Miguel guhlin's Public Library

30 Nov 09

29 Nov 09

virtual museum

www.europeanvirtualmuseum.net/...virtual_museum.asp - Preview

museum

23 Nov 09

Unlearning How to Teach

74.125.95.132/search - Preview

Creativity
or Conformity? Building Cultures of Creativity in Higher Education

A conference
organised by the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff in collaboration
with the Higher Education Academy

Cardiff
January 8-10 2007
Unlearning
How to Teach

Erica McWilliam
23 more annotations...
- arguing the need for a more interventionist role for academic teachers
  and a greater emphasis on an experimental culture of learning, rather
  than a culture in which curriculum and pedagogy is fully ‘locked in’
  in advance of engagement. The challenge for academic teachers is to
  promote and support a culture of teaching and learning that parallels
  a post-millennial social world in which supply and demand is neither
  linear nor stable, and in which labour is shaped by complex patterns
  of anticipations, opportunities, time and space.
- To develop the sorts of learning dispositions
  that are appropriate in such contexts, academic educators will need
  to spend less time explaining through instruction and more time in experimental
  and error-welcoming modes of engagement. If higher education is to play
  a key role in capacity building for graduates’ professional
  workforce futures, then a pedagogy of induction into disciplinary knowledge
  needs radical reworking into a pedagogy in which teachers and students
  work as co-creators and co-assemblers (and dissemblers) of trans-disciplinary
  knowledge applications for digital work futures.
- ‘unlearning’
  will be as important to social success in the 21^st millennium
  as learning has been in the 20^th millennium, then the habit
  of ‘lifelong learning’ will need radical re-thinking in terms of
  the nature and purposes of pedagogical work. Put simply, we will need
  to see a further shift from sage-on-the-stage and guide-on-the-side
  to meddler-in-the-middle (McWilliam, 2005).
- The challenge for academic teachers is to
  promote and support a culture of teaching and learning that parallels
  a post-millennial social world in which supply and demand is neither
  linear nor stable, in which labour is shaped by complex patterns of
  anticipations, opportunities, time and space, and in which new combinations
  of ‘creative’ skills and abilities are increasingly in demand. It
  also takes up the challenge posed by Pat Kane (2005), that of getting
  universities and other learning organisations to become more serious
  about play.
- University graduates, as potential future ‘creatives’ (Cunningham,
  2005, 2006; Florida, 2002; Florida & Goodnight, 2005: Pink 2005),
  will be performing work that is much less focused on routine information-seeking,
  executing transactions and routine problem-solving and much more focused
  on forging relationships, tackling novel challenges and synthesising
  ‘big picture’ scenarios. The challenge of the “Conceptual Age”,
  as Daniel Pink (2005) describes it, is not just the ability to work
  in high technology environments, but to utilise “high concept/high
  touch” abilities to make and re-make our personal and professional
  environments in ways that serve both functional and aesthetic needs
  simultaneously.
- the de-routinisation of present and future creative work has profound
  implications for what university teachers do and how they do it. Yet
  there is little evidence that the nature and purposes of teaching and
  learning have changed in any substantive way in recent times. Mainstream
  pedagogical practice within the academy very much parallels a work culture
  focused on accessing information and using it to solve relatively predictable
  problems or complete routinised transactions of one kind or another.
  Lectures allow students to ‘access’ the wisdom of ‘the best’;
  tutorials allow students support as they seek to ‘master’ the knowledge
  of the ‘master’; assessment tasks focus on how well the young apprentice
  has been able to perform ‘knowing’ the discipline.
- “an English speaking thirteen
  year old in Zaire with internet connection can find out the current
  temperature in Brussels, or closing price of IBM stock or name of Winston
  Churchill’s second finance minister as quickly as the head librarian
  in Cambridge university” (pp.100-101).
- young
  people increasingly experience formal learning and work in parallel
- engage with the challenges of the
  less predictable, less routinised work made possible in the “Conceptual
  Age”, higher educational policy has certainly been saturated with
  calls for more innovation and/or creativity within the sector.
- The collapse of calls to innovation
  is evident in the framing of what is sanctioned as evidence of literacy,
  numeracy, citizenship and employability skills. The evidence is overwhelmingly
  drawn from standardised test results (see Corson, 2002). In broad terms,
  the funders of education, both government and non-government, have come
  to fix almost exclusively on performance data that can be standardised
  in order to allow for intra-national and international comparisons.
  In a performative culture that makes it possible, in theory, to quantify
  the value of higher education on a national and even global scale, winners
  can be highly visible and valued, however that calculation is arrived
  at.
- The capacity to learn and reproduce
  appropriate social behaviours, he argues, is no longer the key to success.
  Instead of opening up possibilities, such learning may actually be unhelpful
  because it assumes a fixed or predictable social world. Bauman elaborates:
  
