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Stephanie Cooper

Seven Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School | Copyblogger - 3 views

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    This guy has some very interesting thoughts, but can teachers really afford to follow some of his advice??  
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    His sense of audience is ridiculous. I'm all about creativity, even in academic writing. My students have a variety of creative opportunities, but the fact remains that they need to learn how to put thoughts together effectively. I just looked at two essays that had absolutely no coherent point, even though they featured personal experiences. He made a comparison between essays and novels. Dude! They are two completely different forms of writing. They have different goals and different parameters. Yes, the 5-paragraph essay is a stilted, inauthentic form of writing and it is largely on its way out, but at the secondary level, it is the training wheels some students need to learn how to organize their thoughts coherently. No matter how they write, they still have to say SOMETHING.
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    He does exaggerate for effect, e.g. his claim that students are told to write in a style similar to classic literature--ridiculous! No one is told to copy any writing style previous to 1950, unless it is graduate students being told to mimic the horrible jargon of academic journals, but I think that's a different "bad" than what he means here. He avoids what should be his real topic--truly bad writing; I mean incompetent, to the point of being an effort to follow, poorly structured writing. We see this writing from the strongest cases of ESL students and from students who seem to have skipped several grades in school or who have never read a great deal in their school years. He leaves off the most important tool for teaching writing, and that is frequency. Anyone who only writes by email, Facebook, and twitter, and only writes something for a class once or twice a semester, will never break into a "conversational" form of writing (with complete sentences and paragraphs) that will be recognized as literate, normal, and natural. We recommend starting with short, non-graded writing and, by writing 2-3 times a week, working up to something more substantial. If teachers can do that, then college student writing will improve, but the plan requires patience and consistency from the teacher.
Stephanie Cooper

Blogging In the Classroom « Peg's Place - 1 views

  • I was concerned with my Writing Proficiency class, their journal entries were getting progressively worse instead of better. I found that students were becoming very lazy with their journal writing. It wasn’t just the content, but the grammar and spelling. They were not paying attention to detail, and making very careless mistakes – I was worried that their writing skills were regressing! Something had to be done…
  • Although, we knew that a blog would be a good tool for writing, we had a few concerns; exactly how were we going use the blog? How would we edit their writing? How would we give meaningful feedback without losing the momentum of having students just write? How would we assess their writing? Despite our concerns, we decided to throw caution to the wind start a classroom blog, and iron out the details later.
  • Although, it is not perfect, students acknowledge the value in using a blog as a writing tool. They recognize it as an opportunity to become more thoughtful writers, and editors; they realize that unlike many other pieces of writing submitted, it cannot be tucked away in their notebooks never to be seen again.
Thomas Clancy

Critical Thinking: What Is It, Anyway? - 1 views

  • The ability to think critically is arguably the most important skill for the 21st century person.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Well, critical thinking is one of five writing literacies taught in QEP classes. Is it the most important?
    • Thomas Clancy
       
      Indeed, we are all about including the five "literacies" in our writing opportunities, even though, technically, "literacy" cannot be pluralized!
  • Instead of using the Five W’s for developing content (they’re the basics for writing a successful news piece), use the Five W’s to analyze any post/piece of writing.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a nice technique to add to the QEP toolbox, and has a dual use for both writing and reading. Keep in mind that QEP should also address reading, as Tom points out to us.
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    critical thinking demands objective examination of a topic and then a conscious response to that examination.
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    critical thinking demands objective examination of a topic and then a conscious response to that examination.
Thomas Clancy

Ideas for Writing Assignments - 2 views

  • n this course, you will write a substantial research essay (6+ pages in MLA Style) on a topic of your own choice that relates to some aspect of the course material. In order to combat the procrastination (I-work-better-under-pressure) syndrome, this assignment has several steps all of which you must complete to achieve the best possible result.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      I like how this assignment was broken down into several steps. The part where they have to share their paper with their classmates is great. This means that they will actually have to do some thinking to be able to answer questions about the topic. This would definitely help with critical thinking skills, thus preventing most opportunites for plagiarism.
    • Thomas Clancy
       
