Without much critical examination, teachers accept they have to grade, students accept being graded, and none of us spend enough time thinking about the why, when, and whether of grades.
Tag: pedagogy
👓 TWP Action Plan | Desert of My Real Life
At the June 4 meeting of the Tackling a Wicked Problem instructors group, we were asked to develop an action plan to lay out things we need to learn about and/or do between now and our next meeting on July 30. Here is my action plan.
Charlie Owen (sonniesedge.net)An electric shock collar, but for developers who say "just" or "simply".
Also for math professors…
Jessica Chretien (Twitter)I increasingly find myself going to write replies to people on Twitter where I accidentally end up writing an essay, so I just decided to make a quick Wordpress so I can actually be vaguely effective in expressing myself? Anyway, here's a post:https://t.co/vKnEvXC89j
— Jessica Chretien (@infuturereverse) May 19, 2019Which is kind of vaguely in response to @cathieleblanc's reply to a thread I wrote yesterday?
— Jessica Chretien (@infuturereverse) May 19, 2019Should I post this in the CPLC moodle? I don't even know my dudes. Not gonna lie, I'm 10000% more comfortable writing this stuff on Twitter bc it feels less formal & therefore doesn't have to be "organized" or "actually good" & can just sometimes end up being surprisingly useful?
— Jessica Chretien (@infuturereverse) May 19, 2019
It’s threads/comments like these that make me think that using Micropub clients like Quill that allow quick and easy posting on one’s own website are so powerful. Sadly, even in a domains-centric world in which people do have their own “thought spaces“, the ease-of-use of tools like Twitter are still winning out. I suspect it’s the result of people not knowing about alternate means of quickly writing out these ideas and syndicating them to services like Twitter for additional distribution while still owning them on spaces they own and control.
I know that Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, and I (among others) often use our websites/commonplace books for quick posts (and sometimes syndicate them to Twitter for others’ sake). We then later come back to them (and the resultant comments) and turn them into more fully fleshed out thoughts and create longer essays, articles, or blogposts like Jessica Chretien eventually did on her own website.
I wonder if it wasn’t for the nearness of time and the interaction she got from Twitter if Jessica would have otherwise eventually searched her Twitter feed and then later compiled the post she ultimately did? It’s examples like this and the prompts I have from my own website and notifications via Webmention from Twitter through Brid.gy that make me thing even more strongly that scholars really need to own even their “less formal” ideas. It’s oftentimes the small little ideas that later become linked into larger ideas that end up making bigger impacts. Sometimes the problem becomes having easy access to these little ideas.
All this is even more interesting within the frame of Jessica’s discussion of students being actively involved in their own learning. If one can collect/aggregate all their references, reading, bookmarks, comments, replies, less formal ideas, etc. on their own site where they’re easily accessed and searched, then the synthesis of them into something larger makes the learning more directly apparent.
👓 Connectivism and scale | blog.edtechie.net
In his recent post criticising the Creative Commons Certificate, which I won’t comment on, Stephen Downes repeats a claim he has made before about the scalability of the connectivist approach, stating: One of the major objectives of our original MOOCs was to enable MOOC participants to c...
👓 Seven Steps to #ProSocialWeb | Greg McVerry
Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)1. Begin with You Ghandi never said "Be the change..." still doesn't mean it ain't great advice. We need to be the web we want to see.1 In fact in my recent efforts into #OpenPedagogy (my approach to getting at #ProSocialWeb) I have focused on the words of another Yogi (correctly attributed) C...
👓 She lived for 99 years with organs in all the wrong places and never knew it | CNN
Oregon medical students were shocked and surprised when they opened the cadaver of Rose Marie Bentley.
👓 4+1 Interview: Kate Owens | Robert Talbert
Kate Owens of the College of Charleston talks about mastery grading, innovative teaching in a historic institution, and more.
Following Association for Learning Technology
The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) represents individual and organisational Members from all sectors and parts of the UK. Our Membership includes practitioners, researchers and policy makers with an interest in Learning Technology. Our community grows more diverse as Learning Technology has become recognised as a fundamental part of learning, teaching and assessment.
Our charitable objective is "to advance education through increasing, exploring and disseminating knowledge in the field of Learning Technology for the benefit of the general public". We have led professionalisation in Learning Technology since 1993.
How we define Learning Technology
We define Learning Technology as the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment. Our community is made up of people who are actively involved in understanding, managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of Learning Technology. We believe that you don't need to be called 'Learning Technologist' to be one.