  Just as long-term commitments
  threaten to mortgage the future, habits too tightly embraced burden
  the present; learning may in the long run disempower as it empowers
  in the short…. ‘Your skills and know-how are as good as their last
  application’. (p.22)
- To develop the sorts
  of learning dispositions that are appropriate in such contexts, academic
  educators will need to spend less time explaining through instruction
  and more time in experimental and error-welcoming modes of engagement.
- This is supported by findings from neuro-science about the way in which
  the brain is ‘changed’ (see Zull, 2004) through hands on, minds
  on experimentation and how it is not changed by instruction-led pedagogy.
- a pedagogy of induction into disciplinary
  knowledge needs radical reworking into a pedagogy in which teachers
  and students work as co-creators and co-assemblers (and dissemblers)
  of trans-disciplinary knowledge applications for digital work futures.
- Put simply,
  we will need to see a further shift from sage-on-the-stage and
  guide-on-the-side to meddler-in-the-middle (McWilliam, 2005).
- “What
  holds people back from taking risks”, he asserts, “is often as not
  …their knowledge, not their ignorance” (p.4). Useful ignorance,
  then, becomes a space of pedagogical possibility rather than a base
  that needs to be covered. ‘Not knowing’ needs to be put to work
  without shame or bluster. This sort of thinking is echoed in Guy Claxon’s
  (2004) call for a pedagogy for “knowing what to do when you don’t
  know what to do” (p.?) .
- value creation
- shifts thinking from consumers to co-creators of value,
  and from value chain to network.
- As co-creators, both would add value to the capacity
  building work being done through the invitation to ‘meddle’ and
  to make errors. The teacher is in there experimenting and learning from
  the instructive complications of her errors
  alongside her students, rather than moving from desk to desk or
  chat room to chat room, watching over her flock.
- if
  we consider the student’s learning network as a type of value network,
  then, we must also accept that such a network allows quick disconnection
  from nodes where value is not added, and quick connections with new
  nodes that promise added value - networks allow individuals to ‘go
  round’ or elude a point of exchange where supply chains do not. In
  blunt terms, this means that the teacher who does not add value to a
  learning network can - and will - be by-passed.
- The rhizomatic capacity
  of networks to flow around a point in a chain means that teachers may
  be located in a linear supply chain of pedagogical services but excluded
  from their students’ learning networks. That would be an effect of
  being perceived by students to be doing things that do not add value.
  And digital technologies can and are being used both to identify value-blocks
  and options for getting around them. Once again, this is not a just
  matter of how much take-up of technology is evident in the pedagogical
  work (Sassen, 2004), but whether or not pedagogical processes bring
  student and teacher together in their shared ignorance and mutual desire
  to make something new of their world.
- If the rethinking of pedagogy as
  co-creation of value re-positions teacher and student (or one student
  with other students) as project partners, as co-directors and co-editors
  of their social world, who then is the rightful assessor of the value
  of that cultural assemblage? What does it mean to make judgements to
  credential individuals on the basis of the quality of the co-creation?
  What new dilemmas does this set up around ‘objectivity’ and assessment?
- “[t]he opposite of play isn’t work.
  It’s depression’ (Sutton-Smith, cited in Pink, 2005: 179)

20 Nov 09

Gained something in the translation « BuzzMachine

www.buzzmachine.com/...d-something-in-the-translation - Preview

@rpaskin tweeted this: “In a link economy, there are values from creating content and linking to content. There’s no value in just reproducing content (Jeff Jarvis).”
There is no value left over for the copiers. Indeed, online, if one copies, one is considered a thief because it’s only the thieves who copy.

