Project Based Learning | BIE. Project-Based Learning. Project Based Learning. Maker High: Why Every School Should Be a Maker Faire. The prevailing problem with American high schools is boredom. Actually, that’s just a symptom of alienation, irrelevance, and infantilization. A disconnected string of classes—some too hard, some too easy—appears to most teens to have little to do with life. And, they are right. But there is a solution, or at least some inspiration at “Maker Faire” running this weekend in San Mateo. It’s a “festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement.” What if, instead of going to class, students planted a garden, started a business, conducted an experiment, produced a video, or wrote a book?
“What about stuff they need to learn to produce high quality products?” That’s how blended learning should work—a combination of personal digital learning and community connected, team-based, production-focused, authentic, engaging, and relevant activities. Big Picture and Edvisions are school networks closest to maker philosophy. Top Sites Blog - Discover Best Websites and Blogs. TEDEducation. An online collaborator’s handbook: What it takes to get a group working online. : Indaba. I’d like to have a conversation about how online collaboration works, based on some things we learned while building the Indaba fieldwork platform, a tool for organizations that use distributed teams to collect data or write reports.
Over the last ten years I have used, loved and hated online collaboration tools with teams in more than 100 countries. It’s not magic. Online collaboration is simply getting stuff done over the Internet, and online collaboration tools, all of them, have some means of addressing three functions: relationship management, knowledge management, and project management. Put more simply: keeping people connected, getting them the stuff they need, and sorting out what to do next. But before I can talk about that, I need to vent a little. Prologue: Why you hate your online collaboration tools. This is a picture of Frank Lloyd Wright. This is a picture of a hammer. This is a picture of Fallingwater, a landmark in modern architecture. Goals and invitations Who’s doing what? 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.
Course Hero | Study Guides, Lecture Notes, Flashcards, Practice Exams, Lecture Videos | The best way to expand your education. Over 2,000 tools for learning -C4LPT. Over 2,000 tools for learning -C4LPT. 7 Things To Avoid in Online Training Video Design. Jeremy Vest knows video design. Having been a teacher, marketer, art director, author and instructional designer, his company xTrain are leaders in online video training having won Emmys for incorporating award winning television production with software-based training. The following is a summary of his slightly longer post that he brought to my attention today – thanks!
7 Sins of Online Video Instructional Design Not connected to learners When creating video training, have the SME address the camera, do not just show screen shots. The more impersonal you make your training videos, the less likely your learners will feel a connection to the SME. Poor Planning before the shoot If you are using a SME, make sure they are prepared for the day of the shoot. Jeremy Vest is the CLO of Splash Media, author of Exploring Web Design, President and Founder of xTrain. Related Posts: Create Tutorials in One Click on Tildee !
The Open University. Top 40 Useful Sites To Learn New Skills. How to Mind Map. Great HDR Photography by Ásmundur Þorkelsson. Few times people have been asking me to dig around and post some HDR (High dynamic range) photos for inspiration, something that I would think is nice, so I thought to my self who is better talk about than Ásmundur Þorkelsson I’ve been following him for quite some time now and I must say am really impressed with all his work not just the HDR photography, OK enough talking and let’s get down to business by displaying some but not all of his HDR work, if you want to get in touch with Asmundur you can just click on his name and it’ll take you right to his profile, so here it goes … © All rights reserved by asmundur.
The World as Your Campus: Designing a General Ed Curriculum for Life. One of the biggest hurdles people face when embarking on a journey of self-education is deciding what to learn. There are so many possibilities that it’s difficult to narrow down the options. If you still don’t know what you want to focus your self-studies on, may I suggest you take a bit of time for “general education.” In college, we think of general education as the series of courses one must take to get a broad understanding of academics. Classes like English, math, and history, help students of all disciplines share a common base of knowledge. In the “world campus,” a general education is anything that helps you explore your own interests and share a common understanding with humanity.
An inspiring essay from William Upski Wimsatt, published in Utne Reader, explores one self-educator’s personal curriculum: “I…enrolled as a student at the University of Planet Earth, the world’s oldest and largest educational institution. Here’s my curriculum: Live in a different city every year. The American Scholar: A Declaration of Intellectual Independence. “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.
He must be a university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson Just 61 years after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, Ralph Waldo Emerson offered a declaration of his own urging Americans to stop being “parrot[s] of other men’s thinking.” The groundbreaking speech, later titled The American Scholar, is a treasure trove of autodidactic insight.
In his speech, Emerson draws attention to three ways that people can become independent thinkers and free themselves from over-reliance upon the ideas of others. Study the Past. The Joy of Practical Learning…What Can You DO? An unfortunate number of people graduate from high school or college with a lot of knowledge and no practical ability. I’m a firm believer that practical learning (i.e. the ability to do something) is just as important as academic learning (i.e. knowledge about something). Practical learning encompasses anything that helps someone master a skill or ability.
