Road Blocks to Doctoral Success - Innovations. It’s that time of year. Students are scrambling to defend their dissertations so that they can graduate on time. Some students are almost done, printing their dissertations on 100% rag cotton paper. Others, unfortunately, are desperately writing their last chapter, hoping to get it to their committee with enough time for a thorough read. I work with both types of students and everyone in between. Since I became a faculty member in 2000, I have chaired over 35 dissertations. As someone who cherishes my relationships with students, I often write about how to succeed in graduate school. Over the years, I have noticed that some students are their own worst enemies when it comes to success. Some students look for ways to give up—weekly, even daily. Other students tell me they have writers block and they’ll never be able to finish.
Some students are perfectionists and become immobilized when they get fixated on a particular issue. Return to Top. Collaborate or Die: The Future of Education. We are entering the age of collaboration. Web 2.0 has gone mainstream. An entire generation of students is arriving in our schools and universities, for whom Facebook is their most important source of information and communications. Education is facing a tidal wave that threatens to overwhelm traditional pedagogical models and classroom concepts. How effective will lectures be when students learn by grazing on tens or hundreds of information feeds each day? How will they react to printed textbooks, when they believe that every document should be editable, commendable, and infinitely shareable? What is the meaning of the word "classroom" when video and mobile devices transmit the majority of knowledge?
Educators and educational institutions face their greatest challenge since the Industrial Revolution sparked the development of the public education system: Adapting a system whose foundations were laid in the 19th century to serve a 21st-century world. The Rise of Social Media. Social Networking: Learning Theory in Action. Social Networking: Learning Theory in Action There has been a lot of recent debate on the benefits of social networking tools and software in education. While there are good points on either side of the debate, there remains the essential difference in theoretical positioning. Most conventional educational environments are "Objectivist" in nature and highly structured in terms of students progress and choice. Social networking essentially requires a less controlled, user-generated environment, which challenges conventional views of the effective "management" of teaching and learning.
Therefore, can social networking both as an instructional concept and user skill be integrated into the conventional approaches to teaching and learning? Do the skills developed within a social networking environment have value in the more conventional environments of learning? Optimum Production. Social Networking: The Future. Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.”
Read Part I and Part II first. This series is an adaptation of a recent talk Suster gave at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking.” You can watch the video here , or you can scroll quickly through the Powerpoint slides embedded at the bottom of the post or here on DocStoc. Follow him on Twitter @msuster. In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (Foursquare). Is the game over? 1. Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Amazon. Designing for virtual communities in ...
The Coming Shift for Professional Learning Communities and Knowledge Workers. A shift is happening in workplaces across the globe. It is an evolution in the ways people will interact, collaborate, coordinate, and accomplish their work. This evolution, this paradigm shift is based around the social media rich ecosystem of the Internet and all of the emerging technologies that it brings into our lives. Case in point, a recent survey conducted by Acrobat.com with Directions Research Inc. The results detail this coming change.
The survey results indicate that, “an evolution in office workplace culture, including the changing ways white-collar workers are interacting and coordinating their tasks, and how business will be conducted in the social media-rich environment of the 21st century.” The 21st Century Professional has long been described as a “knowledge worker.” Leaders - Young professionals who use a variety of emerging technologies both at work and in their personal lives Professional Learning Communities will soon be filled members of this “shifting demographic.” Building and maintaining an online professional learning community. We’ve all been there. You go to a workshop, excited to have a day away from school and eager to learn new ideas. Throughout the workshop, you explore new resources, see effective strategies being modeled, take notes, and flag pages to refer to once you get back to the classroom.
You leave the workshop on a high, excited about what you’ve learned and rejuvenated from a day of professional learning and dialogue. You have high hopes of making instructional changes and using the new resources with your students, and you can’t wait to share what you’ve learned with the teacher down the hall. The following day, you return to your classroom, put your workshop materials on a shelf for the time being, and pick up where you left off two days ago. PLCs: A lasting impact Even with the best intentions, many teachers never make any real change to their instruction based on what they learn in one-shot workshops. Creating a meaningful online professional learning community Making time Wikispaces Twitter. Social Networking for Innovative Educators. When innovative educator Will Richardson speaks to audiences he often asks how many people belong to social networks (aside from dating sites*)?