      I agree, Steph. That's what I'm trying to help our faculty see--their assignments in steps or phases that students can easily accomplish within a short lab visit.
  • It seems natural to assume that students in upper level courses will know the difference between a good term paper and a poor one. I've learned the hard way that this is an unwarranted assumption! My first attempts to use term paper assignments in my psychology courses were disappointing. The failure was partly my fault because I was not very specific in stating my expectations and the characteristics of good writing. Term paper assignments should be used as an opportunity to clearly demonstrate the differences between good and poor writing by communicating practices to avoid in the course assignment.
  • The following is a term paper assignment that I use in my Biopsychology course. The trend that you will notice in this assignment is that the expectations are very clear. For example, acceptable topics and information that should be covered within a topic are stated. In addition, classic space wasters such as huge direct quotes, long bulleted lists, large margins, and oversized fonts are illustrated as practices to avoid. As for the sources, the assignment clearly states that academic or peer reviewed sources are preferred whereas information from encyclopedias is considered unacceptable. These specific expectations help to clearly delineate the differences between good and poor writing practices.
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  • Dan Askren
Keith Hamon

Beyond Current Horizons : Reworking the web, reworking the world: how web 2.0 is changi... - 0 views

  • Lowering communication costs doesn’t just lead to more communication, it leads to qualitatively different behavior by web users.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Higher ed must tap into these "qualitatively different" behaviors by our students.
  • Lowering the interaction costs of communication leads to perhaps the most important feature of Web 2.0: its inclusive, collaborative capacity. The new Read/Write web is allowing people to work together, share information, and reach new and potentially enormous audiences outside some of the traditional structures of power, authority, and communication in our society. The social developments that have resulted from the Web 2.0 phenomena are best understood through a lens of democratization, but we must keep in mind the caveat that democracy means many different things in many different places (Haste and Hogan, 2006).
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The democratic tendencies of inclusive collaboration are a challenge to the traditional classroom, I think, demanding changes in the behavior and expectations of both students and teachers.
  • Web logs, or blogs
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  • Wikis, websites which are authored by a community of people
  • Podcasting tools allowed for the uploading and syndication of audio files, and podcasts
  • YouTube pioneered online video sharing
  • Online social networks also fall within the domain of Web 2.0
  • Virtual worlds, including online games, are, to some degree, other forms of online social networks
  • In America in 2006, over 50% of teenagers – across racial and socioeconomic lines – have created pages on online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and in all likelihood this percentage has increased in the last two years (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007).
  • Web 2.0 refers to these simple, often free tools for adding content to the Web, but it also refers to systems that allow users to evaluate content. Tagging refers to the process of allowing users to apply key word labels to discrete bits of content.
  • convergence is one of the most common features in the evolution of Web 2.0 tools.
  • Whether or not the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0 are realized depends a great deal upon the degree to which users can negotiate for freedom and autonomy within the networks created and controlled by established political and corporate interests.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Education, esp. higher ed, has always been a bastion for the free and open production and distribution of information. This is the best platform yet for disseminating information as widely as possible.
  • The driving force behind Web 2.0, the desire to lower the costs of communication, will continue to be a force shaping the web in the decades ahead, and innovations in time-cheap communications are going to present a future full of new surprises. Three other trends at various levels will continue to act on and shape this driving force. First, new platforms will continue to emerge. Second, the functionality in platforms will continue to converge. Third, we should expect to see greater integration between Web 2.0 tools and handheld devices. Finally, we should consider the efforts to those who seek not to extend the Web 2.0 regime, but to transcend it.
  • No facet of modern life will remain untransformed by the innovations of the Web 2.0.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I think this is especially true of education.
  • Online networks may also upset hierarchical corporate structures.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Online social networks are rhizomatic, and thus, they always subsume and subvert hierarchical structures.
  • These new platforms may allow different kinds of talents – talents related to online networking, communication and collaboration – to be more highly valued in the work place. They also may allow for employees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy to more easily bend the ear of those at the top, and the examples of both Linux development and the Toyota production system lend support to this hypothesis (Evans and Wolf, 2005). These flatter, more democratic, more meritocratic social organizations may allow firms to draw out the strengths of their employees with less regard towards their position in the organization.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Flatter is a perhaps unfortunate visual metaphor to contrast with hierarchical. Rhizomatic is more accurate, richer, fuller.
