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Stephanie Cooper

Collaboration: The Lost Skill? | Dangerously Irrelevant - 2 views

  • I have seen tweets and blog posts recently about frustration that teachers are having getting their students to collaborate. These were mainly secondary teachers and library media specialists. It was even an #EdChat topic a few weeks ago: "How do we engage students who find participatory learning uncomfortable?" What do you find most difficult when getting students to collaborate? Criticism from their peers? A bad experience with a previous teacher? It seems like there's so many factors that can come into play.
  • How are we fostering this skill beyond kindergarten? What have you found that really is motivating for students to collaborate? What gives them true ownership of their learning? There's awesome digital tools that aid in collaboration, but those tools don't MAKE the collaboration. It's a skill that still has to be fine tuned. It's a skill we should all be modeling effectively if we want our students to do it effectively. If you're looking for some great suggestions on how to foster collaboration in your classroom, I would suggest reading Michelle Bourgeois' post titled:  The Collaborative Classroom: It’s a Juggling Act. In this post Michelle tells a story of teaching students how to juggle and says. "Just like the art of juggling, there are several skills that need to be balanced and constantly monitored in a collaborative classroom to make it all come together." Please be sure to check out Michelle's post on how to monitor and keep balance of some essentials in classroom collaboration.
  • We should be fostering this skill in our classrooms, not hindering it. How often are you allowing students to collaborate? Not to say that awesome things can't come out of individual thinking, but as I always like to say, "We're better together." Sure, one mind can do awesome things, but a collective could really rock someone's world.
Keith Hamon

elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age - 1 views

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    Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments. These theories, however, were developed in a time when learning was not impacted through technology. Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn. Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments.
Keith Hamon

The EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation. Developing 21st century literacies (information, digital, and visual) among students and faculty. Reaching and engaging today's learner.
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    Through surveys, interactive brainstorming sessions, and a final community vote, the EDUCAUSE community identified their top five challenges in teaching and learning with technology.
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

Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert | The Awl - 0 views

  • If the printing press empowered the individual, the digital world empowers collaboration.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Collaboration is one of the key principles of connectivism: we must connect to collaborate, and we must collaborate to connect.
  • McLuhan drew from many, many sources in order to develop these ideas; the work of Canadian political economist and media theorist Harold Innis was instrumental for him. Innis's technique, like McLuhan's, forswears the building up of a convincing argument, or any attempt at "proof," instead gathering in a ton of disparate ideas from different disciplines that might seem irreconcilable at first; yet considering them together results in a shifted perspective, and a cascade of new insights.
  • Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic. Rather than being handed an "authoritative" decision, you're given the means for rolling your own.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Again, we are forced to consider the implications of collaborative thinking in "an extended polylogue" on our traditional notions of critical thinking and reflective practices.
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  • The threat to Britannica from Wikipedia is not a matter of dueling methods of providing information. Wikipedia, if it works better than Britannica, threatens not only its authority as a source of information, but also the theory of knowledge on which Britannica is founded. On Wikipedia "the author" is distributed, and this fact is indigestible to current models of thinking. "Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Shirkey is often insightful.
  • If my point of view needn't immediately eradicate yours—if we are having not a contest but an ongoing comparison, whether in politics, art or literary criticism, if "knowledge" is and will remain provisional (and we could put a huge shout-out to Rorty here, if we had the space and the breath) what would this mean to the quality of our discourse, or to the subsequent character and quality of "understanding"?
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is a nice summary of Morin's concept of the dialogic, the fact of knowledge as always the tension between chaos and order, truth and lie.
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    Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.
Keith Hamon

Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views

  • I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This could be a key type of writing assignment in any class, and it can be done individually or in collaborative groups. 
  • What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?
    • Keith Hamon
       
      I think the traditional research paper does invite gobbledygook, that's why we get so much gobbledygook from it.
  • Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Here is a key to why QEP encourages public writing within discourse communities and is moving away from traditional classroom writing aimed solely at a grading teacher.
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  • Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent—not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Imagine that! Our students are becoming MORE literate, not less. This is a core belief of QEP: that the Internet is encouraging more written communications among more people than at any other time in history. We wonder why the Academy is ignoring this wonderful, rich energy.
  • Everything, that is, except the grading.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Assessment is perhaps the single most intractable aspect of traditional education. In some ways, crowdsourcing grades actually violates legal regulations about student privacy. This is a serious issue, but I am confident that we will resolve it.
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    Current practices of our educational institutions-and workplaces-are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.
Keith Hamon

For More Students, Working on Wikis Is Part of Making the Grade - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • students’ learning improved when they embarked on wiki projects. “Rather than trying to read a textbook and regurgitate it for an exam, in order to write coherent segments, you have to actually intellectually understand it and be able to craft your own words, and that is a higher level of learning challenge,” he said. “All the research on learning theory suggests this is in fact a better way to learn.”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Writing is an integral part of participating in a wiki, and writing is what ASU's QEP is all about.
  • “It’s not something that we’re used to,” said Stuart Lee, an undergraduate who took Mr. Netzley’s class and helped create a wiki page on digital media in Japan. “We usually see the professor as the gatekeeper of information.”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      So this is part of what happens when we teachers cease acting as gatekeepers and begin to act as concierges and curators.
  • “The notion of saving face really complicates the learning process,” he said, “because how do you learn if you’re not able to make mistakes and get feedback?”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      When will we move beyond the drive to the right answer and all the anxiety and mental illness that surrounds that drive?
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    Although wikis, with their collaborative approach and vast reach online, have been around for at least 15 years, their use as a general teaching tool in higher education is still relatively recent. But an increasing number of universities are now adopting them as a teaching tool. As part of that trend, a handful of Singapore universities are using the wiki platform as a way to engage students.
Keith Hamon

#PleaseHelp: Learning to Write (Again) on Twitter | Digital Is ... - 0 views

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    My experiences with Twitter made me revisit important lessons as a writer and as a teacher of writing. What I learned through tweeting has applications for each writing teacher and writer.
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