למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

where is EduBlogging heading and/or is it dead already?

It was a good discussion that talked about how the conversation is changing. That at a point in time we used to actually take time to read and leave comments on blog posts. Now we read, and retweet blog posts. We talked about how Twitter is the new aggregator and is replacing RSS as a way people are getting their information. On this blog for example, I have more readers that come via Twitter then I do via the RSS feed.

Yes, the conversations are changing. But in the end we’re just communicating with different tools. Whether it’s paint drawings on walls in a cave or quick 140 character Twitter messages. We have an internal need to communicate and that’s the fundamental skill we need to be teaching students.

תוויות: בלוגים, הרהורים, כלי ווב 2.0

Blogs are author-centric in a world that’s increasingly about relationships. Blogs are slanted toward me, me, me, me, me; the net is inexorably moving to us, us, us, us, us. Dialog trumps monolog.

The blog space is the one I truly own, and as much as I agree there is a shift to a more of an “us” space, you cannot have worthwhile “us” with people who have a strong individuality.

The demise of blogging in the long form, the reflection, the working out of ideas like working dough, is a loss.

תוויות: בלוגים

Just distractions; none of it remotely as interesting as what he’s got to say in the main stream of text.

For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To start with, anything that matters isn’t just written, it’s usually rewritten repeatedly (and more important, condensed). Plus, it has hyperlinks. Plus, it’s smaller and cheaper to ship around. Plus, it’s searchable. Plus, it works on more devices. (I acknowledge that only the first of these is fundamental; but that alone would be enough).

תוויות: בלוגים, טקסט, כתיבה

Yet XO laptops were added (to) this rigid system without extensive teacher training or tight integration into the national curriculum. So as the students progressed past the teachers in computing acumen, the teachers quickly felt threatened by this technology, and unable to control it, felt undermined by it, especially in the classroom.

From a Constructionist perspective, the laptops are a great success - children are self-directing their learning around the teachers. Yet from the teachers' and parents' perspective, that's play, not studying.

... if you don't include the teachers, the project will fail.

תוויות: הטמעה

The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

She examines the varieties of textual practices “deployed by early modern scholars” in response to a perceived “overabundance of books” during the period between 1550 and 1700 and she argues that historians have paid disproportionate attention to what she calls “literary reading” and not enough to other modes of encountering and engaging textual materials ranging from browsing and skimming to buying and collecting to annotating, cutting and pasting, and dog-earing. For Blair these other modes of acting upon texts are important in all historical moments, but in situations where readers feel themselves overwhelmed by information, they become all that much more crucial and telling.

תוויות: אוריינויות, הרהורים, מידענות, קריאה

Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.

Why is it that with young people reading and writing more words than ever before in human history, we find no gains in reading and writing scores?

Why ask whether writing on the Internet makes you a better academic writer? Why not ask whether academic writing makes you a better user of social media? I suppose it is understandable that academics might want to value a particular kind of academic writing, but in the end that valuation is a demonstration of thinking that is no less sloppy than the poor thinking habits of which they accuse students.

The best I think we can say is what should be fairly obvious. The more we write and the greater variety of genres in which we write, the better prepared we will be to write in a variety of genres in the future.

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה

Feeling powerless over something you care about is one of the toughest situations to encounter, and such situations don’t lessen in adulthood. I remember being surprised in my twenties to discover that adults are basically just like you, only older.

What Shady Side (התיכון שלו) gave me on the day-by-day was an appreciation of the obtuse, the angular, the colorful byplay that gave me more to remember and that challenged me to establish my own identity when so little seemed within my own control. And what it gave me on the bigger picture was a chance to cultivate a passion, and to see that the world wasn’t just me and those who crossed my field of vision. It was us, a bunch of people trying to make sense of things, whether teacher or student, loser or bully. And these labels aren’t doled out, one to a person. Instead they are fluid roles that each of us take on at one time or another.

It’s as if the Bat Signal went up, and the call was answered by NANOG, the North American Network Operators Group, an informal mailing list of nerds, some of whom work for various ISPs. NANOG members diagnosed the issue and promulgated a fix. It’s as if your house were to catch on fire. The bad news is that there’s no fire department. The good news is that some of your neighbors promptly come over with garden hoses and put the fire out, expecting neither payment nor recognition for their help.

My view is that Wikipedia and projects like it belong at the heart of a high school and college education. Instead of turning to a handful of approved sources and paraphrasing them to write a ten-page U.S. History paper that will be viewed and graded only by the teacher – who looks at a stack of papers and anticipates the same bad movie, twenty times – you can be asked to demonstrate a sustained and original contribution to a Wikipedia article on an important topic, having to contend with conflicting sources and others’ arguments, learning to discern and then defend truth amidst chaos – and to refine your own view in light of what you discover. There are few things as devastatingly disarming to others as admitting when you’re wrong.

תוויות: למידה, פני החינוך

תוויות: בלוגים, פרסום אישי

No, no, no, no, no. No.

I am willing to accept the idea that the young generation is used to a different way of interacting with information and with each other and that this may have an impact on what they expect from university. But to claim that their minds work differently? Jeez, Louise!

