Group items tagged

Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

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.

What is it about connectivism that stirs up such strong emotion? In my experience it has now been strongly attacked in public at least twice - the first during CCK08 by Catherine Fitzpatrick - who voiced her objections in no uncertain terms and more recently by Marielle Lange in Wikipedia. Perhaps the interesting thing about both these instances is that they end up as personal attacks on Stephen Downes and George Siemens. Why?

Basically, creative commons licensing provides the creator with a way from an "all rights reserved" model to a "some rights reserved" model on copyrighted material.

What follows is an explanation of the Flipped Classroom Model, a model where the video lectures and vodcasts fall within a larger framework of learning activities. It provides a sequence of learning activities based on the learning theories and instructional models of Experiential Learning Cycles.

Educators - it's time to stop all the modeling. Get rid of all the canned graphic organizers. Have the courage to be less helpful. Be patient and let students recognize their own patterns. It's messy work, but its where the learning will take place.

Google's nGram viewer lets you search over 5 million books for the instances of words. Imagine it as a search engine into the uses of words since 1800.

Special issue on Connectivism from IRRODL

I've been tweaking the content of the syllabus for a couple of years now, but was looking for a way to arrange or present it that was less linear, less text-y, more visually engaging, more like a magazine or a website.

This study reports the findings of an investigation of the factors influencing the use and usefulness of wikis in an introductory, undergraduate information systems course. Informed by the media choice, technology acceptance model from information systems research, and group collaborative learning research from the education literature, a survey instrument was developed and administered across the entire course. The study found that wiki use was influenced by the student's prior expertise with wikis, with their perceived usefulness of wikis being strongly influenced by their teachers' attitudes towards the technology, and the ease of access to the wikis. The students' overall attitude towards wikis was largely influenced by the extent to which they saw wikis as helping with their assignment work, and their intention to use wikis in the future was driven by their perception of wiki's usefulness. The paper concludes with an outline of the lessons learned from the study and recommendations for instructors who are thinking of using wikis in their teaching.

Starting the notion of spaces, rather than community, [Paul Gee] argues, can give us an analytical lens with which to examine classrooms and the activities that occur within them without the baggage that community of practice brings with it.

New research suggests that even before 2-year-olds speak in full sentences, they are able to understand grammatical construction and use it to make sense of what they hear.

Cell phones are in the hands of the vast majority of adults, and whether schools like it or not, they're in the hands of most students. While many schools still see cell phones as a distraction rather than as an educational tool, it's hard to deny that these devices are quickly becoming the primary means by which we communicate, in or out of schools.

A few years ago, a team of economists at MIT and UCSD analyzed the data from NIH and HHMI funded labs to see which funding strategy was more effective. … The data was clear: In every biomedical field, the risky HHMI grants were generating the most important, innovative and influential research.

Pablo Picasso once declared: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Well, something similar can be said about scientists. According to a new study in Cognition led by Claire Cook at MIT, every child is a natural scientist. The problem is how to remain a scientist once we grow up.

A new kind of technological literacy is emerging. While a certain amount of technical skills are important, the real goal should be in cultivating digital or new media literacies that are arising around this evolving digital nerve center. These skills allow working collaboratively within social networks, pooling knowledge collectively, navigating and negotiating across diverse communities, and critically analyzing and reconciling conflicting bits of information to form a clear and comprehensive view of the world.

We're seeing more and more recruiters use the web as a place to search for talent and conduct employment background searches. This trend is set to increase year over year and I've been predicting that an "online presence search" will become as common as a drug test since 2007.

I've been having my students use the social bookmarking site Diigo since the start of the school year. They've used it to keep track of information they find on the web, to share information with our class group, and also to respond to digital texts they read.

Several of the most prominent words are included in the title for this blog post. While the word cloud did not write the title for me, it helped me identify important elements from my post and served as an ideal starting point for creating an interesting and informative title for potential readers.