  • The fans were not the simple recipients of the movie; instead, they helped to design the film.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      In their book Wikinomics, Tapscott & Williams closely examine the emergence of the prosumer and its consequences for business. What about for education? Can students be prosumers, both consumers and producers of information? I think so.
  • If myBO becomes another media for the Obama administration to spread a centrally constructed message, then it becomes another instrument of elite political power. If, however, myBO morphs into my.americangovernment.gov, a space where citizens have the opportunity to contribute and collaborate on solving problems and speaking truth to power, then the democratizing power of Web 2.0 tools may indeed lead to a more democratic republic.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Government is very conservative and generally resists change until change is forced upon it. Web 2.0 could be one of the most peaceful revolutions ever. Most people will likely not notice that it has happened until it's done.
  • Relationships developed in virtual or online worlds are not pale reflections of “real” world phenomena. They are a new class of meaningful and profound interactions which researchers will have to consider seriously as they try to understand the evolving nature of society in a Web 2.0 world.
  • hypothesized benefits for using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom with students, which can be organized into four major categories. The first category involves increasing engagement.
  • Web 2.0 tools provide new avenues to teach fundamental skills, like writing, communication, collaboration, and new media literacy.
  • In addition to developing both old and new fundamental skills, students also need to rehearse for 21st century situations.
  • emerging Web tools can enlighten the critique of the contemporary state of education.
  • The Flat Classroom Project of 2007
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Started by Ms. Vicki Davis, a high school teacher in Camilla, GA.
  • While no studies have looked widely across Web 2.0 tools, there is anecdotal evidence that this kind of project is a very rare exception to two normal states. The first normal state with Web 2.0 is failure. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs and wikis created, most die on the vine. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one of the advantages of Web 2.0 is that they are both inexpensive and time-cheap to create, and so one can fail repeatedly before finding a model that works. That said, these failed instantiations are not realizing any of the aforementioned hypothesized benefits. The second normal state for Web 2.0 tools are applications that fit neatly into standard, industrial models of education. In these states, a wiki might be used as an easy way for a teacher to create a website as a one-way delivery device for content, rather than a collaborative medium. Or perhaps a student creates a blog as a kind of online portfolio, but her writings are never published widely, never shared with others, or never commented upon by classmates. In a sense the blog has allowed the student to pass in her homework online, but none of the potentially benefits of publishing within a larger critical, collaborative community are realized. If these two states are indeed the norm, then right now Web 2.0 tools may offer tremendous potential for education, but this potential is not much realized.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      These are two critical pitfalls that ASU's QEP classes must work to avoid.
  • There is also anecdotal evidence that the distribution of the use of these tools, sophisticated or not, is skewed towards wealthy, suburban communities rather than poorer rural or urban communities.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      ASU can certainly be a correction to this trend, if it is the case.
  • very few systems have incentives that reward teachers for innovative instruction.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key element in the success of QEP at ASU. How do we reward faculty who participate and revolutionize their teaching?
  • Most teachers learn to teach from their own experience and from mentors, neither of which usually provide an exemplary model for technology use in the classroom.
  • The driving technical principle behind the evolution of Web 2.0 tools is the reduction of the interaction costs of communication, and these costs will continue to be driven down. As these costs are driven down, we will continue to see the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors and the products of these behaviors will be as or more bizarre to future peoples as Wikipedia and Twitter are to us now. These new behaviors will be at some level democratizing, as they will involve harnessing collaborative energy and collective intelligence to meet cooperative goals. Many of these innovations will level hierarchies and include and involve more people in social systems. They will accelerate globalization by making cross-cultural, cross-content, cross-time-zone conversations even cheaper and take less time to achieve.
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    To sum up the Web 2.0 phenomena in a sentence: lower communication costs have led to opportunities for more inclusive, collaborative, democratic online participation.
Keith Hamon

http://ms.echalksd.com/www/pd_ms/site/hosting/blog_and_writing.pdf - 1 views

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    By combining writing with online technology, teachers can provide opportunities for students and future educators to develop their digital fluency while also strengthening their traditional literacy skills.
Keith Hamon

