Skip to main content

Home/ Writing Across the Curriculum/ Group items tagged power

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Keith Hamon

Turning the Classroom Upside Down - WSJ.com - 0 views

  •  
    In 2008, I started a non-profit organization called the Khan Academy to deliver free online education. As it turns out, our tools have given students and teachers the power to "flip" the traditional classroom: Students can hear lectures at home and spend their time at school doing "homework"-that is, working on problems. It allows them to advance at their own pace, gaining real mastery, and it lets teachers spend more time giving one-to-one instruction.
Keith Hamon

The power of blog tagging | Technology Teacher - 0 views

  •  
    Tagging allows you to find content in other blogs that matches yours and possibly can provide you with additional insights and information about a subject area you are passionate about. But tagging can also serve a very valuable service for faculty using blogs as a class assignment. If your students are writing individual blogs for a class assignment/project, you can ask them to identify their blog posts with a specific tag, such as your name course name and section number.
Keith Hamon

Online Educational Delivery Models: A Descriptive View (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu - 1 views

  •  
    Although there has been a long history of distance education, the creation of online education occurred just over a decade and a half ago-a relatively short time in academic terms. Early course delivery via the web had started by 1994, soon followed by a more structured approach using the new category of course management systems.1 Since that time, online education has slowly but steadily grown in popularity, to the point that in the fall of 2010, almost one-third of U.S. postsecondary students were taking at least one course online.2 Fast forward to 2012: a new concept called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is generating widespread interest in higher education circles. Most significantly, it has opened up strategic discussions in higher education cabinets and boardrooms about online education. Stanford, MIT, Harvard, the University of California-Berkeley, and others have thrown their support-in terms of investment, resources, and presidential backing-behind the transformative power of MOOCs and online education. National media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Atlantic are touting what David Brooks has called "the campus tsunami" of online education.
Keith Hamon

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

  •  
    highly visual introduction to rhizomatics & networking with strong implications for connectivism.
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. 
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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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.
Nicolette Elzie

From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning... - 0 views

  •  
    Author David Thornburg explores the importance of a balanced learning environment. An article by The Atlantic sums up his main ideology. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/lectures-didnt-work-in-1350-and-they-still-dont-work-today/281514/
Stephanie Cooper

Questioning as Technology - 1 views

shared by Stephanie Cooper on 09 Jul 10 - Cached
  • None of us can be expert in everything. To some extent we must rely upon others to help us interpret the world, but we must also be wary of “experts” lacking in wisdom, discretion or reliability. We cannot take the time to conduct original, primary source research each time we look for good ideas. We must turn to the sages.
    • Stephanie Cooper
       
      Supports connectist thinking...but, says we need to be able to think for ourselves.
  • Questions are intended to provoke thought and inspire reflection, but all too often the process is short circuited by the simple answer, the quick truth or the appealing placebo.
  • With the advent of new electronic technologies, our young people are threatened by a weakening of thought and an emphasis on the glib or superficial. Mentalsoftness™ is a new social “virus” that is rarely noticed. We hear complaints of a “new plagiarism,” but few commentators remark upon the ascendancy of superficial thought.6
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • If we hope to see inventive thought infused with critical judgment, questions and questioning must become a priority of schooling and must gain recognition as a supremely important technology. We must lay aside the forked branches of earlier times, the divining rods of soothsayers, technologists and futurists. Rather than reading the entrails or taking the omens to determine the future, we wield powerful questions as tools to construct a future of our own choosing.
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...
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.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • 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.
  •  
    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.
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 Wild World of Massively Open Online Courses « Unlimited Magazine - 1 views

  • “There’s this notion that technology is networked and social. It does alter the power relationship between the educator and the learner, a learner has more autonomy, they have more control. The expectation that you wait on the teacher to create everything for you and to tell you what to do is false.”
    • Keith Hamon
       
