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Barbara Lindsey

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

  • 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

Fluid Learning | the human network - 0 views

  • There must be a point to the exercise, some reason that makes all the technology worthwhile. That search for a point – a search we are still mostly engaged in – will determine whether these computers are meaningful to the educational process, or if they are an impediment to learning.
  • What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.
  • A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.
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  • it has made the work of educational administrators exponentially more difficult. Students now talk, up and down the years, via the recorded ratings on the site. It isn’t possible for an institution of higher education to disguise an individual who happens to be a world-class researcher but a rather ordinary lecturer. In earlier times, schools could foist these instructors on students, who’d be stuck for a semester. This no longer happens, because RateMyProfessors.com effectively warns students away from the poor-quality teachers.
  • This one site has undone all of the neat work of tenure boards and department chairs throughout the entire world of academia.
  • The battle for control over who stands in front of the classroom has now been decisively lost by the administration in favor of the students.
  • That knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.
  • If we are smart enough, we can learn a lesson here and now that we will eventually learn – rather more expensively – if we wait. The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.
  • the shape of things to come. But there are some other trends which are also becoming visible. The first and most significant of these is the trend toward sharing lecture material online, so that it reaches a very large audience.
  • the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.
  • When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?
  • Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?
  • In this near future world, students are the administrators.
  • Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.
  • The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructor facilitates and mentors, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers,
  • The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens.
  • At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode – vanishing online – and explode – the world will become the classroom.
  • Flexibility and fluidity are the hallmark qualities of the 21st century educational institution. An analysis of the atomic features of the educational process shows that the course is a series of readings, assignments and lectures that happen in a given room on a given schedule over a specific duration. In our drive to flexibility how can we reduce the class into to essential, indivisible elements? How can we capture those elements? Once captured, how can we get these elements to the students? And how can the students share elements which they’ve found in their own studies?
  • This is the basic idea that’s guiding Stanford and MIT: recording is cheap, lecturers are expensive, and students are forgetful. Somewhere in the middle these three trends meet around recorded media. Yes, a student at Stanford who misses a lecture can download and watch it later, and that’s a good thing. But it also means that any student, anywhere, can download the same lecture.
  • Every one of these recordings has value, and the more recordings you have, the larger the horde you’re sitting upon. If you think of it like that – banking your work – the logic of capturing everything becomes immediately clear.
  • While education definitely has value – teachers are paid for the work – that does not mean that resources, once captured, should be tightly restricted to authorized users only. In fact, the opposite is the case: the resources you capture should be shared as broadly as can possibly be managed. More than just posting them onto a website (or YouTube or iTunes), you should trumpet their existence from the highest tower. These resources are your calling card, these resources are your recruiting tool.
  • the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.
  • Stanford and MIT
  • show a different way to value education – as experience. You can’t download experience. You can’t bottle it. Experience has to be lived, and that requires a teacher.
  • Rather than going for a commercial solution, I would advise you to look at the open-source solutions. Rather than buying a solution, use Moodle, the open-source, Australian answer to digital courseware. Going open means that as your needs change, the software can change to meet those needs. Given the extraordinary pressures education will be under over the next few years, openness is a necessary component of flexibility.
  • Openness is also about achieving a certain level of device-independence.
  • here are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital. Many students will never be very computer literate, but every single one of them has a mobile handset, and every single one of them sends text messages. It’s the big of computer technology we nearly always overlook – because it is so commonplace. Consider every screen when you capture, and when you share; dealing with them all as equals will help you work find audiences you never suspected you’d have.
  • Yet net filtering throws the baby out with the bathwater. Services like Twitter get filtered out because they could potentially be disruptive, cutting students off from the amazing learning potential of social messaging. Facebook and MySpace are seen as time-wasters, rather than tools for organizing busy schedules. The list goes on: media sites are blocked because the schools don’t have enough bandwidth to support them; Wikipedia is blocked because teachers don’t want students cheating. All of this has got to stop. The classroom does not exist in isolation, nor can it continue to exist in opposition to the Internet. Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.
  • Mind the maxim of the 21st century: connection is king. Students must be free to connect with instructors, almost at whim. This becomes difficult for instructors to manage, but it is vital. Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life.
  • Finally, students must be free to (and encouraged to) connect with their peers. Part of the reason we worry about lecturers being overburdened by all this connectivity is because we have yet to realize that this is a multi-lateral, multi-way affair. It’s not as though all questions and issues immediately rise to the instructor’s attention. This should happen if and only if another student can’t be found to address the issue. Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.
  • Connection is expensive, not in dollars, but in time. But for all its drawbacks, connection enriches us enormously. It allows us to multiply our reach, and learn from the best.
  • learning by listening is proved to be much harder than learning by reading.
  • RateMyProfessors is a good start, and anecdotes about how people use it is interesting, but it has a long long way to go before it comes close to being reliable let alone authoritative.
Barbara Lindsey

Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 1 views

  • Many of today's teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.  The results can be disastrous.  Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.  "Why did I bother to plug my students in for this project?" teachers wonder.  "They could have done better work with a piece of paper and a pencil!"
  • With shared annotation services like Diigo, powerful learning depends on much more than understanding the technical details behind adding highlights and comments for other members of a group to see.  Instead, powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together.  That means teachers must systematically introduce students to a set of collaborative dialogue behaviors that can be easily implemented online.
  • intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence
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  • While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences.
  • A tagging language is nothing more than a set of categories that all members of a group agree to use when bookmarking websites for shared projects.
  • In Shirky's terms, teams that embrace social bookmarking decrease the "cost" of  group transactions.  No longer do members resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning, groups can make sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.
  • Imagine the collective power of an army of readers engaged in ongoing conversation about provocative ideas, challenging one another's thought, publicly debating, and polishing personal beliefs.  Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.  Imagine the potential for brainstorming global solutions, for holding government agencies accountable, or for gathering feedback from disparate stakeholder groups when reading moves from a "fundamentally private activity" to a "community event."
  • Understanding that there are times when users want their shared reading experiences to be more focused, however, Diigo makes it possible to keep highlights and annotations private or available to members of predetermined and self-selected groups.  For professional learning teams exploring instructional practices or for student research groups exploring content for classroom projects, this provides a measure of targeted exploration between likeminded thinkers.
  • Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums
Darcy Goshorn

Experience with facilitating professional development and TurnItIn - 0 views

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    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