4 Ways Mobile Tech Is Improving Education - 1 views

  • one component of mobile implementation is lecture podcasts, which allow students to consume much of the information typically delivered in the classroom on their own time and in their own dorm rooms.The idea is to free up teachers during class time for interacting with students and working through problems, a concept known as “flipping the classroom.”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a strong key for Writing. Realized.
  • In a pilot project of the book, students preferred the book over their traditional textbooks (no assessments were taken to see if BioBook resulted in deeper understanding). A final version of the book, which will be piloted at four universities starting in September, will include analytics, multimedia, short quizzes and other options for teachers to interact with students.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a delightful writing opportunity for students: write the textbook for the class. It also transcends the semester term by extending from class to class and term to term.
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    Students around the world are increasingly bringing their own mini-computers (or some connected device) to class. Whether this creates a distraction or a boon to learning is debatable, but these four uses of mobile phones in education - and countless others - could one day help prove the latter.
Keith Hamon

The Writers' Workshop at Work - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • When I run a workshop, no one—including me—is allowed to say "I want" about someone else's writing. It's not about what you want. That might be an entirely different essay. It's about what the writer is trying to do and how you can help.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      So why don't we evaluate student writing this way? To begin with, why don't we create writing opportunities that encourage students to want to say something, and then give them feedback that teases out what they want to say and helps them say that? 
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    I think the writers' workshop is an appropriate model for academics who want to make their manuscripts better. Creative writers have been "workshopping" each other's stuff for a long time. The workshop model can lead to tears, to bruised egos, and, occasionally, to black eyes. But the right group can produce better work.
Keith Hamon

Personal Learning Network - 2 views

  • An important part of learning is to build your own personal learning network -- a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Okay, so PLNs as an educational concept have been around for a while, at least since 1998. And not just in education, but in the "real world." The significant change today is that we cannot speak of PLNs without talking about online networks.
  • we are all inundated with data (Stage 1) -- all those manuals, brochures, memos, letters, reports, and other printed material that cross our field of vision every day, not to mention all that we receive electronically
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Data overload has simply been complicated and exacerbated by the Internet. We have WAY more data than we can possibly deal with. We have moved from an age of information scarcity to information glut.
  • when you take data and give it relevance and purpose, you create information. Information (Stage 2) is the minimum we should be seeking for all of our learning activities.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key component of QEP: to find ways to make the class data relevant and purposeful information-purposeful beyond simply making a good grade. We suspect that most students never move beyond memorizing the class data so that they can repeat it on the test and then forget it. They never turn the data into useful and purposeful information, much less turn the data into knowledge or wisdom.
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  • Even when we have information, we must use that information by applying it to our work before we can say we "know it." Until we use it, it remains information. Knowledge (Stage 3) comes from applying information to our work. This is the stage at which most company training programs fail -- too often the content of company training programs never gets applied to the employee's work. To me, this means that the investment in that training is totally wasted.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Applying information to our work is the tricky part for students: as most of them do not yet sense that they have any real work. QEP is looking for ways to turn their data processing into knowledge management.
  • Wisdom (Stage 4), that most precious possession, comes from adding intuition and experience to knowledge.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I think that many believe wisdom is beyond the reach of most classrooms, but I'm not willing to give up on it. However, it means that we must provide real, relevant experiences in class through which the student can develop wisdom.
  • This is why having a personal learning network is so important -- to provide us not only with pointers to sources of information, but to answer questions, to coach us, to reinforce our learning when we try to apply it to our work.
  • First, we must sort through all of the available data to find only that information that is relevant to our learning needs and for which we have a purpose.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Too often missing from our classes, which too seldom address a common question among students: how will I use this in the future?
  • Once we have gathered and learned the needed information, we need to apply it to our work in order to transform it into our personal knowledge.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Applying new data to our own work to transform it into personal knowledge. This is as fine a statement of the aims of QEP as I can think of: we use online writing to help students create PLNs as engines for churning the data they are exposed to in their classes into personal knowledge.
  • Who should be in your personal learning network? The members of your network do not need to be people with whom you work directly. In fact, you do not even need to know the people personally. The members of your network should be people, both inside and outside of your work group and your company, who have the knowledge that you are trying to master and who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with you.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      A student's PLN should, of course, include fellow class students and the teacher, but also students, teachers, experts, friends, and others outside the class. We do that online.
  • To establish a learning network, you can ask other people in your group, or with whom you have gone through a training program, to participate in periodic discussions as you all try to implement a new way of working, to support each other and share experiences with each other. Most people are happy to help -- people generally like to talk about their own work and are honored to be asked to share their knowledge and wisdom.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key to social networks: most people LIKE getting together, talking about common interests, and sharing what they know. We need to connect our students to such networks-connectivity, connectivism.
  • the value of knowledge increases when you share it with others.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We need to explore when knowledge is best considered a cooperative, connect-and-collaborate property and when it is best considered a competitive, command-and-control property. When should knowledge be part of the Commons and when should it be proprietary? What about on a test? What about in an essay or research document?
  • Building a personal learning network is requires that you not only seek to learn from others, but also that you also help others in the network learn.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The principle of reciprocity is a key element in building PLNs, and one that most students never learn in grade school, where they are kept in their seats, eyes on their own work, hands to themselves, and forbidden to talk to their colleagues. Who could possibly run a real organization with those rules? It's a model of behavior for an assembly line worker, but not a knowledge worker. Why do our schools have this mismatch?
  • A personal learning network can be your most powerful learning tool no matter what the subject.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This one sentence should be in all correspondence, advertisements, and discussions about QEP.
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    An important part of learning is to build your own personal learning network -- a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.
Keith Hamon