It includes skills that are sometimes considered drudge work…cooking, painting, fixing a car. As well as talents that are more recreational…skiing, drawing, dancing. Why Practical Learning? While skill-based learning comes naturally to some, many people are more comfortable with academic learning. When I graduated college, I loved reading and thinking. Over the next few years, I set aside time to escape from the written word and focus my energy developing skills. If you’re more of a thinker than a do-er, it may be difficult to focus on practical learning.
There is great satisfaction in being able to accomplish something. Can you: How to Learn on Your Own: Creating an Independent Scholar Resource Plan. One of the most challenging and gratifying parts of learning alone is the opportunity to search for and select your own learning material. Students in traditional classrooms usually don’t get to decide how they are going to master course content. Instructors decide for them in the form of textbook selection, quizzes, tests, group projects, etc. As an independent learner, you can make your study time more effective by using only the learning methods that work for you. A resource plan is a document used to brainstorm the learning material you can use when you begin your studies. Before you write a step-by-step schedule, think of every resource that is available to you (such as books, websites, knowledgeable people, etc). Narrow down the most useful resources and include them in your resource plan. This article will show you how to create a resource plan to use in your independent studies.
Step 1: Set a Goal The first step to creating a resource plan is to decide on a single goal. Motivation and Self Improvement. The Liberal Arts as Guideposts in the 21st Century - Commentary. By Nannerl O. Keohane The very broad, capacious form of education that we call the liberal arts is rooted in a specific curriculum in classical and medieval times. But it would be wrong to assume that because it has such ancient roots, this kind of education is outdated, stale, fusty, or irrelevant. In fact, quite the contrary. A liberal-arts education, which Louis Menand defined in The Marketplace of Ideas as "a background mentality, a way of thinking, a kind of intellectual DNA that informs work in every specialized area of inquiry," lends itself particularly well to contemporary high-tech methods of imparting knowledge.
We all wrestle with the challenges of educating students who are used to multitasking, doing their homework while listening to music and texting on their iPhones. For such students, the Web-based facilities of exciting liberal-arts courses are particularly salient. But how can college presidents today best go about making the case for the liberal arts? Nannerl O. Do Hard Things. I have a rather uncommon mantra for my life: Do the hardest thing you can. Uncommon, because I’ve met exceedingly few people who agree with it. In fact, almost everyone suggests the opposite. When I started my MIT Challenge, one of the most common warnings was, “don’t burn yourself out.” Yet, despite taking on bigger projects, I’ve found this mantra to be increasingly valuable.
Building Strength If you lift the heaviest weight you can lift, then you become stronger as a result. A synonym for this kind of strength might be confidence, although that also has implications of irrational self-assessments as well, so I prefer the word strength. When I did my first course for the MIT Challenge, it was stressful. I’d also say I have fewer negative preoccupations during this challenge than before it. What if You Burn Out? Implicit in the mantra is the hardest thing you can do.
Burnout shouldn’t be the goal, but it might be a side-effect. But even in that case, how bad is burnout really? EXTERNAL LINKS. Study Guides: Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking. By Ralph Dumain “Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination. . . ” — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1987), end of section 5 (p. 26) “The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.
I, Chapter 15. “We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. This web site as a whole could be considered essentially a guide to critical thinking (including specimens of erroneous steps along the way). See also my Reason & Society blog, esp. under the rubric “critical thinking”. Developing an Appetite for Hard Ideas. Richard Feynman, professor and Nobel-prize winning physicist purportedly only had an IQ of 125. Smart, but hardly in the rarefied spectrum we normally consider for genius. This trivia is usually brought up to show the ridiculousness of IQ testing. If an obvious genius doesn’t qualify for Mensa, how valid can it be for normal people? After reading Feynman’s memoirs , a different idea struck me. Perhaps genius isn’t best defined by raw intellectual ability. Intelligence as Endurance The two explanations aren’t mutually exclusive.
Despite this, intelligence-as-endurance has empirical support. . Dweck contrasts the two groups of students as fixed-mindset and growth-mindset. In my own experience working with students, I’ve seen how appetite for hard ideas translates to success. Hunger for Hard Ideas When I was a kid, I liked books by Brian Greene . A hunger for hard ideas is a specific subset of curiosity. People who believe in superstitions lack this hunger. Developing Your Appetite. Self Education | Self Learning | Essential Web Sites.
Big lists of free online courses, Web tools, learning games, and other resources for lifelong learners are relatively easy to find, but sites with a serious focus on helping people along the journey of self-education are fewer and farther between. Here are five you may want to bookmark or add to your feed reader. 1. Autodidact Press I mentioned the Autodidact Press in a post I did a while back on the famous self-educated. Its founder, Charles D. Hayes, is one of the Web’s longest standing proponents of lifelong learning and self-education. The resources on the Web site itself are relatively limited, but it is worth signing up for the Self-University Newsletter. 2. I’ve mentioned Jamie Littlefield’s Self Made Scholar at least a couple of times in the Learning Monitor newsletter, and deservedly so. 3.
I only recently came across Wide Awake Minds, which blogger Ryan McCarl describes as a “resource for educators, self-educators, polymaths, and all who love to teach, read, think, and learn.” University of Reddit.
Pearltrees tips.