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation... - 0 views

  • Unfortunately, this margin and that niche don’t map well onto each other, to the extent that education extends beyond single classes and connects with the world.
  • CMSes offer versions of most of these, but in a truncated way. Students can publish links to external objects, but can’t link back in. (In fact, a Blackboard class is a fine place to control access to content for one concerned about “deep linking”) An instructor can assign a reading group consisting of students in one’s class, but no one else. These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.
  • professors can readily built media criticism assignments into class spaces. These experiences are analogous to the pre-digital classroom, and can work well enough. But both refuse to engage with today’s realities, namely that media are deeply shaped by the social. Journaling privately, restricted to an audience not of the writer’s choosing, is unusual.
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  • We’ve seen an explosion in computer-mediated teaching and learning practices based on Web 2.0, in variety and scope too broad to summarize here. Think of the range from class blogs to Wikipedia writing exercises, profcasting to Twitter class announcements, mashups and academic library folksonomies and researchers’ social bookmarking subscriptions. CMSes react in the following ways: first, by simply not recapitulating these functions; second, by imitating them in delayed, limited fashions; third, by attempting them in a marginal way (example: Blackboard’s Scholar.com). CMSes are retrograde in a Web 2.0 teaching world.
  • CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference.
  • Moreover, those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.
  • If we focus on the copyright issue, then the CMS makes for an apparently adequate shield. It also represents an uncritical acceptance of one school of copyright practice, as it enforces one form of fair use through software. However, it does not open up the question of copyright. Compare, for example, with the Creative Commons option increasingly available to content authors in platforms such as Flickr or WordPress. That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.
  • Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature.
  • Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments,
  • Yet does this argument seem familiar, somehow? It was made during the 1990s, once the first Web ballooned, and new forms of information anxiety appeared. Mentioning this historicity is not intended as a point of style, but to remind the audience that, since this is an old problem, we have been steadily evolving solutions. Indeed, ever since the 20th century we can point to practices – out in the open, wild Web! – which help users cope with informational chaos. These include social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed. Most of these skills are not well suited to the walled garden environment, but can be discussed there, of course. Without undue risk of exposure.
  • Put another way, we can sum up the CMS alternative to Web 2.0’s established and evolving pedagogies as a sort of corporate model. This doesn’t refer to the fact that the leading CMS is a business product, produced by a fairly energetic marketplace player. No, the architecture of CMSes recapitulates several aspects of modern business. It enforces copyright compliance. It resembles an intranet, akin to those run by many enterprises. It protects users from external challenges, in true walled garden style. Indeed, at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.
  • The academic uses of realtime search follow the pre-Web pedagogy of seeking timely references to a classroom topic. Think of a professor bringing a newspaper to class, carrying a report about the very subject under discussion. How can this be utilized practically? Faculty members can pick a Web service (Google News, Facebook, Twitter) and search themselves, sharing results; or students can run such queries themselves.
  • Over the past near-decade CMSes have not only grown in scale, but feature development. Consider the variety: gradebooks, registrar system integration, e-Reserve integration, discussion tools, drop boxes, news alerts. Consider too the growth of parallel Web 2.0 tools: wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, podcasting.
  • Now to compare CMSes and Web 2.0: imagine an alternate history, a counterfactual, whereby the world outside academia had Blackboard instead of Web 2.0: § White House health care reform debates: each citizen must log into a town-hall-associated “class,” registering by zip code and social security number. Information is exchanged between “town classes” via email. Relevant documents can be found, often in .doc format, by logging into one’s town class.
  • § Iranian activists collaborate via classes, frantically switching logins and handles to keep government authorities from registering and snooping. § “Citizen media” barely exist. Instead we rely on established authorities (CNN, BBC, Xinua, etc) to sift, select, and, eventually, republish rare selections of user-generated media. § Wikipedia, Flickr and Picasa, the blogosphere, Facebook and MySpace, the world of podcasting simply don’t exist. Instead, we rely on static, non-communicable Web documents, and consult the occasional e-Reserve, sometimes on a purchased DVD. § The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) maintains fan clubs, small, temporary groups where fans of certain bands and artists can sign in and listen to time-limited, DRM’d music. “It’s like tape trading, but legal!” says one promotional campaign.
  • Once we had Bertold Brecht writing plays for radio, neighborhood-based radio shows, and the stupendous Orson Wells; then we moved on, through payola, and onto Kasey Kasem and Clear Channel.
  • For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
  • Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?
  • Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.”
  • What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?
  • CMS. What is it best used for? We have said little about its integration with campus information systems, but these are critical for class (not learning) management, from attendance to grading. Web 2.0 has yet to replace this function. So imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.
  • It makes for a separation from the social media world, a paused space, perhaps one fertile for reflection. If that works for some situations, then it works, and should be selected… consciously, not as a default or unreflective option, but as the result of a pedagogical decision process.
Barbara Lindsey

Philosophy | Intrepid Teacher - 0 views

  • The 21st century classroom must be a place to network, to create, to publish, to share.
  • The new classroom does not integrate technology into an outdated curriculum, but rather infuses technology into the daily performance of classroom life.
  • In this new classroom, the teacher is not the sole expert or the only source of information, but rather the teacher is the lead member of a network—guiding and facilitating as students search for answers to questions they have carefully generated.
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  • It is important to note that some students may be quietly sitting in the corner engrossed in an old fashioned text.
  • Daily and total access to computers allows students to realize that technology is not something they “do” when they go to the lab or when the teacher has checked out the laptop cart, but rather technology is something they can use everyday in class to help themselves learn.
  • In this new classroom, students will begin to understand that their computer is not simply a novelty to take notes with, but it is their binder, their planner, their dictionary, their journal, their photo album, their music archive, their address book.
  • tudents will begin to understand that their computer is not simply a novel
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    The 21st century classroom must be a place to network, to create, to publish, to share.
Barbara Lindsey

Viddler.com - Upload, Enhance, Share - 0 views

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    Viddler is a fresh, creative web application that lets you upload, enhance, and share digital video quickly and easily inside your web browser.
Barbara Lindsey

