Interesting how teaching approaches have gone from "Sage on the Stage" to "Guide on the Side" and now "Connectors." This from a paper by Will Richardson, one of my favorite bloggers, in Edutopia, World Without Walls: Learning Well With Others. Subtitled "How to teach when learning is everywhere."
To quote a snippet: "Inherent in the collaborative process is a new way of thinking about teaching and learning. We must find our own teachers, and they must find us. In fact, in my own kids' lives, I believe their best, most memorable, and most effective teachers will be the ones they discover, not the ones they are given. That's no slight against the people in their face-to-face classrooms, who are equally important in a connected world. But it does suggest that we as educators need to reconsider our roles in students' lives, to think of ourselves as connectors first and content experts second."
Lots more good stuff in the article. Of course, a good teacher is probably a combination of all three: sage, guide and now connector. Will's article also led me to Classroom 2.0, which I joined. This is a social network for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education. It's a great example of what you can do with Ning.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
What Else Can Yoda Teach?
This is pretty interesting to me: George Lucas has started The George Lucas Educational Foundation.
To quote, "Our vision is of a new world of learning. A place where kids and parents, teachers and administrators, policy makers and the people they serve, all are empowered to change education for the better. A place where schools have access to the same invaluable technology as businesses and universities -- where innovation is the rule, not the exception. A place where children become lifelong learners and develop the technical, cultural, and interpersonal skills to succeed in the twenty-first century. A place of inspiration, aspiration, and an urgent belief that improving education improves the world we live in."
Web site at edutopia
Lots of information, nice videos, and podcasts. Though mostly targeted towards middle and high school levels, there is a wide variety of content that is also relevant to higher ed.
I hope to find the time to dig deeper in edutopia. There is always an entertainment element to education, if you can engage the students in any manner, they will pay more attention and learn more. Lucas may have some tricks up his sleeve in this regard. However, he is not just an entertainment innovator, but also a technology innovator, and is now turning his visions towards education. Lucky us!
I already stumbled across an interesting article on the typical process of technology adoption in education as a four-step process:
1. Dabbling.
2. Doing old things in old ways.
3. Doing old things in new ways.
4. Doing new things in new ways.
Full article here.
Friday, May 04, 2007
Process, Product and Presentation
I often try to think of ways of reducing complex situations to simpler ones, for the purpose of explanation, management and support. The danger in this, of course, is that something complicated, with a lot of connections, forces and combinations of underlying technologies IS really complicated. So, eventually, someone has to deal with the fact the situation is not simple in order to adequately support it.
With that caveat, I think that a student's educational experience in a course can be distilled to three things:
1. The process of learning. The interaction between teacher and student, student and the rest of the world, and interactions within the student themselves.
2. The visible end product or products of that process. These are created by the student or study group, and can be simple or elaborate. The goal of having some end-products in a student's portfolio seems an increasingly important tool in job searches. In addition, creating finished products as part of an educational activity, that we can be proud of, is a reward in itself. I still have some of the better term papers I wrote over 40 years ago, along with a few paintings, stashed in the basement. I get a pretty good feeling when I run across them.
3. The student's presentation of the created product to an intended audience. Verbal or formal presentations are becoming more common as part of the educational experience. (Many being PowerPoint shows!) This gets into the areas of public speaking, time management, and also affects design decisions at the beginning of project creation. These are sometimes ignored.
A little story about time management and design decisions. I let one of my student assistants work on her PowerPoint class presentation at work recently, as she was all caught up on her work with us. I noticed it was fairly complex, with 25 slides. I asked, and was allowed to, attend her oral class presentation. At the beginning, the faculty member reminded them that they only had 15 minutes to make their presentation. I divided 25 by 15, and knew she could not get through almost two slides in each minute! She rushed through her slides (I have never heard her speak so rapidly), and the professor gave her an extra 5 minutes at the end (standing up discreetly at one side, but looking slightly uncomfortable). Although the presentation went well, with very original content, it would have been a better experience for everyone if either the students were given more time to explain complex concepts, or if our student had somehow managed to leave out or distill important information. This may not be a typical presentation, but it was given by a senior in the top 5% of her class.
The presentation area is one where students can use more systematic support and training, in my opinion.
The extreme failed presentation, of course, is described in Edward Tufte's analysis of how an inadequate PowerPoint show probably contributed to NASA's Challenger disaster.
Naturally the three areas of Process, Product and Presentation are related to each other. By thinking of them as 3 different concepts, it may make it easier to support each one.
With that caveat, I think that a student's educational experience in a course can be distilled to three things:
1. The process of learning. The interaction between teacher and student, student and the rest of the world, and interactions within the student themselves.
2. The visible end product or products of that process. These are created by the student or study group, and can be simple or elaborate. The goal of having some end-products in a student's portfolio seems an increasingly important tool in job searches. In addition, creating finished products as part of an educational activity, that we can be proud of, is a reward in itself. I still have some of the better term papers I wrote over 40 years ago, along with a few paintings, stashed in the basement. I get a pretty good feeling when I run across them.
