Skip to main content

Home/ worldatways/ Group items matching "post" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Barbara Lindsey

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting | The Penenberg Post | Fast Company - 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
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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.
Barbara Lindsey

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

www.boingboing.net/...student-challenges-p.html

student student-created

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Kyle's a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course -- he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review -- and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.
  • The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs -- including me, at times -- fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.
  • And in this case, it's especially poignant, since Kyle's workflow actually matches the practices of real-world programmers and academic computer scientists: coders look at one anothers' examples, use reference implementations, publish their code for review by peers. If you hired a programmer who insisted that none of her co-workers could see her work, you'd immediately fire her -- that's just not how software is written. Kyle's prof's idea of how computer programmers work is exactly what's meant by the pejorative sense of "academic" -- unrealistic, hidebound, and out-of-touch with reality. Bravo to Kyle for standing his ground!
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer
  • Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."
  • Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?
  • The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 29 Dec 09
     
    Thx to Russel Tarr
Barbara Lindsey

Wired Campus: Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...notes-during-class-via-twitter

twitter higher ed classroom

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Back then, most of his students were unfamiliar with Twitter, the microblogging service that limits messages to 140 characters. And for the first few weeks of course, students were reluctant to tweet, says Mr. Complese. “It took a few weeks for this to click,” he said. “Before it started to work, there was just nothing on the back channel.”
  • his hope is that the second layer of conversation will disrupt the old classroom model and allow new kinds of teaching in which students play a greater role and information is pulled in from outside the classroom walls.
  • Once students warmed to the idea that their professors actually wanted them to chat during class, students begin floating ideas or posting links to related materials, the professor says. In some cases, a shy student would type an observation or question on Twitter, and others in the class would respond with notes encouraging the student to raise the topic out loud. Other times, one of the professors would see a link posted by a student and stop class to discuss it.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • I am one of Cole’s “experimental lab rats,” and I must say that Cole and his colleague changed the way that I view teaching and learning. That course disrupted my notions of participation, identity, and community, and the changes are for the better. The course was so intellectually stimulating that when the course ended, I experienced a tremendous loss. The loss was so great that I felt myself trying to create Twitter communities in my future classes because I missed that engagement. If you are curious about our course, visit my course blog. https://blogs.psu.edu/mt4/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=655&tag=CI597C&limit=20 From there, you can access other students’ blogs and see some of the other conversations that ensued. For those who are critiquing Cole for his “grand experiment,” I must say that those of us who were in the course take pride in being a part of such an innovative course that challenged our perspectives of teaching and learning. We truly became a community, and that community has continued to this day on Twitter. I have even started using Twitter when I teach my undergraduate courses! Thank you, Cole (and colleague), for making a difference in my life! If you still curious about the course, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE935OqkKE8 and hear more about it.
  • @Bill Sodeman, FERPA does not come into play in what we did here. Twitter was not a replacement for a course management system and we didn’t hand out grades or force anyone into the environment. Those who adopted found it worthwhile. Also, controlling access would have killed one of the other really important (and unintentional) things that happened here — people not enrolled in the course followed and contributed via Twitter live!
  • We introduced quite a variety of technologies as we explored themes of community, identity, and design — all while participating in some very rigorous readings and conversations. I wrote a few posts about it a while back. Twitter was the most surprising outcome on many levels. At the end of the day, it was the class that became the community. Twitter empowered that in a strange way — a way that has us thinking about how we do this again. The one thing I am thrilled to see is that this conversation is happening — again, not about Twitter per se, but about rethinking practice. Thanks to everyone who is contributing thoughts!
  • @Megan Fritz The most intriguing part for me was the there was no official “monitor” of our conversation. Instead, we new that Cole and his colleague were tuned in, but it didn’t matter. We were in charge of our conversation. We became the drivers of the conversation, which made it meaningful for us as we constructed our learning. The channels of communication changed from bi-directional (teacher-to-student) to multi-directional (teacher-student-student-teacher, etc.). I would be bothered by thinking that the professor thought that we were “off track” and needed someone to monitor us to keep the back channel on track. In our case, the back channel was very much on task and often sat in the driver’s seat. It gives a whole new meaning to student-directed instruction. While such openness can be scary and intimidating because the control is handed over to the students, the experience can be powerful because the teacher becomes a member of the community partaking in the negotiation of the steering of the conversation.
  • I’m a PR student at the University of Oregon and this term I’m taking a social media marketing class with Kelli Matthews. She allows us to tweet during lecture as long as we tag content with #j412. If anyone would like to sit in just do a twitter search for #j412. We meet Monday and Wednesdays noon to 1:30 (pacific time). Or, check out our class website: http://strategicsocialmedia.wordpress.com/
Barbara Lindsey