About 10% of hands go up depending on the audience. He follows that with how many people teach MySpace or Facebook? Usually no hands are raised. These are good questions and when I’ve been in the audience I put my hand up only half way because while I do have a MySpace account, I don’t really use it at all, so I almost feel like I’m cheating. And, then came Ning… I love Ning and think it is one of the greatest tech tools to come around. Five Reasons Innovative Educators Should Participate in Social Networks 1-Connecting to Digital Natives: Will Richardson is right. 2-Modeling for Digital Natives: As a social network participant innovative educators can share their site and refer to how it affects their learning often with students. 5-Share Your Own Reason: How do you see social networking being used to enhance innovative educating? 7 action steps to improve collaboration - Massi Brand Management. Key elements of success for innovative businesses is the ability to collaborate and do it well.
Sounds pretty easy, as many of us have been part of teams since we were young. So naturally, we assume that successful collaboration can take place in much the same way - gather a group of like minded people, throw them in a room or close proximity - and watch the magic happen. First, the idea of collaboration is to gather people with different knowledge and skills that enables a better, more robust foundation for innovative development.
Gathering likeminded people will most likely lead to a few things - narrow ideation and groupthink. Diversity, while necessary, has its own set of challenges - different ways of working, different language, different expectations and different decision making. The fundamental principals and actions of successful collaboration must address these issues and establish a common platform for success . Are there others that have worked for you? Teaching Screenagers:Screenagers: Making the Connections. "Education has to change. We can't pull kids into learning in school if they are engaged in a different world outside school. " "If you don't know how to use technology in class, you are in trouble. But, of course, technology is a double-edged sword.
You can use it poorly, or you can use it well. " The principals speaking were two of the candidates for the ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award, which will be presented in March at ASCD's Annual Conference in San Francisco. To a person, the candidates talked about effective technology use in their schools. These educators also described such engaging, blended- or low-tech learning projects as making pancakes in science class (an analogy for atom combination); preparing struggling readers to conduct museum tours about Harlem Renaissance artists; organizing honor students to staff a homework café; and dramatizing parodies of Macbeth's famous soliloquy about temptation.
Karen Cator, director of the Office of Education Technology at the U.S. Overcoming Bipolar Thinking. Learning is a continuum of degrees of formality • BY JAY CROSS In the five years since the publication of Informal Learning, I’ve become the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. I didn’t invent the concept. Informal learning is older than civilization. My contribution has been pointing out that overemphasis on formal learning in organizations is dysfunctional, uneconomic, bad business, and not a whole lot of fun. Formal learning is characterized by a curriculum, i.e., content chosen by someone other than the learner. Often, formal learning is delivered to many people at once.
The analogy breaks down because you can ride a bus or a bike, but not both at once. Learning is a continuum of degrees of formality. Permit me to answer the critics of informal learning, usually people who confuse learning and schooling. Question: How do we know that informal learning works? Question: Isn’t informal learning an erosion of discipline and control? Question: What’s the ROI? Dec 10 2010 Trends - Free. An operational attitude towards learning. You've probably heard me say this before, but I am increasingly of the view that the workplace training/learning/L&D (whatever they're called in your organisation) team should be moved out of HR and into Operations.
Why? Well, HR is responsible for looking after people: their payroll, their working conditions, their treatment under employment law, etc. and has no direct accountability in terms of the organisation's business objectives. L&D's job is all about performance, and performance is an operational thing. Our job is to help the organisation meet its business objectives by helping people do their jobs. While L&D remains under the umbrella of HR, it remains okay to take people out of their workspace and put them into a learning space, and then to put them back into their working space again at the end of it. An operational view of learning means that learning needs to be situated in the workspace, because it's part of the job.
In fact, the whole process was a learning process. 5 Strategies for Supporting Bottom-Up Social Media Use. Jane Hart writes an interesting post on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to nurturing social media in organizations, making the excellent point that bottom up support of existing social media activities will work better than imposing social media use from the top down.
What I've been observing in my work with clients, though, is a tendency to use top-down strategies to support bottom-up initiatives, especially in organizations where they're just delving into social media use. For example, one organization with which I've been working identified a project where employees had expressed interest in using Facebook as a strategy for sharing information and connecting with stakeholders. Management rightly concluded that it made sense to experiment with social media by supporting this project. Reading Jane's post it occurred to me that we need to have a better understanding of the questions and strategies that will nurture bottom-up participation in social media. Stephen Downes: The Role of the Educator. How often do we read about the importance of teachers in education? It must be every day, it seems. We are told about "strong empirical evidence that teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student achievement" again and again.
The problem with the educational system, it is argued, is that teachers need to be held accountable. We are told we must fire incompetent teachers. Not just in the United States, but in the UK and elsewhere, the concern is that bad teachers must go. Even here on The Huffington Post, the emphasis is on defining teacher accountability rather than understanding what teachers in the 21st century are supposed to do.