From Degrading to De-Grading - 0 views

  • Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they’re learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they’re also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn’t help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).
  • what grades offer is spurious precision – a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation
  • Grades spoil students’ relationships with each other.  The quality of students’ thinking has been shown to depend partly on the extent to which they are permitted to learn cooperatively (Johnson and Johnson, 1989; Kohn, 1992).  Thus, the ill feelings, suspicion, and resentment generated by grades aren’t just disagreeable in their own right; they interfere with learning.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      In QEP, we seek to enable students to connect to one another. Grading systems that promote competition among students tend to undermine that willingness to connect and collaborate.
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  • The competition that turns schooling into a quest for triumph and ruptures relationships among students doesn’t just happen within classrooms, of course.  The same effect is witnessed at a schoolwide level when kids are not just rated but ranked, sending the message that the point isn’t to learn, or even to perform well, but to defeat others.  Some students might be motivated to improve their class rank, but that is completely different from being motivated to understand ideas.  (Wise educators realize that it doesn’t matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated.  It is the type of motivation that counts, not the amount.)
  • Even when students arrive in high school already accustomed to grades, already primed to ask teachers, “Do we have to know this?” or “What do I have to do to get an A?”, this is a sign that something is very wrong.  It’s more an indictment of what has happened to them in the past than an argument to keep doing it in the future.
  • Research substantiates this:  when the curriculum is engaging – for example, when it involves hands-on, interactive learning activities -- students who aren’t graded at all perform just as well as those who are graded (Moeller and Reschke, 1993).
  • abolishing grades doesn’t mean eliminating the process of gathering information about student performance – and communicating that information to students and parents.  Rather, abolishing grades opens up possibilities that are far more meaningful and constructive.  These include narratives (written comments), portfolios (carefully chosen collections of students’ writings and projects that demonstrate their interests, achievement, and improvement over time),  student-led parent-teacher conferences, exhibitions and other opportunities for students to show what they can do.
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    Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn't help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).
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    The spurious nature of grading seems particularly true in the case of writing. Most any piece of writing can, and often does, receive any grade.
Keith Hamon

