Skip to main content

Home/ Writing Across the Curriculum/ Group items tagged complexity

Rss Feed Group items tagged

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.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 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.
  •  
    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

David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization | Video on TED.com - 1 views

  • David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.
  •  
    David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.
Keith Hamon

A Simple Guide To 4 Complex Learning Theories - Edudemic - 1 views

  •  
    This helpful infographic does a solid job of breaking down the basics of learning theories in a visual and understandable format.
Keith Hamon

Connectivism & Connective Knowledge » Narratives of coherence - 1 views

  • narrative of coherence
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I really like this phrase - narrative of coherence. I think it captures nicely one of the main techniques of all successful learners: they are able to build a narrative of coherence that connects new knowledge to their existing knowledge base and makes it all coherent.
  •  
    In a traditional course, the educator hacks the trails to complex information landscapes. The educator's bias influences what is included and excluded. What we're talking about here is the ability for each learner to create their own narrative of coherence.
Keith Hamon

Chapter 6 - 1 views

  •  
    The decision to adopt online technology (defined here as predominantly Internet-based delivery, with provision for interaction throughout the process), even on a limited basis, is always complex and can be risky, especially if the adopting organization lacks structural, cultural, or financial prerequisites (Welsch, 2002). A discussion of some attributes of media and of the modes of teaching presentation and learning performance they support, in relation to some influential learning models, might help to clarify some of the implications in the choice of any specific delivery or presentation medium.
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 )
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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

ELT notes: IWBs and the Fallacy of Integration - 1 views

  •  
    There is a underlying idea in the framing of our questions that needs unlearning. The belief that there are "levels", layers of complexity, hierarchies that we can detect and... well, control. But wait! Isn't that the very old way we want to truly change with new technologies? We already know it's about shifting power. Tight teacher control is a hindrance to foster empowered students who own their learning paths.
Keith Hamon

Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students :: ... - 1 views

  •  
    The primary aim of this study is to generate a large and uniform data set that leads to a better understanding of the writing behaviors of students across a variety of institutions and locations. Working from the assumption that students lead complex writing lives, this study is interested in a broad range of writing practices and values both for the classroom and beyond it, as well as the technologies, collaborators, spaces, and audiences they draw upon in writing.
Keith Hamon

Toddlers Understand Complex Grammar, Study Shows | FoxNews.com - 0 views

  • new research suggests that even before 2-year-olds speak in full sentences, they are able to understand grammatical construction and use it to make sense of what they hear.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      To my mind, this suggests a fairly universal principle about how we learn any new language: we first immerse ourselves in it, attune ourselves to its structure and content and social rules, and only after this do we begin to create our own utterances in the group, using the language of the group to discuss the topics of the group.
  •  
    New research suggests that even before 2-year-olds speak in full sentences, they are able to understand grammatical construction and use it to make sense of what they hear.
Keith Hamon

David Christian: Big history | Video on TED.com - 0 views

  •  
    Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.
Keith Hamon

RSA Animate - The Power of Networks - YouTube - 0 views

  •  
    highly visual introduction to rhizomatics & networking with strong implications for connectivism.
Stephanie Cooper

The Virtues of Blogging as Scholarly Activity - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of H... - 3 views

  • My academic identity—I'm a professor of educational technology at the Open University in the United Kingdom—is strongly allied with my blog
  • A key aspect of the digital revolution is not the direct replacement of one form of scholarly activity with another, but rather the addition of alternatives to existing forms.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Very true!  We need to remember that technology is just new  tools that allow us to express ourselves in ways we couldn't before.  
  • "Looking back on the history," he writes, "one clear trend stands out: Each new technology increased the complexity of the ecosystem."
Stephanie Cooper

Education can empower us with skills to act upon the world « Moving at the Sp... - 0 views

