Cell phones have become ubiquitous in the lives of teens today,
The previous sentence says 75% of 12-17 year olds own cellphones; i.e. 25% do not. I think that's short of ubiquitous. More importantly, there are 25% seems like to big a fraction to ignore when designing courses.
assign students to a specific workgroup for the duration of the course
Is this preferable to mixing the groups up? Why?
Try letting your students know what you are doing
Almost always a good strategy.
epeatable online quizzes
This came up in one of the earlier readings (maybe from this book). I'm intending to try it this coming semester.
and programmer
Not all games are computer games!
World of Warcraft has been played for a total combined amount of time of about 5.9 million years to date
I'm looking forward to adding a few more days to this total starting next week in the Games and Sims class.
PUBLIC RUBRICS
I know we're focused on early in the college educational process here, but I worry about what this means for later. My stats final project has a "rubric" that looks roughly like "do something awesome related in some way to what we've learnt". I don't want to tie students into more structure than that.
As they struggle with it (and most do to some extent) I offer more examples of what they might do or how they might think about it, but I want this to come /after/ they've done some thinking for themselves. They may well a have ideas that are much better than anything I could come up for them.
And life isn't especially scaffolded in this way. If we want students to thrive beyond college, we need to let them work without as much direct, explicit, frequent support.
main determinant
Presumably there's a random chance factor as well as intelligence and effort?
grades and point systems are not going away anytime soon
We've been talking about doing so at Marlboro for at least as long as I've been here (14 years) and probably much longer.
This intervention
I like this intervention---very similar situation to one I find myself in often. A similar solution I've (accidentally) found is to have staff members in the class. They tend to have that self-efficacy and are good role-models. This Spring I'll try inviting some past students back too.
o be good at things, to develop bonds with other people, and to make our own choices.
Are these sometimes competing? I wonder if different people weigh the three differently and so need different motivating.
The good news is that, as with any beliefs, it’s possible to modify these dysfunctional thoughts with the right persuasive techniques
This seems an optimistic view of beliefs to me, at least given the restricted context we, as teachers and especially online teachers, have to do the persuasion.
Why did you even get out of bed this morning?
Another advantage to online learning: no need to get out of bed. (Sorry, I'm mostly testing out the annotating tool here.)