למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

In an award-winning study of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Dr. Leana found that in the schools where teachers talked to each other the most about their jobs, and where the principals did the best job of staying in touch with the community, students had noticeably higher reading and math test scores.

Even more significant was the discovery that these communication networks had a much bigger impact on test scores than the experience or credentials of the staff did.

Given the time constraints teachers work under, augmenting face to face interactions with online modes, making it easier for them to share student work and data, publish the results of their collaborations, etc. is a no brainer.…

It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.

I think we all intuitively know that our relationships at work matter.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

I love wikis. They're easy to create, anybody can update them, they're just fantastic for collaborative projects. In fact, just about anytime 3 or 4 people are going to be working on a web page together, I almost always begin to hear the word "wiki" being whispered.

That being said, more often than not wikis rarely live up to their potential. While anybody can edit them, generally only the original author does. The ease with which they can do so is still a boon and may justify the use of a wiki anyway, but there are usually other tools that would work just as well.

תוויות: ויקי

As participatory media tools evolve (Twitter, Ning, UStream), concerns about where blogs fit, if at all, weigh heavily on my mind. Thoughts?

My concern has everything to do with exploring whether the edublog community is holding up its end of the collaborative bargain to use blogs as a collaborative tool for the betterment of education.

When I invite educators to keep a blog, I certainly do not exhort them to change the world. Such a goal is arrogant. Rather, I hope that through their own blogging and personal transformation, they will increasingly become agents of transformation. The burgeoning changes, the transformation that results from unleashing the creative power of educators previously muzzled throughout the years could bring about a change greater than what well-meaning societal change advocates might imagine.

I hope it's pretty clear that there is no such thing as "one" edublogosphere. I used to think that perhaps there was - probably before I started blogging in 2005 - but there're too many of "us" and so it becomes more than impossible to keep track of it all.

One stance I'd urge folks to consider, if they haven't already, is that we can and should accept that there's plenty we're going to miss, lots of it quite good, but that we're doing no one a service by trying to read everything or make declarations about the "proper social norms" of the "edublogosphere."

The paradox of "the edublogosphere" is that sometimes, the best thing I can do to build community/group/network capacity is to serve me, myself and I and trust that such self-service will be of use to others.

he (בריטג) buys into the premise that blogging is primarily a conversational medium. If you believe this, you've made a fundamental misunderstanding of blogging. It is a publishing medium. If what you were looking for all along is conversation, you probably will move on to something that suits your needs better.

תוויות: בלוגים, הרהורים, כתיבה

a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

Some thing is very wrong here:

1) an important international expert arrives from overseas to tell us that local knowledge is the most important thing

2) We sit in lecture mode hearing that the lecture is no longer important

3) the limitations of web2.0 apps are not mentioned. There was no context either historical (computer science) or historical, about all the knowledge discovered before computers were invented

תוויות: כנסים

... נכון שמדובר בהתלהבות שאוחזת כל פעם כשנתקלים במשהו חדש.

תוויות: כלים חברתיים, רשתות חברתיות

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced today that every D.C. classroom will have a desktop computer by February under a $4 million technology initiative.

The money will pay for more than 6,300 computers, which will be installed in the city's 141 schools.

the computers will be a big morale boost for her teaching staff and will allow every teacher to keep grades and other records electronically.

You can use them to research your school projects.

Today, we are laying the foundation…. We must use the Internet and other computer applications to help our students compete in the global economy and to enable our teachers to do what they do best, teach and mentor the future leaders of our country.

תוויות: הרהורים, שימוש בבתי ספר

I’m never completely sure that I’m doing the right thing.... Is this [דרך הלמידה שבה הוא דוגל] really the way learning happens? I question myself.... When I see papers like this, I worry that maybe the foundations of the work that I and other people are doing is not well grounded.

The debate:

On one side of this argument are those advocating the hypothesis that people learn best in an unguided or minimally guided environment, generally defined as one in which learners, rather than being presented with essential information, must discover or construct essential information for themselves(e.g., Bruner, 1961; Papert, 1980; Steffe& Gale,1995).

On the other side are those suggesting that novice learners should be provided with direct instructional guidance on the concepts and procedures required by a particular discipline and should not be left to discover those procedures by themselves.

Kirschner ends his response with the remark that you are not debating. That you use a monologue that you control (e.g. on your weblog).

My own belief is that my own style of dialogue and debate is more open than any alternative being proposed. I may control my own website (though I do allow comments both on my main website and on my blog) but I do not control the blogosphere or the wider internet.

Kirshner may not choose to use open and public fora for debate, but it is certainly inappropriate for him to blame me for this choice.

If his understanding of scientific debate and enquiry is that it takes place only in special fora with limited participation and paying audience, then he is in my view mistaken, and he should not blame me for the consequences of his mistake, particularly after my efforts to correct them.

