The West Point study has lessons even for those whose baccalaureate days are far behind them. This is yet more evidence that multitasking doesn’t work. Beware of people who take laptops into meetings — even “just to take notes.” They’re probably not listening to you.
That's very true. As more and more evidence comes out to support this, it is imperative that schools with 1-to-1, or planning to go that way, are mindful of when and where technology is integrated.
My experimentation with open pedagogy – and my attempts to guide students’ learning with/in and across open platforms – was a social endeavor that invited reciprocal networking.
My name is Noam Chomsky, I'm a retired professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I've been for 65 years. I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls. To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover. To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self education and inquiry and investigations, in cooperation and solidarity with others. That's what an educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.
A NEW FEDERALISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION AFFORDABILITY
College Affordability Diagnosis
smart publishers will focus on how their solutions can support and optimize student learning and achievements. They will see themselves as participants in the student outcomes business as well as in the publishing business.
Publisher focus on content creation v student outcomes
marketing directly to students, teachers, and parents, bypassing traditional institutional sales channels.
Does one need a consumer as well as b2b product then?
Students, parents, and teachers are also increasing their role in purchasing decisions. They can choose from more options than in the past,
CIOs who are weighing in on the choice of learning platforms and software
urchasing often involves department heads, CIOs, and provosts, since the choices made can affect the entire school.
To succeed, they will need to fundamentally rethink their value propositions to take full advantage of the digital medium and consider the entire educational experience.
And specifically the utility of various tools shipped with content.
customization tools to “build your own textbook” from a variety of preexisting and newly created content
Seems like a great fit for h...
texts embedded in the online course
practical tools that supplement core instruction
Like, for example, hypothes.is?
education (Pearson, Cengage, McGraw-Hill)
Top 3 edu publishers.
Blogs tend towards conversational and quotative reuse, which is great for some subject areas, but not so great for others. Wiki feeds forward into a consensus process that provides a high level of remix and reuse, but at the expense of personal control and the preservation of divergent goals. Wikity takes lessons from federated wiki, combining the individual control of blogging with the permissionless improvement of wiki.
Mike Caulfield introduces http://wikity.cc, a personal wiki platform in which editing is blog-like (it runs on WordPress), but pages can be easily copied and remixed.
I am particularly excited about ways it might be used to help faculty and students to collaborate on OER across institutions.
If, at the dawn of the web, I was to take a list of things the web would bring about and show them to a researcher, they might disagree on the level of interest people would have in things (what’s with the cat pictures, spaceman?) but there’d be little there to surprise them except for one item: the most used reference work in the world will be collaboratively maintained by a group of anonymous and pseudonymous volunteers as part of a self-organizing network.
It would be nice if on this day, as we marvel about the rise of Wikipedia, we could turn some of our attention to the Wikipedias of the future. Where are opportunities for this mode of collaboration that we’ve missed? Why are we not confronted by more impossible things? How can we move from the electronic dreams of the 1970s to visions informed by the lessons of wiki and Wikipedia? Some people might think we’ve already done that. But I’m pretty sure we’re barely getting started.
Education is no longer viewed as a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is devalued as a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible populace.
Here’s the basic idea — slow & measured reform is often a web of unfortunate compromises, but its protection of the status quo generally preserves business regulation, at least at some level. Because this is unacceptable to business interests, business needs to create a crisis or scale up an existing crisis. It needs to make the status quo malfunction to the point where there is supposedly “nothing left to lose”. With the system reduced, supposedly, to rubble, economic interests can move in to “solve” the problem — if the public will only place its faith in them, and abandon their old public institutions and outdated business regulations.
Mike Caulfield summarizes Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and points out that it's being applied to public education.
In other words, the solution isn’t to turn away from public funding for higher education. Rather, taxpayers should take some of the money they’ve been inefficiently sending to the for-profit sector, and channel it toward America’s underfunded public higher education system. There, the emphasis should be on emulating some of the flexibility of the for-profit sector while offering the quality of non-profit schools. That should boost graduation rates and employment prospects, and result in taxpayers getting stiffed a lot less in the future.
The key is that the public funding should go toward helping the higher ed system adjust/augment its model so that it can work for people who need a more flexible approach than the traditional 4-year system
Asking What Students Spend on Textbooks Is the Wrong Question
Cost of textbooks and what students are able to spend.
Convinced that big undergraduate lectures are ineffectual, Wieman long ago ditched those big performances in favor of getting students to problem-solve. He gets them actively engaged with course material, working in smaller groups. The techniques have become known as an evidence-based, "active learning" style of teaching.
The University of New Hampshire Open Educational Resources Ambassador Pilot
Newsela class link/code model for signing students up w/out emails
Those with the highest degree of functional literacy aren’t necessarily those with the highest social status.
In precise contrast with school. In some ways, literacy is such a basic part of schooling that it’s nearly impossible to imagine other core skills (from numeracy to empathy) giving pupils and students any kind of social status outside of literacy.
The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory
Love in pedagogical work is an orientation. It’s a commitment to the personhood of learners, to their intersectionality, to their deep emotional backgrounds, to the authenticity of their lives. It is a decision to commit first to the community of learners and second to the material we’ve come to teach.
"Orientation" is a powerful concept here. At a seminar for Gestalt Coaching, participants were asked "How do you orient?" It's not only a question of how we get our bearings but also where they come from. I used to think I was oriented towards people and during that seminar I realized that it wasn't people, per se, it was relationships. Relationships both stimulated my most active curiosity and my deepest anxieties. So "Love" as an orientation speaks deeply to me. My content area (physical education) is my vehicle for building learning relationships with my students. Without the relationship, there is no learning.
not to provide citizens with jobs. That's the role of the economy.
