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Nigel Coutts

Thinking and learning in the postnormal era - The Learner's Way - 0 views

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    We live in a time of chaos, complexity and contradiction. (Sardar, 2010 [1]) Where rapid changes and transformations through technology, politics, globalisation and the climate, conspire against normality (Friedman, 2016 [2]) These times demand a fresh approach to education, one that provides learners with the thinking dispositions they need to turn challenges into opportunities, to connect their learning to their passions and emerge from their years of formal education as self-navigating life-long learners. 
Nigel Coutts

Supporting Mathematical Thinking through the Eight Cultural Forces - The Learner's Way - 1 views

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    At the heart of mathematics are a set of connected thinking dispositions. The mathematician uses these dispositions as the cognitive tools of their trade. While the traditional imagining of mathematics might be all about the accurate application of well-rehearsed algorithms and processes, in the real world of mathematics, it is all about the thinking. As we consider what our students need from their mathematical education, we should not overlook the importance of these dispositions. 
Nigel Coutts

Student voice, choice, agency, partnerships and participation - The Learner's Way - 1 views

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    This week I joined with teachers, students, researchers and policy writers at Melbourne University to discuss student voice. This conference was hosted by Social Education Victoria and made possible by the conference partners, The University of Melbourne, Education and Training Victoria, Foundation for Young Australians and Connect. Over three days, participants engaged in rigorous dialogue about the significance of student voice and what is required to ensure its benefits are maximised for all.
Nigel Coutts

Moving beyond linear plans for learning - The Learner's Way - 0 views

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    An important part of the role of any educator is that of planning learning sequences. Perhaps you are tasked with designing curriculum or more likely you are translating a mandatory curriculum into workable units of learning. The task is complex and there are multiple arrangements. The goal is to design units that connect students with learning in ways that are meaningful and relevant. A well-designed unit of learning fits seamlessly alongside other learning opportunities and the overall sequence of learning should match the learners developing expertise. As we plan units of learning we must consider a great variety of factors which impact the learning we design. Our knowledge of our students and where they are with their learning is crucial and a strong place to start. We also need to know what it is we are required to teach and have a grab bag of pedagogical moves that bring this content alive.
Lyn Collins

Dan Pink: How Teachers Can Sell Love of Learning to Students | MindShift - 0 views

  • Guided by findings in educational research and neuroscience, the emphasis on cognitive skills like computation and memorization is evolving to include less tangible, non-cognitive skills, like collaboration and improvisation.
  • are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas.
  • Pink said school superintendents rated problem-solving as the top capability they wanted to instill.
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  • Corporate executives, however, rated problem-solving as seventh on their list of attributes in employees, but rated problem identification as the single most important skill. That is, the ability to suss out issues and challenges that aren’t necessarily obvious. And this is where students could benefit from educators — learning the process of identifying a problem.
  • There’s something to be said for connecting particular lessons to something in the real world.”
  • . Games have the potential to make math more relevant or engaging, Pink said, but if they lead to standardized thinking about getting to the one right answer, that can be problematic.
  • To get to that engagement, people have to unlearn these deeply rooted habits. I defy you to find a two year old who is not engaged. That’s how we are out of the box.”
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    A great post!
Nigel Coutts

Why build a Personal Learning Network? - 1 views

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    'Inside the Black Box' was written by Black and William in 1998 and in it they describe the classroom as a black box with inputs and outputs but what occurred inside was a mystery. For many teachers the reality has been that what occurs in their classroom has been both private and isolating, a matter between the teacher and his or her students but a task largely tackled alone. But this isolationist view is, in the age of the social media and networking increasingly challenged and more and more teachers are finding their voice, sharing their ideas and gaining valuable insights from a global community of connected educators.
Robyn Jay

A critical examination of Blackboard's e-learning environment - Coopman - 3 views

