Because to blog is to teach yourself what you think.
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shared by Keith Hamon on 10 Oct 12
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Shimon Schocken: The self-organizing computer course | Video on TED.com - 0 views
www.ted.com/...rganizing_computer_course.html
Shimon Schocken Noam Nisan MOOC elearning Education 2.0 rhizome
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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.
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TeachPaperless: Why Teachers Should Blog - 10 views
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This is what Keith and Tom have been preaching! LOL I like the way this guy discusses the pros of blogging and refers to the students who "don't get it."
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Blogging provides the opportunity for a teacher to express his or her ideas, too. (A teacher sometimes requires his or her students to blog, so the teacher should gain experience as well.) As a blogger, I want to restrict my comments; I do not want everyone to have access to my thoughts.
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Yeah, there are no cons, except what economists would call "opportunity cost." That is, every one of us only has so much (or so little) time. My colleagues and I are doing the annual faculty evaluation this week. I looked at the evaluation formular and could not find how blogging can add points for me and help me get tenure. Everything said in this article is right, and I agree. But everyone knows where his or her priority is, right?
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Because to face one's ill conclusions, self-congratulations, petty foibles, and impolite rhetoric among peers in the public square of the blogosphere is to begin to learn to grow.
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I do understand a need to grow as professionals, but I'd like to keep some 'growth spurts' personal.
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Yes, but no blogger automatically posts everything that comes to mind. One aspect of reflection is to think carefully about what you are writing and the wisdom of sharing it. For instance, I think it's worthwhile to post this.
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I think both are achieved through the crucial practice of critical thinking and earnest self-analysis. And no where, if sincerely met with daily conviction, can both be better employed than in the practice of blogging.
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I agree that self analysis and critical thinking go together, though it may come only after lots of practice and perseverance. I am still not convinced that blogging is the only way, could be one of the ways, not for me. Nevertheless blogging opens any one to a larger group of people which may help in sharing your thoughts, opinions etc..
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shared by Keith Hamon on 17 Feb 12
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The Death of the Traditional Web: Implications for Self-Directed Learning | Social Lear... - 1 views
www.dashe.com/...ons-for-self-directed-learning
social learning hive learning elearning Education 2.0 connectivism social networking PLN
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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.
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shared by Keith Hamon on 17 Sep 10
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Alternative approaches to assessing student engagement rates. Chapman, Elaine - 0 views
pareonline.net/getvn.asp
Elaine Chapman engagement writing elearning social networking PLN Web 2.0 Education 2.0 connectivism
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Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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While the next online model remains unclear, Southern New Hampshire's president, Paul J. LeBlanc, has sketched out one possible blueprint. … The vision is that students could sign up for self-paced online programs with no conventional instructors. They could work at their own speeds through engaging online content that offers built-in assessments, allowing them to determine when they are ready to move on. They could get help through networks of peers who are working on the same courses; online discussions could be monitored by subject experts. When they're ready, students could complete a proctored assessment, perhaps at a local high school, or perhaps online. The university's staff could then grade the assessment and assign credit. … The whole model hinges on excellent assessment.
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shared by Keith Hamon on 05 Oct 11
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Frontal Cortex | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views
www.wired.com/...frontal-cortex
Jonah Lehrer neuroscience critical thinking pedagogy Learning failure
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Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.
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The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
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The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Bohr's quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn't magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.
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shared by Keith Hamon on 03 Aug 10
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Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: 5 Steps to Digitizing the Writing Workshop #edchat #writing - 3 views
www.mguhlin.org/...gitizing-writing-workshop.html
writing digitalstorytelling edtech Miguel Guhlin PLN Web 2.0
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Expecting students to write in our classrooms for hit-or-miss praise is criminal. Their nimble fingers can text an entire piece of writing via their mobile device to a relevant audience online at the same time they publish to a worldwide network. For them, the pay is in the joy of publication, in the act of making their work known, and of partaking of the work of others.
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Take advantage of over 20 digital tools for students (Sidebar #2 - Digital Tools for Students).
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You can easily transition from notes and highlights kept in Diigo.com social bookmarking tool to a written piece that appropriately cites content. Check Sidebar #3 for Electronic Citation Resources.
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reflect on the teacher's role in the writing workshop, and the technology available to organize the writing workshop.