Not "provide" but "prepare" citizens for a productive purposeful life that includes a job.
The product of education should be effective citizenship that is enacted out in the open
agree better citizenship of the world
After the 2007-2008 financial crisis in the United States, a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets are seeing education — and educational technology – as growth areas. Resistance by students, parents and educators to high-stakes standardized testing and the Common Core State Standards confronted them with a temporary setback, but now they are poised to make an end run around the Opt Out movement by concentrating on “personalized learning” which requires a huge investment in computerization of classrooms as well as software. Along with this remaking of schooling, the powers that be plan a data-based reinvention of teacher education that will require the closing, or reinvention of colleges of teacher education. If these plans go through, a majority of the nation’s teachers and teacher educators could lose their jobs in the next 10 years, replaced by people who will largely be temp workers making little more than minimum wage. This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky thinking. It is happening in higher education with the switch to adjunct labor. I fear it is about to sweep through our public schools with the force of a juggernaut.
A dystopian future for educators.
Open data
Sadly, there may not be much work on opening up data in Higher Education. For instance, there was only one panel at last year’s international Open Data Conference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUtQBC4SqTU
Looking at the interoperability of competency profiles, been wondering if it could be enhanced through use of Linked Open Data.
Open Learning
Could soooo imagine a presentation on using #Hypothesis with #PressBooks!
open – that is, to make public, transparent, and participatory
Neat definition of “open”, very contextual, it sounds like.
open annotation.
I'd like to hear discussion around the term "open" here. How exactly are you using it @remiholden? To mean public as opposed to private?
For me, open has specific infrastructural connotations: it's about a variety of annotation clients like hypothes.is conforming to certain wider standards so that web annotation--like the web itself--is an interoperable system.
But I'm curious the degree to which that matters to teachers and learners. And why? We're using hypothes.is, which promises to conform to standards being developed by the w3c, but could DIIGO do the trick even though they're system (for now) is closed?
True personalized learning calls for a "rethinking and redesign" of schools, which could require them to overhaul classroom structures and schedules, curricula, and the instructional approaches of teachers, Mr. Calkins of EDUCAUSE argued. For instance, in an effective personalized learning model, teachers' roles are more like those of coaches or facilitators than "content providers," he said.
Of course, no mention of curriculum
"Technology can help provide students with more choices on how they're going to learn a lesson," Ms. Patrick said. "[It] empowers teachers in personalizing learning" and "empowers students through their own exercise of choice."
And that is the problem, right...the "how they're going to learn a lesson" part. It's still "our" lesson being personalized for them. The agency piece is choosing how they get to "our" lesson. That misses the point.
It reminds me of the New Math of the 1960s, which fashioned mathematics in a dramatically more abstract, more analytic way than before. And if Johnny Can’t Add with the new math, maybe Jenny Won’t Code with an overly abstract presentation of computing. Papert points us in the opposite direction
It’s a source of power to do something and figure things out, in a dance between the computer and our thoughts. The inversion, starting with computing as a formal thing to understand and then come to the application later, takes away its power.
One striking comment follows a couple of pages later, where the phrase “computer-aided instruction” evokes in Papert the unappealing idea that “the computer is being used to program the child” — his vision, of course, is that the child must program the computer.
In 1980, Seymour Papert published the book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas” [2]. Papert was co-director, under Marvin Minsky, of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1967 to 1981. Previously, he had worked with Jean Piaget in Geneva. Piaget was a developmental psychologist best known for pioneering the learning theory known as constructivism: simply put, that learners construct new knowledge (in their minds) from the interaction of their experiences with previous knowledge. Papert, in turn, developed the theory of constructionism, adding the notion that learning is enhanced when the learner is engaged in “constructing a meaningful product.”
Credentalism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity. Over the past 40 years, professions that never required a college degree began demanding it. "The United States has become the most rigidly credentialised society in the world," write James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield in their 2005 book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. "A BA is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four."
Inquiry Learning Vs. Standardized Content: Can They Coexist?
What do we know about sharing?
Framing our Open EdTech project
We don’t know if content will be interoperable – that is, usable beyond the Amazon (Kindle) ecosystem – or if there’ll be integration with other software systems.
If not then it really wouldn't be truly "open."
With more than 18 million downloads to date, Minecraft is the best-selling computer game of all time; the game’s free-form structure has made it popular with kids and adults alike. But little by little, teachers, parents, and students have discovered that the game can be used for educational purposes, too.
18 million downloads. This is a popular game. Parents, teachers, and students are using the game for educational purposes. This surprises me because I never though a game would help kids.
From 1926 until the early 1950s, US military aircraft relied on a "one size fits all" design based on average measurements of hundreds of male pilots.
But a 1950 study by Lt. Gilbert Daniels showed that out of 4,063 airmen, not even one was average in all ten measurements. They started designing cockpits and controls to be adjustable. Accidents decreased, and pilot performance increased.
Standardized education makes the same mistake.
We have an obligation to help all students become the best they can be, according to each one’s unique constitution of abilities and interests.
It is safe to say that the most limited member of the populace has potentialities which do not now reveal themselves and which will not reveal themselves till we convert education by and for mediocrity into an education by and for individuality.
-- John Dewey
It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
-- James Truslow Adams, coining the phrase "The American Dream" in his 1931 book The Epic of America.
The author almost realized the much more important conclusion of the fact he lived. He shouldn't conclude the article by asking "what is the purpose of studying maths?" and then giving an three stupid answers.
He should have asked: is this actually "knowledge" as they say academia brings to society? Is the money researchers earn being well spent? Did I actually deserve to be remunerated by this piece of work no one understands -- and, in fact, no one has read except for maybe three people?