  • teaching/learning as performance and teaching/learning as text
  • perceived institutional presence — the degree to which online learners felt connected to the university — was positively related to learning outcomes, satisfaction with the course, and intent to stay in the program.
  • students in the traditional classes interacted with each other far less than those in the hybrid (Web–enhanced) classes
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  • quality of interaction in online discussions, rather than quantity, may be the better predictor of student achievement
  • Interrogating the structure of learning management systems such as Blackboard brings to light the unnoticed ways in which the software frames online classroom interaction
  • Rose (2004) argued in her critique of learning management systems that the mediated tools instructors use to teach their classes are not value–free. The author lamented that “there is no acknowledgment of the fundamental transformations that must be wreaked upon content imported into platforms such as WebCT and Blackboard, nor of the fact that the very structure of these systems constrains instructional possibilities and decision–making.” [4] Like a highly bureaucratic organization, once a structure is built into a learning management system, changing the structure becomes unimaginable (Sandvig, 2006).
  • Online class discussions typically involve more student–student interaction and less instructor–student interaction. Lobel, et al. (2005) found that instructors were the center of the interaction network during in person discussions whereas the group was the center during online discussions. Blackboard’s discussion feature allows students to interact directly with each other, bypassing the instructor. However, the degree of structural flexibility in a Blackboard discussion board resides to a large extent in the decisions the instructor makes. May students attach files? May students start new discussion threads? May students post anonymously? Do they rate each other’s messages? What is the rating system?
  • What has changed is the instructor’s increased ability to track students’ use of the class Web site: number of messages posted, number of messages read, and how many times various pages or sections are accessed. Mullen (2002) argued that this type of information seems to provide an objective measure of student engagement, but in fact creates a dangerously decontextualized, essentialized image of a class in which levels of “participation” stand in for evidence of learning having taken place. Students are treated not as learners, as partners in an educational enterprise, but as users
  • “The brave new world of digital education promises greater access, increased democratic participation, and the transcendence of discrimination through pure minds. We must interrogate the actuality of these hypes: who has access, is participation online transformative, and is transcendence of difference a goal of progressive pedagogies?” [8]
Robyn Jay

What to Do With Wikipedia - 0 views

  • Wikipedia is an affront to academia, because it undercuts what makes academics the elite in society.
  • Embracing the World of Wikipedia Figuring out what to do with Wikipedia is part of a larger question: When is academia going to acknowledge the elephant in the room? Over the past decade, the web has become the primary informational environment for the average student. This is where our students live. Wrenching them out of it in the name of academic quality is simply not going to work. But the genius of the web is that it is a means, not an end. The same medium that brings us Wikipedia also brings us e-reference and ejournals. Thus we have an opportunity to introduce Wikipedia devotees to three undiscovered realities: 1. Truth to tell, much of Wikipedia is simply amazing in its detail, currency, and accuracy. Denying this is tantamount to taking ourselves out of the new digital reality. But we need to help our students see that Wikipedia is also an environment for shallow thinking, debates over interpretation, and the settling of scores. Wikipedia itself advises that its users consult other sources to verify the information they are finding. If a key element in information literacy is the ability to evaluate information, what better place to start than with Wikipedia? We can help students to distinguish the trite from the brilliant and encourage them to check their Wikipedia information against other sources. 2. We need to introduce students to digital resources that are, in many cases, stronger than Wikipedia. Some of these are freely available online, like the amazing Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu). Others may be commercial e-reference sources with no barrier except a user name and password. 3. The most daring solution would be for academia to enter the world of Wikipedia directly. Rather than throwing rocks at it, the academy has a unique opportunity to engage Wikipedia in a way that marries the digital generation with the academic enterprise. How about these options: • A professor writes or rewrites Wikipedia articles, learning the system and improving the product. • A professor takes his or her class through a key Wikipedia article on a topic related to the course, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses, editing it to be a better reflection of reality. • A professor or information literacy instructor assigns groups of students to evaluate and edit Wikipedia articles, using research from other sources as an evaluative tool. • A course takes on specific Wikipedia topics as heritage articles. The first group of students creates the articles and successive groups update and expand on them. In this way, collections of key “professor approved” articles can be produced in many subject areas, making Wikipedia better and better as time goes on. If you want to see further options, Wikipedia itself provides examples (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects). What to Do with Wikipedia When academia finally recognizes that Wikipedia is here to stay and that we can either fight it or improve it, we may finally discover that professors and students have come to a meeting of minds. This doesn’t mean that Wikipedia articles will now be fully acceptable in research paper bibliographies. But surely there is a middle ground that connects instruction on evaluation with judicious use of Wikipedia information. Ultimately, the academy has to stop fighting Wikipedia and work to make it better. Academic administrators need to find ways to recognize Wikipedia writing as part of legitimate scholarship for tenure, promotion, and research points. When professors are writing the articles or guiding their students in article production and revision, we may become much less paranoid about this wildly popular resource. Rather than castigating it, we can use it as a tool to improve information literacy.
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