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Barbara Lindsey

Education/EduCourse/Announcement - MozillaWiki - 0 views

wiki.mozilla.org/...Announcement

oer free educators Wiley

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 22 May 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 22 May 10
     
    The Mozilla Foundation, in collaboration with ccLearn/Creative Commons and the Peer 2 Peer University, launches a practical online seminar on open education. This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on prototypes of innovative open education projects; and get input from some of the world leading innovators along the way.
Barbara Lindsey

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting | The Penenberg Post | F... - 1 views

www.fastcompany.com/...say-so-long-book-we-know-it

ebooks books

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Dec 09 - Cached
  • But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
  • Like early filmmakers, some of us will seek new ways to express ourselves through multimedia. Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web and be ported over to any and all mobil devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and beyond.
  • where there's chaos, there's opportunity
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  • For the non-fiction author therein lie possibilities to create the proverbial last word on a subject, a one-stop shop for all the information surrounding a particular subject matter. Imagine a biography of Wiley Post, the one-eyed pilot from the 1930s who was the first to fly around the world. It would not only offer the entire text of a book but newsreel footage from his era, coverage of his most famous flights, radio interviews, schematics of his plane, interactive maps of his journeys, interviews with aviation historians and pilots of today, a virtual tour of his cockpit and description of every gauge and dial, short profiles of other flyers of his time, photos, hyperlinked endnotes and index, links to other resources on the subject. Social media could be woven into the fabric of the experience--discussion threads and wikis where readers share information, photos, video, and add their own content to Post's story, which would tie them more closely to the book. There's also the potential for additional revenue streams: You could buy MP3s of popular songs from the 1930s, clothes that were the hot thing back then, model airplanes, other printed books, DVDs, journals, and memorabilia. A visionary author could push the boundaries and re-imagine these books in wholly new ways. A novelist could create whole new realities, a pastiche of video and audio and words and images that could rain down on the user, offering metaphors for artistic expressions. Or they could warp into videogame-like worlds where readers become characters and through the expression of their own free will alter the story to fit. They could come with music soundtracks or be directed or produced by renowned documentarians. They could be collaborations or one-woman projects.
  • Serious literature, and even perhaps much fiction will however, will be published in old book form…or maybe in the current “text on screen” form. The point of reading fiction IS to imagine your own characters and use your imagination…that’s why you read rather then watch a video about it!
  • Traditional books (especially literature) will be relegated to smaller, specialty houses and self-publishing, in its infancy, will boom!
  • The question is, how will the media companies (not just book publishers) respond? We're already seeing the effect on newspapers, as their ad revenue (and business model) collapses. Perhaps history can offer another analogy: When home refrigeration became affordable, it posed an existential threat to the large ice-delivery companies. Some of these firms manufactured ice by the ton in order to warehouse and deliver it at retail. They saw the threat, but not the opportunity - didn't realize the value of their core technology, the ice-making equipment itself. They saw only the falloff in their retail delivery logistics model. Had they licensed their chillers, they could have made a fortune. Likewise, buggy-whip-makers could have retooled as purveyors of leather goods for automobiles.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Dec 09
     
    But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.
Darcy Goshorn

Experience with facilitating professional development and TurnItIn - 0 views

akoaotearoa.ac.nz/...t-turnitin---owen--narayan.pdf

plagiarism professional development pd turnitin training writing language arts pedagogy

shared by Darcy Goshorn on 09 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Darcy Goshorn on 09 Jan 13
     
