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Keith Hamon

eLearn: Feature Article - E-learning 2.0 - 1 views

  • Sharing content is not considered unethical; indeed, the hoarding of content is viewed as antisocial [9]. And open content is viewed not merely as nice to have but essential for the creation of the sort of learning network described by Siemens [10].
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Open content is one reason we prefer Google tools over Blackboard or Moodle, both of which are closed systems that restrict access to content.
  • In a nutshell, what was happening was that the Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along. And what people were doing with the Web was not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they could get their hands on. And this became, and looked like, and behaved like, a network.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      QEP wants to join this network, adding its smaller class networks to the larger network, thereby enriching both.
  • Blogging is very different from traditionally assigned learning content. It is much less formal. It is written from a personal point of view, in a personal voice. Students' blog posts are often about something from their own range of interests, rather than on a course topic or assigned project. More importantly, what happens when students blog, and read reach others' blogs, is that a network of interactions forms-much like a social network, and much like Wenger's community of practice.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Student blogging is still one of the more significant strategies for encouraging students to use writing as a tool for learning and communicating.
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  • What happens when online learning ceases to be like a medium, and becomes more like a platform? What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is "delivered," and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created? The model of e-learning as being a type of content, produced by publishers, organized and structured into courses, and consumed by students, is turned on its head. Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read— and is, in any case, more likely to be produced by students than courseware authors. And insofar as there is structure, it is more likely to resemble a language or a conversation rather than a book or a manual.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This shift from medium to platform is key to understanding writing in Web 2.0 as opposed to writing in print for it radically shifts the relationships between writer and subject and writer and reader.
  • learning comes not from the design of learning content but in how it is used
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a radical shift away from the activity of the teacher to the activity of the students.
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    E-learning has been around for ten years or so. During that time, it has emerged from being a radical idea-the effectiveness of which was yet to be proven-to something that is widely regarded as mainstream. And now, e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it's changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0.
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

Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: 5 Steps to Digitizing the Writing Workshop #edchat #writing - 3 views

  • Expecting students to write in our classrooms for hit-or-miss praise is criminal. Their nimble fingers can text an entire piece of writing via their mobile device to a relevant audience online at the same time they publish to a worldwide network. For them, the pay is in the joy of publication, in the act of making their work known, and of partaking of the work of others.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a big part of the intrinsic, and fun, motivation for writing online.
  • Take advantage of over 20 digital tools for students (Sidebar #2 - Digital Tools for Students).
  • You can easily transition from notes and highlights kept in Diigo.com social bookmarking tool to a written piece that appropriately cites content. Check Sidebar #3 for Electronic Citation Resources.
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  • reflect on the teacher's role in the writing workshop, and the technology available to organize the writing workshop.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      One of our tasks in QEP is to devise tools and strategies to make the instructor's job easier, not more difficult. Technology can help, and we want to explore how.
  • Create a Self-Editing checklist that is actually a GoogleForm or the Questionnaire Module in Moodle so you can quickly see class progress in graphs. Students complete this information via a web-based form that allows you to quantitatively track progress in class. Create a bank of online mini-lessons that students can watch and listen to again and again in an archive. Build that in your GoogleSites Wiki or Moodle. Facilitate sharing using recording tools in a discussion forum or Sites wiki. When doing the Group Share during a Writing Workshop, you can either play the students' presentation of the audio (which they recorded when they were ready) or record the feedback students get so that it can be added to the written piece/recording shared. That way, students can come back and reflect on the advice provided by their peers.
  • Using a Moodle or wiki, you can create a reference point that can house your mini-lesson content, including audio and/or video recordings.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Perhaps we could build a mini-lesson space on the Writing Labs wiki?
  • VoiceThread.com - Enables teachers to create an enhanced podcast about the MiniLesson content, but also allow students to contribute audio, text, or video content as comments. This enables many to many interactions.
  • GoogleDocs Presentation Tool - Enables teachers to create a slideshow that students can participate in chat, as well as contribute slides to.
  • As wonderful as a writing workshop teacher may be, s/he cannot offer the feedback that ALL students may need. However, online discussion forums through Moodle, attached to wikis, or with blog postings and comments CAN facilitate student to student interaction independent of the teacher. While many fear these kinds of interactions, in online learning, these interactions make or break an online course...or a face to face one.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Fostering this kind of online conversation is key to QEP. It's what we are about, but we recognize that most of our students are unaccustomed to conversing about academic issues among themselves. We want to teach them to talk college.
  • Collaborative word processors can also serve as a way for students in groups to interact with ONE text online.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is an excellent entry point into many different kinds of exercises: group editing, group writing, group brainstorming, group illumination (adding images and video). I like this.
  • Shelly Blake-Pollock, the teacher and author of the TeachPaperless blog (http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com), encourages his students to publish online. Beyond that step, though, he offers feedback on their writing online as well via screencasts, or video recording of his computer screen. Screencasts, or "JingCrits," that he creates are short, less than 5-minute video clips where he highlights student work on screen and offers feedback (View an example - http://bit.ly/bsgVQQ).
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This could be a wonderful strategy for moving our QEP Writing Labs into the online world, enabling writing specialists to engage student writing, and offer useful feedback, online.
  •  
    This article is about 5 steps you can take, as a writing teacher, to digitize your writing workshop. There are many more, though, so "stay tuned" for future articles!
Stephanie Cooper

JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching - 1 views

  • The use of web logs (“blogs”) has become a popular addition to many college courses as faculty try to find new ways to integrate this popular technology into the classroom. (Beeson, 2005; Quible, 2005; Ducate, 2005, Glogoff, 2005).   By the end of 2004, 32 million Americans said they had read a blog, eight million Americans had created blogs, and almost half were created by people under age 30 (Reine, 2005).   In fact, Huffaker (2005) cites several studies that reveal that a significant number of blog authors are younger than 20.  Lenhart (2006) notes that by 2006, these numbers had increased to 12 million American adults who keep a blog, and 57 million American adults who say they read them. Thus, students come to the classroom with a facility for maintaining and communicating through blogs.  Beeson (2005) argues that it is an approach that is more in keeping with their way of thinking (29).  With the increased popularity of blogs, faculty members have been integrating them into their courses to enhance class discussion.  Past research has summarized findings from case studies involving the use of blogs in a single course (Glogoff, 2003; Quible, 2005; Ducate, 2005).  The authors of this study, conducted at a business university, assigned a similar blogging exercise in three different courses—expository writing, e-commerce, and government--in order to introduce students to the use of blogs in their respective disciplines and to help students prepare for meaningful classroom discussion. This study finds that by completing the required readings and then posting discussion questions and reflections on topics of interest to which their classmates can respond--essentially beginning the conversation prior to the class session--students become more engaged in the course material. This exercise requires students not only to read the required course materials but to engage with them critically in order to move beyond a superficial understanding of the materials.  By using the same assignment and assessment tool, the authors found that blogs can be effective in enhancing class discussion in a range of disciplines and in integrating liberal learning into professional programs.            Blogging in the Classroom
  • Like online threaded discussion groups, blogs are an easy way to engage in dialogue on the web outside the classroom. The availability of several blog providers such as Google’s blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, and WordPress.com make it free and easy to set up, manage, and update blogs frequently and without additional support.   By using blogs “students become familiar with blogging, a tool now used by an ever-increasing number of employers to support routine operating functions” (Quible, 2005, p. 76).
  • Since blogs are a fairly recent pedagogical tool, new scholarship has emerged that points to its benefits in the classroom.  The ability of students and faculty to easily update an online journal promotes blogging as a new form of communication to enhance class discussion and to create a community outside the classroom.  Flatley (2005) argues that the technological medium provides a space where students can interact with one another, and it can open up the classroom space "where discussions are continued and where every student gets an equal voice" (p. 77).  In addition, blogs can promote collaboration (Flatley, 2005; Williams & Jacobs, 2004; Oravec, 2002).
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  • In contrast to more traditional forums for online discussion, blogs are open to the world to see. This provides visibility for students to share their ideas with the larger world. Quible (2005) says that blogs are “a natural in business communications courses” (p. 73) because they enable students to share their writing with a larger audience.  Glogoff (2003) notes that students “used the [class] blog for a purpose other than from what it was initially intended,” (p. 2162) causing them to create a new blog for a more general audience.  Huffaker (2005) argues that bloggers can get feedback on their writing from a wide range of other bloggers, and "they can link to fellow bloggers, creating an interwoven, dynamic organization" (p. 94).  In addition, "students can have a personal space to lty member not want student writing made public, blogs can be maintained so that only the students in the are allowed to access it and post to it.
Keith Hamon

Learning or Management Systems? « Connectivism - 1 views

  • Two broad approaches exist for learning technology implementation: The adoption of a centralized learning management approach. This may include development of a central learning support lab where new courses are developed in a team-based approach—consisting of subject matter expert, graphic designers, instructional designer, and programmers. This model can be effective for creation of new courses and programs receiving large sources of funding. Most likely, however, enterprise-wide adoption (standardizing on a single LMS) requires individual departments and faculty members to move courses online by themselves. Support may be provided for learning how to use the LMS, but moving content online is largely the responsibility of faculty. This model works well for environments where faculty have a high degree of autonomy, though it does cause varying levels of quality in online courses. Personal learning environments (PLEs) are a recent trend addressing the limitations of an LMS. Instead of a centralized model of design and deployment, individual departments select from a collage of tools—each intending to serve a particular function in the learning process. Instead of limited functionality, with highly centralized control and sequential delivery of learning, a PLE provides a more contextually appropriate toolset. The greater adaptability to differing learning approaches and environments afforded by PLEs is offset by the challenge of reduced structure in management and implementation of learning. This can present a significant challenge when organizations value traditional lecture learning models.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      QEP as I envision it leans heavily toward the second of these two approaches.
    • Thomas Clancy
       
