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Keith Hamon

Purdue OWL: Writing Across the Curriculum: An Introduction - 0 views

  • This pedagogical approach values writing as a method of learning.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Writing to learn content is a valuable academic skill, but it overlooks the importance of social networking.
  • This approach recognizes that each discipline has its own unique language conventions, format, and structure. In other words, the style, organization, and format that is acceptable in one discipline may not be at all acceptable in another.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This gets a bit closer to social networking, but it implies an awkward approach to learning a group's language conventions. Most people learn a new group's language conventions by (1) wanting to belong to the group, (2) listening to learn the conversation, and (3) engaging in the group's conversation. How many of our students want to join our groups and learn our language conventions?
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    a pedagogical movement that began in the 1980s. Generally, writing across the curriculum programs share the philosophy that writing instruction should happen across the academic community and throughout a student's undergraduate education. Writing across the curriculum programs also value writing as a method of learning. Finally, writing across the curriculum acknowledges the differences in writing conventions across the disciplines, and believes that students can best learn to write in their areas by practicing those discipline-specific writing conventions.
Keith Hamon

Shimon Schocken: The self-organizing computer course | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan developed a curriculum for their students to build a computer, piece by piece. When they put the course online -- giving away the tools, simulators, chip specifications and other building blocks -- they were surprised that thousands jumped at the opportunity to learn, working independently as well as organizing their own classes in the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). A call to forget about grades and tap into the self-motivation to learn.
Keith Hamon

Manoa Writing Program, Univ of Hawaii at Manoa - 1 views

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    Wonderful writing across the curriculum resource from the Univ. of Hawai'i at Manoa.
Keith Hamon

DH Syllabi - CUNY Academic Commons - 0 views

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    A brief selection of DH-related syllabi. Readers, let us know if you have syllabus, curriculum, or program information that you'd like to share here.
Keith Hamon

How to Create Nonreaders - 1 views

  • have kids read (and write) mostly on their own -- if your goal were to cause them to lose interest in what they’re doing.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The point of a PLN is to encourage our students to write to other people (teachers too seldom qualify as other people in the minds of students).
  • every single study that has examined grades and intrinsic motivation has found that the former has a negative effect on the latter.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      If we tie writing and critical thinking to grades, we will undermine both.
  • What matters is not what we teach; it’s what they learn,[14] and the probability of real learning is far higher when the students have a lot to say about both the content and the process.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      The point is not to cover content, but to spark knowledge in students.
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    I'd like to begin my contribution to an issue of this journal whose theme is "Motivating Students" by suggesting that it is impossible to motivate students. … What a teacher can do - all a teacher can do - is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with:  to make sense of oneself and the world, to become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to connect with (and express oneself to) other people.
Keith Hamon

Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum @ Dave's Educational Blog - 1 views

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    The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.
Stephanie Cooper

Learning through Reflection - 1 views

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

Half an Hour: Connectivism and Transculturality - 1 views

  • you need a mixture of materials, you need a collection of different perspectives, different points of view, in order to come to any new understanding.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Do teachers approach any class with the ambitions of gaining new understanding? Why not? What would change about a class if they did?
  • Communities have to be open, they have to have some source of new material coming in, whether its raw material, resources, ideas, etc., and then they have to have some place where they can send their creative product, the things that they make, the ideas that they have.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      How in QEP do we overcome the static curriculum closed to any new information?
  • A third criterion that distinguishes a community defines as a network from a community defined as a group is autonomy. And what that means is that each of the members of that community are working toward their own sense of values, their own sense of purpose, their own goals or endeavours.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      College classes too seldom incorporate the value of the student into the mix, ignoring the purposes, goals, and experiences of the student and delivering a plain vanilla product, one-size-fits-all.
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  • When I say 'interactivity' I say the knowledge in the community is created by the interaction of the members of the community rather than created in one person and then spread through the community.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a key to connectivism: that learning emerges, either in our minds or in our communities, from the patterns and interactions of individual people or neurons.
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    Our knowledge, our intelligence, must be based on something emergent from the connective activity of many individual neurons, can't be based on the content of a neuron, has to be based on the pattern of connectivity of these neurons. We replicate that in connectivist teaching.
Thomas Clancy

4,100 Massachusetts Students Prove Small Isn't Always Better - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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    This article has a positive message for our QEP strategy. Include real reading and real writing in every class, and communication skills and learning cannot help but improve.
Keith Hamon

From Degrading to De-Grading - 0 views

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

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.
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.
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    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.
Keith Hamon

Concurrent Session: WAC 2.0: Rethinking Writing Across the Curriculum in the Age of the... - 0 views

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    WAC has become more timely and valuable within participatory Web 2.0 environments. This presentation highlightsinnovative teaching examples from UIUC that engage students within Web 2.0 by applying WAC principles:
Keith Hamon

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

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    Hints, tips, suggestions, pointers and prompts from faculty for faculty...
Joel Garza

Sven Birkerts, "The Room and The Elephant" LA Review of Books - 4 views

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    Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies) on one of the challenges in teaching writing across the curriculum now: "In the world according to 2.0, these are deemed to be some of the big changes of our moment. Expertise, authorship, individual creativity: out. Team collaborations, Wikipedia: in. Inevitably: "Knowledge is growing more broadly and immediately participatory and collaborative by the moment."
Keith Hamon

CK12.ORG - FlexBooks - 0 views

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    Open source textbooks for K12.
Keith Hamon

Videos of 'Teaching students to write mathematics' | Mathematical Sciences HE Curriculu... - 1 views

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    Students don't write mathematics correctly. They throw down a mess of symbols with the answer underlined at the bottom and rely on the examiner's intelligence to get the marks. Teaching them to write in a more orderly and logical way has numerous advantages: it makes marking easier; allows students to demonstrate understanding (or not); forces an improvement in their thinking skills. Expressing their ideas clearly and correctly is a valuable skill for graduates in further study, employment and life in general.
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