I conduct my side of the debate in the open five days a week for all to see, and if Kirshner has not seen, and does not care to take part, in this debate, then it is his loss, not mine. And I would say that the advantage that I - and any others who take part - gain from this method *is* empirical evidence for the position that non-guided instruction supports learning.

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה

The twist (there always is one) is that they were to write as little of the paper as possible. You see, wholesale plagiarism is discouraged, but weaving together a coherent piece from ten or fifteen different extant sources is tough and an excellent chance to get some first hand experience with reuse.

This kind of re-writing seems to be the academic equivalent of a mix tape... pulling together the greatest hits / greatest quotes from a certain genre or area to produce the desired effect. As I’ve said before, DJs are a metaphor for life...

תוויות: העתקה-הדבקה

A lot of people seem to have trouble realizing the utility of giving older students an inexpensive, robust work computer. I think it is partly because you can't thread the needle between those who say "we can't give them this, they'll play around with it" and those who say "if you don't give them something they can play around with, they won't use it." However, for kids, as adults, if you give them a computer to do their work on, they'll probably do their work on it. Of course, you can't say that because supposedly the whole purpose of giving kids computers is to change what kind of work kids do, so any discussion along these lines is immediately hijacked into an unresolvable discussion of curriculum and pedagogy.

תוויות: שימוש בבתי ספר

Technology has parents and teenagers talking

Sitting round the table together for a meal was once the bedrock of family life. It is now becoming a thing of the past but Woolfson stressed that was not the end of the world.

"Now we have today's high-tech family where family communication takes place by email, internet, webcam and mobile phone as well as face-to-face of course," he said.

a study of how family communication has evolved

was an unscientific survey of around 1000 people. It was done solely for PR purposes and attracted a lot of publicity

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, מידענות, סלולארי

תוויות: הרהורים, סטנדרטים

a major crisis in our classrooms: that educators who are trying to improve students’ media literacy are being hampered by their own illiteracy when it comes to copyright and fair use.

many educators lack a key media literacy skill - the ability to articulate their rights to use unlicensed works in the course of their media literacy teachings.

[T]eachers face conflicting information about their rights, and their students’ rights, to quote copyrighted material. They also confront complex, restrictive copyright policies in their own institutions. As a result, teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms.

תוויות: זכויות יוצרים

E-learning gurus want to exploit their students' passion for the new generation of interactive online communication tools - collectively known as web 2.0 - to deliver academic content. Not content with podcasting mini-lectures to students' mobile phones and i-Pods, they are hijacking the internet telephone system, Skype, and invading FaceBook.

a research exercise carried out by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), called the Learner Experience Project, has just revealed, amazingly, that students want to be left alone. Their message to the trendy academics is: "Get out of MySpace!"

are confident and competent IT users, but they are too often unaware of how they could apply their skills to enhance their studies.

תוויות: כלים חברתיים, רשתות חברתיות, שימוש בבתי ספר

this overwhelming information environment requires us to be able to distinguish information, to make decisions on what information to use and what to ignore.

Therefore, it is no longer enough to simply be able to write a coherent paragraph. We must be able to express ourselves compellingly, so that our information will compete for the attention of our audiences.

a depiction of the network, red in tooth and claw, as individual nodes compete with each other for more and more connections.

Then there is the other way, where the node processes information and communicates, not with reference to the competition, but rather, with reference to its own nature, striving to be the best of whatever type of node it is and letting the connection chips fall where they may. This sort of node uses connections, not as some sort of weapon, but in a spirit of cooperation, linking and sharing as an exchange of mutual value.

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה

attested to the exasperation of countless teachers and professors in the computer era. Their perpetual war of attrition with defiantly inattentive students has escalated from the quaint pursuits of pigtail-pulling, spitball-lobbing and notebook-doodling to a high-tech arsenal of laptops, cellphones, BlackBerries and the like.

The poor schoolmarm or master, required to provide a certain amount of value for your child’s entertainment dollar, now must compete with texting, instant-messaging, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Addictinggames.com and other poxes on pedagogy.

The baby boomers seem to see technology as information and communication. Their offspring and the emerging generation seem to see the same devices as entertainment and socializing.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, סלולארי, שימוש בבתי ספר

שלא כמו רשתות אחרות, הרשתות החברתיות מאבדות מערכן כשהן מגיעות לגודל מסוים.

The presumption in the design of most networks is that the value of the network increases with the number of nodes in the network....

It is therefore tempting to suggest that a similar sort of thing holds for members of the network, that the value of the network is increased the more connections a person has to the network. This isn't the case.

Each connection produces value to the person. But the relative utility of the connection - that is, its value compared to the value that has already been received elsewhere - decreases after a certain point has been reached.

תוויות: כלים חברתיים, רשתות חברתיות

מהי הסינגולריות של רוח האדם?

תוויות: דיווחים, הרהורים

תוויות: כנסים

SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards.

Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy

תוויות: כנסים

תוויות: כנסים