3. The student's presentation of the created product to an intended audience. Verbal or formal presentations are becoming more common as part of the educational experience. (Many being PowerPoint shows!) This gets into the areas of public speaking, time management, and also affects design decisions at the beginning of project creation. These are sometimes ignored.
A little story about time management and design decisions. I let one of my student assistants work on her PowerPoint class presentation at work recently, as she was all caught up on her work with us. I noticed it was fairly complex, with 25 slides. I asked, and was allowed to, attend her oral class presentation. At the beginning, the faculty member reminded them that they only had 15 minutes to make their presentation. I divided 25 by 15, and knew she could not get through almost two slides in each minute! She rushed through her slides (I have never heard her speak so rapidly), and the professor gave her an extra 5 minutes at the end (standing up discreetly at one side, but looking slightly uncomfortable). Although the presentation went well, with very original content, it would have been a better experience for everyone if either the students were given more time to explain complex concepts, or if our student had somehow managed to leave out or distill important information. This may not be a typical presentation, but it was given by a senior in the top 5% of her class.
The presentation area is one where students can use more systematic support and training, in my opinion.
The extreme failed presentation, of course, is described in Edward Tufte's analysis of how an inadequate PowerPoint show probably contributed to NASA's Challenger disaster.
Naturally the three areas of Process, Product and Presentation are related to each other. By thinking of them as 3 different concepts, it may make it easier to support each one.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Education, Blogging and Branding
As we look forward to implementing blogging for the purpose of student curriculum assignments, we are deliberating whether to use a hosted service, such as Blogger, Edublogs, or WordPress.com, or installing, configuring and supporting our own institutional blog server. For this post, I will define a "student blog" as one created to meet the academic requirements of a specific course. And I will use Blogger as the example of a hosted service, though other good ones exist.
The pace of innovation and development is rapid in the blog server area. By using a hosted service we can "ride on the coat tails" of the constant improvements and added features of the service we use, reaping benefits with little additional work. With us hosting our own solution, we have to concern ourselves with never-ending upgrade procedures, migrating old blogs to the new server, etc. This is on top of all the work involved in setting up a secure and full-featured blogging server to beging with, backing it up, and maintaining it. It seems that if you have a critical mass of users, or anticipate one, this work can be justified.
However, what is the "tipping point" of users that makes it more sensible to use a hosted service? Assuming we had only a few classes interested in student blogs next semester, I am tending towards using a hosted service. A major downside to this may appear to be the lack of "branding" of the blog to the institution.
If a student blog is to remain private, with only the student(s) and faculty in the class and support staff seeing it, branding should not be an issue. If a student blog is intended to be a public blog with a "PR" slant to it, we would pass it on to College Relations, which uses a locally installed version of Movable Type. However, in most cases the primary purpose of a student blog is not to make our institution look good. If it does, so much the better, but pedagogical issues should not be shaped by publicity issues. Do we want someone asking a student to change a blog to make it look better on our public web site?
I have tried our slightly older installation of Movable Type, and find that Blogger is much easier and more fun to use. The usability aspect is a major one, I want technology to be as transparent as possible. As Will Richardson recently said: "I’m more and more finding myself without patience for tools that aren’t extremely easy and intuitive, no matter what they claim to offer." I find that faculty and students want and need this transparency in technology, without it few will use whatever technical solutions are offered. Personally, I like to get "under the hood" and tinker, but most people here just want to get in the car and drive. Because of this, I'm currently leaning towards Blogger instead of a local Movable Type, but am concerned about the "branding" issue.
Not sure excactly what "branding" meant, but knowing its importance to some people, I Googled "define branding", and came up with this:
"The process by which a commodity in the marketplace is known primarily for the image it projects rather than any actual quality."
"The process by which the true character and purpose of the company or organization is communicated."
"Is a promise, a pledge of quality. It is the essence of a product, including why it is great, and how it is better than all competiting products. It is an image. It is a combination of words and letters, symbols, and colors"
"The process of building a favorable image for a product or company that differentiates it, in the minds of prospects and end users, from other competitors."
"Selecting and blending tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the product, service or corporation in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way."
It has become more and more apparent to me over the years that branding and PR are big factors in how an educational institution communicates with the outside world, so how important is branding in academic student blogs?
While finishing this post I ran across a timely video, where Glenna Ryan, formerly of Rensselaer Polytechnic University, talks about their admissions student blogging efforts:
The above was pulled from Dan Karleen's recent blog entries on Admissions Blogging.
It's obvious from this that "admissions blogs" are NOT the same as student academic blogs, they are shaped by totally different forces, and have a different purpose. However, we now get into the gray area of student blogs that were private for the purpose of an assignment, but because they are worth sharing, everyone later agrees should be made public.
