Group items tagged

MOOCs reduce barriers to information access and to the dialogue that permits individuals (and society) to grow knowledge.

Knowledge is a mashup. Many people contribute. Many different forums are used. Multiple media permit varied and nuanced expressions of knowledge. And, because the information base (which is required for knowledge formation) changes so rapidly, being properly connected to the right people and information is vitally important.

MOOCs share the process of knowledge work – facilitators model and display sensemaking and wayfinding in their discipline. They respond to critics, to challenges from participants in the course. Instead of sharing only their knowledge (as is done in a university course) they share their sensemaking habits and their thinking processes with participants. Epistemology is augmented with ontology.

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.

identifying something people believe in and inviting them to talk to each other. You don’t create the interest, you create the platform

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.

designing your community that reflects both the common interest and the individual contributions as equals.

Critical thinking is, among many things, the ability to understand and apply the abstract, the ability to infer and to meaningfully investigate. It’s the skills needed to see parallels, comprehend intersections, identify problems, and develop sustainable solutions.

sound critical thinking is imperative to social progress.

Cultivating critical thinking may be accomplished with modeling

One might think that this kind of imaginative play is mildly interesting but essentially frivolous. Not so. Imagination of the kind that starts in childhood is the gateway not just to literature, as Keats discerned, but to adult thinking. In her experiment-based book on how imagination is necessary for creating mental models (including models of how the world might be but is not), Ruth Byrne (2005) has said that rational thought has turned out to be: “more imaginative than cognitive scientists ... supposed,” and that “imaginative thought is more rational than scientists imagined” (xi).

I’ve recently been working with a district that over the last two years has given over 300 workshops on various tools, but when I asked them to talk about what significant, real change had come about because of those workshops, there was basically silence in the room. I’ve started saying that the only workshop we should offer our teachers is one titled something like “How to Learn Online,” one that gives teachers some context and some strategy for directing their own learning but places the expectation for DIYPD squarely on their shoulders. That’s what I find really compelling about PLP, that it supports teachers in developing their own learning goals and strategies, yet at the same time gives them a great sense of potential of these online communities as well. Ultimately, this still is about us, about the decisions we make as “solo practitioners.” But we have to have a different frame, a different context for those decisions now, one that helps us understand our roles as truly connected educators as well.

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.

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.

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.

one component of mobile implementation is lecture podcasts, which allow students to consume much of the information typically delivered in the classroom on their own time and in their own dorm rooms.The idea is to free up teachers during class time for interacting with students and working through problems, a concept known as “flipping the classroom.”

In a pilot project of the book, students preferred the book over their traditional textbooks (no assessments were taken to see if BioBook resulted in deeper understanding). A final version of the book, which will be piloted at four universities starting in September, will include analytics, multimedia, short quizzes and other options for teachers to interact with students.

Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.

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.”

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.

Use a solid, detailed collaboration and teamwork rubric

Distinguish working groups from teams.

I suggest it is possible to ask your students to write more, as long as you adapt your grading style

But you can also use informal, non-graded assignments to allow students to show themselves what they’ve taken in from lectures, discussion, and readings, especially at a point where they may not have fully mastered the material.

Rather than putting comments on paper after paper, you can teach course concepts and writing by featuring one or two exemplary papers.

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.”

“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.”

“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?”

students need to gain experience actually participating in social media. The best way to understand the expectations of a particular medium is to participate in that medium and identify its genre expectations as they emerge.

Students need to think of their online data along the dimensions of: * accessibility* searchability* persistence

As more and more of our writing makes its way into digital form -- and as the increasing use of biometrics and other forms of behavior monitoring turns our behaviors into volumes of data -- it will become increasingly important for writers to take steps to ensure the integrity of their private data.