Please Turn on Your Cell Phone: Change Observer: Design Observer - 0 views

  • U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, came out in support of cell phone use saying, “Finding ways to use cell phones to deliver lesson plans to students would improve education and meet federal guidelines.”
  • In the U.S., 76 percent of students ages 12 to 18 have their own cell phone. Forward-thinking educators recognize in these statistics a low-tech, low-cost solution to the ongoing technology problem in underserved schools, where hardware is dysfunctional, wireless infrastructure is weak and inadequate staffing fails to meet the demands of upkeep.
  • The bottom line is cell phones are the most affordable, accessible way to provide access to technology and narrow the digital divide.
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  • But advocating for cell phone use in education is about more than cost, sustainability or parity; it’s about accessing points of entry. When it comes to technology integration, you need to meet students (and teachers) where they are. When you begin with a tool they already know and love, you’re less likely to be met with the kind of resistance you might otherwise get to institutional hardware or software. For teachers, eliminate the fear factor and you’ve empowered a previously disenfranchised group of self-professed Luddites. For students, who treat the cell phone like an appendage, you’re capitalizing on an existing passion for the technology.
  • In the model of the Asia Society International Studies School Network, we prepare college-ready, globally competent students by requiring them to participate in learning engagements both within and beyond the classroom. Internships, service learning, foreign and domestic travel and learning expeditions of all kinds develop students’ methods of inquiry. What’s especially exciting about integrating cell phone use into the curriculum is the opportunity to extend and better support the rich learning that’s already happening outside of our classrooms (while also allowing us to work around the ban).
  • We design inquiry-based curricula that send students out into the world to investigate, collect, report, reflect and engage. In doing so, students gain a sense of themselves as producers of knowledge. They become part of a continuous learning loop of inputs and outputs mediated by teacher and student alike. With basic mobile functions like voice, text and camera coupled with web 2.0 technologies, students’ knowledge can be shared locally and globally, all the while developing critical communication and collaboration skills. Audiocasting, photoblogging, polling, surveying and language acquisition are just a few of the activities that utilize mobile devices for learning. These are context-specific opportunities for students to share with authentic and limitless audiences. And for teenagers, to share is to be — which lies at the heart of their love for the cell phone to begin with.
  • we need to leverage this love to help students transform their communication networks into learning networks.
  • I ask teachers all the time, "how do you use technology (read: the Web, your phone, etc") to learn?" and it's difficult for many to answer. Like many students, they've never had models for effective learning with technology (as opposed to information retrieval, which admittedly, hasn't been great either.)
  • I am suggesting that if we want to take advantage of the undeniable potential for learning with technology, we have to help educators be learners in those contexts first.
  • Cell phones are not useful in school when pedagogy does not use them to support the kind of learning wanted. While the kids in a class are 'distracted' by their phones, they are learning an enormous amount, just not what the teacher intends. The easy answer is to ban the technology, the more difficult but far richer answer is to develop pedagogy that exploits it.
  • Kids fluency and engagement with mobile devices should be viewed as a wonderful resource and indication of their engagement in things they want to learn, not as a distraction that has to be silenced to make lessons easier.
  • Your post and these comments make it evident that educators, families, politicians et. al. must first become participants in using these tools prior to understanding or advocating for their use.
Barbara Lindsey

Upwardly Mobile » Blog Archive » Mobile Phones in the Classroom - Educatio... - 0 views

  • David Warlick asks on his blog; “what will we ask on our tests when students come in with Google in their pockets? Will they be better questions than we ask today?” Web-capable mobile phones allow users to both access and create the information which is shared on the Internet. My research explored the reality of making use of the mobile phone as a tool for accessing the Internet and the reaction of both teachers and their students to having ‘information on-demand’ or ‘Google in their pocket’.
  • Are students learning to cope with information overload and to become critical and discerning in their use of information? Hedley Beare (2002) has written extensively on the future of schooling. He states that it is ironic “that teachers currently give the information out to students that they have already deemed to be correct. There is not authentic context requiring students to critique information”. It is the ability to critique and use information that is such a crucial skill.
  • My research found that often students were being set internet based ‘research’ activities for homework with very little guidance as to how to go about finding the desired information, or more importantly what to do with it.
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    David Warlick asks on his blog; "what will we ask on our tests when students come in with Google in their pockets? Will they be better questions than we ask today?" Web-capable mobile phones allow users to both access and create the information which is shared on the Internet. My research explored the reality of making use of the mobile phone as a tool for accessing the Internet and the reaction of both teachers and their students to having 'information on-demand' or 'Google in their pocket'.
Barbara Lindsey

