Responding to Online Students - How Do We Tell Them They've Made a Mistake? Unlike my other three posts that address the E-Cultures and Digital Learning MOOC I'm participating in, this post is more practical in nature, and is a reflection on something that happened this week in the online course I'm teaching. I welcome feedback (criticism and otherwise) to this situation. This semester, I'm teaching a cross-listed (not only graduate and undergraduate, but also interdisciplinary) course on race, gender, and professional and technical writing. In the discussion boards for this week's readings, a few students had similar problems interpreting the claims made by one of the authors; specifically, they understood her to be saying the exact opposite of what she actually said. This situation left me in a dilemma: I suffer from politeness, and not just any politeness, but Midwestern, female-driven politeness. The dilemma: Do I post, publicly, the correct interpretation and explain it. The online environment, however, does not provide those opportunities in the same way.
Poverty, technology, and the future of global education Online learning seems to be quite a hot topic at Washington University and other major universities. The Clinton Global Initiative University (taking place at Wash. U. April 5-7) has announced Salman Khan, creator of the insanely successful online learning program Khan Academy, as one of its keynote speakers. Khan has used the popularity of Khan Academy to promote a radical view of the future of education. Reversing the education system in such a radical way could also help reverse the growing trend toward education inequity. However, it will take a lot more than technology to address the root causes of education inequality. In today’s information-driven global economy, there is no reason why a kid at a Massachusetts prep school and a kid at a Brooklyn public school cannot have the same access to educational resources.
64 Sites for Digital Storytelling Tools and Information Big Universe- for younger childrenBlurb- prices start at $10.95 (small book) discounts on quantity orders Bookemon BoomWriter- students write a book together; class gets one free copy (free shipping) ClassikTV- create a movie by adding subtitles to old movie scenes Creaza- suite of creative tools, including cartoonist, movie editor, audio editor and mindmaps DigiTales- create 3-5 minute stories from these types: living memories, beyond words, itza wrap Do Ink- create Flash-style animations using a "simple and friendly vector editor Domo Animate- free animation website offers characters with dialogue, backdrops and special effects Glogster- drag and drop text, images, audio, video drawings and more; premium edition has no ads Kerpoof- make movies, cards, drawings,pictures, tell stories; for grades K-8; site also has lesson plans and teacher tools. Lightning Bug -assists students in writing a story from finding an idea to finishing the story My eBook- create novels, comics, magazines, brochures
An Ed-Tech Guide for Teachers and Technologists “Ed-Tech” stands for educational technology, it is about the education-focused technologies or using general technologies for education purposes. Looking back on 2012, a review on Top 10 Educational Technologies of 2012 (from School Library Journal) is a must-read, and Top 100 Tools for Learning from C4LPT (2012) is the comprehensive list of top Ed-Tech tools from C4LPT. Looking forward to next year, MIT Enterprise Forum gave us the highlight on Converging Trends and Opportunities of K12 EdTech, and The Open University proposed ten innovations that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice: Innovating Pedagogy 2012 from The Open University. Back to the basics of Ed-Tech, Audrey Watters(Hack Education) had created “The Audrey Test” in 2012 – … some of the things I think techies (engineers and entrepreneurs) should know about education. So she came out a guidebook for both sides, it will help us see the whole picture and details around Ed-Tech better.
Why Informal Learning is Crowding Out Formal Learning I saw an interesting graphic (the one on the right) from a presentation by Professional Development Group. It shows that as we become more experienced, we’re less likely to engage in formal learning. Pretty intuitive, right? It was probably always true. We’re pressed for time. So, if we can’t cram as much learning into our workers’ brains as we could a quarter century ago, what’s that mean? Formal training will always have its place. You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email - simply add your email address to the box below and click the "Subscribe" button. Please check your email now and click the link to confirm your email address Connect with RLI’s CEO, Stephen Meyer Close
connected learning: getting beyond technological determinism Life lately has felt like one of those dreams where you’re in a cab with your third-grade teacher on the way to a conference presentation you forgot to prepare for and then suddenly the cab morphs into a giant recycling plant and everything is spinning and… What? You don’t have those dreams? I have them when things get busy. From the midst of the blur, though, there’s a thread I want to try to untangle from the early weeks of #etmooc (Educational Technology and Media, a collaboratively-hosted connectivist MOOC) and #edcmooc (E-learning and Digital Cultures, my first Coursera effort, offered through the University of Edinburgh). But the ideas are starting to bounce off each other and amplify…and then weave back together around this thread of technological determinism. Now, I’m not saying all determinist conclusions about technologies are wrong. What’s wrong with that? Determinism is, in effect, a world view; one that reduces societal phenomena to “technology x did thing y.”