Young Leaders of Grass-Roots Movements Meet in Mexico City - 0 views

www.america.gov/...10046GLnesnoM4.101199e-02.html

activism social justice social media

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Technology now facilitates civic involvement throughout the world, said the State Department’s Jared Cohen. In an essay for the Web site Huffington Post.com, Cohen reflected on the lessons of the AYM conference and concluded that “this new ability to connect [online] is leveling the playing field and breaking down previous age, gender, socioeconomic and circumstantial barriers to who can emerge as a leader, activist or grassroots agent for change.”
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Nov 09
     
    Technology now facilitates civic involvement throughout the world, said the State Department's Jared Cohen. In an essay for the Web site Huffington Post.com, Cohen reflected on the lessons of the AYM conference and concluded that "this new ability to connect [online] is leveling the playing field and breaking down previous age, gender, socioeconomic and circumstantial barriers to who can emerge as a leader, activist or grassroots agent for change."
Barbara Lindsey

adVancEducation: A cookbook for 21st century project management - 1 views

advanceducation.blogspot.com/...-for-21st-century-project.html

projectmanagement 21stcentury calico chapter book

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 25 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 25 Jun 10
     
    Vance Stevens' blog post about his Calico journal article. He even gives the full text of his chapter via google docs for us to read.
Barbara Lindsey

The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World: Teaching Thursday: Communicating with Students Online - 1 views

mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/...ting-with-students-online.html

twitter students professor courses

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 11 Jul 10
     
    Assist Prof of Archeology details how he uses Twitter and discussion boards to more effectively communicate with students and help guide them in writing more appropriate and higher level response posts. 
Barbara Lindsey

M.I.T. Lets Student Bloggers Post Without Censoring - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...02blogs.html

student blogging MIT

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Oct 09 - Cached
  • “I was blogging myself, almost every day, when I was in high school, and I read the M.I.T. blogs all the time,” said Jess Kim, a senior blogger. “For me they painted a picture of what life would be like here, and that was part of why I wanted to come.”
  • M.I.T. chooses its bloggers through a contest, in which applicants submit samples of their writing. “The annual blogger selection is like the admissions office’s own running of the bulls,” said Dave McOwen, Mr. Jones’s successor in the admissions office, in his message inviting applications.
  • “You want people who can communicate and who are going to be involved in different parts of campus life,” he said. “You want them to be positive, but it’s not mandatory.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But so far, none of the blogs match the interactivity and creativity of those of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they are posted prominently on the admissions homepage, along with hundreds of responses from prospective applicants — all unedited.
Barbara Lindsey

Teachers And YouTube: Connecticut May Study Impact Of Video-Recording Devices In Classrooms -- Courant.com - 0 views

www.courant.com/...s-0320.artmar20,0,565895.story

teachers video banned law cellphones

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09 - Cached
  • There is Smoker, 44, in his Guilford High School classroom more than a year ago, flailing his arms, short-hopping across the classroom, then pushing against a wall. He is explaining how molecules move, but the only sound in this YouTube video is instrumental music.
  • Experiences such as Smoker's are behind a bill that the state's largest teachers' union is lobbying for at the state Capitol. The legislation, under consideration by the General Assembly's education committee, would create a task force to study the impact of cellphone cameras and video-recording devices in the classroom.
  • State law already allows local school boards to ban or restrict cellphones at school — and many of them do —
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Connecticut Education Association argues that the pervasiveness of small mobile phones that can record videos easily uploaded to the Internet is reason to update the law to specifically limit their use.
  • "What we're trying to do is address the problem head-on," Mark Waxenberg, the CEA's government relations director, said this week.
  • A Norwalk High School math teacher was suspended with pay in 2006 after a cellphone video posted on the Internet showed him calling a student a homophobic slur.
  • courts in the country have generally limited teachers' privacy rights in the classroom
  • No teachers spoke when the bill was aired at a public hearing Monday. And the lone piece of written testimony comes from Ray Rossomando, a CEA employee, who said that "surreptitious video-recordings of teachers has been an increasing concern" and cited the example of a Naugatuck Valley teacher who was recorded while instructing class this year. The clip was posted on YouTube.
  • People have to take the course to see the dance, he tells them.
  • So the clip is "a little upsetting," Smoker said, "because I do teach mostly seniors, and they know what the policy is. To do a sneaky video like this was out of line."
  • Still, Smoker was worried that the video would be taken out of context, and he called it a "rude awakening." He contacted the student, who has since graduated, to ask that it be taken down.
Barbara Lindsey