An Open Education Reader
“ Whatever happened to Instructional Technology? ”. With this publication , he highlighted a nd attempted to explain the persistent failure of ICT to penetrate the world of higher education, despite several decades of effort and massive inve stment (Geoghegan, 1994)
This may situate the problem quite deeply in the history of educational ict and support claims relating to the persistence of this problem in the face of numerous interventions.
One of the founders of Games Workshop, who helped revamp the computing curriculum, is to open 2 new free schools specialising in computer science, technology and the arts, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan announced today (5 February 2016) as she revealed the latest batch of this Parliament’s 500 new schools. Drawing on his experience as a videogame entrepreneur, Ian Livingstone will open the Livingstone Academies in Tower Hamlets and Bournemouth, which will provide over 3,000 children with a rigorous education rooted in STEAM - science, technology, engineering, arts and maths.
"Free school" has a few different meanings. Here, it means a classification of schools in England that are publicly financed but independent.
https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school/free-schools<br> https://www.gov.uk/set-up-free-school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school<br> (various meanings)
improve the educational ecosystems in underserved communities.
the latest teaching and learning technology and pedagogical innovations that have the potential to scale quality across the world.
Hypothes.is reminds me a lot of some of the primary goals of the MeAggregator JISC project, as well as having a lot in common with other annotation tools (obviously!). The implementation appears smooth and reliable, and having just revisited it (thanks to a Facebook post by a friend of a friend), I wish I had been using it for a while now. I suspect it will be finding its way in to my teaching practice very soon.<br> This page on their site "Back to School with Annotation: 10 Ways to Annotate with Students" has some useful suggestions. I particularly need to check out the private groups and sharing options, and investigate the possibility of collating annotations (potentially producing new documents from a set of annotations).
Discussion about Obama's computer science for K-12 initiative. CS programs in high school are about 40 years overdue. It is a valid concern that much of this money may be wasted on overpriced proprietary software, hardware, and training programs. And of course, average schools will handle CS about like they handle other subjects -- not very well.
Another concern raised, and countered, is that more programmers will mean lower wages for programmers. But not everyone who studies CS in high school is going to become a programmer. And an increase in computer literacy may help increase the demand for programmers and technicians.
educators and business leaders are increasingly recognizing that CS is a “new basic” skill necessary for economic opportunity. The President referenced his Computer Science for All Initiative, which provides $4 billion in funding for states and $100 million directly for districts in his upcoming budget; and invests more than $135 million beginning this year by the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service to support and train CS teachers.
Professor Christine Ortiz is stepping down from her post [at MIT] as dean for graduate education to found a new residential research university.
...
Ortiz said the university would focus on project-based learning and would dispense with some of the familiar hallmarks of university education, like the lecture.
"I don't see it having any face to face, on-the-ground lectures, actually," she said. "No majors, no lectures, no classrooms."
BCcampus as a whole is a research project in the eyes of our parent institution SFU
Good to know. Didn’t realise this.
Job functionOther,Marketing
But, but… Eric said it wasn’t marketing!
In 2014, U.S. based education technology (EdTech) companies raised $1.2 billion in funding across 357 venture rounds.
The Syllabus Explorer publishes only metadata (citations, dates, locations, etc) extracted from its collection via machine learning techniques. It does not publish underlying documents or personally identifying information.
Searchable list of textbooks categorized by field, institution, state, and country, ranked by the number of times they found them listed in a course.
http://opensyllabusproject.org/<br> https://twitter.com/opensyllabus
societies which continue their commitment to, compulsory, universal schooling insists on a frustrating and ever more insidious enterprise of multiplying dropouts and cripples
Pulling no punches...
inevitably, to academics working as part of a team
What makes this so unavoidable? And why do these teams need to be so structured?
Dweck’s message is that we can’t just adopt a growth mindset and forget about it, and simply praising effort regardless of actual progress is completely counterproductive. Successfully cultivating a growth mindset is an ongoing process that consists of teaching strategies for growth and praising effort thoughtfully, rather than regardlessly.
"Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. It's the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement." -- Carol Dweck
learning “in the wild”
Is this the same as rewilding your education?
I like Terry's idea here to semi-privatise this conversation/annotation exercise by making this chapter available through his blog. While anyone can come here (from the wild) it is more likely to be found via people that follow Terry via other social platforms (semi-wild).
Learning in the wild~An all-seasons activity~For all the brave souls. #haiku
Dea Conrad-Curry contrasts ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) with its predecessor, NCLB (No Child Left Behind).
Moreover, the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery is itself a form of experiential learning, indeed a kind of metaexperiential learning that vividly and concretely teaches the experience of networks themselves.
With a wide open network, it also makes the world look smaller.
This is a great essay by Gardner Campbell. I'd add more notes. But every time I try, I start sounding like a crazed revolutionary. Like this...
Ask not how you can be a more suitable corporate drone. Ask how you can knock them down a few pegs.
The computer is an unprecedented partner for the human mind. We've barely begun to tap its potential. Stop trying to turn it into television.
Stop training kids to do what they're told. Teach them to teach themselves and one another.
massive advances in Open Educational Resources
Some may be surprised to hear about OERs in a post about proprietary technology, especially since this was before iBooks Author allowed the creation of ePUB3 books.
Using the Web and Wikipedia to make writing assignments more relevant and instructive. Includes links to Wikipedia tools for educators.
How should we measure student engagement? Certainly not by using computers to force feed students fixed lesson plans.
Gardner Campbell's presentation at UNF Academic Technology Innovation Summit, November 2015.