    In an environment where global economy, global collaboration, and global 'knowledge' are  the aspiration of many countries, the understanding of the complexities of plagiarism becomes  a global requirement that needs to be addressed by all educators and learners. This paper  considers a simple definition of plagiarism, and then briefly considers reasons why students  plagiarise. At Unitec NZ, Te Puna Ako: The Centre for Teaching and Learning Innovation  (TPA:CTLI) is working closely with faculty, managers, student support services and library  personnel to introduce strategies and tools that can be integrated into programmes and  curricula whilst remaining flexible enough to be tailored for specific learners. The authors  therefore provide an overview of one of the tools available to check student work for  plagiarism - Turnitin - and describe the academic Professional Development (PD)  approaches that have been put in place to share existing expertise, as well as help staff at  Unitec NZ to use the tool in pedagogically informed ways, which also assist students in its  use. Evaluation and results are considered, before concluding with some recommendations. It  goes on to theorise how blended programmes that fully integrate academic literacy skills and  conventions might be used to positively scaffold students in the avoidance of plagiarism.  Conference participants will be asked to comment on and discuss their institutions' approach  to supporting the avoidance of plagiarism (including the utilisation of PDS and other  deterrents), describe their own personal experiences, and relate the strategies they employ in  their teaching practice and assessment design to help their learners avoid plagiarism. It is  planned to record the session so that the audience's narratives can be shared with other  practitioners.
Barbara Lindsey

Steve's HR Technology - Journal - Welcome to the Company! Here is your iPhone - 0 views

steveboese.squarespace.com/...mpany-here-is-your-iphone.html

ACU mobiles iphone

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The school distributed the iPhones with some specific, and fairly modest goals. Let students participate in class polls, have access to some information systems, etc.  These were important and valuable benefits.  But the students proceeded to leverage the technology to better connect with each other, to facilitate their own projects and group activities, and ultimately to derive more value than the administration had ever foreseen.
  • When technology is designed to promote adaptation, or is developed and consumed in ways that can support changes to configuration and flexible levels of personalization the opportunity for end users and employees to 'discover' new and better uses is significantly enhanced.
  • Abilene Christian certainly seems like an unlikely place to be at the forefront of an innovative, cutting edge technology-based project like this.  And it is.  But it shows that even from unlikely sources, ones without national reputations, and billion-dollar endowments, that fantastic innovations can arise.
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  • How about next year, when your first batch of new recuits come marching in the door, you hand them a brand new iPhone, and encourage them to use it to connect, learn, share, and experiment? I know what you are thinking, where is the budget for that going to come from? I would bet the extra productivity you will get from the program will more than fund the phones over the year. Ask Abilene Christian if the investment was worth it, they have gotten more mileage as the 'iPhone College' than they ever bargained for.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 28 Dec 09
     
    The school distributed the iPhones with some specific, and fairly modest goals. Let students participate in class polls, have access to some information systems, etc.  These were important and valuable benefits.  But the students proceeded to leverage the technology to better connect with each other, to facilitate their own projects and group activities, and ultimately to derive more value than the administration had ever foreseen.
Barbara Lindsey

Edge: NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE By Clay Shirky - 0 views

www.edge.org/...shirky09_index.html

shirky future newspapers

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad.
  • When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times.
  • With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
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  • many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg's invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther's use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
  • The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"
  • Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
  • During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word.
  • When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
  • If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.
  • The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau.
  • Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.
  • Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole.
  • In craigslist's gradual shift from 'interesting if minor' to 'essential and transformative', there is one possible answer to the question "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
  • Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
  • Second, they will stay focused on producing the best digital news products for their audience, products that take full advantage of the Internet's unique properties — its ability to combine immediacy and depth, its ability to offer highly personalized experiences, its ability to offer instant access to useful information from obscure public records to mundane event listings, and its ability to form networks so that users may form communities that mirror and extend the ones that exist in the physical world. They will learn how to engage their users to create and contribute content to enrich the experience of reading online, and not overwhelm their readers with a cacophony of undifferentiated noise.
  • The point here is that newspapers must accomplish online what they have long been able to achieve for generations of readers in print: they must forge an emotional bond with their readers by becoming an essential part of their daily lives.
  • Third, and perhaps most important (because without this the first two are impossible), newspapers must recognize (as some already have) that technology and journalism are inexorably intertwined.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09
     
    "Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario."
Barbara Lindsey

Education Innovation: The Ten Cultural Elements Of Collaboration In The Professional Ne... - 0 views

educationinnovation.typepad.com/...ed-learning-collaborative.html

collaboration innovation education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 03 Jun 09
     