      This is perhaps the practical heart of Connectivism: that the world is networked and that the learner is at the center of their own personal learning network.
  • “At the beginning, we had quite a number of students feeling quite overwhelmed because you would get 200 or 300 posts going into a discussion forum per day and that’s just about impossible to follow,” Siemens says.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      PLNs must have filters and aggregators to help us manage the massive flow of information in MOOCs.
  • Even if students in massively open online courses master the technology and overcome their virtual stage fright, a third problem remains: how to recognize the value of a learning experience that isn’t for credit.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Validation remains a very sticky issue for online learning and for PLNs. However, I'm not sure the resolution will be to find a method for online validation, redefinition of validation, or a mixture of both.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It’s a question that proponents of online education continue to grapple with. Even if a student in an open course gains from their experience, there is no guarantee that the boss, or a potential employer, will recognize their learning without a certificate or other official, institution-approved record to prove it.
  •  
    With advancing online tools innovative educators are examining new ways to break out of this one-to-many model of education, through a concept called massively open online courses. The idea is to use open-source learning tools to make courses transparent and open to all, harnessing the knowledge of anyone who is interested in a topic.
Keith Hamon

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation | Video on TED.com - 1 views

  •  
    How the Web inspires creativity and innovation.
Keith Hamon

Classroom Wikis and Professional Portfolios - Powerful Ingredients for Blended Learning - 2 views

  •  
    It is a "best practice" for classroom teachers today to use a website as a learning portal for links and resources related to class studies. In this learning module we'll learn the difference between blogs and wikis, explore examples of K-12 exemplary classroom wikis and professional portfolios, as well as tools for creating educational wikis.
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.
  •  
    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.
Stephanie Cooper

I hate writing but love to blog….why? | The Thinking Stick - 0 views

  • o why is it that I hate to write and love to blog? First, I think a lot of it has to do with the computer and word processing. As I type this in my Firefox extension Performancing every misspelled word is underlined in red for me, giving me instant feedback on what I have misspelled. Does it catch all my mistakes, heck no, but you should see a post before it actually goes live. Secondly, I can type faster then I can write…about 75 words/minute and you can actually read what I’ve written when I’m done. Finally, I don’t see blogging as writing…it’s idea generation, it’s the free flow of ideas between people and it is a conversation. I love to talk (if you have a hard time writing you usually do…coping skill). I would rather stand in front of a group of parents and give a presentation, or have a face to face parent conference than write a letter home.
  • Blogging gives me an audience, just like giving a presentation…I almost feel that way sometimes…like I’m presenting information, my thoughts rather than writing. It could be a podcast, a video, or blogging…it’s about having an audience. I wonder if I would have blogged in school, given the chance? It would have depended, I bet, on how the teacher used it as a tool. Was it a reflective journal to layout your thoughts, or did every period, capital and ‘ie, ei’ combination have to be perfect. If that was the case I’d have hated it. Blogging is different…it’s not writing in the sense we think about it. People ask me why I blog and I truly can’t give them an answer…I just do, because it’s an outlet for me. I’d bet that I’ve blogged more in the past year then I wrote my whole life leading up to it. It’s been that powerful for me as a tool, and I see it in my students as well. In myspace and youtube…this networking, conversation, sharing atmosphere is contagious!
  • I think you hit on the larger issue, though, is that blogging is much less structured (mostly) than a typical piece of writing. Blogging is much more stream-of-consciousness than writing. As I am writing this, it is a direct connection from idea to publication. I think that is the blogging revolution. I would wonder how different your post would have been, or my comment for that matter, had we outlined it before writing it.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Good writing is really about good editing. Too much time in school is spent on conventions–grammar, spelling–and not on helping people find their voice. Blogging is not writing in the sense that much of blogging comes from a very authentic, unedited perspective. We say what we feel. We mean what we say. We just do not always overprocess it. We have chosen our audience by virtue of the topics and themes we choose.
  • Blogging offers realtime, real world feedback. How many people actually comment on misspellings? Who cares if I end a sentence with a preposition? Perhaps monitors in somepeople’s houses have red circles on them. People comment on the usefulness, the humour, the passion, the ideas. Call it what you will, Blogging is writing with an attitude. Yours. And yours alone. Sure someone might flame you, but you can delete their posts. Now I could proof read this. I could let it sit an daim to craft my thoughts better, but I like the rawness of this.
  •  
    I liked this article because it talks about how it is easier for resistant writers to write by blogging.
Stephanie Cooper

Professor to students: Text away | The Committed Sardine - 1 views

  • Georgia State University students who don’t want to yell their questions from the back of a cavernous lecture hall now have another option: They can send text messages to their professor, who reads the queries from an overhead screen.
  • Text-messaged questions, McDonald said, are compiled on a class web page—known as a wiki—where other students can answer the questions. “It creates a knowledge base, and a knowledge base has real power,” he said. “And students love to show how smart they are.”
Keith Hamon