19 Nov 09

Education Innovation: Essential Education: "Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom" by Alan November

educationinnovation.typepad.com/...lassroom-by-alan-november.html - Preview

education innovation technology videos videosforpresentation

16 Nov 09

100 Excellent Open Access Journals for Educators | Online College Tips - Online Colleges

www.onlinecollege.org/...-access-journals-for-educators - Preview

100 Excellent Open Access Journals for Educators
The following open access journals provide top-notch scholarly information available at no cost. Most of these journals are published just once or a few times a year, so subscribe to several so you can keep up-to-date on the latest research coming out of the field of education.
21 more annotations...
- Journal of Curriculum and Instruction. The articles here focus on research and practice relevant to pre K-12 education.
  The School Community Journal. The mission of this journal is to unite the entire community of teachers, parents, and students to work in the interest of successful education.
  Insight. This annual journal focuses on research-based articles, case studies, and innovation in teaching, learning, and assessment.
- Networks. Kindergarten through postgraduate teachers share research on classroom practices in an effort to improve effectiveness.
- International Journal of Progressive Education. Explore the possibilities of the future of education by looking at such issues as multicultural education, new literacies, and globalization.
- Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation. This journal provides scholarly articles on research and ideas about educational practices.
- Research in Middle Level Education Online. Read studies, cases, and research relevant to middle school education and young adolescents.
  The Open Education Journal. This open access journal offers information on contemporary education and learning.
- Education Next. This evidence-based journal highlights current research in education policy and school reform.
  Education Policy Analysis Archives. Available in both English and Spanish, the articles here focus on current policy in American education.
- Florida Journal of Educational Administration & Policy. Publishing peer-reviewed articles on education administration and policy, this journal invites readers from K-12 and higher education settings.
- Current Issues in Comparative Education. With voices from teachers, students, policy-makers, and academics, this journal explores contemporary educational issues.
  Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies. Examining a variety of policy approaches to education, this journal is specifically an exploration of Marxist and Left analyses of education.
- Academic Leadership. Learn about cultivating leadership in both public school and higher education settings.
- International Journal of Teacher Leadership. This peer-reviewed journal offers information on the practice and research of teacher leadership in their annual publications.
- The ALAN Review. This journal provides information relevant to teaching literature to teens.
  Kairos. This journal explores the language arts and rhetoric through the use of new media.
  Computers and Composition Online. Learn about technology as a tool to teaching and learning literacy in this journal.
- The Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching. Aimed at teachers of language in K-12 and college, this journal examines the use of imagination in teaching first and secondary languages.
- Language Learning & Technology. This journal is specifically for teachers of second and foreign language and how teaching and learning can be enhanced through the use of technology.
- Journal of Museum Studies. Students and faculty involved in museum studies will benefit from the articles in this publication.
- Journal of Educational Technology & Society. These articles serve to unite those who design technology systems for education and those educators who implement and manage these systems to work together for the greater good of education.
- Meridian. This journal provides information on technology in middle school education.
- International Journal of Educational Technology. A joint venture between the US and Australia, this journal provides scholarly articles on technology in education twice a year.
  THEN: Journal. This journal offers a humanities-based approach to learning about research on the use of technology in education.
- Journal of Online Behavior. Read the research being done surrounding online behavior.
- Journal of Technology Education. Explore topics in technology education with this academic journal.
- Innovate. Explore the current practices and trends in online education with this journal.
  Journal of Interactive Online Learning. Read manuscripts, essays, and reviews discussing perspectives of online learning.
- School Library Media Research. Learn about evaluating and implementing successful school library media programs with the articles here.