      Indeed, these two stood out for me, too! We are all about developing PLEs / PLNs for our QEP students.
  • Self-organised learning networks provide a base for the establishment of a form of education that goes beyond course and curriculum centric models, and envisions a learner-centred and learner controlled model of lifelong learning. In such learning contexts learners have the same possibilities to act that teachers and other staff members have in regular, less learner-centred educational approaches. In addition these networks are designed to operate without increasing the workload for learners or staff members.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is the QEP approach to online learning-in a nutshell, and explains why we prefer the suite of open Web 2.0 tools over central learning management systems such as Blackboard Vista.
  • Instead of learning housed in content management systems, learning is embedded in rich networks and conversational spaces. The onus, again, falls on the university to define its views of learning.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      One of the issues for QEP is to redefine the way ASU defines teaching/learning.
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  • Two key areas are gaining substantial attention: (a) social software, and (b) personal learning environments (PLEs). Social software and PLEs have recently gained attention as alternatives to the structured model of an LMS. PLEs are defined as: “systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning” (van Harmelen, 2006, ¶ 1). PLEs “are about articulating a conceptual shift that acknowledges the reality of distributed learning practices and the range of learner preference” (Fraser, 2006, ¶ 9). A variety of informal, socially-based tools comprise this space: (a) blogs, (b) wikis, (c) social bookmarking sites, (d) social networking sites (may be pure networking, or directed around an activity, 43 Things or flickr are examples), (e) content aggregation through RSS or Atom, (f) integrated tools, like elgg.net, (g) podcast and video cast tools, (h) search engines, (i) email, and (j) Voice over IP.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is the QEP approach, but QEP must still accommodate the demands of the institution, or work to change those demands.
  • For an individual used to Skyping, blogging, tagging, creating podcasts, or collaboratively writing an online document, the transition to a learning management system is a step back in time (by several years).
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Though too many ASU students are not sophisticated Net users, they increasingly will be and we want to enable them to become more sophisticated.
  • LMS may well continue to play an important role in education—but not as a critical centre. Diverse tools, serving different functionality, adhering to open guidelines, inline with tools learners currently use, may be the best option forward.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This strikes me as the proper orientation toward technology for QEP to assume.
  • As these learners enter higher education, they may not be content to sit and click through a series of online content pages with periodic contributions to a discussion forum.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Increasingly, these will be our students.
  • Involve all stakeholders (beyond simple surveys). Define the university’s view of learning. Critically evaluate the role of an LMS in relation to university views of learning and needs of all stakeholders. Promote an understanding that different learning needs and context require different approaches. Perform small-scale research projects utilizing alternative methods of learning. Foster communities where faculty can dialogue about personal experiences teaching with technology. Actively promote different learning technologies to faculty, so their unique needs—not technology—drives tools selected.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      These are good goals for QEP to stay mindful of.
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    The initial intent of an LMS was to enable administrators and educators to manage the learning process. This mindset is reflected in the features typically promoted by vendors: ability to track student progress, manage content, roster students, and such. The learning experience takes a back seat to the management functions.
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    The initial intent of an LMS was to enable administrators and educators to manage the learning process. This mindset is reflected in the features typically promoted by vendors: ability to track student progress, manage content, roster students, and such. The learning experience takes a back seat to the management functions.
Stephanie Cooper

ACU Connected Blog » Class Blogs as a Mobile Hub - 2 views

  • Ideas to Get You Started Here are a few basic strategies for integrating student voices into your class blog this semester. Comments – Obviously the most familiar way to add student voices to a class blog is adding comments to a post. At the beginning of the week, the instructor or TA would create a post that includes a discussion question or prompt. Then during or between classes students would stop by to add comments to the main question or reply to the comments of others. Question Queue: create a standing post where students can raise questions they would like to discuss in class. Rapid Response: ask students, individually or in pairs, to contribute a 3-4 sentence position statement they will then defend or debate. Student Posts – One way students can master new concepts is by having to teach them to others. Most blog software provides user roles for secondary contributors, so with a little preparation, students can have their own dashboard and post content as a full author to the blog. If you imagine student work more like a short essay than a single observation, then allowing students to make full posts may communicate higher expectations and value of their work. Reading Journal: ask students to post a summary of preliminary research or more formal abstract to the blog for peer comments and critique. Media Mashup: have students analyze appearances of course concepts in popular media by embedding a YouTube clip and then evaluating its relevance. Post by Email – A final feature we found in many mobile blogging tools was post by email. For students and faculty with mobile devices, this provided us a simple way to share content quickly back to the class hub. Since most native apps on the iPhone offered email sharing of photos, links, and media, post by email become the common avenue connecting mobiles to the blog. (At ACU, this feature is built on a Gmail account associated with each blog and the Postie WordPress plug-in described below.) Webliography: early in a survey course, ask students to construct a bibliography of useful study materials and web sites by emailing links with annotations to the blog. Photo Shoot: send students into the community (or out onto the web) to capture images that reflect social attitudes toward a common topic then email them to the blog for discussion. (New iPhone or iPod touch users may not know they can tap and hold on a web image to copy it before pasting it into an email. Remind them to cite the original source of the image, or better yet copy and paste the URL as well.)
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This is great info to make class blogging successful.
  • WPtouch – An essential plugin for mobile blogging via WordPress is WPtouch (now standard on all WordPress.com blogs). Once installed, the plugin makes reading and commenting on mobile posts and pages easy. Simple to install and MU compatible.
  • CONS: essential links from sidebar widgets in a desktop theme must be added to the WPtouch menu manually.
Stephanie Cooper