The whole organic nature of learning experience through the #walkmyworld learning events meant that I learned what I needed to learn as I needed to learn it. It wasn’t a top down dictate of learning outcomes because the outcomes were determined by the process. It is a revolutionary concept — yet as ancient as Aristotle. Learning should never be measured solely by standard outcomes; people learn, and I mean really LEARN, when they discover for themselves what they know, what they want to know, and how they want to know it.
Participate Learning Twitter client for education twitter chats. Choose from more than 150 chats, or request to have one added. Sign in with Twitter to view live or archived tweets, a list of participants, and a list of links that were shared.
Participate Learning provides categorized, vetted educational resources, both free and commercial, and online tools for curating collections and collaborating with other educators.
https://medium.com/@alanwarms/why-we-launched-participate-chats-5f1d0a61b2b8
Over the years, I've challenged the notion of just having kids read on their own at school. (Or, maybe not so much challenged the notion as told people about the actual research findings on this topic which aren't so wonderful.) I’ve not been a friend to DEAR, SSR, SQUIRT, or similar schemes that set aside daily amounts of time for self selected reading in the classroom. Most studies don’t find much pay off for this kind of reading—either in reading achievement or motivation to read. There are many better things to do if your goal is to encourage reading than to just tell kids to go read on their own (a directive that sounds a lot like, “go away and leave me alone").
Timothy Shanahan of U of IL Chicago says we aren't spending enough time on reading and writing instruction.
Here’s what the Finns, who don’t begin formal reading instruction until around age 7, have to say about preparing preschoolers to read: “The basis for the beginnings of literacy is that children have heard and listened … They have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed [things] with them … They have asked questions and received answers.”
Calendar of education Twitter chats, with US timezone selection EST, CST, MST, PST. Click on a chat for more information.
one wonders about the relationships between scholarship, technology, and the academic institution that engendered that turn from printing materials to printing ideas.
One sure does.
College students respond to articles by professors about the pros and cons of lectures.
Imagine if we could actively facilitate conversations between college-bound high school students and professionals in the fields in which they believe they want to enter. Wouldn’t this have the potential to dramatically increase a student’s understanding of the industry before they commit an exorbitant amount of time and money towards it?
constructivism (Jean Piaget) - Learners must actively construct their body of knowledge, their schema, through experience and reflection. When we encounter a new idea, we can do one of three things:
social constructivism (Lev Vygotsky) - emphasized that building knowledge is a social process
constructionism (Seymour Papert) - Learning works best when we are publicly building artifacts -- of any kind whatsoever. While communicating with others, we get valuable feedback, and learn to put thoughts in various concrete forms.
“The key is deliberate practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.”
Peter Norvig's definition of deliberate practice, from "Teach Yourself to Program in 10 Years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html
But my favorite part was the “get ahead” part of this answer. Because, to me, it demonstrates how Clinton — as a Presidential candidate — thinks about public education in America. Education is a scarce resource that helps some poor kids individually “get ahead,” but only if they demonstrate talent and ambition. Educating the poor is not a thing Clinton believes benefits the nation, it’s just a thing that individual kids can do to enrich themselves.
This is in response to Hillary Clinton's comment during the Democratic debate on Saturday, 19 December:
“I don’t believe in free tuition for everybody. I believe we should focus on middle-class families, working families and poor kids who have the ambition and the talent to go to college and get ahead.”
I haven't heard anyone mention that we can provide more education without paying an extra dime of tuition to any college. Neither schools nor teachers are necessary for learning and demonstration of knowledge.
numbers have to be interpreted by those who do the daily work of classroom teaching
despite having promised not to track students, Google is abusing its position of power as a provider of some educational services to profit off of students’ data when they use other Google services—services that Google has arbitrarily decided don’t deserve any protection.
If Knewton were doing more of this, I wouldn’t be as critical.
nearly $8 billion prekindergarten through 12th-grade education technology software market
Hoping for interprovincial collaboration on the development and indexing of educational resources. Lots of potential and maybe a few less hurdles.
purchasable à la carte
How many units of learning per dollar?
no research
In direct opposition with the model for most universities, these days. So that may be the fork in the road. But there are more than two paths.
Universities bundle services like mad
Who came up with such a scheme? A mad scientist? We’re far from Bologna.
perfect storm of bundling
only unbundling health clubs suffer
There might be something about the connection between learning and “health & wellness”.
Unbundling has played out in almost every media industry.
And the shift away from “access to content” is still going on, a decade and a half after Napster. If education is a “content industry” and “content industries” are being disrupted, then education will be disrupted… by becoming even more “industrial”.
consumer choice will inevitably force them to unbundle.
The battle is raging on, but the issue is predetermined.
Yes, my intention was to show the most easily replaced in dark and move it to the least easily replaced.
One linear model, represented in something of a spiral… Agreed that the transformative experience is tough to “disrupt”, but the whole “content delivery” emphasis shows that the disruption isn’t so quick.
customers become less willing to pay
There are a few key cases, here. a) Public Education (much of the planet) b) Parent-Funded Higher Education (US-centric model) c) Corporate Training (emphasis for most learning platforms, these days) d) For-Profit Universities (Apollo Group and such) e) xMOOCs (learning as a startup idea, with freemium models) f) Ad-Supported Apps & Games (Hey! Some of them are “educational”!)
In every industry, the early successful products and services often have an interdependent architecture—meaning that they tend to be proprietary and bundled.
The idea that there’s a “Great Unbundling of (Higher) Education” needs not be restricted to the business side of things, but it’s partly driven by those who perceive education as an “industry”. Producing… graduates?
Series of webinars on the pedagogy of Web annotation.