Powerful Learning: Studies Show Deep Understanding Derives from Collaborative Methods |... - 1 views

  •  
    Today's students will enter a job market that values skills and abilities far different from the traditional workplace talents that so ably served their parents and grandparents. They must be able to crisply collect, synthesize, and analyze information, then conduct targeted research and work with others to employ that newfound knowledge. In essence, students must learn how to learn, while responding to endlessly changing technologies and social, economic, and global conditions.
Keith Hamon

From Groups to Teams: The Key to Powering up PBL | Edutopia - 1 views

  • PBL teachers need a set of tools that establish a team ethic. They also need to set aside time for this during a project and before a project.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      Team ethic is key to successful collaboration.
  • Use a solid, detailed collaboration and teamwork rubric
  • Distinguish working groups from teams.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Help students focus on the core element that distinguishes a group from a team: The commitment to each other’s success.
    • Keith Hamon
       
      We don't teach students how to identify & capitalize upon the different strengths they each bring to a team.
  •  
    PBL is still kind of a cool way to address standards and, too often these days, is simply coverage by another name. But its ultimate benefit is to help students think, learn, and operate in the new century by challenging them at deeper levels. That requires reversing the equation between skills and content: PBL is method for teaching students to find, process, understand, and share information, not a way to extend the industrial landscape of regurgitation and recall.
Mary Ann Scott

Writing for Learning--Not Just for Demonstrating Learning - 2 views

  • And the main thing to keep in mind is that if you are not teaching a writing course, there is no law that says you have to comment.
    • Mary Ann Scott
       
      Not all writing is for the teacher's consumption and subsequent evaluation of the student's learning. It is part of the process of learning. We need to let students learn without judgment at least some of the time.
  • There's a quick and easy form of "proto-commenting" that is remarkably effective--especially appropriate perhaps for think pieces: putting straight lines alongside or underneath strong passages, wavy lines alongside or underneath problem passages, and X's next to things that seem plainly wrong. I can do this almost as fast as I can read, and it gives remarkably useful feedback to students: it conveys the presence and reactions of a reader.
    • Mary Ann Scott
       
      If you feel the need to respond, here is a short and easy way to remind your students that you are there to guide them.
  • Two-fers:
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • About think-pieces:
  • Students understand and retain course material much better when they write copiously about it. We tend to think of learning as input and writing as output, but it also works the other way around. Learning is increased by "putting out"; writing causes input. Students won't take writing seriously till all faculty demand it. Writing needn't take any time away from course material. We can demand good writing without teaching it. The demand itself teaches much. Students won't write enough unless we assign more writing than we can comment on--or even read. There is no law against not reading what we make them write. Writing can have a powerful communal or social dimension; it doesn't have to feel solitary.
    • Mary Ann Scott
       
      These premises are KEY. Read every one of them and consider how they can work in your class.
  • 8 minutes of writing at the start of class to help students bring to mind their homework reading or lab work or previous lectures. 8minutes in mid class when things go dead--or to get students to think about an important question that has come up. 8 minutes at the end of class or lecture to get them to think about what's been discussed. 5 minutes at the end of class to write to us about what they learned that day: what was the main idea for them, what was going on for them during that class. Not only will this help them integrate and internalize the course material; it helps our teaching by showing us what's getting through and what isn't.
    • Mary Ann Scott
       
      Some excellent examples of reflective writing in action.
  • This is the name I give to writing that is a bit more thought out and worked over--but not yet an essay:
  • Think pieces are a productive and nonpunitive way to make students do the reading on time and come to class.
  • When students understand that they are being asked for two very different kinds of writing in the course, their essays get better because of their extensive practice with low stakes think pieces, and their low stakes writing gets more thoughtful when they experience it as practice for the high stakes essays (and relief from them too)
    • Mary Ann Scott
       
      Take the "punishment" out of writing by showing your students that is part of learning. Give them the freedom to express themselves in ways that won't be judged.
  • I find term papers involve maximum work and minimum learning.
    • Mary Ann Scott
       
      Absolutely true!
  • Peer feedback or student response groups.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 43 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page