100+ Google Tricks That Will Save You Time in School | Online Colleges - 0 views

  • Google Specifically for Education From Google Scholar that returns only results from scholarly literature to learning more about computer science, these Google items will help you at school. Google Scholar. Use this specialized Google search to get results from scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, and academic publishers. Use Google Earth’s Sky feature. Take a look at the night sky straight from your computer when you use this feature. Open your browser with iGoogle. Set up an iGoogle page and make it your homepage to have ready access to news stories, your Google calendar, blogs you follow in Google Reader, and much more. Stay current with Google News. Like an electronic clearinghouse for news, Google News brings headlines from news sources around the world to help you stay current without much effort. Create a Google Custom Search Engine. On your own or in collaboration with other students, put together an awesome project like one of the examples provided that can be used by many. Collect research notes with Google Notebook. Use this simple note-taking tool to collect your research for a paper or project. Make a study group with Google Groups. Google Groups allows you to communicate and collaborate in groups, so take this option to set up a study group that doesn’t have to meet face-to-face. Google Code University. Visit this Google site to have access to Creative Commons-licensed content to help you learn more about computer science. Study the oceans with Google Earth 5. Google Earth 5 provides information on the ocean floor and surface with data from marine experts, including shipwrecks in 3D. Learn what experts have to say. Explore Knol to find out what experts have to say on a wide range of topics. If you are an expert, write your own Knol, too.
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    There's so much Google can do that most of us aren't even aware of! Some of these might come in handy for yourself as well as your students.
Stephanie Cooper

I hate writing but love to blog….why? | The Thinking Stick - 0 views

  • o why is it that I hate to write and love to blog? First, I think a lot of it has to do with the computer and word processing. As I type this in my Firefox extension Performancing every misspelled word is underlined in red for me, giving me instant feedback on what I have misspelled. Does it catch all my mistakes, heck no, but you should see a post before it actually goes live. Secondly, I can type faster then I can write…about 75 words/minute and you can actually read what I’ve written when I’m done. Finally, I don’t see blogging as writing…it’s idea generation, it’s the free flow of ideas between people and it is a conversation. I love to talk (if you have a hard time writing you usually do…coping skill). I would rather stand in front of a group of parents and give a presentation, or have a face to face parent conference than write a letter home.
  • Blogging gives me an audience, just like giving a presentation…I almost feel that way sometimes…like I’m presenting information, my thoughts rather than writing. It could be a podcast, a video, or blogging…it’s about having an audience. I wonder if I would have blogged in school, given the chance? It would have depended, I bet, on how the teacher used it as a tool. Was it a reflective journal to layout your thoughts, or did every period, capital and ‘ie, ei’ combination have to be perfect. If that was the case I’d have hated it. Blogging is different…it’s not writing in the sense we think about it. People ask me why I blog and I truly can’t give them an answer…I just do, because it’s an outlet for me. I’d bet that I’ve blogged more in the past year then I wrote my whole life leading up to it. It’s been that powerful for me as a tool, and I see it in my students as well. In myspace and youtube…this networking, conversation, sharing atmosphere is contagious!
  • I think you hit on the larger issue, though, is that blogging is much less structured (mostly) than a typical piece of writing. Blogging is much more stream-of-consciousness than writing. As I am writing this, it is a direct connection from idea to publication. I think that is the blogging revolution. I would wonder how different your post would have been, or my comment for that matter, had we outlined it before writing it.
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  • Good writing is really about good editing. Too much time in school is spent on conventions–grammar, spelling–and not on helping people find their voice. Blogging is not writing in the sense that much of blogging comes from a very authentic, unedited perspective. We say what we feel. We mean what we say. We just do not always overprocess it. We have chosen our audience by virtue of the topics and themes we choose.
  • Blogging offers realtime, real world feedback. How many people actually comment on misspellings? Who cares if I end a sentence with a preposition? Perhaps monitors in somepeople’s houses have red circles on them. People comment on the usefulness, the humour, the passion, the ideas. Call it what you will, Blogging is writing with an attitude. Yours. And yours alone. Sure someone might flame you, but you can delete their posts. Now I could proof read this. I could let it sit an daim to craft my thoughts better, but I like the rawness of this.
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    I liked this article because it talks about how it is easier for resistant writers to write by blogging.
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.
  •  
    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