Sundry Notes - 0 views

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    Free and for fee iPad app that allows you to capture and annotate notes with drawings, scribbles, videos, pics and share with others
Barbara Lindsey

TeamViewer - Free Remote Access and Remote Desktop Sharing over the Internet - 1 views

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    Thx 2 Vicki Davis tweet
Barbara Lindsey

The Fourth Estate: Web2.0 - The Hard Act To Follow - 0 views

  • Facebook has become the Outlook and webmail client for an increasing number of people, especially kids.
  • he World Wide Web as World Wide Database. Rather than simply sharing links to documents, the next generation web will be about accessing the implicit data. In Kelly's view, every object we manufacture will have a sliver of intelligence in it. The entire world and everything in it will go into a globally connected database of things, that is then shared and linked. We won't worry about how different devices operate or access content. They will all be windows into the same universal network.
  • Cloud computing, massive scale driven platforms, semantic webs, ubiquitous mobile devices, augmented reality - its a tall order - even for 6500 days. And if you find all of that a hard cocktail to envision, don't be surprised. As Kelly himself acknowledged, when he started Wired magazine in the nineties he expected the Web to be TV, just better. This time he's sure of one thing. Whatever comes next won't be the Web, only better.
Barbara Lindsey

Qik | Product Highlight - 0 views

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    Live video sharing via cell phone
Barbara Lindsey

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDU... - 0 views

  • Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5
  • In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field.9 But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
  • In the fall of 2004, Wiley taught a graduate seminar, “Understanding Online Interaction.” He describes what happened when his students were required to share their coursework publicly:
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The writing students did in the first few weeks was interesting but average. In the fourth week, however, I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another's writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other's writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community's discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.17
  • for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.
  • Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
  • The demand-pull approach to learning might appear to be extremely resource-intensive. But the Internet is becoming a vast resource for supporting this style of learning. Its resources include the rapidly growing amount of open courseware, access to powerful instruments and simulation models, and scholarly websites, which already number in the hundreds, as well as thousands of niche communities based around specific areas of interest in virtually every field of endeavor.22
  • We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.
  • This new form of learning begins with the knowledge and practices acquired in school but is equally suited for continuous, lifelong learning that extends beyond formal schooling.
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    Seely Brown and Adler article
Barbara Lindsey

Theory of Knowledge | What kind of TOK blog do we want? - 0 views

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    Great post about the whys of blogging. Really nice blog done by high school kids and their teacher(s). Thanks to Jeff Utecht for sharing via twitter (@jutecht)
Barbara Lindsey

Twitter-What is it and why would I use it? | Musings from an International Teacher - 0 views

  • Why would you go to a educational conference or workshop? To find out about what best practices are out there, make connections with teachers and hopefully learn something new. However, sometimes you go to workshops that are fascinating and want to learn more from the presenter. Usually you forget about this workshop or lose their business card they gave you. Twitter allows you maintain contact and read updates, new blog posts or interesting websites that they find automatically. You do this by “following” them on Twitter.
  • Once you have this network, you an ask them questions and build on a shared knowledge from this network. This is often referred as a PLN (personal learning network).
  • If you don’t “give anything” than people aren’t going to follow you. Everyone has some knowledge to offer others whether it be a good website, a great technology tool or a better teaching strategy. Share it! Slowly, you will start appearing in search results and people will recognize this and add you. This creates a culture of reciprocity. If you aren’t a team player, Twitter might not be for you.
Barbara Lindsey

FriendFeed - 0 views

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    FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.
Barbara Lindsey

Turning links into a library with Diigo - 0 views

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    Great overview of the many benefits to using Diigo to collect, organize and share your bookmarks.
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