Writing Across the Curriculum Teaching Circle > Tips for Faculty - 0 views

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    Hints, tips, suggestions, pointers and prompts from faculty for faculty...
Keith Hamon

Rewriting research / Special report: Social academia / Special Reports / Home - Broker - 0 views

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    as academics embrace the opportunities offered by web 2.0 applications for social networking, especially blogs and wikis, are they about to shake up this traditional system?
zhoujianchuan

TeachPaperless: Why Teachers Should Blog - 10 views

  • Because to blog is to teach yourself what you think.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This is what Keith and Tom have been preaching! LOL  I like  the way this guy discusses the pros of blogging and refers to the students who "don't get it."  
    • pajenkins1
       
      It's interesting that there are no cons about blogging.
    • ypypenn67
       
      Blogging provides the opportunity for a teacher to express his or her ideas, too. (A teacher sometimes requires his or her students to blog, so the teacher should gain experience as well.) As a blogger, I want to restrict my comments; I do not want everyone to have access to my thoughts.
    • zhoujianchuan
       
      Yeah, there are no cons, except what economists would call "opportunity cost." That is, every one of us only has so much (or so little) time. My colleagues and I are doing the annual faculty evaluation this week. I looked at the evaluation formular and could not find how blogging can add points for me and help me get tenure. Everything said in this article is right, and I agree. But everyone knows where his or her priority is, right?
  • Because to face one's ill conclusions, self-congratulations, petty foibles, and impolite rhetoric among peers in the public square of the blogosphere is to begin to learn to grow.
    • pajenkins1
       
      I do understand a need to grow as professionals, but I'd like to keep some 'growth spurts' personal.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Yes, but no blogger automatically posts everything that comes to mind. One aspect of reflection is to think carefully about what you are writing and the wisdom of sharing it. For instance, I think it's worthwhile to post this.
  • I think both are achieved through the crucial practice of critical thinking and earnest self-analysis. And no where, if sincerely met with daily conviction, can both be better employed than in the practice of blogging.
    • malikravindra007
       
      I agree that self analysis and critical thinking go together, though it may come only after lots of practice and perseverance. I am still not convinced that blogging is the only way, could be one of the ways, not for me. Nevertheless blogging opens any one to a larger group of people which may help in sharing your thoughts, opinions etc..
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Blogging is just one mechanism. There are many tools for reflection.
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  • This is real maturity
Keith Hamon

A Taxonomy of Reflection: Critical Thinking For Students, Teachers, and Principals (Par... - 0 views

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    Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It's not something that's fostered in school - typically someone else tells you how you're doing! At best, students can narrate what they did, but have trouble thinking abstractly about their learning - patterns, connections and progress. Likewise teachers and principals need encouragement and opportunities to think more reflectively about their craft.  In an effort to help schools become more reflective learning environments, I've developed this "Taxonomy of Reflection." - modeled on Bloom's approach.
Keith Hamon

Mapping Novels with Google Earth - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    The use of models and other abstract forms in literary study has recently seen a revival in a digital age that puts data and sophisticated data management systems in the hands of the literary scholar, teacher, and student. Pedagogical applications of these abstract models are rich with possibility for the literary classroom, and offer exciting opportunities for engaging non-English majors and non-traditional learners in the advanced study of literature, as well as challenging students to verbally articulate visual and spatial knowledge.
Stephanie Cooper