5 Tools for Building a Next-Generation 'Hybrid' Class Website - ProfHacker - The Chroni... - 0 views

  • To build the module, we used a rapid e-learning authoring tool called Adobe Captivate. Some other popular programs for this kind of rapid authoring are Articulate and Lectora. Captivate is great for building interactive self-guided simulations and branching scenarios.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We should explore how to add external tools to ASU's Moodle so that we can gather info about our students.
  • We created our unit in PearlTrees by adding links to all the web-based readings, videos and articles for the course and then embedded it into our LMS.
  • We decided used Prezi to create a Case Study Library with six categories (Health, Education, etc.) to introduce our students to the tools organizations are using to address different elements of the peacebuilding and international development spectrum.
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  • Our LMS had a built-in functionality for users to submit links and tag them, but other options include setting up a class Diigo account with one class username and password. If the majority of participants are already on Facebook and Twitter, other options include creating a dedicated course Facebook group to share content, or setting up a class hashtag (ex. #AU1234) for Twitter to categorize and easily reference all class tweets. (Read further ProfHacker reflections on teaching with social media.)
  • This course was just the beginning of our attempt at TechChange to go beyond what industry leaders like Blackboard and others currently provide to find and implement the most effective technologies and platforms to support dynamic learning. The feedback from the participants was remarkably positive, and the model is something that can easily scale with the right tools and training.
  •  
    The tools we discuss below can be embedded into any open source LMS and down the road we plan to revisit other platforms.
Keith Hamon

Brown - 0 views

  • As new technologies take us through major transformations in the way we use documents, it becomes increasingly important to look beyond the conduit image. We need to see the way documents have served not simply to write, but also to underwrite social interactions; not simply to communicate, but also to coordinate social practices.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This touches directly on Deleuze & Guattari's admonition to ask not what a document means but what it does.
  • Printed documents, Anderson maintains, were essential to replacing the ideology of sovereigns and subjects by creating the idea of a self-constructed society built around shared ideals and shared practices.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Creating documents of our own empowers us in all ways.
  • Anderson calls the resulting community an "imagined" one. This is no slight. An imagined community is quite distinct from an imaginary community. It is one, Anderson notes, whose members "will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." Where an imaginary community does not exist, an imagined one exists on too large a scale to be known in any other way. And the central way they can be imagined is through the documents they share.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I really like this imagined community. Actually, I think all communities are imagined, but this makes a useful distinction.
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  • In this way, document forms both old (like the newspaper) and relatively new (like the television program) have underwritten a sense of community among a disparate and dispersed group of people.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Connectivity enables community, and it's the documents created in that community that provide the tell-tale markers and sign-posts about the function of that community.
  • In offering an alternative to the notion that documents deliver meaning, both arguments instead suggest connection between the creation of communities and the creation of meaning, for communities seem to create meaning for themselves.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a very challenging notion in education, where we usually assume that it's the job of experts to provide or channel meaning to the students and verify that they got it. This says that a group of students create meaning in a community and that teachers assist in that construction.
  • Providing a shared context for constructing meaning, documents are the beginning rather than the end of the process of negotiation.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      To my mind, this inverts the usual role of documents in most classrooms.
  • Indeed, writing on writing is both literally and metaphorically an important part of the way meaning is negotiated. Annotation is a rich cultural practice which helps, if only by the density of comment attached, to signify the different cultural importance of texts and parts of texts. The thin trickle of original text overflowing a vast dam of commentary, the long introduction, and the separate subject entry in a library catalog offer clear indications that a particular text is socially and culturally valued.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      How often do we ask students to write on writing, and then tell that their constructed meaning is wrong?
  • Hypertext software, however, has revived the immediacy of intertextual links.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Software such as Diigo allows for easy annotation and for sharing such annotations within a community.
  • The interpretation of a document always depends on community standards. Nonetheless, documents can and do play important roles in negotiating differences and coordinating practices between communities.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Nice: documents at once define a community and act as a point of negotiating between that community and other communities. What does that say about our classes as communities of discourse?
  •  
    To fully assess the document's evolving role requires a broad understanding of both old and new documents. For documents are much more than just a powerful means for structuring and navigating information space -- important though that is. They are also a powerful resource for constructing and negotiating social space. It is the latter quite as much as the former that has made the documents of the World Wide Web so popular.
Nicolette Elzie

Writing in College - 1. Some crucial differences between high school and college writing - 1 views