More consolidation in the LMS market?
course design is more important than the LMS
In all the platform news, we can talk about “learning management” in view of instructional and course design. But maybe it even goes further than design into a variety of practices which aren´t through-designed.
It is possible to achieve a more humane and personal education at scale
Important claim, probably coming from the need for reports which answer the “But does it scale?” question.
The Innovator's Mindset, George Couros
To combat this trend, a broad movement is underway to raise the performance level of American students, driven primarily by the adoption of the Common Core State Standards by most states and the District of Columbia.
mention CCSS
web annotation as close reading web annotation as promoting digital literacies
policies aligned with college- and career-ready academic standards
code for Common Core?
increase the number of college graduates in STEM fields
focus on STEM in tertiary grant making
Active Learning
annotation as active learning
group-based discussions
discussion in the sci classroom v lecture
Black Culture is Cool, So Why Aren't Black People? has received over 20K views. It was written for a freshman writing class at Cornell University taught by Dexter Thomas, Jr..
Standards based learning and “rigorous” testing are not going to be successful in elementary school, unless your goal is to get children to hate education at a very early age.
Which reminds me that many people hold the belief that kids are supposed to hate school to some degree -- especially class time. That's warped, folks.
Elementary school should be about exploration, and exposure to vast amounts of very well-written books. Writing should be an opportunity to capture observations and imagination in a tangible form. Elementary education should include learning about history through storytelling, art, and music.
Actually, this also applies to high school and college.
I usually enjoyed school, and liked all of my grade school teachers and most of my high school teachers. But if I magically became a child again, I would insist on spending most of my day in the public library, or browsing the Web, or doing something of my own choice.
alliance of Moodle service providers that currently collaborate on Moodle-related projects of mutual interest
In open education we have generally focused on the rights that individuals have to remix content, while not providing or using publishing tools that make it easy to fork content in ways that make sense to non-programming communities. Wikity attempts to apply the tools and logic of forking to WordPress, the world's most popular web content platform. Content published in Wikity is easily forked to new sites while maintaining an attribution trail and keeping track of past versions.
Mike Caulfield is working on WordPress software to make Federated Wiki concepts accessible to a wider audience. http://wikity.cc/ is the most recent result.
If we look back to the beginnings of the university in ancient Greece, there was a struggle even then against a new technology – writing. Plato thought this new-fangled device would ‘implant forgetfulness in [men’s] souls’; it would destroy their memory. People in his day were taught to memorise thousands of lines of poetry and long speeches as part of rhetoric, the art of ‘enchanting the soul’. He thought writing was an artificial memory that would eat away at our natural skills.
Memorization of poetry and epic stories is rare in Western culture today. But musicians, comedians, and stage actors work largely by memory What are we missing, if anything? Verbatim memorization of long texts might be nothing more than a waste of brain power. Or if memorization is worthwhile, then books and computers can be used toward that goal, with advantages over oral transmission.
Tertiary education must adapt to the technological changes that are occurring at the moment, from the way that courses are written and delivered to the way that students are assessed. This is not just because we will ‘lose’ students, but because what we teach will become irrelevant.
It’s a useful term if you work in marketing, PR or business development – but I think academics and media students should be more critical. The idea of Media Studies 2.0 is quite funny; is that where the students collaboratively write the course material and give the lectures to each other? Love it.
The goal of education is for the educator to become less and less needed for learners to learn.
The reverse of the typical “goal displacement”. Instead of focusing on ensuring our continued employment as “instructors”, we want to make sure learning happens. Deep down, we know we’ll find ways to work, no matter what happens. The comparison with health can be interesting. If doctors had an incentive to keep people sick, society wouldn’t benefit much. Allegedly, Chinese healthcare provides incentives for doctors to help people stay healthy. Sounds like it’d make sense, somehow. Yet education and health are both treated like industries. We produce graduates, future employees, etc. Doctors produce people who fit a pattern of what it means to be healthy in a given social context. There’s even a factory-chain metaphor used when some people apply “lean management” to hospitals or colleges. Not that the problem is with the management philosophy itself. But focusing so much on resource allocation blinds us from a deep reality: as we are getting healthier and more “learned”, roles are shifting.
jupyterhub Multi-user notebook for organizations with plugglable authentication and scalability. Documentation | Repo
An asset for education. Using notebooks in the classroom.
Among the most useful summaries I have found for Linked Data, generally, and in relationship to libraries, specifically. After first reading it, got to hear of the acronym LODLAM: “Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums”. Been finding uses for this tag, in no small part because it gets people to think about the connections between diverse knowledge-focused institutions, places where knowledge is constructed. Somewhat surprised academia, universities, colleges, institutes, or educational organisations like schools aren’t explicitly tied to those others. In fact, it’s quite remarkable that education tends to drive much development in #OpenData, as opposed to municipal or federal governments, for instance. But it’s still very interesting to think about Libraries and Museums as moving from a focus on (a Web of) documents to a focus on (a Web of) data.
Tools like Hypothesis are the future of education.
Let’s imagine that future. What else could [h] do, if we were to make a wishlist?
Encouraging students to curate their own content
Learners already create and curate a lot of “content”. Let’s encourage them to do more with it, even if they keep it somewhat closed. Much of it doesn’t have to be so high-minded, as even forum posts can do a lot to the learning process. “Open Education” isn’t merely about content and a lot of work in the 5Rs can be done in learning communities.
if free textbooks or OER offer learners free access to good quality knowledge
Big “if”. And it’s one of those cases where defining those terms (“access”, “knowledge”, “free”, “good quality”, even “learners”…) is important but risky. We don’t want sterile debates, but we need to acknowledge that we may not be talking about the same things.