If they are hosted, there is no college "brand" associated with them. If a public student blog has a little orange "B", does it make any difference in branding the institution? Should we go to the effort of eliminating the top Blogger bar in student blogs by customizing the html template? And what influence and how much control should non-pedagogical forces and non-instructional staff have on the content and style of a student's academic blog?
We will soon be facing those challenges, and it does not hurt to prepare some sensible answers and formulate policies. There are many factors influencing the choice of a local vs. hosted version of a weblog server, not just branding, and unfortunately politics can trump technology. There is no same best way for everyone, and we'll only be deciding what's best for our spring 2007 semester. There are currently too many rapid developments in this area to formulate long-term strategy. Our goal is to stay one step ahead, and keep a close eye on the future.
Although College Relations has supported a few "PR" student blogs, our Instructional Technology Team is new at supporting student academic blogging. I am both impressed and humbled by how far others have gone, such as MIT's Katie Livingston Vale (800k PDF), and Drexel University's Jean-Claude Bradley. Thankfully, we have a variety of good role models to guide and inspire us.
The pace of innovation and development is rapid in the blog server area. By using a hosted service we can "ride on the coat tails" of the constant improvements and added features of the service we use, reaping benefits with little additional work. With us hosting our own solution, we have to concern ourselves with never-ending upgrade procedures, migrating old blogs to the new server, etc. This is on top of all the work involved in setting up a secure and full-featured blogging server to beging with, backing it up, and maintaining it. It seems that if you have a critical mass of users, or anticipate one, this work can be justified.
However, what is the "tipping point" of users that makes it more sensible to use a hosted service? Assuming we had only a few classes interested in student blogs next semester, I am tending towards using a hosted service. A major downside to this may appear to be the lack of "branding" of the blog to the institution.
If a student blog is to remain private, with only the student(s) and faculty in the class and support staff seeing it, branding should not be an issue. If a student blog is intended to be a public blog with a "PR" slant to it, we would pass it on to College Relations, which uses a locally installed version of Movable Type. However, in most cases the primary purpose of a student blog is not to make our institution look good. If it does, so much the better, but pedagogical issues should not be shaped by publicity issues. Do we want someone asking a student to change a blog to make it look better on our public web site?
I have tried our slightly older installation of Movable Type, and find that Blogger is much easier and more fun to use. The usability aspect is a major one, I want technology to be as transparent as possible. As Will Richardson recently said: "I’m more and more finding myself without patience for tools that aren’t extremely easy and intuitive, no matter what they claim to offer." I find that faculty and students want and need this transparency in technology, without it few will use whatever technical solutions are offered. Personally, I like to get "under the hood" and tinker, but most people here just want to get in the car and drive. Because of this, I'm currently leaning towards Blogger instead of a local Movable Type, but am concerned about the "branding" issue.
Not sure excactly what "branding" meant, but knowing its importance to some people, I Googled "define branding", and came up with this:
"The process by which a commodity in the marketplace is known primarily for the image it projects rather than any actual quality."
"The process by which the true character and purpose of the company or organization is communicated."
"Is a promise, a pledge of quality. It is the essence of a product, including why it is great, and how it is better than all competiting products. It is an image. It is a combination of words and letters, symbols, and colors"
"The process of building a favorable image for a product or company that differentiates it, in the minds of prospects and end users, from other competitors."
"Selecting and blending tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the product, service or corporation in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way."
It has become more and more apparent to me over the years that branding and PR are big factors in how an educational institution communicates with the outside world, so how important is branding in academic student blogs?
While finishing this post I ran across a timely video, where Glenna Ryan, formerly of Rensselaer Polytechnic University, talks about their admissions student blogging efforts:
The above was pulled from Dan Karleen's recent blog entries on Admissions Blogging.
It's obvious from this that "admissions blogs" are NOT the same as student academic blogs, they are shaped by totally different forces, and have a different purpose. However, we now get into the gray area of student blogs that were private for the purpose of an assignment, but because they are worth sharing, everyone later agrees should be made public.
If they are hosted, there is no college "brand" associated with them. If a public student blog has a little orange "B", does it make any difference in branding the institution? Should we go to the effort of eliminating the top Blogger bar in student blogs by customizing the html template? And what influence and how much control should non-pedagogical forces and non-instructional staff have on the content and style of a student's academic blog?
We will soon be facing those challenges, and it does not hurt to prepare some sensible answers and formulate policies. There are many factors influencing the choice of a local vs. hosted version of a weblog server, not just branding, and unfortunately politics can trump technology. There is no same best way for everyone, and we'll only be deciding what's best for our spring 2007 semester. There are currently too many rapid developments in this area to formulate long-term strategy. Our goal is to stay one step ahead, and keep a close eye on the future.
Although College Relations has supported a few "PR" student blogs, our Instructional Technology Team is new at supporting student academic blogging. I am both impressed and humbled by how far others have gone, such as MIT's Katie Livingston Vale (800k PDF), and Drexel University's Jean-Claude Bradley. Thankfully, we have a variety of good role models to guide and inspire us.
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