Shoring the fragments of #edcmooc | Teaching 'E-learning and Digital Cultures' Eleni Zazani’s competition entry This week I had to try to pull together a position, a wide view, of what’s been happening on the EDC MOOC, in order to present at a symposium on ‘Disrupting Higher Education’ in Dublin (blogged here by Eoin O’Dell). It was hard. In the end, the best way I could find to do it, was by piecing together fragments, snippets from the work of the teaching team and of the participants, to build a picture of what we’ve achieved over the last few weeks, and the questions which remain unanswered. I’d like to summarise roughly what I see as being the gains we’ve made, and what I was trying to convey in this presentation. We’ve also seen that the personal learning networks and communities being formed for some participants through the MOOC have been intense, enriching and deeply motivating. Then, we’ve seen this great burst of multimodal creativity, innovation, sharing and making, as Jen highlighted in her post. Sian Bayne@sianbayne Like this: Like Loading...
The use of music and animation in eLearning Do you think that introductory music and animation clips help, motivate and engage the participants of an e-learning course? Do genre, volume level and duration affect their concentration? Do music and animation clips constitute an attention grabber or an annoyance factor? Apparently, views are conflicting and experiences differ. Do Whether a piece of music or a video clip are tasteful or appropriate is completely subjective. According to various studies, the use of high quality, short, content-relevant, age-relevant and well-produced video, graphics and music clips can stimulate audience interest, without being annoying or distracting. Don’t do According to "E-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning" by Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer (Pfeiffer, 2011), the best practice is “don’t do it”, as videos and music clips rather interfere than enhance learning. ShortRecorded in a low volumeAudience and age relativeContent-related
Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching - Wired Campus Students regularly drop out of massive open online courses before they come to term. For a professor to drop out is less common. But that is what happened on Saturday in “Microeconomics for Managers,” a MOOC offered by the University of California at Irvine through Coursera. Richard A. McKenzie, an emeritus professor of enterprise and society at the university’s business school, sent a note to his students announcing that he would no longer be teaching the course, which was about to enter its fifth week. “Because of disagreements over how to best conduct this course, I’ve agreed to disengage from it, with regret,” Mr. Mr. Mr. Daphne Koller, one of Coursera’s founders, said by e-mail that Mr. Gary Matkin, the dean for distance education at Irvine, said the problem had stemmed from Mr. “In Professor McKenzie’s view, for instance, uninformed or superfluous responses to the questions posed in the discussion forums hobbled the serious students in their learning,” said Mr. Ms. Mr.
EDCMOOC - My Digital Artefact: The Human Revolution Designed for Learning! Saturday, February 23, 2013 EDCMOOC - My Digital Artefact: The Human Revolution For the last 4 weeks, I was immersed in an online course titled "Elearning and Digital Cultures" #edcmooc .With more than 40,000 students from all over the globe and 5 amazing professors from the University of Edinburgh,(Jeremy Knox, Siân Bayne, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair) it was indeed a massive online learning movement! PS: A more reflective post on my experience with #edcmooc and MOOCs in general will be coming soon. Posted by Taruna Goel Email ThisBlogThis! 10 comments: ryan2point0Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 7:11:00 PM PSTNice work, Taruna! Load more... Links to this post Create a Link Newer PostOlder PostHome Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) About Me Taruna Goel Vancouver, BC, Canada I am a Learning and Development/Training Specialist with more than 14 years of experience in the area of technical writing, content development, instructional design, and training. Posts
Humanizing Online Learning with VoiceThread It’s really time to put the age old arguments about online classes being dull, cold, and alienating to bed and accept that these problems are only effects of the choices made by those who design, develop, and teach the course. If you are an online instructor who is aching to break out of the social limitations of the text-based discussion forum that still dominates online courses, despite the audio and visual rich social technologies that abound, read on. Take a few minutes to step inside one of my online classes and view this clip of an interaction between me and one of my former online Art Appreciation students from a class VoiceThread activity. The excerpt you see here shows a single slide (out of many) from an online activity. Students were required to comment after reading a chapter that introduced them to the concepts of “form and content.” You probably observed a few things about this interaction. Video and Voice Empowers Dyslexic Learners What is VoiceThread?
EDCMOOC by Heikki Hallantie 50+Ways - home EDCMOOC Present tense “We want the community to understand why it’s important to study the brain and to study the brilliance of other animals … so that they can tell us how their brains do it, so that we can then make hypotheses about how the human brain does it.” Sarah Woolley, researcher Utopian Potential The Great Backyard Bird Count is a citizen science project that relies on citizens to record and report sighting of birds in their area. An intersection of technology, science and everyday people, the #GBBC relies on the Internet to bring it all together. The #GBBC is an example of the educational potential of Internet-based tools and the potential for citizens to provide meaningful contributions to science. This utopian use of technology both educates participants while engaging them in contributing to the collective human endeavor of furthering our shared knowledge. The unique ability to be both a learner and a teacher is central to the promise of the MOOC and the evolution of education.