    Thanks to icpjones and todbaker via Twitter
Barbara Lindsey

What is Bamboo? | Project Bamboo - 0 views

projectbamboo.org/what-bamboo

bamboo higher ed interdisciplinary academic commons

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 May 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 May 09
     
    What is Bamboo? Workshop 1bProject Bamboo is an 18-month planning and community design program where through a series of conversations and workshops, we are mapping out the scholarly practices and common technology challenges across and among disciplines to discover where a coordinated, cross-disciplinary development effort can best foster academic innovation.
Barbara Lindsey

Content IS Infrastructure (Welcome to the club, Chris) at iterating toward openness - 0 views

opencontent.org/672

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Good open content is a vital part of creating a vital open education apparatus… Content is just one piece of the open education mosaic that is worth a lot less on its own than in concert with practices, context, artifacts.
  • Creating and sharing content is certainly not the sexiest part of the open education movement. But the open education movement is going nowhere fast without open content. And while infrastructure / content work generally doesn’t excite anyone, the results of innovation in the infrastructure space do excite people. What would you say if I told you that “fiber to the curb” internet service was going to be available at your house/apt in January!”? Probably the same thing you would say if I told you that “content complete, interactive courses - including assessments with feedback - will be available from BYU’s Open Learning pilot in January!”
Barbara Lindsey

Career U. - Making College 'Relevant' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...03careerism-t.html

highered curriculum relevance

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Dr. Coleman says she had an “aha” moment five years ago, when the director of admissions was describing the incoming class and noted that 10 percent — some 600 students — had started a business in high school.
  • “We believe that we do our best for students when we give them tools to be analytical, to be able to gather information and to determine the validity of that information themselves, particularly in this world where people don’t filter for you anymore,” Dr. Coleman says.
  • There’s evidence, though, that employers also don’t want students specializing too soon. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”
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  • Companies are demanding more of employees. They really want them to have a broad set of skills.”
  • But the major isn’t nearly as important as the toolbox of skills you come out with and the experiences you have.”
  • Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 10
     
    Changing course offerings and foci in American unis over the past decade or more.
Barbara Lindsey

The Innovative Educator: Don't be illTwitterate or aTextual - 0 views

theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/...illtwitterate-or-atextual.html

twitter students

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 08 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 08 Jan 10
     