Some practitioners of open education have been dismayed at the recent emphasis on "free textbooks", which implies that cost-cutting is the main goal of openness. But it should not be forgotten that for many teachers and students, open textbooks provide an introduction to broader open practices.
The limitations of access alone: Moving towards open processes in education technology
Canada is unique in the world in that it is the only country whose national government has no authority in education;
Though it may be taken for granted by actors in the sphere of learning in Canada, this factoid can have a large impact in terms of “Canadian Exceptionalism”.
How do you aid recent high school graduates while at the same time dealing with working adults who are coming back to school?
Used to be the core model for Quebec’s Cegep system, a mix of high school graduates and “non-traditionals” (especially divorcées going “back to school”).
open access
Not really what we tend to mean by “open access” in academia, but closer to “open education” than one might assume. It can be less about the cost of textbooks than about inclusion. And diversity.
Non-Traditional Students: The New Majority
Education, she sure is changing.
Turtle blocks
Open Education Handbook 2014
All about open education
creation of an OER culture among faculty
Pretty much what we’re trying to enable. Culture change is organic, but there are ways to empower those actors who are pushing things in an appropriate direction, in terms of Open Education.
While the thinkers are arguing, textbook publishers are acting. With their traditional business models under pressure, they’ve begun to reinvent themselves as educational technology companies. They’re selling schools and colleges on a new generation of digital courseware—ALEKS is just one example—that takes on much of the work that teachers used to do. The software isn’t meant to replace teachers, they insist. Rather, it’s meant to free them to focus on the sort of high-level, conceptual instruction that only a human can provide.
Justin Reich argues in a blog post for Education Week, computers “are good at assessing the kinds of things—quantitative things, computational things—that computers are good at doing. Which is to say that they are good at assessing things that we no longer need humans to do anymore.” The implication is that adaptive software might prove effective at training children to pass standardized tests. But it won’t teach them the underlying skills that they’ll need to tackle complex, real-world problems. And it won’t prepare them for a future in which rote jobs are increasingly automated.
But the collaboration between university and for-profit startup raised some troubling questions about just who owned all the data that flowed from students’ use of the software—and what they might ultimately do with it. Knewton’s Ferreira says he envisions a future in which students’ educational records added up to much more than a series of letter grades that make up traditional transcripts. By tracking everything they read, every problem they solve, every concept they master, Knewton could compile a “psychometric profile” on each student that includes not only what she learned but how readily she learned it, and at what sorts of problem-solving she struggled and exceled. That sort of data could be of great interest to admission committees and employers. It could also, in theory, erode the privacy that has traditionally surrounded young people’s schoolwork.
“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”
They found that, more than any particular type of activity, achieving flow was determined by the mix of challenge and support teachers provide: Engagement was high when students were appropriately challenged by complex goals and high teacher expectations but also supported through positive interactions with their teacher.
They found that students were most engaged in school while taking tests, doing individual work, and doing group work, and less so when listening to lectures or watching videos. In addition, the students were most engaged and reported being in a better mood when they felt that their activities were under their own control and relevant to their lives. The researchers conclude that teachers can encourage more flow in their classrooms through lessons that offer choice, are connected to students’ goals, and provide both challenges and opportunities for success that are appropriate to students’ level of skill.
But one place where we might not find too much flow these days, sadly, is in American schools. For years, the learning conditions in classrooms have been practically antithetical to the conditions people need to achieve flow and all the benefits that come with it. Especially in the era of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing, schools have often favored regimentation over self-directed learning, making it harder for students to get deeply engaged with topics that interest them. Paradoxically, these trends might be undermining the kind of student achievement they were designed to promote, and could even be causing student burnout.
The positive response to the program was almost immediate. “In one classroom, the children went from having the most behavioral problems in the school—as measured by number of visits to the principal’s office—to having zero behavioral problems, after only two to three weeks of instruction,” says Schonert-Reichl.
Mindfulness training in schools seems to have some major benefits.
Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge. Why should students be limited to a textbook that was printed two years ago, and maybe designed 10 years ago, when they could have access to the world's best and most up-to-date textbook?
Can serve well as an OER quote.
He gave the example of digital textbooks which can be updated as an example of how online technology could be better than traditional methods.
Great argument for OERs, no? And Open Annotations, for that matter.
Still, it’s reasonably certain that in the late eleventh century a group of students in Bologna got together and decided to pool their resources—financial, intellectual, and spiritual—in order to learn.
Student-driven beginning for universities.
dissatisfaction with curricula offered by commercial providers
Maybe the model from commercial textbooks isn’t the one we need to follow?
OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.
In other words, Open Educational Resources need not reproduce the textbook model.
taking advantage of free, "open source" textbooks.
Editorialising through scare quotes?
Unlike many of my peers, I do think that there are direct and relevant connections between efforts by progressive students to regulate content Look: I have already said more about trigger warnings than I want to. I will simply note that every trigger warning necessarily contains ideological presumptions and political baggage. Someone I know said “I don’t want to ban American Sniper on campus, but I do want it to carry a trigger warning as war propaganda and Islamaphobia.” That trigger warning preempts the very critical conversation that we should be having about it! It’s a classic “when did you stop beating your wife?” tactic. It’s tautological; it presumes precisely the issue in question. Clint Eastwood, who made the damn movie, called it an antiwar film. I disagree with him; I quite despised it, actually, and for political reasons most of all. But I don’t pretend that my opinion on this question amounts to proof positive. Every trigger warning ever devised makes presumptions about the nature of trauma, the treatment of PTSD, and which kinds of content are potentially offensive. You would think that a bunch of close-reading academics would recognize that.