14 Nov 09

google-docs-upload - Project Hosting on Google Code

code.google.com/...google-docs-upload - Preview

A tool for batch upload documents to a Google Docs account with recursive traversing of directories. The tool supports PDF upload.
Total list of supported formats: csv, doc, docx, html, htm, ods, odt, pdf, ppt, pps, rtf, sxw, tsv, tab, txt, xls, xlsx.
Google Docs Batch Upload
1 more annotations...
- Featured downloads:
  
  google-docs-upload-1.2.jar

Google Docs Batch Upload Eases Online Document Transfers - Google Docs - Lifehacker

lifehacker.com/...ases-online-document-transfers - Preview

Windows/Mac/Linux (Java): Got a bunch of files to send to Google Docs, and don't have time for the webapp's one-by-one uploads? Google Docs Batch Upload does just what you might think, loading any folder of files into Google Docs' servers
java -jar google-docs-upload-1.2.jar /home/kevin/uploads --recursive
2 more annotations...
- You'll be asked for your Google Docs login credentials, and then Google Docs Batch Upload gets to work. The latest version includes the ability to replicate a folder structure of sub-folders placed in your chosen upload folder, which might relieve the minds of those with a hyper-organized set of docs.
- Google Docs Batch Upload is a free download and works wherever Java does. Looking for a two-way Google Docs sync solution? Try the similarly command-line-powered GDataCopier

13 Nov 09

Free Backup software, automate backup, synchronization, and archiving tasks, JaBack

"JaBack - Automated Data Backup Software. Improve your productivity!
Backup software designed to automate all your backup, synchronization, and archiving tasks.

* Easy to use: no programming or scripting required, graphical interface
* Powerful, versatile, reliable and FREE
* Run 1000+ tasks a day"

www.hiteksoftware.com/...index.htm - Preview

jaback backup freeware softtools tools4macs

The Virtual Museum of Canada

www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/A99F4E45C3A8913984B69D12BE7D87 - Preview

museum onlinelearning

12 Nov 09

20 Hilarious Social Media Comic Strips | Penn Olson

www.penn-olson.com/...20-social-media-comic-strips - Preview

comics socialmedia

The Daily Beacon

dailybeacon.utk.edu/showarticle.php - Preview

Online courses simplify scheduling process
Robbie Hargett - Staff Writer
Thursday, November 05, 2009 issue
4 more annotations...
- “Most of the lectures are uploaded to the Blackboard site, and students are able to download and listen to the lectures at their own schedule,” Singh said. “The participation from the students in the course is via assignments and discussion boards.”
- “The main advantage a person wants to get from an online class is scheduling flexibility,” McClanahan said.
- The issues of limited class sizes and, consequently, timely graduations are other factors that promote the usage of online courses.
  
  Singh and McClanahan both agreed that this method of learning can help students when they enter the workplace as well.
  
  “These courses introduce the students to distance learning technologies and tools and teach them how to collaborate in online environments, how to use online tools to effectively communicate, and prepares them for the distributed workplace of current and future times,” Singh said.
  
  The results of the current online courses are extremely positive. McClanahan gave her students a survey that asked whether they would choose a traditional class over one online, after experiencing both.
  
  “Sixty-five percent said they would register for the online version over the traditional one,” McClanahan said.
- “She said that after experiencing it, she had completely changed her point of view and now would like to take at least one online class per semester, because she really likes the flexibility of choosing when and where she attends a class session and simplifying course scheduling,”

11 Nov 09

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft disconnects Xbox gamers

news.bbc.co.uk/...8354166.stm - Preview

Thousands of gamers may have been cut off from Microsoft's online gaming service Xbox Live for modifying their consoles to play pirated games.
Online reports suggest that as many as 600,000 gamers may have been affected.
Microsoft said that modifying an Xbox 360 console "violates" the service's "terms of use" and would result in a player being disconnected.

"All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and that modifying their Xbox 360 console to play pirated discs violates the Xbox Live terms of use, will void their warranty and result in a ban from Xbox Live," Microsoft has said in a statement.
4 more annotations...
- Many gamers modify their consoles by installing new chips or software that allows them to run unofficial programs. Some chips are specifically designed to play pirated games.
- Microsoft has not said how it was able to determine which gamers to disconnect.
- "We do not reveal specifics, but can say that all consoles have been verified to have violated the terms of use," the firm said in a statement.
  Affected gamers were met with a message during the login process. It read: ""Your console has been banned from Xbox".
- the ban does not stop the console from working and only affects a gamer's Xbox Live account.