    Ideas for using Twitter with students
Barbara Lindsey

The iPad and Information's Third Age | Open Culture - 2 views

www.openculture.com/...nd_informations_third_age.html

ipad openculture abilene

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Though the university initially fought its introduction, the printed textbook provided broad access to information that, for the first time, promised the possibility of universal education.
  • A barrier of symbolic complexity emerged between people and information for one of the first times in history. And the superabundance of information created a world that by necessity had to be divided into smaller and smaller subsections for organizational reasons. As people began to feel increasingly disconnected from information and as its relational and contextual aspects began to fade, we saw a transformation in teaching and learning. Hands-on apprenticeships and small teacher/student cohorts began to disappear, replaced by teachers delivering carefully parsed and categorized information to “standardized” students, all while trapped in classrooms isolated from the world in order to limit “distraction.”
  • It has become virtually impossible for a person to assess the quality, relevance, and usefulness of more information than she can process in a lifetime. And this is a problem that will only get worse as information continues to proliferate. But a quick look at popular technologies shows some of the ways people are working to address it. Social networking leverages selected communities to recommend books, restaurants, and movies. Context- and location-aware applications help focus search results and eliminate extraneous complexity. And customization and personalization allow people to create informational spaces that limit the intrusion of informational chaos.
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  • Any genuine solution will have to address the problems of the current informational age — and it will need to continue answering the problems of the previous informational ages. From what I’ve seen, Apple’s new iPad is the first device to promise this (even if that promise isn’t yet fully realized). That is what makes it such a compelling candidate to be the first platform that serves true digital books.
  • Books that are static, don’t allow customization, don’t connect with other information on the device, and don’t leverage social connectivity aren’t the future, no matter how sophisticated the device that serves them. They’re simply the past repackaged.
  • Given what I’ve seen of its features and approaches, the iPad shows the promise to engender such a change, though much development will have to take place for it to realize its potential. Nonetheless, the innovation it offers in three critical areas is especially compelling: accessibility, participation, and customization. Central to all three of these is the fact that the iPad is not a single-use, standalone device; it’s a powerful, converged platform with robust development tools and capabilities.
  • I would argue that the key accessibility feature of the iPad is its apparent “lack” of an interface (a feature Apple’s marketing is working hard to underscore). Unlike all of the other similar devices (including those running Apple’s standard OS), which require users to learn to negotiate complex symbolic interfaces — files, folders, hierarchies, toolbars, navigational buttons — the iPad limits or even eliminates these in favor of touch, an approach intuitive even to those too young to read.
  • The collapsing of symbolic complexity into the simplicity of touch enables participation by new groups of people — even relative technophobes — and this mirrors the increased accessibility offered by Gutenberg’s revolution while lowering the barrier characteristic of most recent technologies.
  • For those interested in culture and creativity, this is an exciting prospect.
  • In Gutenberg’s case, the increase in accessibility led to a dramatic increase in cultural participation, and this is another way the iPad differentiates itself from many of its peer devices.
  • Put in the hands of readers and students, the robust capabilities of its new version of iWork, combined with access to the complete range of apps on the App Store and an entirely new generation of native apps, the iPad could provide access to professional-quality creative tools that empower a new set of participants
  • the iPad’s blend of social and contextual technologies and its ease of customization offer useful ways for the device to help users sort, focus, and control the information around them. The iPad’s networking capabilities, linked to a new generation of digital books, could help people discover both new texts and the members of a discussion group who could help them process what they’re reading. Combined with a portable format that allows readers to carry their books into various contexts, this could be incredibly powerful. One imagines, for example, a field-guide to forests linked to live discussion partners, allowing a reader to discover the forest in a new and engaging way that offers the advantages of both the first and second informational ages. Yet this sort of capability also reveals an area where the iPad falls surprisingly short: its lack of a camera (let alone two, one forward and one backward facing) means the device has limited capabilities for interesting emerging technologies like augmented reality — a staple of recently-developed apps. In terms of future eBooks, a volume of Hemingway that could alert readers that they were only two blocks from the café Les Deux Magots, for example, and offer an augmented tour of the place or that could direct the reader of Brontë to a moor would be transformational indeed. Perhaps we’ll see such capabilities on iPad 2.0.
Barbara Lindsey

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...who-needs-harvard.html

edupunk education higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Aug 09 - Cached
  • "The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros," says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, "is the biggest virgin forest out there." Ferreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest.
  • MIT in 2001, when the school agreed to put coursework online for free.
  • "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge."
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  • "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."
  • The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that's structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor's degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.
  • "If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."
  • The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom, he points out. The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all.
Barbara Lindsey

News: 'The World Is Open' - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...bonk