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

blogs.saschina.org/...at-kind-of-tok-blog-do-we-want

blogs watw beyondwebct students worldatways

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Nov 08
     
    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

Blog Smarter | Zemanta Ltd. - 0 views

www.zemanta.com

free plugin firefox wordpress zemanta semantic for:gaugler watw beyondwebct worldatways

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Nov 08
     
    Any user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly "read" by Zemanta, which recognizes all contextual content. Zemanta then combs the web for the most relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving these results to th
Barbara Lindsey

TeacherTube - The Essay - 0 views

www.teachertube.com/view_video.php

watw cell kolb worldatways

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 Nov 08
     
    Use for cellphone blog post
Barbara Lindsey

Teaching College Math » Blog Archive » How to Grade a Student Blog - 0 views

teachingcollegemath.com/?p=1898

blog rubric student

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 05 Jan 10
     
    Really nice explanation and description of student blog posting rubric.
Barbara Lindsey

Access Flash websites on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch (including Webkinz and Club Penguin) « Moving at the Speed of Creativity - 0 views

www.speedofcreativity.org/...uding-webkinz-and-club-penguin

fryer flash apple

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 16 May 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 16 May 10
     
    Wes Fryer post on how to access flash-based sites on apple devices.
Barbara Lindsey

Langwitches Blog » Saying Goodbye Ning - 1 views

langwitches.org/...saying-goodbye-ning

langwitches ning alternative buddypress opensource

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 May 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 17 May 10
     
    Great post explaining what and how Silvia transitioned to from her Ning network.
Barbara Lindsey

twitter : Ruminate - 0 views

www.chrislott.org/twitter

twitter

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 08 Apr 09
     
    Chris Lott posts on Twitter, esp. for ed
Barbara Lindsey

Learning with 'e's: Teaching with Twitter - 0 views

steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/...teaching-with-twitter.html

twitter education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 08 Apr 09
     
    Has some good links to other Twitter posts
Barbara Lindsey

Open Subtitles - 0 views

www.avc.com/...open-subtitles.html

subtitles video opensource

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 13 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 13 Oct 09
     
    Blog post describing how (here seems illegally, if following the letter of the law) the use of opensource media platforms and subtitling can bring world cinema to a wider audience.
Barbara Lindsey

Twitter Lists; Limitations, bugs, impact, and brilliance - scobleizer's posterous - 0 views

scobleizer.posterous.com/imitations-bugs-impact-and-bri

twitter feature lists

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 18 Oct 09
     
    Post from Robert Scoble about very intriguing beta Twitter feature and what the rest of us mere mortals can expect once it is released to the general twiiterverse.
Barbara Lindsey

Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...47082

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Jan 09 - Cached
  • The iPod might have an instructional potential, but it is the educators who arrange and structure instructional events around it to make learning happen, not the instrument itself. To realize the instructional potential of technology requires a set of skills that can only be acquired through adequate instruction and practice. Just as speaking a foreign language is not a qualification to teach it, knowing how to use a technology does not mean that one knows intuitively how to use it as a teaching tool.
  • A keyword search for the word "tech%" and "computer" in the Modern Language Association (MLA) job list1 returns over 43 relevant ads out of 236 job postings (as of November 20, 2007): "familiarity with teaching-related technologies" (tenure track in Spanish, Missouri); "experience with technology in the classroom" (tenure track in French, Michigan); "ability to use technology effectively in teaching and learning" (tenure track in Japanese, South Carolina). The wording varies slightly from one ad to the next, but the message is the same: job candidates are well advised to have an answer ready when asked how they use technology in the classroom.
  • Because the field of language technology is at the crossroads of technology, instructional design, and languages, it calls for the close collaboration of experts in each area. Today, language centers are the only campus units where such a wide range of expertise can easily be found.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Unfortunately, graduate students interested in becoming acquainted with relevant instructional technologies have a limited number of options.
Barbara Lindsey

Fluid Learning | the human network - 0 views

blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94

mark pesce higher ed technology learning control

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • 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.
1 - 20 of 37 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page