  • You get no credit for asserting the existence of something we already know exists.
  • You must shape and focus that discussion or analysis so that it supports a claim that you discovered and formulated and that all of your discussion and explanation develops and supports.
  • In that sense, you might state the point of your paper as "Well, I want to show/prove/claim/argue/demonstrate (any of those words will serve to introduce the point) that "Though Falstaff seems to play the role of Hal's father, he is, in fact, acting more like a younger brother who . . . ."" If you include in your paper what appears after I want to prove that, then that's the point of your paper, its main claim that the rest of your paper supports.
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  • Most of us begin our research with a question, with a puzzle, something that we don't understand but want to, and maybe a vague sense of what an answer might look like. We hope that out of our early research to resolve that puzzle there emerges a solution to the puzzle, an idea that seems promising, but one that only more research can test.
  • A good point or claim typically has several key characteristics: it says something significant about what you have read, something that helps you and your readers understand it better; it says something that is not obvious, something that your reader didn't already know; it is at least mildly contestable, something that no one would agree with just by reading it; it asserts something that you can plausibly support in five pages, not something that would require a book.
  •  
    I thought this was a great article on the differences between collegiate level writing and high school writing. Moreover, it lays a groundwork for writing a paper. If only there was some way to convey these differences to our students in a way that they will understand without feeling discouraged. I think the weakness of the article is that it is very long, if I wanted to pass this on to a student I fear that the sheer length would deter them away from both reading it and/or finishing it. On the other hand, if we could manage to make this simpler or convert it into a series of short workshops for students then I think the content would be extraordinarily beneficial.
Thomas Clancy

Can Learners Participate At Their Own Level of Expertise? by Mary Arnold : Learning Sol... - 1 views

  • As an early assignment, a facilitator might ask the group to vote on a question, to introduce themselves to the rest of the group, or provide a link to resources they’ve found useful in the past.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I like starting with a very simple online task that I know most students can complete successfully. Nothing like success to help people feel confident with something new.
    • Thomas Clancy
       
      We are coming to the point of valuing online participation first--good-old buy-in. An improvement in written communication skills WILL follow.
  • The first threaded discussions might evolve from simple polls into exercises where you ask learners to rank choices in the order of their preference and explain the reasons for their choice. Later, you might ask participants to divide into groups (or they might naturally divide into groups on their own) to argue the pros and cons of a particular situation. You can ask specific members to pose questions to the group, submit blog entries, or edit wiki entries for accuracy.
  • Scoring is a motivator because it provides users with feedback. If your learning environment doesn’t include a scoring strategy, look for ways to help the members of the community notice and appreciate one another’s contributions.
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  • Learning communities that sustain themselves over long periods engage in these activities naturally. Members are simply curious about one another’s opinions and know others appreciate their contributions. If learners are engaged in productive conversation without you, avoid the temptation to get caught up in the role of emcee. Ultimately, the goal is to create a learning community that sustains itself with minimal intervention from the learning designer.
  • Consider the scoring strategy Yahoo! Answers uses to award points to its members. New users start with 100 points, the ability to ask up to five questions a day, answer up to 20 questions a day, and comment on 10 answers a day. But if users want the ability to rate other answers with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” they have to earn another 150 points first. To earn those points, they could simply log in once a day for 150 days. If they choose to answer questions, however, they can earn 2 points per question, which would speed up the process. The quickest way to earn a lot of points is to provide the Best Answer for the question. When an Asker selects a Best Answer, the participant who wrote it gets 10 points, and additional points for each “thumbs up” rating from other users.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Ahh … so we educators can learn a thing or two from the business world. Nice.
  •  
    Scores can be a surprisingly good way to help learners enter the class learning environment at their own level of expertise.
  •  
    Scores can be a surprisingly good way to help learners enter the class learning environment at their own level of expertise.
Keith Hamon

Teachers Guide on The Use of Wikis in Education - 1 views

  •  
    According to Leuf and Cunningham, a wiki is "a free expandable collection of interlinked webpages, a hypertext system for storing and modifyinh information, a data base, where each page is easily edited by any user." A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges necessary, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. The Wiki is gaining  traction in education as an ideal tool for collaborative work.
Keith Hamon

Using E-Portfolios to Support an Undergraduate Learning Career: An Experiment with Acad... - 0 views

  • The concept of an e-portfolio is multifaceted — it is a technology, a pedagogical approach, and a process, as well as a product. Its purpose can range from tracking development within a program to finding a job or monitoring performance.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      ePortfolios are so much more than mere repositories of academic work. They are the students identity on the Net, the space that says, "This is who I am, and this is what I know how to do."
  • a culture of folio thinking, a pedagogical approach that focuses on designing structured opportunities for students to create e-portfolios and reflect on their learning experiences.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Folio thinking is very QEP-oriented: providing opportunities for reflection, rationale building, and planning.
  • Instead of prioritizing e-portfolio technology, folio thinking addresses the adoption and integration of e-portfolio praxis in existing contexts as a critical first step toward a successful implementation that can lead to wider scalability and longer-term sustainability of the e-portfolio initiative.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We must be careful to focus NOT on the tools for building ePortfolios, but on the practice of building them. The tool should be the choice of the student. After all, we don't dictate which brand of pen they should use.
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  • While introducing the e-portfolio in academic advising is a natural starting point for first-year and transfer students, the success of a broader and longer term e-portfolio implementation depends on the integration of e-portfolios into the Stanford curriculum and in other activities related to milestones of the undergraduate learning career.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      To be successful, ePortfolios must integrate across an entire program with specific links to each course.
  •  
    E-portfolio efforts at Stanford have focused on capturing and documenting students' learning and engaging in reflection, rationale building, or planning, contributing to a culture of folio thinking. In fall 2010, Stanford initiated a pilot introducing e-portfolios to assist with the advising of students in their first two years prior to declaring a major, to learn from students and advisors how e-portfolios and folio thinking can enhance their face-to-face interactions. The pilot will explore the possibility that persistence can be improved through the active involvement of others (mentors, alumni, family, peers) in the lives of students as facilitated through the medium of e-portfolios.
Stephanie Cooper

