Group items tagged

"The best performing teacher in the whole system was a woman named Zenaida Tan. Up until that report, she was completely unheralded. The skills she possessed were invisible. Meanwhile, less important traits were measured on her evaluations (three times she was late to pick up students from recess). In part, Lemov is talking about the skill of herding cats. The master of cat herding senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education. This raises an important point. As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today's loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks. People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation - willing to listen 70 percent of the time"

"If we've let the fickleness of history and public policy describe the bizarre set of standards (looking at you, Math) and therefore the metrics that we'll measure all students against, you'll end up with a system designed for those metrics. Instead, if you define your own measures, and actually study longitudinally their validity, we'll end up in a place where perhaps we'll value the emotional-intelligence development of a teenager above their ability to comply with outdated curricula. Maybe we'll come to value the nuance of entrepreneurial thought opposed to attempting to cram a line of reasoning they stole wholesale from Reddit into five paragraphs 20 minutes before the paper is due. "

"Lighten up your email with the Emotional Labor extension. Works on any email sent through Gmail. First write an email. Then click the smiley face to brighten up the tone of the email before sending. "

"Audrey Watters: It's gonna take more than a 'genius hour'. I've tried to do something somewhat like this - it's essential for my team to have time to explore, create, play, discover, etc., and they can't do that if they're expected to be "on task" 100% of the time. A big part of our role in the Technology Integration Group is to go deliberately off script, off-piste, and do things that we think are worth trying. Even if (especially if?) it's not an Official Project. But, it's hard to sustain when Real Projects and Deadlines loom and suck up all of the available time. So we have cycles. There are weeks where we're all "on task", and weeks where we're exploring new stuff. "

"Here is a collection of digital tools that are designed to help researchers explore the millions of research articles available to this date. Search engines and curators help you to quickly find the articles you are interested in and stay up to date with the literature. Article visualization tools enhance your reading experience, for instance, by helping you navigate from a paper to another. "

"Here is a collection of digital tools that are designed to help researchers explore the millions of research articles available to this date. Search engines and curators help you to quickly find the articles you are interested in and stay up to date with the literature. Article visualization tools enhance your reading experience, for instance, by helping you navigate from a paper to another. "

"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."

"In order to make it easier to track activity in Hypothes.is, I created a program called Hypothes.is Collector. The idea is that you can type in user name, a URL, a tag, or a group ID and click the button to see all of the related annotations. The program will create a new sheet with an archive of up to 200 annotations based on the search terms.  It will then create a third sheet that will count how many of these annotations were made on each URL in the set by each user."

"But we also need to think and question and explore and understand, so that we can take up our particular responsibilities as educators as well as our general responsibilities as human beings. I might be wrong in my thinking, but I'm not going to stop thinking and putting it out there because that too, is an act of resistance."

"By being up-front with my students about what I'm asking them to do outside of class, and-most essentially-why I have ordered things in that manner, I'm asking them to be co-owners of their learning experience. By making it clear that I'm doing my level best to value their time, they see my investment in their success."

""One of the things I learned about the world of art," Teller says, "is there are people who really want to believe in magic, that artists are supernatural beings-there was some guy who could walk up and do that. But art is work like anything else-concentration, physical pain. Part of the subject of this movie is that a great work of art should seem to have magically sprung like a miracle on the wall. But to get that miracle is an enormous, aggravating pain." To see Vermeer as "a god" makes him "a discouraging bore," Teller went on. But if you think of him as a genius artist and an inventor, he becomes a hero: "Now he can inspire." "

Interesting guy to talk to etc. at some point. "In the 17th century, scholar-publishers created the first scientific journals, revolutionising the communication and practice of scholarship. Today, we're at the beginning of a second revolution, as academia slowly awakens to the tranformative potential of the Web.   I'm interested in both pushing this revolution forward, and in studying it as it happens. I'm investigating altmetrics: measuring scholarly impact over the social web instead of through traditional citation. I'm also interested in new publishing practices like scholarly tweeting, overlay journals, alternative peer review forms, and open access. These slides give a good idea of what I've been up to lately; my CV links to other recent publications and talks. "

" Back then, I perceived my experiences on the internet as ephemeral. My screenshot habit picked up when I began thinking of my time online as something archived and traced."

It's a bit insane to me this was a conversation but it's one that ought to happen much more. Are we practicing what we preach? "One of my undergrads came up to me and said, 'You know, Professor, your ideas about games as models for learning environments are really interesting, but I'm curious, why don't you teach your class following those ideas?'" Mr. Fishman says. "And I thought, Well, that's a really excellent question."

I dislike the term accessibility. It is an accurate enough term. It just conjures up the wrong preconceptions. When you talk about accessibility people's eyes glaze over. They are either imagining wheelchair ramps or WCAG checklists. Either way, it does nothing to capture the truth about accessibility. Accessibility is not about designing for the few. It is designing for us all. Tweet this That is why I have started talking about inclusive design instead. Accessibility is about designing for everybody, not the few. It is not about designing just for the disabled. It is about designing for every one of us.

"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!

"We're rich in data-but the returns are diminishing rapidly, because after a certain point the more information you have, the harder it becomes to extract meaning from it. Ironically, an excess of information resists analysis and comprehension in much the same way a lack of it does. As a result, the more that new technology floods our world with complex information, the more we end up calling on a much older field of human endeavor, one that has always been devoted to making complexity comprehensible and extracting meaning from chaos, namely, art. "

"Dr. Moorman conducted a study focused on what meaning VTS had for students exploring how they used VTS in patient care.  Guided by a series of 3 questions, a facilitator chose a work of art and asked students the following questions: 'What is going on in this painting?' 'What are you seeing that makes you say that?' (requiring students to give visual evidence), and 'What more can you find?' (requiring them to look again and scaffold off of others' comments).  Students found their observational skills improved and that they were more open to hearing other's opinions.  They found that they were more likely to give detail to back up observations in their clinical situations and listen to others during report. They also found they used the same line of questioning that the facilitator used when they were seeking more information during clinical rotations during patient care.    "

We had a faculty member who took our students to the VMFA every year for this exercise. The students loved it. I didn't understand its point at the time, but this makes a great deal of sense.

This comes up every so often. h/t D'Arcy Norman