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Keith Hamon

The Rules of Writing Group - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    The basic mechanism is simple: The group meets once a week. On the weeks that it is your turn to present, you (and only you) circulate your writing to the other members of your group, 48 hours before your scheduled meeting. The other members then read the draft and make written comments. When the members meet, those comments are shared and the piece is discussed in toto.
Stephanie Cooper

Essay on making student learning the focus of higher education | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Too many college graduates are not prepared to think critically and creatively, speak and write cogently and clearly, solve problems, comprehend complex issues, accept responsibility and accountability, take the perspective of others, or meet the expectations of employers.
  • The current culture -- the shared norms, values, standards, expectations and priorities -- of teaching and learning in the academy is not powerful enough to support true higher learning. As a result, students do not experience the kind of integrated, holistic, developmental, rigorous undergraduate education that must exist as an absolute condition for truly transformative higher learning to occur.
  • Degrees have become deliverables because we are no longer willing to make students work hard against high standards to earn them.
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  • The primary problem is that the current culture of colleges and universities no longer puts learning first -- and in most institutions, that culture perpetuates a fear of doing so.
  • In calling for the kind of serious, systemic rethinking that directly and unflinchingly accepts the challenge of improving undergraduate higher education, we are asking for four things; taken together, they demand, and would catalyze, a profound, needed, and overdue cultural change in our colleges and universities.
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    America faces a crisis in higher learning. Too many college graduates are not prepared to think critically and creatively, speak and write cogently and clearly, solve problems, comprehend complex issues, accept responsibility and accountability, take the perspective of others, or meet the expectations of employers. 
Keith Hamon

Free and Unlimited Web Conferencing | Free Video Conferencing | Online Web Meeting | Mu... - 1 views

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    A virtual round table for meetings & events, with free, unlimited web conferences.
Keith Hamon

21st Century Education Requires Distributed Support for Learning « Educationa... - 0 views

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    Educational transformation is coming not because of the increasing ineffectiveness of schools in meeting society's needs - though that is certainly a good reason - but due to their growing unaffordability. We now see student-teacher ratios in some urban settings climbing to unworkable levels of 40 plus, even 60 pupils per class (Dolan, 2011; Dillon, 2011). This is not a temporary financial dislocation due to an economic downturn, but a permanent sea-change that has already happened in every other service sector of our economy.
Stephanie Cooper

Some Ideas for Motivating Students - 3 views

  • (In a study conducted on one college campus, a faculty member gave a student assignment to a group of colleagues for analysis. Few of them could understand what the faculty member wanted. If experienced profs are confused, how can we expect students to understand?)
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Supports our QEP theory that a well developed assignment will result in better student grades and participation...
  • Some recent research shows that many students do poorly on assignments or in participation because they do not understand what to do or why they should do it.
  • Attending to the need for power could be as simple as allowing students to choose from among two or three things to do--two or three paper topics, two or three activities, choosing between writing an extra paper and taking the final exam, etc. Many students have a need to have fun in active ways--in other words, they need to be noisy and excited. Rather than always avoiding or suppressing these needs, design an educational activity that fulfills them.
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  • Students will be much more committed to a learning activity that has value for them, that they can see as meeting their needs, either long term or short term. They will, in fact, put up with substantial immediate unpleasantness and do an amazing amount of hard work if they are convinced that what they are learning ultimately meets their needs.
Keith Hamon

Successful Use of Various Social Media In A Class - AEJMC Hot Topics - 1 views

  • there are no written exams for those who successfully complete the weekly assignments of regular social media engagement.
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    This course, with 36 undergraduates, was one of twenty-five new interdisciplinary courses approved by my institution to address "new problems" facing society and to experiment with new teaching and learning strategies. The goals of the class are to use and evaluate various social media in the contexts of information production, sharing, consumption, teaching, and learning. Since the course is open to all majors, one of my goals as a journalism professor is to tap a diverse group of students to gain a better understanding of how digital information and social media are utilized in different disciplines. This "hybrid" course combines class meetings with the use of more than ten different social media tools during the 12-week semester. Some tools take the place of more traditional teaching methods such as papers and written exams.
Keith Hamon

New Wine in Old Skins: Why the CV needs hacking - 0 views

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    So, I say we need, and can build, a new CV, or whatever you want to call it. But what does this new CV look like? Here are at least some of the criteria a new vision for the professional identity document should meet
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.
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?
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    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.
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.
Keith Hamon