Flexibility
Some connection with SAMR, unbundling, “open learning”… With diverse learners whose constraints may affect institutions, there’s a fair bit of talk about new(ish) tech-infused approaches to distance education. As with many other things, not much of it is new. But there might be some enabling phenomena. Not sure how gamification fits, here. Sure, open play could allow for a lot of flexibility. But gamification is pretty much the reverse: game mechanics without the open-ended playfulness.
Shared information
The “social”, with an embedded emphasis on the data part of knowledge building and a nod to solidarity. Cloud computing does go well with collaboration and spelling out the difference can help lift some confusion.
Not usually fond of these listicles, but the classification makes sense.
So, rather than an exploration of a work in which instructor and student collaborate on meaning-making, Education Genius maintains a hierarchical divide between teacher and learner.
I wonder if this stems from the misguided assumptions of the MOOC, that education can be distributed en masse rather than requiring careful collaboration and community management.
Hm… Awkward business model.
The TLA components align with 4 key concepts: experience tracking, learner profiles, content brokering and understanding, and competency networks.
The Training and Learning Architecture (TLA) encompasses a set of standardized Web service specifications and Open Source Software (OSS) designed to create a rich environment for connected training and learning.
The student account option provides a greater privacy for the user
How exactly? No associated email? Limited visibility?
Teacher Console, where the teacher can create and manage student accounts, with student email addresses being optional)
2 things of import here:
1.) teachers need to be able to create student account easily.
doing so by listing a bunch of email addresses seems a first step.
being able to sync with lists of students in school/LMS databases would be another feature down the road.
2.) signing students up without email addresses would cover some concerns about privacy of student data schools have.
what labor, whose labor is saved, is replaced in this, an age of economic precarity, adjunct-ification, anti-unionism, automation?
So glad we are talking about labor here, and the costs of digital labor. This ties into such a robust body of work by Gina Neff and others. And the connection to education can definitely be distilled into OLPC - see Anita Chan and forthcoming work by Morgan Ames
“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”
this is fascinating to me - i had no idea of his connections with education. Makes me wonder about Tesla's thoughts on education now. And how he'd feel about filmstrips, which are in essence super cheap motion pictures.
All available evidence suggests that over 60% of new Ph.D.s in science in the United States will not have careers in academic research, yet graduate training in science has followed the same basic format for almost 100 years, heavily focused on producing academic researchers.
Would be nice to be able to track down this reference, because this is a rather startling statistic. Although I suppose that in any highly competitive field, e.g., acting, sports, the percentages of those actually pursuing what they were trained for might be even lower?
the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free
I read this paragraph three times, blinking back tears. Moments like this get collected by many (not all) of our students. It's amazing to ask them, to give them space -- perhaps a little information -- to tell their own memories of these weeks. There's something here for curriculum, for teasing out the memories of our students over the past years. And asking them what these stories mean to them, and asking them to use writing to remember and to make meaning of these moments. That's how anti-racist education with African-American and Latino youth is different.
Slentz, Kristine
Another author to pay attention to
Krogh, Suzanne
Should find more work by this author
Its fascinating that people find it "counterintuitive" that people are more likely to respect and follow authorities if they are treated with respect and fairness. Where did we get the idea that we should abuse people in order to get them to do what we think they should?
Teachers Know Best is a multi-year research effort to better understand how teachers use digital instructional tools and how these tools can be improved to foster personalized learning.
Important potential partner/collaborator. Here's their site.
Education and culture statutes for the state of Connecticut
to interact and collaborate with others.
This emphasis on collaboration is particularly important in social reading. Through replies, each annotation is actually the beginning of a potential conversation.
Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.
Digital annotation is particularly suited to this type of everyday writing practice.
In a sense, it's more like posting to Facebook or Twitter than writing an essay. But because it is grounded in text, it encourages more thoughtfulness.
At the same time, if students are regularly annotating using an application like hypothes.is, then they will surely exceed the word count usually required in a five page essay. Annotation projects might be seen as pre-writing--a collaborative drafting space for ideas and language to be developed later in formal papers--or it might be seen as an end in itself.
through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
This is essential to the pedagogy of annotation as well. The first step must be to identify an appropriate selection of text from a document. The annotation itself is the space for analysis.
Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources,
Students using an annotation application like hypothes.is can literally map their research on a topic in tagged annotations on sources from across the Internet.
The focus on "decoding" should send shivers down the spine of every English teacher who has ever had a student demand they just tell them what the poem means.
I think Billy Collins captures this tortuous pedagogy well in "Intro to Poetry":
But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope<br> and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose<br> to find out what it really means.
he greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.
Annotation would seem to have a role to play here.
I first discovered the power of collaborative annotation
Collins actually imagines a moment of shared marginalia in his poem. In a copy of A Catcher in the Rye that he borrows from a library as a boy, he finds the following: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” The young Collins imagines the note to be written by a beautiful girl and feels himself in a sense falling in love with that other reader. Though we need not develop a dating service out of the modern technologies that allow for social reading, we can at least see the humanity that can be shared in the margin of a digital page: the teachable moments, the conversations that might occur. We have glimpsed such moments on other social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I argue they lack the depth of annotation, which brings together text, comment, and now, readers.
Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.
Again, the hypothes.is application allows for this kind of intertextual analysis to be activated and visualized in powerful ways. Students can literally link between related themes or moments in various texts studied.
words and phrases
Digital annotation powerfully visualizes this process, as the application allows the user to isolate a particular word or phrase, and then create a comment specifically on that piece of textual evidence.
PRINT THIS PAGE
No, annotate this page!
including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
The possibilities of digital writing, given the WYSIWYG interface above, allow for students to integrate a variety of media into their own annotation compositions. Moreover, this use of media is not simply illustrative but as an integral part of the overall argument.