The Importance of Teaching Technology to Teachers - TheApple.com - 0 views

  • Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to: > 1. Develop proficiency with the tools of technology > 2. Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally > 3. Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes > 4. Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information > 5. Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts > 6. Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This sounds right on track with our QEP mission!
  • Teachers are hungry to use technology in their classrooms. But they don’t. While part of this lack of usage stems from problems with education reform that emerges from administrators and education boards not fully understanding the technologies themselves, another part of teachers not using technology in the classroom comes from the simple fact that they don’t know how to use the technologies, let alone how to incorporate these technologies into their classrooms. In some cases, the teachers don’t know about the technologies at all.
  • How in god’s name can we talk seriously about 21st Century skills for kids if we’re not talking 21st Century skills for educators first? (URGENT: 21st Century Skills for Educators (and Others) First )
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  • Take a minute and ask yourself what technologies you are well versed in. Have you posted to YouTube? Do you use PowerPoint to aid in your lectures? What other technologies do you use? Do you have a Twitter account? Make a list. When you have your list made, consider your colleagues. Do they know these technologies? Do they know how they can use them in the classroom? Is there a technology that you know one of your colleagues knows that you would like to be familiar with? Now, instead of waiting for somebody to put together a workshop on one of these technologies, consider creating your own workshop. Think about it. You’re a teacher. You know these technologies. Is there really a difference in teaching what you know about Google Earth to your colleagues and teaching it to your students? Within your own school you can create a technology club (much like a book club, except that instead of reading a book a month, you experiment with a technology each month). Get together as a group and discuss the technologies and how you could use these to aid your teachers. This is exactly what I’m doing with the colleagues I know are interested in using the technology but don’t know how. Sure, you may have to wait for education reform to allow you to use these technologies, but if you start using them, you can readily become one of the advocates who aids in getting the reforms to education that we need to teach these technologies to our students.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This sounds like something we could incorporate into the QEP classes/workshops that Hugh & Tom conduct. A "tech club" might even appeal to people not currently involved in QEP at this moment.
Stephanie Cooper

May, 1998, From Now On - 1 views

  • it is reckless and irresponsible to continue requiring topical "go find out about" research projects in this new electronic context. To do so extends an invitation (perhaps even a demand) to "binge" on information.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I agree that too many research assignments encourage plagiarism. Stopping plagiarism begins with crafting better research assignments.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      True. This definitely needs to be addressed at the beginning of our workshop as a "what not to do."
  • Little thinking is required. This is information gathering at its crudest and simplest level.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      An assignment that requires little thinking will encourage plagiarism.
  • Students become producers of insight and ideas rather than mere consumers.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is the key to avoiding plagiarism: providing students with a real situation (writer's role, reader's need, real-world problem) that demands the student be a producer of information rather than a repackager and redistributor of information.
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  • questions worth asking
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Questions are never automatically worth asking; rather, they are always worth asking for someone specifically. Questions should be have value for the students.
  • While some claim that "There are no new ideas under the sun," our students must learn how to apply some extra color or tone it down. They must learn to see the underlying structure and then construct or deconstruct the original until it shimmers with originality.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Even if there are no new ideas to express, there are new ideas to express to a given audience. Our research assignments too often leave out audience-always to the detriment.
  • We show students how to take notes with a database program.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Evernote is a useful online note-taking tool.
  • we keep an eye on the note-taking and idea development as they evolve.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Too many teachers ignore this phase because of the administrative overhead suggested; however, it is much easier & less burdensome to do this online than on paper.
  • We build our programs around what I called The Prime Questions in the October, 1997 issue of From Now On, "The Question is the Answer:" http://fno.org/oct97/question.html Why How Which is best? We transform topical research into projects which demand that students move past mere gathering of information to the construction of new meanings and insight. Example: Instead of asking why events turned out particular ways in our past (a question fraught with plagiaristic opportunities since historians have probably already offered answers), we might ask students to hypothesize why various outcomes did not occur. Example: Instead of asking how we might protect an endangered species whose chances have already been improved (the bald eagle), we might focus on one which no one has managed to protect (various Australian marsupials, for example). Example: Instead of asking students to study a single country or city, we might ask them to decide which is best for various purposes (the Winter Olympics, a university degree, the building of a theme park, etc.).
  •  
    Under the old system of "go find out about" topical research, it took students a huge amount of time to move words from the encyclopedia pages onto white index cards. The New Plagiarism requires little effort and is geometrically more powerful.
  •  
    Under the old system of "go find out about" topical research, it took students a huge amount of time to move words from the encyclopedia pages onto white index cards. The New Plagiarism requires little effort and is geometrically more powerful.
Keith Hamon

