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The Usefulness of Wenger’s Framework in Understanding a Community of Practice.
Jane Bozarth's dissertation on communities of practice, including a proposed revised framework for analyzing and understanding these communities. The revised version clarifies the difference between engagement and participation and adjusts definitions of other terms.
10 Qualities of the Ideal Instructional Designer : The eLearning Coach
Brief discussion about whether instructional designers need degrees, followed by a list of qualities for successful instructional designers like "Be obsessed with learning everything."
Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn: Scientific American - Sean Kearney's Lifestream
Interesting research--totally flies in the face of how most of us think about designing learning. Do we design learning environments that allow people to fail enough to learn?
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The idea embedded in this approach is that if students make errors, they will learn the errors and be prevented (or slowed) in learning the correct information. But research by Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork at U.C.L.A. that recently appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition reveals that this worry is misplaced. In fact, they found, learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors
New evidence that bullet-points don’t work : Speaking about Presenting
Research applying cognitive load theory to slide presentations providing evidence that slides crammed full of text aren't effective for helping people learn and remember
Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge
Long paper by Stephen Downes on the nature of knowledge, connectivism, learning, and e-learning 2.0
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Add Sticky NoteIn other
words, cognitivists defend an approach that may be called ‘folk
psychology’. “In our everyday social interactions we
both predict and explain behavior, and our explanations are couched
in a mentalistic vocabulary which includes terms like ‘belief’
and ‘desire’.” The argument, in a nutshell, is that
the claims of folk psychology are literally true, that there is, for
example, an entity in the mind corresponding to the belief that
'Paris is the capital of France', and that this belief is, in fact,
what might loosely be called 'brain writing' - or, more precisely,
there is a one-to-one correspondence between a person's brain states
and the sentence itself.- I've never heard cognitivism compared to "folk psychology" before. I'm not totally convinced by this argument. Cognitivist methods do have some research support, after all. (Think multimedia learning, Clark & Mayer's "ELearning and the Science of Instruction.") But their methods could (at least sometimes) be right even if their explanation of the underlying mechanism is wrong. - on 2009-10-06
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Add Sticky NoteWe may contrast cognitivism, which is a
causal theory of mind, with connectionism, which is an
emergentist
theory of mind. This is not to say that connectionism
(see also)
does away with causation altogether; it is not a ‘hand of God’
theory. It allows that there is a physical, causal connection
between entities, and this is what makes communication possible. But
where it differs is, crucially: the transfer of information does
not reduce to this physical substrate. Contrary to the
communications-theoretical account, the new theory is a non-reductive
theory. The contents of communications, such as sentences, are not
isomorphic with some mental state.- From Wikipedia: "A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is more than the sum of the properties of the system's parts." If I understand Stephen's argument correctly, part of what he's saying here is that rather than knowledge being exactly what we perceive it to be (a sentence like "Paris is a city in France"), what's happening in our brains is more than that. When a teacher shares knowledge with a learner, it doesn't work like a copy machine where the teacher gives the learner a duplicate of the original and then both people have discrete copies of that knowledge. - on 2009-10-06
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CCK09: What about teaching?
Stephen Downes on connectivism and teaching, arguing that this theory isn't really about classroom teaching.
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This theory is, first and foremost, a theory about learning. This is why I tweeted a few weeks ago that people - including teachers - should be viewing Connectivism as a theory describing how to learn, not how to teach. And what it says about learning, essentially, is that you should immerse yourselve in the relevant environment, observe and practice the common actions in that environment, and reflect on that practice.
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So - insofar as there is a pedagogy attached to Connectivism, I content that it involves more and more removing students from a structured and managed classroom environment, and more and more providing means for them to be immersed in communities of practitioners, and for this to happen at a younger and younger age, and in addition, to more and more create in practitioners the expectation and responsibility of working openly and including new and inexperienced members into their communities.
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Dave’s Whiteboard » Blog Archive » 21st-century skills: Downes’s OS for the mind
Dave Ferguson pulls out big ideas from Stephen Downes' "OS for the mind" essay. Essentially, the argument is that we need to teach more than just facts: we need to teach people what to do with facts.
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- You can learn to tell fact from non-fact. Detecting deception (or, I think, error, or misrepresentation) is a skill, Downes says, “and you need just as much as your computer needs to be able to detect malware.”
- You’ve gotta decide. This point is key: decision-making isn’t rote performance, which means it’s not based solely on facts.
A review of research on professional learning communities: What do we know?
Like the title says, a research review on PLCs, synthesizing results from 10 articles.