Leaders and Laggards: Recommendations

www.americanprogress.org/...recommendations.html - Preview

Our analysis of the innovation gap in American education leads us to recommend the following reforms.
Empower schools and principals.
12 more annotations...
- Develop student-based funding policies and other more flexible approaches to school funding
- Reinvent education management.
- Reinvention calls for nothing less than a seismic shift on the part of states, from micromanaging districts through bureaucratic and irrelevant funding schemes, program initiatives, and policies to creating a flexible, performance-focused management system that is loose on inputs and strict on school outcomes.
- Rethink the school day and calendar.
- Better Accountability
- Reform teacher pay and reward teachers whose performance improves student achievement.
- Develop statewide longitudinal data systems and provide better information to schools, teachers, and the public.
- Provide teachers with focused professional development on key topics such as use of data and technology. High-tech tools are of little use unless teachers in the trenches can take advantage of them.
- Support state efforts to create common academic standards linked to rigorous assessments.
- Support state reform organizations.
- Encourage entrepreneurial organizations such as Teach for America and Wireless Generation.
- the status quo needs to be disrupted for purposeful innovation to thrive. Only then will our nation's students receive the kind of education that they deserve.

Leaders and Laggards: Findings

www.americanprogress.org/...findings.html - Preview

Among our major findings:
Rigid education bureaucracies impede quality schooling. Ninety percent of teachers say that routine duties and paperwork interfere with their teaching, according to our analysis of the 2007-2008 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), a nationally representative survey of teachers and principals administered every four years by the National Center for Education Statistics. Only about one-third of teachers approve of how their schools are run. Throughout our educational system, a traditionalist school culture limits autonomy and innovation.
9 more annotations...
- State finance systems are opaque, inefficient, and undermine innovation. The jumbled patchwork of spending programs in each state provides schools almost no room to spend resources in more effective ways.
- The teacher pipeline fails to provide a diverse pool of high-quality educators. In some states, such as Iowa and Nebraska, almost no teachers enter the profession through alternative certification programs, which make it easier for talented liberal arts graduates and midcareer professionals to enter the classroom without conventional teaching preparation. At the same time, school leaders lack the authority to recruit the best candidates: Fewer than half of the principals in states, such as Oklahoma and North Dakota, report having a major degree of influence over teacher hiring.
- Teacher evaluations are not based on performance. State systems for evaluating the effectiveness of teachers are focused almost entirely on inputs such as training and years of experience, even though these factors have been shown to have little impact on student achievement.
- Major barriers exist to the removal of poor-performing teachers. Seventy-two percent of principals say that tenure policies are a barrier to firing ineffective teachers, according to our analysis of federal SASS data. Another 61% say that teacher unions are an obstacle. Without the ability to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, school leaders cannot build a cohesive school culture, create an environment of accountability, and ensure that all students will learn.
- The outcome of state technology spending is unknown. Despite a systematic effort to examine the Web-based materials available from every state department of education, we found no evidence that any state had conducted a large-scale technology return-on-investment study. Instead, states collect data largely on student access to computers and the Internet. While technology has the potential to reinvent education delivery, without information on outcomes states will not know whether their investment in technology is well spent.
- State data systems provide limited information on school operations and outcomes. States have made substantial improvements to their education data systems, but they still barely skim the surface of school operations, failing to answer basic capacity questions such as the degree to which professional development improves student outcomes.
- Schools provide too little access to college-level coursework. In most cases, dual-enrollment programs (in which students attend high school while enrolling in select collegiate courses) are a win-win educational strategy. They allow high school students to take advanced coursework and gain college credit while boosting college readiness and breaking down the often meaningless boundaries between high school and college. But our research shows that fewer than two-thirds of schools report having such programs.
- In almost every state, education dollars do not follow students to the schools they attend according to their needs. Instead, funds are distributed based on factors that have little to do with students, such as the number of teachers in a school or the kind of educational programs that a school provides. Such financial practices make it nearly impossible for principals to allocate resources in new and innovative ways.
- States lack a culture of education advocacy. Innovation-focused reform will require deep reserves of political capital because entrenched interests will fight meaningful changes. But few leaders have stepped forward to create the political conditions for reform.