opensource opencontent free education higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Tom Reeves from the University of Georgia, argues that we should not be content when online courses are just as good as face-to-face ones; instead, they should be better. They should excite people into this age of learning. Online courses should offer interactive elements such as animations and contextually rich simulations, extended video and audio resources, engaging discussion forums with peers and experts, and multiple learning format options. They should not simply be pages of digital content to click through. We do not need to be offering degrees in electronic page turning.
  • And if a free online course that lacks interactive elements is my only choice, then that is indeed my choice. It may lack a caring instructor, but I may still need to learn that content for a job promotion or skill retooling. There may not be embedded discussion forums with peers and experts, but that does not stop me from discussing the content with whomever I want to. The rich video or audio resources may be inaccessible to me since I am hearing or visually impaired, but I can use specialized software tools to assist in my learning with the learning contents that are, in fact, accessible to me. We need to stop thinking about what is not possible and replace such thinking with ideas and optimism of what is now possible! And sure, along the way we should admit to the myriad limitations of open education and make genuine attempts to address each of them and open up education even more. If we only offer questions and not think of solutions, we are not benefiting the open learning world nor will we benefit from it.
  • OER and OCW can do just that — they can showcase the best of the best from each school, college, university, and corporate and non-profit training center. When one’s work is on display to the world community, instructors are often forced to rethink their teaching and perhaps come up with even more innovative ways to deliver their content.
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  • So, to answer your question, the reason you notice the strange mix of reactions to wikis is due to the quite varied ways in which wikis can be employed in educational settings. At the far end of the risk continuum they might be used in place of expert knowledge. More safely, they can simply accumulate knowledge and information resources for a class. As my colleagues and I found in our first semester teaching with wikis, when interesting online resources are found, students will often say, “put it in the wiki” so it can be forever shared. And that is not a bad way to start to use them. Instructors can dip their toes into the wonderful world of wikis and remain in shallow waters testing them out before they get in too deep. Later, they might try Wikibooks or perhaps creating and editing Wikipedia pages.
  • We will see a lengthening of higher education during the coming decades of about 1 year for each 10. By the end of this century, it will be quite common to attend college until one is 30. Today only a small percent do. Open education will provide continued access to learning resources before, during, or after graduation. In turn, there will be less self-doubt about whether one can succeed. The increased knowledge needs of every citizen of this planet should calm the fears of those who predict fewer educators or institutions of higher learning will be needed. Just the opposite!
  • The type of instructors needed in higher education will dramatically vary from today. Many will remain in traditional instructor roles. Some will be course and program developers. Others will be online facilitators. Still others will be learning guides who help students make sense of their options. What is more interesting to me is the coming rise of the super e-mentor or e-coach. Such individuals will have a discipline expertise (e.g., theater, journalism, public health, finance, etc.) as well as human development or counseling skills. Third, they will understand the learning opportunities of the Web. They will know how to guide students in their online learning quests. Some will be needed daily, some monthly, and others perhaps just annually or biannually. They will be our learning gurus, in this, what I label, “the learning century.”Global and international education will be the buzz words of the coming decade. They already are. Student peers will increasingly be those from other institutions and regions of the world. One’s cohort groups will include many people that you will never physically meet. This will make affiliations with just one institution more difficult. More people will claim to be alums and be loyal to your institution but not to the same depth or degree as before.
  • Students will have more opportunities to create their own degree tracks and programs. There are no longer limits in terms of the time, place, and sequence of courses. The degrees offered will only be limited by one’s imagination. With the range of courses today, self-service learning will be the norm. It already is widely accepted in corporate training circles.
Barbara Lindsey

Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice - 1 views

www.infed.org/...communities_of_practice.htm

CoP community education wenger collaboration practice learning communities mafla09 actfl09 blended learning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 May 09 - Cached
  • Supposing learning is social and comes largely from of our experience of participating in daily life? It was this thought that formed the basis of a significant rethinking of learning theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s by two researchers from very different disciplines - Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Their model of situated learning proposed that learning involved a process of engagement in a 'community of practice'. 
  • When looking closely at everyday activity, she has argued, it is clear that 'learning is ubiquitous in ongoing activity, though often unrecognized as such' (Lave 1993: 5).
  • Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. (Wenger circa 2007)
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  • Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore to call these kinds of communities communities of practice. (Wenger 1998: 45)
  • The characteristics of communities of practice According to Etienne Wenger (c 2007), three elements are crucial in distinguishing a community of practice from other groups and communities: The domain. A community of practice is is something more than a club of friends or a network of connections between people. 'It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people' (op. cit.). The community. 'In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other' (op. cit.). The practice. 'Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction' (op. cit.).
  • The fact that they are organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community.
  • The interactions involved, and the ability to undertake larger or more complex activities and projects though cooperation, bind people together and help to facilitate relationship and trust
  • Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have tried to place it in social relationships – situations of co-participation.
  • It not so much that learners acquire structures or models to understand the world, but they participate in frameworks that that have structure. Learning involves participation in a community of practice. And that participation 'refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities' (Wenger 1999: 4).
  • Initially people have to join communities and learn at the periphery. The things they are involved in, the tasks they do may be less key to the community than others.
  • Learning is, thus, not seen as the acquisition of knowledge by individuals so much as a process of social participation. The nature of the situation impacts significantly on the process.
  • What is more, and in contrast with learning as internalization, ‘learning as increasing participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person acting in the world’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 49). The focus is on the ways in which learning is ‘an evolving, continuously renewed set of relations’ (ibid.: 50). In other words, this is a relational view of the person and learning (see the discussion of selfhood).
  • 'the purpose is not to learn from talk as a substitute for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation'. This orientation has the definite advantage of drawing attention to the need to understand knowledge and learning in context. However, situated learning depends on two claims: It makes no sense to talk of knowledge that is decontextualized, abstract or general. New knowledge and learning are properly conceived as being located in communities of practice (Tennant 1997: 77).
  • There is a risk, as Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger acknowledge, of romanticizing communities of practice.
  • 'In their eagerness to debunk testing, formal education and formal accreditation, they do not analyse how their omission [of a range of questions and issues] affects power relations, access, public knowledge and public accountability' (Tennant 1997: 79).
  • Perhaps the most helpful of these explorations is that of Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues (2001). They examine the work of an innovative school in Salt Lake City and how teachers, students and parents were able to work together to develop an approach to schooling based around the principle that learning 'occurs through interested participation with other learners'.
  • Learning is in the relationships between people. As McDermott (in Murphy 1999:17) puts it: Learning traditionally gets measured as on the assumption that it is a possession of individuals that can be found inside their heads… [Here] learning is in the relationships between people. Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on a relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part.
  • One of the implications for schools, as Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues suggest is that they must prioritize 'instruction that builds on children's interests in a collaborative way'. Such schools need also to be places where 'learning activities are planned by children as well as adults, and where parents and teachers not only foster children's learning but also learn from their own involvement with children' (2001: 3). Their example in this area have particular force as they are derived from actual school practice.
  • learning involves a deepening process of participation in a community of practice
  • Acknowledging that communities of practice affect performance is important in part because of their potential to overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a fast-moving virtual economy. Communities also appear to be an effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems and to share knowledge outside of the traditional structural boundaries. In addition, the community concept is acknowledged to be a means of developing and maintaining long-term organizational memory. These outcomes are an important, yet often unrecognized, supplement to the value that individual members of a community obtain in the form of enriched learning and higher motivation to apply what they learn. (Lesser and Storck 2001)
  • Educators need to reflect on their understanding of what constitutes knowledge and practice. Perhaps one of the most important things to grasp here is the extent to which education involves informed and committed action.
Barbara Lindsey

Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...ia_in_africa_part_2_mobile.php

mobile_phones africa social_networking mobile

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 13 Sep 09 - Cached
  • social media technology conference PICNIC2008
  • conference featured prolific social entrepreneurs and technology developers from around the world who offered insight into various projects from the African continent.
  • Africa is unique in that it seems to have bypassed the same era of community infrastructure building that has occurred in developed nations around the world.
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  • most of the technologies that currently permeate Africa aren't terrestrial. There are very few telephone lines, but mobile penetration is higher than any other region in the world.
  • Instead, internet connectivity is distributed nearly entirely by satellite.
  • The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."
  • Perhaps this thought is what motivated Google to invest in O3B Networks earlier this month. O3B Networks is an ambitious attempt to bring three billion people in the developing world (mainly in parts of Asia and Africa) online by launching sixteen inexpensive, low-orbit satellites. The potential benefits for Google are obvious. This is three billion new internet users, who will more than likely use Google to search, and who will potentially click-through Adsense links and use other Google products. An indicator that Google may be anticipating as much is their move into Africa last year. They've since opened offices and hired people in both South Africa and Kenya with plans to eventually operate out of all sub-Saharan African countries.
  • At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4% Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country. Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt
  • The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers. In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.
  • Micro-payments and Mobile Banking
  • Mobile News Reporting
Barbara Lindsey

The Innovative Educator: Ideas for Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Cell Phones Eve... - 0 views

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cellphones education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The first thing to acknowledge is that while students in some districts are banned from using mobile technologies at school, teachers are not. This means that teachers have multiple opportunities to model and demonstrate best practices to students. The next thing to acknowledge is that few teachers have ever used cells or other mobile technologies as instructional tools so they need to develop comfort and experience doing so before trying to do this with their students.
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