* All research supported the idea that learning communities change teaching practice, although not all articles were specific about what changes took place.
* In one study, teachers in PLCs developed more student-centered classrooms. Some other studies discussed specific teaching strategies used as a result of PLCs.
* All studies showed a change in school culture through "collaboration, focus on student learning, teacher authority, and continuous teacher learning."
* All 6 studies that looked at student achievement found that student learning improved. However, this was only seen when the focus of collaboration was student learning and not just working together.
* Their conclusion: "The focus of a PLC should be developing teachers’ “knowledge of practice” around the issue of student learning"
* "...working collaboratively is the process not the goal of a PLC. The goal is enhanced student achievement."
elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age
George Siemens' 2004 introduction to connectivism
Facebook Applications for Learning - 2009 - ASTD
Applications for sharing presentations, books, quizzes, note-taking, and research. Some of these are more general applications than learning ones (like SocialCalendar & Files), but a number of these apps are new to me.
22 Why Reasons People Go Online: Which is Your Blog Connecting With?
Why do people go online? The most popular category is learning: educating yourself, doing research, or keeping informed. Fun reasons like passing time and being entertained as well as socializing also ranked high.
edtechpost - PLE Diagrams
Collection of diagrams showing PLEs--lots of different ideas here
Could Power Point Presentations Be Stifling Learning?
This summary doesn't say how large the sample size was, and the researchers clarify that it's only about teaching new concepts. However, it is interesting to note that animation in PowerPoint slide decreased recall and comprehension.
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To test their hypothesis, the team recorded two versions of a PowerPoint lecture. The presentations differed only in the presence of animation to incrementally present information. They then showed students either the animated or non-animated lecture and then tested the students recall and comprehension of the lecture.
The team found a marked difference in average student performance, with those seeing the non-animated lecture performing much better in the tests than those who watched the animated lecture.
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To test their hypothesis, the team recorded two versions of a PowerPoint lecture. The presentations differed only in the presence of animation to incrementally present information. They then showed students either the animated or non-animated lecture and then tested the students recall and comprehension of the lecture.
The team found a marked difference in average student performance, with those seeing the non-animated lecture performing much better in the tests than those who watched the animated lecture. Students were able to recall details of the static graphics much better. Animated slides meant to present information incrementally actually require greater concentration, which makes it harder to remember content as well as reducing overall exposure time to the "complete" slide, the researchers found.
100 Free Online Lectures that Will Make You a Better Teacher | Best Universities
Video lectures for teachers on creativity, technology, special needs, specific subjects, classroom management, and more.
Will at Work Learning: New Research Report on Using Culturally, Linguistically, and Situationally Relevant Scenarios
Research on how to support learning with scenarios that are relevant to the specific situation. Even though this is explicitly about workplace training, the major recommendations could be adapted for instructional design in education contexts too.
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Utilize decision-making scenarios. Consider using them not just in a minor role—for example at the end of a section—but integrated into the main narrative of your learning design.
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Determine the most important points you want to get across AND the most important situations in which these points are critical. Then, provide extra repetitions spaced over time on these key points and situations.
Measuring Networked (or Social) Learning « Daretoshare
Networked learning can't be assessed the same way as traditional, formal learning (or if it can, we wouldn't measure the real value that way). So what do you measure? This is a starting point.
Donald Clark Plan B: Brilliant 35 studies in media and learning
Great summary of research points on our perceptions of media with implications for using media effectively for learning. For example, audio quality matters a lot, but video quality can be low and still effective. Large, wide screens are preferred over higher quality images on smaller screens.
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35 psychological studies into the human reaction to media all point towards the simple proposition that people react towards media socially even though, at a conscious level, they believe it is not reasonable to do so. They can't help it. In short, people think that computers are people, which makes e-learning work.
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As long as a media technology is consistent with social and physical rules, we will accept it. Read that last part again, 'as long as a media technology is consistent with social and physical rules'. If the media technology fails to conform to these human expectations - we will very much not accept it.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Drop Practice | Tom Werner
Summary of research which compared courses with the same content but with specific elements of Gagne's instructional events removed. The strongest correlation with student performance and satisfaction was with practice with feedback.
(This is an old post, but it's moved since I originally bookmarked it.)
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The only instructional element that really matters is practice with feedback.
Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning - Emerging Technologies for Learning
George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger have created this wiki handbook for educators who want to incorporate technology into learning. Looks at how and why change is happening in education and how technology can help meet the educational needs of a changing world.
Flickr: Great quotes about Learning and Change
Flickr group with quotes on learning and change with great images. I could see this being really helpful for presentations
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