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Create a Self-Editing checklist that is actually a GoogleForm or the Questionnaire Module in Moodle so you can quickly see class progress in graphs. Students complete this information via a web-based form that allows you to quantitatively track progress in class. Create a bank of online mini-lessons that students can watch and listen to again and again in an archive. Build that in your GoogleSites Wiki or Moodle. Facilitate sharing using recording tools in a discussion forum or Sites wiki. When doing the Group Share during a Writing Workshop, you can either play the students' presentation of the audio (which they recorded when they were ready) or record the feedback students get so that it can be added to the written piece/recording shared. That way, students can come back and reflect on the advice provided by their peers.
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Using a Moodle or wiki, you can create a reference point that can house your mini-lesson content, including audio and/or video recordings.
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VoiceThread.com - Enables teachers to create an enhanced podcast about the MiniLesson content, but also allow students to contribute audio, text, or video content as comments. This enables many to many interactions.
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GoogleDocs Presentation Tool - Enables teachers to create a slideshow that students can participate in chat, as well as contribute slides to.
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As wonderful as a writing workshop teacher may be, s/he cannot offer the feedback that ALL students may need. However, online discussion forums through Moodle, attached to wikis, or with blog postings and comments CAN facilitate student to student interaction independent of the teacher. While many fear these kinds of interactions, in online learning, these interactions make or break an online course...or a face to face one.
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Collaborative word processors can also serve as a way for students in groups to interact with ONE text online.
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Shelly Blake-Pollock, the teacher and author of the TeachPaperless blog (http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com), encourages his students to publish online. Beyond that step, though, he offers feedback on their writing online as well via screencasts, or video recording of his computer screen. Screencasts, or "JingCrits," that he creates are short, less than 5-minute video clips where he highlights student work on screen and offers feedback (View an example - http://bit.ly/bsgVQQ).
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shared by Keith Hamon on 07 Sep 10
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A Primer About Successful Online Communities - FeverBee - The Online Community Guide - 0 views
www.feverbee.com/...primeronlinecommunity.html
Richard Millington social networking writing PLN connectivism
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identifying something people believe in and inviting them to talk to each other. You don’t create the interest, you create the platform
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The better you get to know and like your fellow members, and the more you care about their opinion of you, the more you participate and thus work towards a successful goal.
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designing your community that reflects both the common interest and the individual contributions as equals.
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This self-disclosure is important. If you’re not continuously asking members to share their thoughts and experiences, members will never truly bond as a group. No bonds means low engagement and participation rate. More importantly, it means no community spirit (the something special we mentioned at the beginning).
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as your community grows you need to begin decentralizing responsibility. Give popular members their own forums/groups to moderate.
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Brown - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Providing a shared context for constructing meaning, documents are the beginning rather than the end of the process of negotiation.
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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.
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Hypertext software, however, has revived the immediacy of intertextual links.
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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.
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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.
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Learning or Management Systems? « Connectivism - 1 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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5 Tools for Building a Next-Generation 'Hybrid' Class Website - ProfHacker - The Chroni... - 0 views
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To build the module, we used a rapid e-learning authoring tool called Adobe Captivate. Some other popular programs for this kind of rapid authoring are Articulate and Lectora. Captivate is great for building interactive self-guided simulations and branching scenarios.
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We created our unit in PearlTrees by adding links to all the web-based readings, videos and articles for the course and then embedded it into our LMS.
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We decided used Prezi to create a Case Study Library with six categories (Health, Education, etc.) to introduce our students to the tools organizations are using to address different elements of the peacebuilding and international development spectrum.
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Our LMS had a built-in functionality for users to submit links and tag them, but other options include setting up a class Diigo account with one class username and password. If the majority of participants are already on Facebook and Twitter, other options include creating a dedicated course Facebook group to share content, or setting up a class hashtag (ex. #AU1234) for Twitter to categorize and easily reference all class tweets. (Read further ProfHacker reflections on teaching with social media.)
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This course was just the beginning of our attempt at TechChange to go beyond what industry leaders like Blackboard and others currently provide to find and implement the most effective technologies and platforms to support dynamic learning. The feedback from the participants was remarkably positive, and the model is something that can easily scale with the right tools and training.