required "a different kind of learning," as one student put it. Nor did the readings always build on the week's MOOC content in clear ways."

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).

"THE EDITORS OF THE Public Library of Science (PLOS) family of scientific journals recently decided to give their authors much more specific instructions for sharing data. They announced that "authors must make all data publicly available, without restriction, immediately upon publication of the article." They defined data as "any and all of the digital materials that are collected and analyzed in the pursuit of scientific advances," and now require authors to provide a "data availability statement" that serves the purpose of "describing where and how others can access each dataset that underlies the findings.""

An interesting place to find/share/interact with audio. You can remix many of the tracks and make audio notes that are associated with specific points in time on the audio track. Easily embed in WordPress using just the URL to the page.

This is a collection of courses, students posts etc. (some VCU specific, some from other institutions) that might be useful.

"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."

"Praxis Network programs are allied but differently-inflected humanities education initiatives, mainly focused on graduate training, and all engaged in rethinking pedagogy and campus partnerships in relation to the digital. Among other elements, the initiatives emphasize new models of methodological training and collaborative research. Each program exists within a particular ecosystem of disciplinary expectations, institutional needs, available resources, leadership styles, and specific challenges."

"We build software that shapes our cities. More specifically, (1) we create micro-institutions in physical space, (2) we design social processes that allow others to replicate and evolve those micro-institutions, and (3) we write software that enables those social processes. We use this process to create more robust, decentralized, human-scale systems in our cities. We are particularly focused on reinventing our current systems for learning, agriculture, and transportation."

BMC Microbiology is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in analytical and functional studies of prokaryotic and eukaryotic microorganisms, viruses and small parasites, as well as host and therapeutic responses to them, and their interaction with the environment.BMC Microbiology is part of the BMC series which publishes subject-specific journals focused on the needs of individual research communities across all areas of biology and medicine. We offer an efficient, fair and friendly peer review service, and are committed to publishing all sound science, provided that there is some advance in knowledge presented by the work.

" twXplorer, which allows you search for a specific hashtag or term, giving you the most recent 500 tweets along with some basic analysis of the content found therein."

" also share a lot of your concerns about specifics, but I think I've found a way to work my brain around it. You're absolute right; we've been conditioned to think in terms of exact numbers. We're used to being told our posts should be 200 words with 4 paragraphs and exactly 8 links to external sources, so that's how we've learned to function. I think this class has been great for me to retrain my brain to think creatively rather than within the confines of instructions. For length, I just make sure I answer the question. I ask myself if I feel that my answer is appropriate, or if I should go into more detail. It helps me if I stop focusing on the grade (as hard as that is) and instead focus on the assignment itself. If I can answer the question with detail in two sentences, I feel like two sentences is a perfectly fine entry. Most of the time, my entries are 2-3 paragraphs. I just write down what I'm thinking, rather than trying to filter through "Is this what Dr. Becker wants to see?" I think my work looks a lot better when I'm focused on what I think looks respectable, rather than trying to mold myself to what I think others may expect of me." h/t Jon

This could be a checklist for ALL professional development across education and, I suspect, other fields as well. Personalized, customized, sustained.

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.

I very much wish to try this.

Worth thinking about for our own space (digitally and otherwise). "It is important when you walk into any studio that you feel as much as see what is being built - the studio should crackle with creative energy. Specifically, I believe you can determine the health of any design studio simply by looking at its walls."

This is actually an interesting historical account of how language evolves in the digital age.

Oh. My. (Palm to face.) A few weeks ago I gave the following in class assignment; take 5 minutes to interview your partner to find out what they did this weekend. Be specific. After the two minutes I said, "Ok - now you have 30-60 seconds to sell us their weekend. Pretend we are an audience of people looking for the perfect weekend. Sell us their weekend." Guess how many weekends were FILLED with 'Netflix and chill". Now guess how many times I nodded in agreement recalling documentary marathon after documentary marathon. One of these things is not like the other!

"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:"