The problem with focusing on the role of the teacher, from my perspective, is that it misses the point. Let me tell you how I know this. Each of these has contributed in one way or another to an overall approach not only to learning online but to learning generally. It's an approach that emphasizes open learning and learner autonomy. Twas the Night Before Social Media. Reflection on a presentation: Social Media and Social Network #SoMe. Earlier this week I gave the following presentation to a groups of first year Accounting and Finance students: Social Media & Networks: How to survive online (or “your [next] employer is watching you”) and was kindly asked by Pauline Randall of Florizel Media to write up a reflective account of the presentation and what kind of impact it had on the students.
You can read my full account on Pauline’s website: Florizel Media – Reflection on a presentation: Social Media and Social Network I hope Pauline doesn’t mind but here is a snippet for you to read, but please read the full reflection using the link above. “What I was not prepared for, when I thought about presenting this, was the students were completely unaware that their activity online could have any bearing on their employability. I also had the event recorded by the Bournemouth University installation of the Echo360 lecture capture system. Click to view recording of the “Social Media and Social Network” Presentation. Your social intranet is where work gets done « Dachis Group Collaboratory. 6 Ways Social Media is Changing Education.
Uncategorized Flickr: ivanpw By Sara Bernard “The fact that we as educators even have to have discussions on whether or not social media is good for schools is sad,” writes Steve Johnson, a teacher and Edutopia guest blogger. “Social media just IS…..it’s life.” He’s right — as of July, there were half a billion active Facebook users alone (not counting other social networking sites), and that number grows daily. To that end, here’s a handful of the ways that social media is infiltrating, influencing, overtaking, and game-changing the educational landscape: Galvanizing students: Social media, with its lightning speed and viral powers, is the perfect tool for activism, and students are no exception.
Defining boundaries: The fine line between personal and professional lives gets stickier when it involves teachers and students. Redefining parent communication: Social media is both opening and altering the lines of communcation between teachers, parents, and students. Related. Education 2.0 ? Social Networking and Education. Think Tank: Fix the workplace, not the workers. Database Error. How willing are companies to take the social media plunge? - Nov. 1, 2010. Harold Jarche ? Network Learning: Working Smarter. Is Your Training Path Full of Traffic Lights (Instead of Roads)?
Going Social. The Value of Social Media to Learning. The Case For Social Media in Schools. Face to Facebook Learning. Shifting perspectives. The catalyst to accelerated learning and performance. Learnativity by Marcia Conner | Enterprise Consulting, Analysis, Speaking and Education. The Evolving Social Organization. 3 ways CEOs can connect with employees using social media. 44 Benefits of Collaborative Learning. Working, learning and playing through Personal Learning Environments.
Collaborative Enterprise - Social Learning Introduction. Using Social Media2. Using Elgg as a Social Learning platform. 8 Reasons to Focus on Informal & Social Learning. Supporting organizational learning with Social Media. Leadership Development in a Learning 2.0 World ? Performance X Design. Training needs to change or risk irrelevance. The Social Employee Manifesto | Smart Data Collective. The Elgg Community. Identifying a collaboration platform. 5 Differences Between Social Media and Social Networking. How to Get Employee Generated Content... (Visual Lounge) Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity - Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd - The Conversation. E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez ? Top 10 Use Cases Enterprise Microsharing Will Help You Get Less Email. Collaboration and Cooperation.
Five Barriers to Effective Learning in Organisations. Where Social Learning Thrives. Micro-Blogging is Good for Leadership, Good for Your Culture. A framework for social learning in the enterprise. Encourage the Use of Social Media at Work - Management Tip of the Day - February 3, 2010. » Social Networking as a Learning Tool Robin Talkowski’s Blog: Reading & Technology. Social Media in Learning examples. 85+ Resources: Educator Guide for Integrating Social Media.
Twitter4pd.wikispaces. Connecting and Sharing. Article - Adoption of Real-time Collaboration Tools Continues to Grow Among Oil & Gas Professionals. How to Make the Most of Your Social Media Time: Online Collaboration « Social Media as an internal tool - The Collaboration Soapbox. Getting started with virtual communities such as Second Life - by Caryna St. John. Virtual Learning Communities Flourish | Gridjumper's Blog. How Social Media Reveals Invisible Work. How Social Media is Affecting the Way We Speak and Write: Online Collaboration « eNews_final. Balancing Your Use of Social Media. Harvard EdCast - Download free content from Harvard University. The History of Social Media. Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center.
Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center. Education Resources Information Center. PermalinkPopup. PermalinkPopup. PermalinkPopup. PermalinkPopup.