I remember several years ago, when I was assistant professor at Acadia University, I decided that students could be responsible, so I chose to be flexible about assignment deadlines. Sure, students could still give me their homeworks every week, but they could also rearrange their schedule. Well... I got crap over it... from the students. I am still flexible over the assignments, and I still get unusual drop-out rates. I no longer get bad reviews for it because I no longer tell my students that I am flexible.

They don’t want to have to “interact”, they want to be told what to do. Of course, it is not entirely the result of how they were educated, because it is just plain harder to take charge of your life... but I don’t think Tapscott realizes how our current system relies strongly on student expectations. It is not University management that is resisting to changes... students are just plain not asking for changes. Students want the country-club-like campus with old-school lectures. Even if it is useless, even if it is boring.

Have you ever noticed how “Star Trek Academy” is depicted? Exactly like any current-day school. Zero progress. In the recent Star Trek movie, you even have the large lecture hall.

If you have the technology to fly to the stars, why would you cram 500 students in a classroom for a lecture?

Progress will start happening when scifi movies represent schools differently.

But wait... as a professor, why would I care about how my students do on a 3-hour exam? Does it measure what I care about? Jon Dron said it best: ”So, I have been thinking about what exams taught me:(…) that the most important things in life generally take around three hours to complete.”

We need novelists, NASA engineers, and researchers. People who can work for days, weeks, months, on the same project. What I want from my students is an ability to sit down for hours and days, and work out difficult problems. I see no evidence that training specifically for exams is the right type of training.

תוויות: בלוגים, דיגיטאליות, נוער

אחד הפתרונות הוא שימוש בספרים דיגיטאליים, ואם להתייחס להצהרה של מנכ"ל משרד החינוך, ד"ר שושני מהבוקר, הרי שבתוך ארבע שנים יהיו 60% מספרי הלימוד ספרים דיגיטאליים.

Today our kids get their information from the internet, downloaded onto their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their cell phones ... So why are California's public school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?

Ever since Tony Blair came in and talked about 'education, education, education,' at least £2bn has been invested in learning technology, and if things carry on in the same vein, perhaps 40% of educational resources will be digital in 10 years time.

תוויות: 1:1, דיגיטאליות, נייר

The chairman basically told everyone that we don't need Venetian-blind effects or fancy backdrops. All we need is the information.

עוזר הרמטכ"ל, אלוף משנה ארז וינר, פרסם בחודש שעבר בכתב העת הצבאי "מערכות" מאמר נוקב בגנות השימוש במצגות. ה"פאוור פוינט", כותב וינר, היא "נקודת חוזק שהפכה לתורפה. האמריקאים כבר הגיעו למסקנה שהשימוש במצגות מרדד את הדיונים ופוגע בחשיבה. בצה"ל עדיין מכורים לכלי הזה ומשלמים על כך מחיר יקר".

ככל שהגרפיקה יפה יותר כך רואים במציג מרצה מוכשר יותר. אינני רוצה להיחשב כמי שמאשים את הש"ג אבל לדעתי השימוש במצגות השטיח את רמת הדיונים ואת עומק הלימודים.

תוויות: PPT

I love using the internet. It is very easy and requires no writing.

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה, למידה

The problem is that any web presence that is purely prescribed by a bureaucracy will have no soul or personal 'declaration' and therefore especially for the teenage user, no interest whatsoever.

Its their teenage bedroom, we own the house and we can say there are key thing that need to be in there, but we can only stand back and watch as they decorate it in a manner that they find wonderful, and we may find hideous.

תוויות: פורטפוליו

Tech folks frequently buy in to this Trojan Horse metaphor. Often, we (they?) think that by sneaking computers into classrooms under various auspices (e.g., it's the 21st century, the Internet is Really Important) with the real hope that what will happen is that teachers will embrace notions of constructivism, will become more student-centered and will change our educational system.

It strikes me today that though I'm all for these changes, I don't think that the promise of those changes is the point. I continue to be struck that we in education seem to feel obligated to come up with some Really Good Reason to use computers in schools. So much so that, for example, teachers in schools where every kid has a laptop, lament that they're "only" word processing and using the web. They think that they need to have kids creating movies or doing something that's "not possible" without computers. Otherwise, they're somehow "wasting" the computers.

תוויות: הרהורים, שימוש בבתי ספר

What I discovered was that I was seeing the paper in a new light, because I was now reading from the perspective of a blogger. And some of what Mills has to say rings bells for academics who find themselves reflecting on the relationship between blogging and intellectual work.

set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist’s way of saying: - keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it. In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it directly to various work in progress.

Wright shared several traits with the prototypical blogger—his eccentric range of interests, his resolution "to write down what I see and hear and feel daily," his use of journals to "let off" rants of "indignation," his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the "greater part of the day writing in his room."

His three children have commented to each other how much he would have appreciated the personal computer and, especially, the World Wide Web. Were it not for the frustrations of a command line interface and limited hard drive storage, he might have seen his own book published in his lifetime. He would often say that “Knowledge is like a web or a net: the more you add to it the more you can catch.”

תוויות: בלוגים, הרהורים, פרסום אישי