Read closely
Close reading is a major emphasis of the Common Core Standards, though most English teachers since New Critic I.A. Richards would probably agree that is it essential to any humanities curriculum. As the "Introduction" to the ELA section states:
Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying great works of literature.
Digital annotation, though, is close reading 2.0. The major activity of a service like hypothes.is is "annotation," the highlighting and noting of words, phrases, and sentences, which demands that students keep their thinking and writing "close" to the text and its evidence.
Moreover, because digital annotation has the potential to be collaborative. It links this mandate for close reading with later calls in the Standards for collaboration. I like to think of hypothes.is as a "A Social Network for Close Reading." Could we make students obsess with annotations on the web like they obsess with Facebook and Twitter posts?...
If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears. To solve the problem of college completion, you first need to get inside the mind of a college student.
How do you get inside the mind of a college student?
For our purposes as educators, Hypothesis is an easy-to-use tool for collaboratively studying web resources.
SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle. FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO BERNARDO Who's there? FRANCISCO Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.
This has to be one of the most intense opening scenes in all of literature. We are immediately thrown into a moment of panic as each guard responds wearily to the other's approach. In general these opening lines set the tone of the play to be one of apprehension.
Mission: Build an entry level (under $500) EDM machine for making carbide/HSS tooling and/or lead screws.
DrugScience (formerly Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs)
The computer science taught in colleges still focusses more on theory than on commercial application; the business of teaching practical coding skills has the whiff of trade school. So-called coding “boot camps,” such as General Assembly, founded in 2010, are trying to fill the gap, teaching crash courses in how to design Web sites and write code. But Jake Schwartz, the co-founder and C.E.O. of General Assembly, told me, “There’s simply not enough senior people in the system.”
Britain’s Coalition government is rushing through an anti-terrorism bill that would require universities to take action to stop students and staff from being drawn into terrorist activity. According to Home Secretary Theresa May, this would require higher education institutions to ban extremists from speaking on campus.
That seems all kinds of problematic, to me. The government really should not be telling universities what speech to allow on their campuses. That's antithetical to liberal education, as far as I can tell.
If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.
The federal government already spends enough on student aid to cover tuition for every public college student in America. Maybe it's time to try.
How can we start this moving in Congress?
Audrey Watters, hackeducation.com Education APIs: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Looking forward to reading/hearing Audrey Water's thoughts on education APIs.
I wish I had not known the wretched-ness of wasting so much of my youth in this way. I wish that the scholars of rhetoric and dialectic would heed my advice and would sometimes think of the truth and usefulness of their subjects instead of tenaciously and obstinately quarreling over matters which they have naively accepted at a first hearing, without ever giving them proper consideration
Regret. Ever achievable? Too quick to argue. Maybe difference between education and schooling?
the rules which are laid down in the art of oratory could not have been observed, and noted, and reduced to system, if they had not first had their birth in the genius of orators
Early study of a language needed.
For it is because they are eloquent that they exemplify these rules; it is not that they use them in order to be eloquent.
Early education needed?
For even the art of grammar, which teaches correctness of speech, need not be learnt by boys, if they have the advantage of growing up and living among men who speak correctly.
Early education maybe good but not necessarily.
But the other sort of speakers call that force which ought rather to be called violence.
lack of eloquence, art
But there are some things concerning this point that very naturally deceive the unskilful; for division, though it is of great consequence in pleadings, diminishes the appearance of strength; what is rough is imagined more bulky than what is polished; and objects when scattered are thought more numerous than when they are ranged in order.
That mere boys should sit mixed with young men, I do not approve; for though such a man as ought to preside over their studies and conduct may keep even the eldest of his pupils under control, yet the more tender ought to be separate from the more mature, and they should all be kept free, not merely from the guilt of licentiousness, but even from the suspicion of it
Of these professors the morals must first be ascertained, a point of which I proceed to treat in this part of my work, not because I do not think that the same examination is to be made, and with the utmost care, in regard also to other teachers (as indeed I have shown in the preceding book), but because the very age of the pupils makes attention to the matter still more necessary. 3. For boys are consigned to these professors when almost grown up and continue their studies under them even after they are become men. Greater care must in consequence be adopted with regard to them in order that the purity of the master may secure their more tender years from corruption and that his authority deter their bolder age from licentiousness. 4. Nor is it enough that he give, in himself, an example of the strictest morality, unless he regulate also, by severity of discipline, the conduct of those who come to receive his instructions.
For minds, before they are hardened are more ready to learn, as is proved by the fact that children, within two years after they can fairly pronounce words, speak almost the whole language, though no one incites them to learn; but for how many years does the Latin tongue resist the efforts of our purchased slaves! You may well understand, if you attempt to teach a grown up person to read, that those who do everything in their own art with excellence are not without reason called παιδομαθεῖς (paidomatheis), that is, "instructed from boyhood." 10. The temper of boys is better able to bear labor than that of men, for as neither the falls of children, with which they are so often thrown on the ground, nor their crawling on hands and knees, nor, soon after, constant play and running all day hither and thither, inconvenience their bodies so much as those of adults, because they are of little weight and no burden to themselves, so their minds likewise, I conceive, suffer less from fatigue, because they exert themselves with less effort and do not apply to study by putting any force upon themselves, but merely yield themselves to others to be formed. 11. Moreover, in addition to the other pliancy of that age, they follow their teachers, as it were, with greater confidence and do not set themselves to measure what they have already done. Consideration about labor is as yet unknown to them, and as we ourselves have frequently experienced, toil has less effect upon the powers than thought.
Interesting thought, pliancy of youth