The Wild World of Massively Open Online Courses « Unlimited Magazine - 1 views

  • “There’s this notion that technology is networked and social. It does alter the power relationship between the educator and the learner, a learner has more autonomy, they have more control. The expectation that you wait on the teacher to create everything for you and to tell you what to do is false.”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is perhaps the practical heart of Connectivism: that the world is networked and that the learner is at the center of their own personal learning network.
  • “At the beginning, we had quite a number of students feeling quite overwhelmed because you would get 200 or 300 posts going into a discussion forum per day and that’s just about impossible to follow,” Siemens says.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      PLNs must have filters and aggregators to help us manage the massive flow of information in MOOCs.
  • Even if students in massively open online courses master the technology and overcome their virtual stage fright, a third problem remains: how to recognize the value of a learning experience that isn’t for credit.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Validation remains a very sticky issue for online learning and for PLNs. However, I'm not sure the resolution will be to find a method for online validation, redefinition of validation, or a mixture of both.
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  • It’s a question that proponents of online education continue to grapple with. Even if a student in an open course gains from their experience, there is no guarantee that the boss, or a potential employer, will recognize their learning without a certificate or other official, institution-approved record to prove it.
  •  
    With advancing online tools innovative educators are examining new ways to break out of this one-to-many model of education, through a concept called massively open online courses. The idea is to use open-source learning tools to make courses transparent and open to all, harnessing the knowledge of anyone who is interested in a topic.
Keith Hamon

Students, Reading and Writing - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • In many courses that are not focused on writing skills, instructors might not provide detailed enough instructions on their writing assignments to convey to the student what the instructors’ expectations are
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key issue for QEP: helping faculty to compose assignments that maximize a student's chances for success.
  • a badly written essay may be the result of the student author not understanding the subject rather than not being a capable writer.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Even a well-written assignment must be placed within the context of solid learning. If a student does not understand the material, then their chances for errors-and plagiarism-increase dramatically.
  • On the question of how students are incorporating and acknowledging the sources they find through their research, Howard and Jamieson report that the vast majority of the first-year writing student essays studied so far are defined primarily by “patchwriting,” evidence that students are not really understanding or engaging the material they are reading for their essays.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      It seems that students use patchwriting to complete an assignment that they don't understand, simply filling up paper with whatever comes to hand.
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  • I would argue, we need to ensure in every department on campus that we structure our courses and our assignments such that students learn where and how to find authoritative source material and such that students must demonstrate a solid comprehension in writing of the material they’re writing about.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The issue with plagiarism, then, is that students don't understand their assignment, don't understand the material they are writing about, and don't understand why a writer would incorporate outside material in the first place. We should fix this.
  •  
    So what happens between the end of that two-course sequence and the start of the rest of those students' college careers? If pressed I would offer a hypothesis or two: In many courses that are not focused on writing skills, instructors might not provide detailed enough instructions on their writing assignments to convey to the student what the instructors' expectations are, and A different issue is whether or not the student understands the course material: a badly written essay may be the result of the student author not understanding the subject rather than not being a capable writer.
Keith Hamon

Use Diigo To Help Write Your Next College Essay or Term Paper - 0 views

  • since most research papers are based on quotes used from various sources, Diigo provides a way to not only bookmark your sources, but also to manage and access your quotes, notes, and analysis.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This post assumes that most college research papers are based on secondary sources easily found on the Internet.
  • The best way to do research is know what your thesis is for a given topic.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I'm not sure I agree. Many students start with a subject, such as gun control, but don't develop a thesis until after they have done some reading and investigation.
  • Having a thesis in mind can help you narrow research, even if you change your thesis during the process.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I do believe that students should be taught to do research after they know what they are looking for. 
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  • create a list for your topic. This list will be used to manage all your bookmarks and highlights.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Any item can be added to many lists, or more precisely, can be tagged with many items.
  • install the Diigo bookmarklet, or diigolet, in your favorite web browser
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is an essential tool for using Diigo. You can bookmark without the Diigo tool, but it is much more cumbersome to do so.
  • You might consider color coding your highlights, e.g., yellow for quotes that support your thesis, and green for quotes that are against your thesis.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Visual cues work for some people.
  • If you’re working on a group research project, Diigo can be used for the same purpose. Simply create a group for which everyone can bookmark sources to.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Diigo is a great tool for collaborative writing.
  •  
    Diigo can be a very useful tool for helping you to write a college essay or research paper.
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