  • Reading and writing gave me skills to create with and to act on the world... through assignments like these I was learning how to marshal evidence and frame an argument. And I was also becoming more adept at handling a sentence, folding information onto it, making a complex point without losing the reader. These skills played out again and again on different topics and in different settings, leading to the ability to write a research article, a memo advocating a course of action, a newspaper opinion piece, an essay like the present one... All of the forgoing helped me develop a sense of myself as knowledgeable and capable of using what I know. This is a lovely and powerful quality-- cognitive, emotional, and existential all in one. It has to do with identity and agency, with how we define ourselves, not only in matters academic but also in the way we interact with others and with institutions. It has to do with how we move through our economic and civic lives. Education gave me the competence and confidence to independently seek out information and make decisions, to advocate for myself and my parents and those I taught, to probe political issues, to resist simple answers to messy social problems, to assume that I could figure things out and act on what I learned. In a sense, this was the best training I could have gotten for vocation and citizenship.
  •  
    A strong argument for learning to read and write...
Stephanie Cooper

Our obligation to prepare students for what is and will be, not what was | Dangerously ... - 1 views

  • What's our moral / ethical / professional obligation as school leaders to prepare students for the world as it is and will be, not what was? I think it's pretty high.
  • You note that students aren't using the technology for anything 'meaningful.' Why would they be? Have their schools, teachers, or parents helped them understand the power of using digital technologies for productive work within the relevant discipline of study? Most have not, instead utilizing technology primarily for replicating factory, rather than information age, models of schooling. Absent productive use and modeling by their instructors and/or parents, of course students are going to use technology primarily for social purposes (just like we adults do).
  • In my recent experience of integrating technology into my classroom, I’ve found that the mode of communication changes but several elements of classroom do not change.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What stays the same is the need students have to be engaged as active learners, not passive receptacles. (That’s an old, old idea that still sticks like tar in the minds of too many teachers.) Technology provides ways for students to enrich even the most elaborate and complex presentation a teacher can provide.
  • I guess the bottom line is this: If the content they are expected to learn is not interesting to them, they are not engaged. If they are not being asked to think critically in their learning, they are not engaged. It wont matter what tools or technology you use. However, today’s technology resources are available 24/7 and allow us to reach and engage students in ways we never could before. This is paying off big-time at my school.
Keith Hamon

"The Future of Privacy: How Privacy Norms Can Inform Regulation" - 1 views

  • privacy in an era of social media is complicated. It’s not simply about individual data.  It's about managing visibility, negotiating networks, and facing an ever-increasing flow of information.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Social networks have highlighted the complexity of privacy, which is no longer a personal, individual issue (an issue of protecting personal data); rather, privacy is now an issue of the appropriate, value-added interplay between an individual and her environment. I think privacy has always been the negotiation of this interplay, but social networks have made it obvious.
  • Privacy is fundamentally about both context and networks.
  • People may not like having their privacy violated or being in situations where they're being surveilled, but they will always choose social status and community over privacy.  They would rather be vulnerable to more people and deal with institutions than to feel disconnected from their peers and loved ones.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Participation in Facebook is not as much of an individual choice as people think.  Even if you opt out, people can still write about you, can still create groups about you, can still reference you in updates.  You become part of the network regardless of your personal choices.
  •  
    I'm completely baffled by the persistent assumption that social norms around privacy have radically changed because of social media. This rhetoric is pervasive and is often used to justify privacy invasions.  There is little doubt that the Internet is restructuring social interactions, but there is no radical shift in social norms because of social media.  Teenagers care _deeply_ about privacy.  But they also want to participate in public life and they're trying to find ways to have both.  Privacy is far from dead but it is definitely in a state of flux.
Stephanie Cooper

Would You Hire Your Own Kids? 7 Skills Schools Should Be Teaching Them| The Committed S... - 1 views

  • "First and foremost, I look for someone who asks good questions," Parker responded. "Our business is changing, and so the skills our engineers need change rapidly, as well. We can teach them the technical stuff. But for employees to solve problems or to learn new things, they have to know what questions to ask. And we can't teach them how to ask good questions - how to think. The ability to ask the right questions is the single most important skill."
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      This is an example of the need for critical thinkers in the real world!!
  • "All of our work is done in teams. You have to know how to work well with others. But you also have to know how to engage the customer -- to find out what his needs are. If you can't engage others, then you won't learn what you need to know."
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Connectivism at work!
  • Where in the 20th century, rigor meant mastering more -- and more complex -- academic content, 21st century rigor is about creating new knowledge and applying what you know to new problems and situations.
1 - 16 of 16
Showing 20 items per page