What we value and what we do
Our current strategy sets out our aims for 2017-2020:
Increasing the impact of Learning Technology for the wider community, strengthening recognition and representation for the Membership at a national level and leading professionalisation for individual Learning Technology professionals in a broad range of roles.
You can explore the strategy slides, download the full text in PDF or Google docs. Visual content is available on Flickr.
🔖 AnnotatED at OLC Innovate 2019 | Google Slides | Hypothes.is
OLC Innovate, 2 April 2019
What would a classroom look like if it were set up for dialogue rather than monologue? What would a syllabus look like if it’s goal was to connect things rather than to arrive somewhere? Will we know learning is happening if we don’t measure it by where it ends?
Laura Gibbs (Twitter)pinging @btopro ...do you know about @Inoreader? it's like the old Google Reader plus the old Yahoo Pipes for remixing (INCREDIBLE remixing) of RSS feeds that you can then send back out as RSS or as HTML clips, which is how I get my blog network to display in different web spaces
— Laura Gibbs (@OnlineCrsLady) March 30, 2019
I’m curious if you use Inoreader’s OPML subscription functionality at all? It’s kind of like Twitter lists in a sense, but a lot more open and distributed.
Much like your version piped into an LMS, it could be used used to create a planet of all of the participants in a course, but set up in such a way that only one person needs to create and maintain an OPML file that everyone else can use instead of needing to manually find and subscribe to a bunch of feeds or worry about missing out on that one feed of the student who joined the course two weeks late.
As an example, here’s an OPML file on my own website (through my following page) of all the educators I’m following who are tangentially involved in the IndieWeb movement. If you subscribe to the OPML file in Inoreader, when I update it with additional feeds, you get all the changes synced automatically.
I’d be interested to see exactly how you’re using Inoreader–particularly the off-label methods. Have you written up any of the details anywhere? It looks like you’re using tags in Inoreader and piping those details back to the LMS so that you can filter portions of the class content?
I recently documented some of my personal use here: Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader. A big portion of it is about being able to use Inoreader to interact within its interface, but also have those interactions reflected on my own website (aka digital commonplace book) which sends notifications to the original content on the web instead of just leaving it siloed within Inoreader.
The Centre for Innovation of Leiden University has always strongly supported social or collaborative learning in online learning: the interaction between learners facilitating learners, whether that is in discussion forums, peer review assignments or in our Facebook groups, contributes to a deeper understanding of subjects, and prepares learners to apply their knowledge.
However, the Centre for Innovation has a responsibility to our teachers, learners and volunteers, under GDPR and our own Privacy Policy. Based on this we conducted a review of different platforms that we made use of for collaborative, social learning and have decided to move away from those that do not allow us to meet our obligations and promises to those in our care.
Therefore we have decided to close all Facebook groups, Whatsapp groups and Instagram accounts currently under control of the Centre for Innovation, per the 29th of March 2019, and have adjusted our courses accordingly.
You can direct any questions or remarks in regards to this policy to MOOC@sea.leidenuniv.nl.
Kind Regards,
On behalf of Centre for Innovation, Leiden University,
Tanja de Bie, Community Manager
At least part of Leiden University is apparently making the moral and ethical call to close all their Facebook related properties. Kudos! They’ve already got a great website, perhaps they’ll move a bit more toward the IndieWeb?
🔖 Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James M. Lang
Employ cognitive theory in the classroom every day
Research into how we learn has opened the door for utilizing cognitive theory to facilitate better student learning. But that's easier said than done. Many books about cognitive theory introduce radical but impractical theories, failing to make the connection to the classroom. In Small Teaching, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of modest but powerful changes that make a big difference—many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These strategies are designed to bridge the chasm between primary research and the classroom environment in a way that can be implemented by any faculty in any discipline, and even integrated into pre-existing teaching techniques. Learn, for example:
- How does one become good at retrieving knowledge from memory?
- How does making predictions now help us learn in the future?
- How do instructors instill fixed or growth mindsets in their students?
Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive theory, explains when and how it should be employed, and provides firm examples of how the intervention has been or could be used in a variety of disciplines. Small teaching techniques include brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or communication with students.
hat tip: Robert Talbert
👓 Three teaching habits that support active learning | Robert Talbert
Teaching is behavior and behavior is founded on habits. How can teachers build good teaching habits for active learning?