blogging about .edu stuff
Archive for Students
November 12, 2006 at 11:40 pm · Filed under Students, education
by Lisa Delpit is a great book. I only read a couple of chapters but it’s one of those books that makes you really think. It’s along the line of the experience I had reading E.D. Hirsch, hearing another angle, when you feel like all you’ve been hearing is one side of a story. In this case it’s the “progressive” side.
What Hirsch and Delpit agree on is a sound rationale for why progressive education can actually prevent kids of color and low SES from succeeding academically. It doesn’t meet their needs. They argue for more traditional teaching strategies. I don’t agree with Hirsch about teaching the classical, Eurocentric canon however. Delpit pointed out that the whole language reading program the schools were using at the time, was not used by Black teachers. In their opinions, their kids needed to develop the technical side of writing, not fluency. They needed to learn how to write to get into colleges and realistically compete on the job market.
June 4, 2006 at 12:21 am · Filed under Students, informal learning, social computing, trends
An informative article about the latest controversies surrounding MySpace.
What is MySpace? Why is it important? How big is it (and its cousins such as Facebook)?
What is the controversy over MySpace? Is it that site in particular or as a genre of web-based-social-networks?
What is the direction of your current research on new media, and how does it relate to the controversy?
What do ’social networking software programs’ provide participants? What’s their down side?
What skills do students/children learn in working in social networks? How does these contribute (or not) to their development?
and more.
May 28, 2006 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Students, trends
Teaching kids young how to use technology productively seems to be the best way to combat unproductive multitasking says Janice Friesen. She’s commenting on YOUNG AND WIRED
Computers, cell phones, video games, blogs, text messages — how will the sheer amount of time spent plugged in affect our kids? by Kathrine Seligman.
I agree with one concern, that we’ll end up with a generation of kids with “very quick but shallow thinking.” What kinds of jobs and lives will they be prepared to participate in? I hate to wonder.
Overall I’m not concerned. Like Prensky points out women have been mulitasking since the beginning of recorded history. And we know that the brain doesn’t multitask it prioritizes. Helping students understand this and see how they can benefit from this knowledge seems like a worthwhile endeavor.
May 28, 2006 at 12:52 pm · Filed under Students, jobs, learning
I appreciate George Siemens posts, they’re often filled with lots of food for thought. His white paper Learning in Sync with Life: New Models New processes got me to thinking again about non-formal learning and metacognition.
How do learners accumulate their learning and demonstrate competence and capability?
How do learners understand and perceive their own learning, acquired competencies and capacity? I read some years ago that the skills and knowledge a “homemaker” accumulates from the myriad of duties she attends to to keep a home running, equal or exceed those of a middle manager.
I’d guess that most people have little interest in how they learn, but rather in how their skills can be transferred and applied to various situations. Resume writing and preparing for job interviews are a great vehicle for synthesizing and summarizing our competencies.
I’m not sure we can create a culture of life long learning without exposing our beliefs about what it (learning) looks like, when it happens, and how.
And I’m wondering too as I write this, that perhaps some of the fears of obsolescence educational professionals have, might be justified. Tools, games and connections continue to become more sophisticated technologically, socially and politically. We need to keep up enough to be able to guide students’ attention and co-construct what’s going on. This process might make it possible for us to model and facilitate non-formal learning and metacognition.
May 25, 2006 at 7:48 am · Filed under News, Students, jobs, trends
A culture of debt we are but this is the first time I’ve heard it put in these terms:
…With hefty repayments in their future, however, many students, including Boston University graduate Lowery, are walking away from low-paying government, nonprofit, and teaching jobs.”I really want to work in advocacy law,” she says, “but from a practical perspective that’s not going to happen. I just won’t be able to pay back my loans.”
Read more
May 10, 2006 at 8:07 am · Filed under Blogging, Edublogging, Students, educational technology, social computing
Christopher Sessums does some nice reflecting on the social software/web2 paradigm in this post.
He only touches on transactional distance though.
“A transaction is a mutual exchange between parties. Moore recognized that in a course high in structure, such as a pure lecture course, there is generally little dialog between educator and learner and transactional distance is maximized. Conversely, as dialog is increased, the structure decreases, thereby minimizing the transactional distance between educator and learner.”
While the theory is used in distance education I wonder to what extent it can also be applied to web 2, particularly in the edublogger domain. It might be worth exploring one’s experience of geographical distance as a starting point. I’ve often shared a personal story in support of distributed learning, the one about interacting more with my mother since email. For the past 28 years we’ve lived no less than 3,000 miles apart and in many ways I’ve never felt closer to her as a result of email. A colleague shared a similar story about being separated from her partner for over a year.
There’s a lot to chew on. There’s personality type/learner preferences. I think maturity and psychological development play a role too in that until fairly recently working adults were the primary consumers of distance education (I like the term distributed learning). However, Pam Tate at CAEL points out the profile of an adult, for educational purposes is rapidly changing.
And then there’s the comparison to our experience of transactional distance in familiar educational settings. How does that experience of TD impact learning in a 500 seat classroom? For some learners I can imagine it’s perfectly acceptable and preferred. I’d guess though that they’d be above average students, more field independent, and intrinsically motivated.
Add to that scenario, virtual office hours and a thriving online exchange of discussions and group work. In the former, the lecturer is actually available more often because the technology makes that more feasible and cost effective. In the latter, the technology enables pedagogy that is impractical in a face to face setting. The other student, the one who’s more field dependent, now has a place to land.
May 5, 2006 at 7:58 am · Filed under Students
US file-sharing students targeted
US students
File-sharing by students is described as an “evolving problem”
The US media industry is targeting universities in the latest wave of its campaign against illegal file-sharing. They want the colleges to filter traffic to stop what they describe as an “ever evolving problem”. The RIAA and MPAA has been involved in a long-running battle to stem the sharing of copyrighted files online.
Read more
April 28, 2006 at 6:34 pm · Filed under Students
MySpace, the social networking site has over 74 million users. It’s not to be ignored and I’ve heard educators ponder just how it might be made part of the learning experience. I think it’s simply an important aspect of student culture, their lives and interests. This NYT article talks about how young people use it to mourn the death of a friend of loved one.
April 26, 2006 at 10:41 pm · Filed under Blogging, Students
Is it news or opinion/voice? Bloggers aren’t professional journalists to be sure, but there’s something very satisfying in getting the “other” story. If you’ve been at an event and then watched it on the nightly news, it becomes obvious why this is so important to nurture. I think the BBC is on the right track with their announcement of revamping their site to include reader content. Spending even a small amount of time in the blogosphere helps you get quickly oriented to who’s who, what’s legitimate and what isn’t. Sure students need to somehow learn how to decipher all this; but the paradigm has changed and is changing. Legitimate sources exist now that are found only on the web. We know too that history books are neither “objective” nor unbiased. True though that some person’s opinions I could give a hoot about and so too their blogs. But I want the choice. Like the choice I have to get my “news” from outside the US.
April 26, 2006 at 10:17 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Community, Students, coolstuff
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. I haven’t tried it out yet, but sounds interesting
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