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"Some may consider online learning to be the anti-classroom.  A rebellion against the chalkboard and the Blackboard in favor of virtual classrooms, avatars in sweater vests lecturing in a Charlie Brown monotone…  I simply look at it as a different kind of team approach to learning.  More opportunities for inputs.  If anything, it makes the scholarship more rigorous.  As both teachers and students, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide behind airs of academia when the scholarship can be researched, published, evaluated and revised in a nano-second.  It makes educational leadership even more important when the skills necessary to synthesize information both in person and on line are changing, and changing quickly."

Does space matter?

Creating a sense of community in the classroom and making meaningful student-faculty interactions can help curb retention issues in higher ed.

great ideas here, esp the one on schema roller.

"In this "Profiles in Learning," Joe Cates, Ph.D., Assistant Professor University College, discusses Civic Engagement and the duties we have being an urban university, intertwined within the city of Richmond. This allows the students to actively engage with one another and inquire about topics related to their community."

There is in his syllabus no compromise with expediency, no taking for granted of power structures, nothing but rigorous honesty and tireless interrogation; there is some feeling or hope that if you could put every single thing under the sun into words you can head off sorrow, frustration, resentment, missed communication, thwarted ambition. Wallace refuses the habitual patterns and usual fictions that govern a classroom. His syllabus warns: "If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they're due, running them quickly through the computer's Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them 'because the ideas are good' or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one's ideas and the quality of those ideas' verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding."

The following pages give you suggestions for when and how to use music during your teaching or training. With these techniques, you, the teacher, can orchestrate a classroom environment that is rich and resonant-- and provide learners with a symphony of learning opportunities and a sound education!

"Nelson said often times students don't connect what they learn in school to what they do out of school. So he works with teachers during the previous semester to build a summer program reflective of what they learn in class. "When students come out to the park, they're referencing things they are doing in the classroom. Then when students go back to the classroom, they're referencing things they've done in the park," he said."

It's been two years since a New York Times article declared the "year of the MOOC" -short for "massive open online courses." Now, for the first time, researchers have carried out a detailed study that shows that these classes really can teach at least as effectively as traditional classroom courses - and they found that this is true regardless of how much preparation and knowledge students start out with.

Facilitation has its own challenges. One was in facilitating collaborative work among the students. "There're a lot of assumptions made about students, that they're able to interact naturally in a group," Shen observes. "Even though you give them roles, you assume the leader will always know how to play the role of a leader, but not necessarily so." "We had to teach them group work skills too," she adds. "It's learning for both the teachers and the students."

"Research and its potentially competitive nature also pose a challenge, in that it fosters an individualistic and protective attitude during the gestation of ideas. In contrast, for Borges, originality is a vain illusion: being original is simply impossible. Rather, instead of becoming obsessed about developing a unique voice, the writer should pay homage to his precursors, lose himself by imitating the writers he admires, seek and enjoy the connections between seemingly old and new ideas, reveal or interpret their transformation. In short, the writer should first be a passionate, insightful reader. Along the same lines, American composer George Perle, coined the expression "the listening composer," alluding precisely to the mandatory connection between the timeless continuum and the individual creative spirit, each nurturing the other. "

"Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning is intended to assist anyone embarking on open teaching. It offers foundational methods, examples, and explanatory theories for how to set up the practices of a class, how to determine guiding principles, how to theorize what you are doing in the classroom, how to design the class, how to include multimedia elements and approaches such as games, and how to ensure that you have designed a class for inclusion, not exclusion. Finally, the openness of the learning should continue even after the book is published/goes public, and the chapters in the "Invitations" section offer advice on how to extend your open practices to the world beyond the classroom. This is by no means the only way to set up peer-to-peer teaching, but it is an account of the way we have done it, with as much detail as possible to encourage others to try, in whatever way suits their community and purposes."

Fascinating to read the comment thread on this piece, too.

Tagged for awareness of this product for possible classroom interaction

Worth reading / viewing as we think about our Incubator Classroom as a "Blended Learning" space

USA Today, "The place where the video game was invented more than 50 years ago now wants to teach teachers, entrepreneurs and students how to design games for learning - and it is hoping that the end result will be a new kind of tech tool for the classroom." The VCU ALT Lab now has an area for the exploration of games as a means of learning. The MIT online courses might be a good springboard for conversation and experiments in the ALTLab.

"The Science of Online Discussions Our working knowledge regarding distance education suggests that productive discussions are essential to learning in an asynchronous online environment. Online discussions effectively take the place of face-to-face classroom discussion. It has even been suggested that, if well facilitated, online discussions may allow for more in-depth and thoughtful learning than is possible in a face-to-face setting (Hawkes, 2006). Gao, Wang, and Sun (2009) contend that in a productive online discussion, it is essential for participants to embrace the following four dispositions:"