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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.
Keith Hamon

All Things Google: Using Google for Writing Portfolios - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of ... - 0 views

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    I opted to have students use Google Sites to create their portfolios, for several reasons. Students were already using Google Documents for their essays, so the interface was reasonably familiar to them. Google Documents integrates well with Google Sites, so it was very easy for students to embed their essays in their portfolios. Google Sites allows for easy customization, for any student who might want to get creative with site design. Using Google Sites along with Google Documents makes it very easy for students to control who's allowed to see what.
Keith Hamon

Primary Source Materials & Document Based Questions - 1 views

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    Don't depend on someone else's interpretation of a document. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Listen to speeches and hear for yourself, who said what. Document based questions (DBQs) are a major focus in schools today. To be answered correctly, students must be adept at analyzing and synthesizing the information provided. They must be able to write coherent and logical essays. This site is meant to provide students with resources to develop the skills needed to effectively respond to DBQs.
Keith Hamon

How to Create Excellent Courses with Open Education Resources | online learning insights - 0 views

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    Open Educational Resources abbreviated as OER, are openly formatted and licensed documents and media accessed on the Web that are useful for teaching, learning, education, assessment and research that anyone can openly use and reuse, without charge.
Keith Hamon

The Death of the Traditional Web: Implications for Self-Directed Learning | Social Lear... - 1 views

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    Traditional use of the Web (i.e. non-mobile and non-video usage) is shrinking.  Per-person consumption of traditional Web content fell by 3 percent between March 2010 and March 2011 in terms of minutes. Within that shrinking slice of online time, Facebook is increasingly the portal for everything.  While the "document Web" (as author Ben Elowitz terms the old-style Web) shrank by 9 percent overall, Facebook consumption increased by 69 percent, essentially stealing time from everything else.  It now accounts for 1 out of every 8 minutes of online time, as opposed to 1 out of 13 at the beginning of the year.  Search engines, once the gatekeepers to the Web, are giving way to Facebook.  Google and everything it represents is facing the first stages of irrelevancy.
Keith Hamon

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

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    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

Nik's Learning Technology Blog: Free Downloads - 1 views

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    A collection of tech resources, tutorials, and guides, especially for teaching English. You can download all of these documents free of charge or read them online.
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

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
Keith Hamon

The 5 Best Free Tools For Making Slick Infographics | Fast Company - 0 views

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    It's not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals. While there are many professional information designers making a name for themselves, such as Nicholas Felton of Feltron.com, the majority of these digital artists are up to their eyeballs in high-paying work. Where does this leave you? Well, if you want to spruce up your documents, blog posts, and presentations, there are some free tools online that can help.
Stephanie Cooper

How To Easily Implement Blended Learning in the Classroom | WPLMS - 0 views

  • you should set-up an introductory questionnaire or forum for them to introduce themselves and to ask any initial questions.
  • include a help forum
  • Topics on your LMS should include a course overview before students enter into the actual lessons and quizzes. The course overview can be as elaborate as you like, include videos, printable instructions, documents, and so forth.
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  • When possible, offer the content via audio, video, and text so that multiple learning styles are addressed.
  • The greatest part of introducing a blended learning approach to your classroom is that you can encourage (and manage) communication.
Keith Hamon

CC HowTo #1: How to Attribute a Creative Commons licensed work | Molly Kleinman - 0 views

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    a practical how to attribute Creative Commons licensed material.
Stephanie Cooper

Forsyth's Teaching Resources - 0 views

  • But writing assignments are not just exercises in grammar and grading. They are exercises in learning
  • Psychologists and other cognitive scientists know so much about psycholinguistics, language, and memory that they should well understand the close link between composition and knowledge. Yet many view writing as only a means of assessing a students' understanding of course material, and overlook the profound impact that the writing process has on understanding itself
  • The act of writing is an act of thought
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  • Writing, then, is a profoundly active learning experience, for when people write, they identify and define problems, evaluate evidence, analyze assumptions, recognize emotional reasoning and oversimplification, consider alternative interpretations, and reduce their uncertainty (Wade, 1995). Indeed, in many cases writers do not understand a concept clearly until they must organize their thoughts on the topic and communicate those thoughts through composition. As a result, authors are often surprised by the ideas they themselves write, for understanding emerges during the struggle to make points clear to others (Murray, 1985).
  • Professors who wish to add just one element of student-centered instruction to an otherwise professor-centered approach should start by asking students to write. These writing assignments may include the traditional favorites-term papers and essay tests-but Walvoord (1982) wisely recommends giving shorter, but more varied and frequent, writing assignments.
  • When students write they are learning to use "the traditions of language to discipline their thinking and to make that thinking clear to others" (Murray, 1985, p. 52). Unfortunately, many students will need coaching on the process of writing and feedback about the quality of the writing they generate. The professor must, as Walvoord (1982, p. 3) suggests, "make writing assignments meaningful, establish a wholesome and stimulating writing environment for their students, coach pupils in the writing process, respond accurately and specifically to student papers, communicate clearly with students about their writing successes and failures, and help student improve writing as they learn and in order to learn."
  • Clarify the assignment. Nodine (1999) notes that students need to learn about writing assignments as much as they need to learn about writing per se. Telling the students to "write a 5-10 page paper on one of the topics covered in this unit" is likely to frustrate students and disappoint professors. Instead, the assignment should explain the paper's purpose, the audience for the paper, the genre, voice, typical length, style, degree of documentation expected, and deadlines.
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    Writing as an exercise in learning
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.
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    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

OklahomaHandout.doc - 0 views

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    A collection of resources, with links, for building PLNs.
Stephanie Cooper

The Electric Educator: Using Google Calendar for Lesson Planning - 1 views

  • A new feature currently in calendar labs adds the ability to attach a Google Doc to a calendar event. This makes using Google Calendar for lesson planning a powerful tool. After create a lesson or unit, you can share your calendar and relevant documents with other teachers in your building or district, fostering collaboration.
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    This site has a "how-to" video for using Google calendar to create and share lesson plans. This might be something useful for our QEP faculty to learn.
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

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.
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