Overall, I was very skeptical using twitter in class. I never thought it would have such a huge impact on me with my education. 

TweetDeck offers a convenient way to look at twitter by letting you view multiple timelines (i.e. hashtags) on one screen.

Now, sitting here a semester later I could have never imagined the profound effect that twitter would have on my education.

the need for learning contexts that bring together in-school and out-of-school learning and activity.

provide social supports for learning through social media and online affinity groups,

I now see the world a bit differently, and find myself constantly connecting everything I do/ come across.

Why? because it’s not information that was dumped on me. It’s not information that I was forced to regurgitate. It’s information that I voluntarily sought out and connect with my personal interests.

I was linking the Biology to my personal life which was my inspiration and in doing this I found more links (a genetic link) that I continued to explore even further in my next post.

I’m sure you can only imagine my surprise when I logged into the course to discover my first assignment was to set up a blog and twitter.

Teach your students how to edit Wikipedia articles. By adding new content, revising existing content, adding citations, or adding images, students can (with the support of the Wiki Education Foundation[20]) make direct contributions to one of the most popular public repositories for information.

OERs are licensed with open licenses, which reflects not just a commitment to access in terms of the cost of knowledge, but also access in terms of the creation of knowledge.

This is precisely why the push to reduce the high cost of textbooks that has been the cornerstone of the OER movement has been a wake-up call for many of us who may not always have understood what we could do to directly impact the affordability of a college degree.

he postulated not only that OERs offer a free alternative to high-priced commercial textbooks, but also that the open license would allow students (and teaching faculty) to contribute to the knowledge commons, not just consume from it, in meaningful and lasting ways

Because printed, copyright-protected learning materials are not easily (or legally) revised and remixed, it is unthinkable that we might simply start taking books apart in order to assemble exactly what we want and exactly what our students need.

Clearly, the Internet has empowered us to copy and share with an efficiency never before known or imagined.

“Open educational resources” (or OER) have become a widely discussed topic in recent years

In the case of interdisciplinary studies, an attitudinal barrier would be a scholar or researcher who has no interest in collaborating with other disciplines or people.

Society needs people to be masters in specific areas because they contribute to the understanding of the world at large.

The interconnected of life is so complex and massive that it almost seems counterintuitive to teach students single disciplines, completely separated from one another.

They develop these skills because there is no predetermined curriculum waiting for them when they start their first day of college:

. Education is about more than passing a test or being accepted to the “right” school, it’s about self-discovery and personal growth as an individual.

If students are not engaged with a subject because they believe it’s irrelevant, no amount of force will change their minds, or if they do change their minds, the decision comes from outside, not from within.

they may leave school with an incomplete or inconclusive education.

He believed that a student, by age eighteen, was old enough to select his own courses and pursue his own imagination

Until the industrial revolution, education was dominated by religion and classical texts, exploring questions of morality and a higher truth

Interdisciplinary studies, as a concept, would not be possible without the foundational structure of disciplinary studies.

This was weird to think of how they are able to still make a social connection when in competition.

Already we see much collaboration in medicine between researchers and doctors, but how much of it is multidisciplinary, rather than interdisciplinary as it should be?

These universities offered a basic liberal arts degree to educate mostly ministers. Most universities were strictly religious and only accepted students within that particular religion.

gave a speech stating that there is no best method or focus for learning, therefore Harvard will have them all.

The University of Al-Karaouine in Morocco, Africa is the oldest continuously operating, degree-granting university in the world.

 The elder would mentor and guide the adolescent, but it was a one-on-one basis.  

As time progressed, universities began to focus their efforts on religion and eventually evolved to where we are today.

interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory.

We need to reconceptualize our model of disciplinary growth and specialization, adopting a more organic model that accounts for the intricate links among the many specializations.

In some ways, epistemology explains the why of a discipline: why it focuses on certain content and why it chooses the methods that it chooses.

Sometimes a discipline’s methods are referred to as methodology.

we may need to break the question up into parts and look at study time, social life, living away from home, economic issues, mental health, oppression, and more. Studying these parts will help us get a sense of the overall reasons for the problem.

since breaking a problem or concept down may help us see the different disciplines that are involved, which will then allow us to organize our research approach.

the number of disciplines involved, the “distance” between them, the novelty and creativity involved in combining the disciplinary elements, and their degree of integration.

distinctive flavor of each is no longer recognizable

A Disciplinary Community grows when practitioners in a common discipline engage in work together. Disciplinary communities might:

“Interdisciplinarity” is more like a fruit smoothie, where the disciplines are blended together–integrated– to create something new.

Interdisciplinarity: Incorporates several fields of study to allow collaboration among diverse disciplines to either specify or broaden students’ education, to gain understanding, and/or to problem solve.

Unfortunately generalists are not held in high regard on campus or in our society unless they are big names, or else because they became generalists after first earning credibility as specialists.

Clearly we have to re-evaluate our entire system of education for what it is: an 18- year learning continuum that prepares citizens for a life of learning. We must rid it of unnecessary and wasteful duplication, and create coherence and integrity in our curricula.

Unfortunately, many of those student workers say that holding a job hurts their grades, as well as limits their choice of courses.

We must reform higher education to reconstruct the unity and value of knowledge.

Colleges are becoming academic superstores,

“very important” for them to find work that “will make a positive difference in people’s lives.”

For most students, college is a time for self-discovery, for developing passionate interests, and for trying to weave them into a meaningful career.

the same process; this study has me standing alone and in this case, that isn’t a bad thing.

Because at the end of the day, your opinion and your thoughts matter, and you need to make those important to you before they are important to anyone else.

In today’s world one of the top aspects an employer will look for when hiring an individual, is creativity

majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies has given me the confidence to create something of my own that may not be out there yet.

It makes sense when students find ownership in what they choose to create, how they put it online, and how it engages a broader audience.

public assignments tap into fears of public embarrassment.

’ How often do traditional ‘assignments’ misrepresent student interests, passion, and rigor?

“To own one’s domain gives students an understanding of how Web technologies work. It puts them in a much better position to control their work, their data, their identity online.”

To get there, students must be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives

To get there, students must be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives

They would play with wikis and blogs; they would tinker and begin to assemble a platform to support their publishing, their archiving, their importing and exporting, their internal and external information connections.

Students would have the convenience of one-stop, single-sign-on activities, from registering for classes to participating in online discussion to seeing grades mere seconds after they were posted.

progress means looping back to earlier ideas whose vitality and importance were unrecognized or underexplored at the time, and bringing those ideas back into play in a new context.

progress means looping back to earlier ideas whose vitality and importance were unrecognized or underexplored at the time, and bringing those ideas back into play in a new context.

While some schools are turning to social media monitoring firms to keep an eye on students online, rarely do schools give students the opportunity to demonstrate the good work that they do publicly.

in turn they begin to have an understanding of the technologies that underpin the Web, including how their work and their data circulate there.

the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.

It isn’t simply a blog or a bit of Web space and storage at the school’s dot-edu, but their own domain – the dot com (or dot net, etc) of the student’s choosing.

But almost all arguments about student privacy, whether those calling for more restrictions or fewer, fail to give students themselves a voice, let alone some assistance in deciding what to share online.