Learning through Reflection - 1 views

  • Strategies for Fostering Reflection Hatton and Smith (1995) reported four activites that in in the process of reflection: Action Research Projects Case and cultural studies Practical experiences Structured curriculum tasks: Reading fiction and non-fiction Oral interviews Writing tasks such as narratives, biographies, reflective essays, and keeping journals. However, although these strategies have the potential to encourage reflection, there is little research evidence to show that this is actually being achieved. Obviously "fact" questions do not promote reflection (e.g., What are the functional areas of an air base?). But posing hypothetical situations produced similarly disappointing results (e.g., Assume you have inherited a significant sum of money and wish to buy land in an environmentally sensitive area on which to build. What factors will go into your decision and why?). In contrast, the most successful probe asked learners to write a one page letter to a parent, sibling or other significant person in their lives.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      These are great ideas for creating opportunities for reflective practices into discussion questions and outside research.
  • Extending evaluative feedback might have even more powerful effects. Providing probes may cause the learner to continue to think about the topic, such as: "Have you thought about how a skilled operator might do this?" "But how much does safety really get compromised when you don't use safety shoes?" Pointing out other possibilities may also result in additional thinking about relationships among factors not previously considered, such as:  "Another factor you might consider is how many different tools will be required if you use different size bolts in the design?" "But what if the rate of water flow is doubled?" Although such feedback may be provided via written comments, they are probably most powerful when used interactively in interpersonal dialogue. Carrying on a dialogue with one or more learners about the work they have submitted is probably the ultimate in promoting reflection via feedback. But the logistics of doing so and having discussion leaders who are skilled in the content and possess good interpersonal skills may be beyond the capacity of the system to provide; unless it is computer mediated in some way. Other hints for encouraging reflection include: Seek alternatives. View from various perspectives. Seek the framework, theoretical basis, underlying rationale (of behaviors, methods, techniques, programs). Compare and contrast. Put into different/varied contexts. Ask "what if. . . ?" Consider consequences.
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    This may be  useful for the Reflective Practices literacy workshop.
Keith Hamon

Introducing the Collaboration Curve - John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Daviso... - 1 views

  • the more participants--and interactions between those participants--you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This implies for QEP that the more our students write to more people, then the more their rate of improvement will go up. Is this the case? Is writing in someway like playing WoW?
  • we're seeing the emergence of a new kind of learning curve as we scale connectivity and learning through pull, rather than scaling efficiency through push. We call it the "collaboration curve."
    • Keith Hamon
       
      A new kind of learning curve is what QEP is after, and it seems that connective, collaborative social networks are the way to achieve them.
  • The evidence for the collaboration curve is, as yet, mostly anecdotal.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Here's a great opportunity for QEP-based research.
  •  
    the more participants--and interactions between those participants--you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up.
Stephanie Cooper

