Kathy Cannon's List: Brave New Teaching

• • The best content here is found near the end where professors recognize that tools are for calculating and presenting conceptual learning opportunities. WolframAlpha is powerful, but brave, clever faculty will figure out how to use it to take students further in their understanding and applications of math concepts.
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• Mr. Wolfram,
• believes that at any given time, one should use the best tools available,
• “I’m a person who believes that at any given time, one should use the best tools available,” he said.
• “I suppose I have a personal experience that if you use more tools, you can get more done.”
• He opened WolframAlpha and entered a homework problem from his calculus course. The problem involved limits and square roots, and the service solved it easily. By clicking the link titled “show steps,” Mr. Petrak illustrated how students could write down those steps and pretend they understood the process when they had simply copied it.
• also opens the door to teaching more advanced concepts. It shows graphical representations of the equation and introduces concepts he would not usually get to in an introductory course.
• “It will make it possible for students to do different things than they did before, and it may require instructors to ask questions differently than they might have done in the past.”
• conceptual, not computational

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• • From the examples below, you'll see how this combination of display, annotation and archiving during an active class presentation can change the way students engage with the content.
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• Once I explain that they do everything a laptop does PLUS you can draw in the screen, then the next obvious question becomes, "How does this help me in class?"
• you don't interrupt the train of thought
• she had a student (for the first time ever) ask her to  go BACK 3 pages to where she was five minutes ago
• interesting  effect of changing student note-taking - they start to shift from  "transcribers" to "thinkers".
• all the students could see just fine. In fact, they  seemed to be GLUED to the content.
• learning is social, and eye contact can tell you a LOT
• students focus more on the content
• "I like to come up and work  the problems"

  • Students felt more comfortable taking risks to share their own knowledge publicly when the content became the focus.
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• anywhere that learning is liable to be happening
• pre-recording presentations and assigning them as homework
• more class discussion

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• Then I read an article by Clive Thompson at Wired. Clive’s article convinced me that perhaps it was worth giving Twitter a try.
• Some of these ideas are general, and some are specifically from a Twittering assignment I did for a class last semester
• one of the better things I did with that class

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• Compared to other social networking sites, "Twitter is more about creating connections with others who may not be your real friends," she says.
• alert their classmates to world events or issues that are relevant to the course
• Howard Rheingold, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University, was an early adopter of Twitter and often turns to it for teaching advice. He explains to his digital journalism students how to use the site to establish a network of sources and, using tweets, how to entice those sources to follow them in return. In his social media course, he has his students employ Twitter for what he describes as "student-to-teacher-to-student ambient office hours."

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  Rheingold says that how useful Twitter is depends on the individual person. "If you want to share information in small bites with a group of people who share your interest," he says, "that's what it's for."

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• The unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit
• Open Teaching is the name Mr. Wiley and others use for their experimental knowledge giveaway
• Now Mr. Wiley wants to give away the interaction, too. MIT is unlikely to follow his lead.
• The rapid pace of change means employers want the latest skills without having to wait for employees to go off and get whole degrees
• one potential nightmare scenario for traditional institutions is that a form of college home-schooling will emerge, where students teach themselves using free materials posted by MIT and other leading institutions.

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