Interactive Map: Leaders and Laggards

www.americanprogress.org/...leaders_laggards - Preview

Two years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute came together to grade the states on school performance.
In this follow-up report, we turn our attention to the future, looking not at how states are performing today, but at what they are doing to prepare themselves for the challenges that lie ahead. Thus, some states with positive academic results receive poor grades on our measures of innovation, while others with lackluster scholarly achievement nevertheless earn high marks for policies that are creating an entrepreneurial culture in their schools. We chose this focus because, regardless of current academic accomplishment in each state, we believe innovative educational practices are vital to laying the groundwork for continuous and transformational change.
16 more annotations...
- Roughly one in three eighth graders is proficient in reading. Most high schools graduate little more than two-thirds of their students on time. And even the students who do receive a high school diploma lack adequate skills: More than 33% of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.
- Our aim is to encourage states to embrace policies that make it easier to design smart solutions that serve 21st century students and address 21st century challenges. The impulse to either dictate one-size-fits-all solutions from the top or simply to do something--anything--differently will not address our pressing needs. Instead, this report seeks to foster a flexible, performance-oriented culture that will help our schools meet educational challenges.
- The challenge is to boost the chance that creative problem solvers will ultimately make a real, lasting difference for our nation and our children
- Too often, reformers tend to embrace only those advances that we can conveniently measure with today's crude tools, such as grades three-to-eight reading and math scores. The principal virtue of the No Child Left Behind Act, for example--a much-needed focus on outcomes and transparency--has been coupled with a bureaucratic impulse and an inflexible, cookie-cutter approach to gauging teacher and school quality.
- we should also embrace what might be called smart quality control. That means measuring the value of various providers and solutions in terms of what they are intended to do--whether that is recruiting teachers or tutoring foreign languages--rather than merely on whether they affect the rate at which students improve their performance on middle school reading and math tests.
- the need for a variety of new providers that deliver additional support to educators in answering classroom and schoolwide challenges.
- Capacity building is
- To examine the degree to which states have developed such a culture, we focused on eight areas:
- School Management
- Finance (including the accessibility of state financial data)
- Staffing: Hiring & Evaluation (including alternative certification for teachers)
- Staffing: Removing Ineffective Teachers (including the percentage of principals who report barriers to the removal of poor-performing teachers)
- Data (including such measures as state-collected college student remediation data)
- Technology (including students per Internet-connected computer)
- Pipeline to Postsecondary (including the percentage of schools reporting dual-enrollment programs)
- State Reform Environment (an ungraded category that includes data on the presence of reform groups and participation in international assessments)

How to craft a memorable key message in 10 minutes : Speaking about Presenting

www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/...morable-key-message-10-minutes - Preview

presentationdesign

Miguel guhlin's Public Library

Ping on AIR - Application Installer

virtual museum

Unlearning How to Teach

Gained something in the translation « BuzzMachine

Education Innovation: Essential Education: "Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom" by Alan November

Virtual School Symposium 2009 Overlay - live

copyrightfriendly - home

StateU.com

100 Excellent Open Access Journals for Educators | Online College Tips - Online Colleges

100 Excellent Open Access Journals for Educators

google-docs-upload - Project Hosting on Google Code

Google Docs Batch Upload Eases Online Document Transfers - Google Docs - Lifehacker

Free Backup software, automate backup, synchronization, and archiving tasks, JaBack

The Virtual Museum of Canada

20 Hilarious Social Media Comic Strips | Penn Olson

The Daily Beacon

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft disconnects Xbox gamers

Leaders and Laggards: Recommendations

Leaders and Laggards: Findings

Interactive Map: Leaders and Laggards

How to craft a memorable key message in 10 minutes : Speaking about Presenting

Sponsored Links

Top Tags

View All Recent Tags (49)

Public Tags (1704)

Miguel guhlin's Public Lists (1)