REACHING THE SECOND TIER: LEARNING AND TEACHING STYLES IN COLLEGE SCIENCE EDUCATION - 0 views

  • Active and Reflective Processing. Active learners tend to learn while doing something active---trying things out, bouncing ideas off others; reflective learners do much more of their processing introspectively, thinking things through before trying them out [12]. Active learners work well in groups; reflective learners prefer to work alone or in pairs. Unfortunately, most lecture classes do very little for either group: the active learners never get to do anything and the reflective learners never have time to reflect. Instead, both groups are kept busy trying to keep up with a constant barrage of verbiage, or else they are lulled into inattention by their enforced passivity. The research is quite clear on the question of active and reflective versus passive learning. In a number of studies comparing instructor-centered classes (lecture/demonstration) with student-centered classes (problem-solving/discussion), lectures were found to be marginally more effective when students were tested on short-term recall of facts but active classroom environments were superior when the criteria involved comprehension, long-term recall, general problem-solving ability, scientific attitude, and subsequent interest in the subject [15]. Substantial benefits are also cited for teaching methods that provide opportunities for reflection, such as giving students time in class to write brief summaries and formulate written questions about the material just covered [15,20].
  • reflective learners do well at individual research and design.
  • Unfortunately---in part because teachers tend to favor their own learning styles, in part because they instinctively teach the way they were taught in most college classes---the teaching style in most lecture courses tilts heavily toward the small percentage of college students who are at once intuitive, verbal, deductive, reflective and sequential. This imbalance puts a sizeable fraction of the student population at a disadvantage. Laboratory courses, being inherently sensory, visual, and active, could in principle compensate for a portion of the imbalance; however, most labs involve primarily mechanical exercises that illustrate only a minor subset of the concepts presented in lecture and seldom provide significant insights or skill development. Sensing, visual, inductive, active, and global learners thus rarely get their educational needs met in science courses.
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  • These problems could be minimized and the quality of science education significantly enhanced if instructors modified their teaching styles to accommodate the learning styles of all the students in their classes. Granted, the prospect of trying to address 32 different learning styles simultaneously in a single class might seem forbidding to most instructors; the point, however, is not to determine each student's learning style and then teach to it exclusively but simply to address each side of each learning style dimension at least some of the time. If this balance could be achieved in science courses, the students would all be taught in a manner that sometimes matches their learning styles, thereby promoting effective learning and positive attitudes toward science, and sometimes compels them to exercise and hence strengthen their less developed abilities, ultimately making them better scholars and scientists.
  • Provide time in class for students to think about the material being presented (reflective) and for active student participation (active). Occasionally pause during a lecture to allow time for thinking and formulating questions. Assign "one-minute papers" close to the end of a lecture period, having students write on index cards the most important point made in the lecture and the single most pressing unanswered question [20]. Assign brief group problem-solving exercises in class in which the students working in groups of three or four at their seats spend one or several minutes tackling any of a wide variety of questions and problems. ("Begin the solution to this problem." "Take the next step in the solution." "What's wrong with what I just wrote on the board?" "What assumptions are implicit in this result?" "Suppose you go into the laboratory, take measurements, and find that the formula we have just derived gives incorrect results: how many possible explanations can you come up with?")
  • How can an instructor do all that and still get through the syllabus? One way is to put most of the material usually written on the board in handouts, go through the handouts quickly in class, and use the considerable class time saved for activities like those just suggested. The consequent gain in quantity and quality of the resulting learning will more than compensate for the photocopying costs.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Instead of making handouts, they could put the info on the wiki: slideshow, Gdoc, etc.
Thomas Clancy

The 21st-Century Digital Learner: How Tech-Obsessed iKids Would Improve Our Schools| Th... - 2 views

  • I've heard some teachers claim that this is nothing new. Kids have always been bored in school. But I think now it's different. Some of the boredom, of course, comes from the contrast with the more engaging learning opportunities kids have outside of school. Others blame it on today's "continuous partial attention" (CPA), a term coined by Linda Stone, who researches trends and their consumer implications. Stone describes CPA as the need "to be a live node on the network," continually text messaging, checking the cell phone, and jumping on email. "It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis," she writes. "We pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything."
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Stone's definition of "continuous partial attention" hits the whole philosophy behind connectivism and rhyzomes on the head!
    • Thomas Clancy
       
      The sub-text here, forgive the pun, is that the primacy of the textbook in class (and a lecture derived from the textbook) is deadly. As an out-of-class reference, ok, but as the focus of a class period, NO.
Keith Hamon

When Teaching the Right Answers Is the Wrong Direction | Edutopia - 0 views

  • Step off the soapbox, tone down that direct teaching, and become wondrous and inquisitive right along side your students. Take a break from what you are expert at and delve into unknown territory with new content, activities, or a concept. Here are ways to get started:
    • Keith Hamon
       
      In QEP terms, this means ceasing to be THE content deliverer and become a co-content explorer and generator with your students.
  • Begin and end a lesson, unit, or project with an essential question or two. These are overarching questions that do not have a definitive answer
  • Take every opportunity to express to your students that you have no idea about an answer, even if you have to fake it a little.
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  • Dwindle down those teacher sentences that start with "This means" and replace them with, "I wonder," "What if," and "How might?"
  • Give students plenty of think time. When you stop rushing, students may seem a bit shocked and may even believe it to be some sort of trick or hidden tactic.
  • Be mindful of your tone. Try replacing a flat, authoritative, expert-sounding one with -- and this might sound corny -- a singsong intonation, the one we use when we are whimsically curious.
  • Make your classroom a place of wonderment.
  •  
    Students are all too often on a quest for the Correct Answers, which has little to do with critical-thinking development. Our schools are about competition, merits, awards, and how to earn the Golden Ticket -- giving the right answers. And this focus often starts as early as kindergarten.  … Studies show that getting answers wrong actually helps students learn.
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