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Barbara Lindsey

Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course - Boing Boing - 0 views

  • Kyle's a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course -- he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review -- and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.
  • The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs -- including me, at times -- fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.
  • And in this case, it's especially poignant, since Kyle's workflow actually matches the practices of real-world programmers and academic computer scientists: coders look at one anothers' examples, use reference implementations, publish their code for review by peers. If you hired a programmer who insisted that none of her co-workers could see her work, you'd immediately fire her -- that's just not how software is written. Kyle's prof's idea of how computer programmers work is exactly what's meant by the pejorative sense of "academic" -- unrealistic, hidebound, and out-of-touch with reality. Bravo to Kyle for standing his ground!
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  • I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer
  • Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."
  • Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?
  • The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.
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    Thx to Russel Tarr
Barbara Lindsey

News: Hybrid Education 2.0 - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • he researchers seem more excited by a hybrid application of the open-learning program that, instead of replacing professors, tries to use them more effectively. By combining the open-learning software with two weekly 50-minute class sessions in an intro-level statistics course, they found that they could get students to learn the same amount of material in half the time.
  • “At the most selective tier of colleges and universities, they have some significant interest in the existing model of residential education,” says Roger C. Schonfeld, manager of research at Ithaka S+R, the strategy arm of Ithaka, a non-profit higher-ed technology group. “And I think there’s a lot more at risk in terms of the reputation they have built up over the course of decades or centuries, that even for the many advantages that might come from new models, there may be obvious or unforeseen disadvantages they need to guard against.”
  • So what exactly is the pedagogical model Carnegie Mellon has discovered, that has inspired such faith? Essentially, it’s an online program that teaches students itself, rather than just being the medium a professor uses to teach. Furthermore, it leverages the opportunity to interact directly with a unique student -- an opportunity a professor addressing dozens of students in a lecture hall does not have.
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  • The virtual tutor takes care of the basic concepts that typically dominate lectures, leaving professors open to plan the face-to-face component of the course according to what parts of the curriculum the software tells him students are picking up more slowly, and what concepts could bear reinforcement. For example, if a statistics professor notices in the data he receives from activity in the open-learning program that a great number of students struggled with the assessments the program gave while teaching conditional probability, the professor could use the class periods to hold a discussion with his students about that concept until he is confident they get it -- a preferable alternative, Thille says, to rolling through concepts didactically and hoping they stick.
  • Lectures and the classroom spaces built to accommodate them, she explains, represent academe’s first attempt to do higher education at scale after new waves of students started flooding into America’s universities following World War II. With technology having evolved to its current state, such a method is primitive, she says. “You have this poor faculty member,” Thille says, “who’s sitting there as an expert in their area trying to figure out how to transfer their expertise to this large number of students, who are all variable. And it’s a horrible task. The affordances of the technology and also the learning sciences… for the first time enable us to really think about how to scale in a much more effective way, so we truly can serve many many many more students."
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    Carnegie Mellon research on blended learning results
Barbara Lindsey

RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline - 0 views

  • RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009. People can monitor news and information via Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, their Firefox bookmarks, their OS, aggregators like Techmeme, and so on. Tell us in the comments how you currently read your RSS feeds and how often you check them in an RSS Reader - if indeed you still use one... Update: I should add that our news writers use a variety of RSS Readers daily.
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    "One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to."
Barbara Lindsey

eduTecher.net - 0 views

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    Incredibly well-organized, collaborative resource for educationally focused tech environments, including reviews, how-tos, iPhone app.
Barbara Lindsey

How it works | crowdSPRING - 0 views

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    Way to crowdsource your projects. Thx to Wes Fryer
Barbara Lindsey

Access Flash websites on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch (including Webkinz and... - 0 views

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    Wes Fryer post on how to access flash-based sites on apple devices.
Barbara Lindsey

Langwitches Blog » Saying Goodbye Ning - 1 views

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    Great post explaining what and how Silvia transitioned to from her Ning network.
Barbara Lindsey

Epeus' epigone: How Twitter works in theory - 0 views

Barbara Lindsey

Open Subtitles - 0 views

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    Blog post describing how (here seems illegally, if following the letter of the law) the use of opensource media platforms and subtitling can bring world cinema to a wider audience.
Barbara Lindsey

Sensors and Sensitivity | The Communication Initiative Network - 0 views

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    Describes how mobile phones can be used for data collection in emergency relief efforts, global pandemics, etc. in remote locations.
Barbara Lindsey

TeachPaperless: On Blogging and Connections - 0 views

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    Shelly talks about how blogging, done well, is a communal and not a solitary act; it's all about communicating with others not at others.
Barbara Lindsey

Google Earth Education Community - 0 views

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    A place for teachers and students to share and find info on topics that have been turned into GE activities. Some helpful how tos on using the tool.
Barbara Lindsey

YouTube - Street View in Google Earth - 0 views

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    Demo of street view and how to navigate it in Google Earth.
Barbara Lindsey

TCEA 2009 Google Earth Literature Trips - Susan F. Reeves - 0 views

  • It is CRUCIAL to download, preview, plan, and practice using the Lit Trip within Google Earth before using with a class!
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    A fabulous guided exploration of what Google Lit Trips are and how to use them with your students.
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