Connectivism - 2 views

  • Early research results aren’t surprising: - Students are heavy users of computers, but not for education. - Teachers make limited use of computers and other technologies in class - Parents are limited computer users - Teacher training is lacking in utilizing computers effectively in classrooms
    • Keith Hamon
       
      To my mind, age is the real digital divide, not poverty. Even when given devices, olders will not use them as often or as well as youngers, which says to me that we QEP teachers must device strategies to work around our technological disabilities.
  • At the core of the discussion surrounding the future of education is a concern of how to navigate shifting power and control. What is the role of the student? The teacher? The school? The parents? If learners have the ability to do what educators have done in the past (access information directly), what role should the educator play?
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is the core question that will bedevil educators for the next decade: do we really want to create and empower independent learners? And if we do, then what role do we teachers assume when we can no longer dictate what happens in a class?
  • Perhaps face-to-face time should take on a different model than we currently utilize. We should do what we can with technology outside of classrooms. Then we wouldn’t need to meet in classrooms as often.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This matches my own experience in F2F classrooms, where more of the classwork shifted outside the room to the Net, forcing me to shift what happened in the room. Mostly we shifted away from mere transfer of information, which is more efficiently done on the Net, and more toward group interaction: discussion, debates, group presentations, etc.
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  • Most of us in education agree on our needs today: 1. We want good teachers 2. We want good educational content 3. We want to give our learners a bright and hopeful future 4. We want school systems that are relevant to learners and to society 5. We want schools to remedy the social and cultural inequalities that other institutions of society generate
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Nice list, but it omits the most common item listed by American educators: We want students to become productive members of society. Why?
  • We need to surface technology’s hidden ideologies and philosophies. If we don’t surface these aspects, we dance blindly to a tune that we refuse to acknowledge, but still shapes our moves.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We in QEP cannot assume that introducing computers and writing (both are technologies) into our classes will have no effect on either the content or the conduct of our courses. The tech we introduce will absolutely change what and how we teach. We must accept that and be conscious of it.
  • The key question for me is whether we need content in order to start learning or whether content is the by-product of an effective learning experience.
  • In terms of content, learners should create, teachers should curate.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      At least one aspect of this orientation is that teachers can provide the historical context, assuming that they are older or more experienced than their students, that students lack.
  • Technology is, possibly in a positive sense, a lever for change. The systemic innovation that many desire may not be possible through policy decisions alone.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      In a reverse sense, technology can lead to change despite opposing policies. Thus, Web 2.0 will redefine how we think of privacy, regardless of our policy statements.
  • Leadership can be somewhat attended to by the contributions of many. When we distribute control, we distribute responsibility
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The wisdom of crowds can almost always help, especially in large policy decisions, and especially when the crowd includes those most affected by the decisions.
  • Today, leaders need co-leaders – people who are active in experimenting and exploring future directions.
  • Writing excellent, thorough descriptions of what is happening can be very valuable in coming to understand the nuances of a phenomenon.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Most important observation for QEP. How often do we ask our students to describe, esp. as a gateway to understanding.
  • I have not seen any studies that evaluate the effectiveness of the iPod in listening to music. For end-users, it’s not an issue. They use it because it works. Perhaps research in educational technology should have a similar focus: use it because it exists, because it is a part of society, because it is used in other aspects of their lives. By this metric, simply have computers available and using them for learning is success enough.
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.
Stephanie Cooper

Has Google Developed the Next Wave of Online Education?| The Committed Sardine - 0 views

  • What would eMail look like if it were invented today? The answer is a format that merges social networking with multimedia in an online meeting space where students and instructors can see each other type in real time, conduct private conversations, and edit documents simultaneously.
  • Some higher-education technology administrators said Google Wave could replace interactive online classrooms available through expensive proprietary course-management systems such as Blackboard. The officials—who did not want their names printed because their campuses have long-standing relationships with Blackboard—said Wave could make expensive CMS software obsolete if it’s as good as advertised.
Thomas Clancy

Education Meets 'World Of Warcraft' - Forbes - 3 views

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    The "gamification of education" is very hot at all levels of education. It reminds me of what Keith and I were trying to do by bringing a concept of "play theory" to our QEP model, in our case, through repeated small yet successful writing experiences for the students. Through the repetition of pleasurable experiences, what I call "regenerative value," the students "level up" in their written communication abilities.
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