collaboration

05 Apr 09

learning by design: activities using a group blog

ABSTRACT: The paper presents a case study of the educational exploitation of group blogging for the implementation of a “learning by design” activity. More specifically, a group of students used a blog as a communication and information management tool in the University course of ICT-enhanced Geometry learning activities. The analysis of the designed learning activities, the blog content and log files, as well as the points of view of the students (via a questionnaire and a group interview) expressed upon completion of the activity gives significant findings supporting the researchers’ initial hypotheses about the potential of blogs’ educational applications. Blogs combined with a proper pedagogical approach such as ‘learning by design’ enable teachers to offer high quality learning experiences to their students.

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28 Mar 09

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

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the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.
And in a rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills.
20 more annotations...
- We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.
- t is unlikely that sufficient resources will be available to build enough new campuses to meet the growing global demand for higher education—at least not the sort of campuses that we have traditionally built for colleges and universities. Nor is it likely that the current methods of teaching and learning will suffice to prepare students for the lives that they will lead in the twenty-first century.
- Fortunately, various initiatives launched over the past few years have created a series of building blocks that could provide the means for transforming the ways in which we provide education and support learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by the growth and evolution of the Internet, which has created a global “platform” that has vastly expanded access to all sorts of resources, including formal and informal educational materials. The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.
- Arguably, the most visible impact of the Internet on education to date has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them.
- The Internet has also been used to provide students with direct access to high-quality (and therefore scarce and expensive) tools like telescopes, scanning electron microscopes, and supercomputer simulation models, allowing students to engage personally in research.
- The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people. New kinds of online resources—such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities—have allowed people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multiple modes of learning.
- The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.⁵
- The emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for over one hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”
- There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field.
- In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field.⁹ But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field.
- “productive inquiry”
- ways in which technology has begun to change the game in education
- virtual environment is the Terra Incognita project of the University of Southern Queensland (Australia), which has built a classroom in Second Life,
- it also seems likely that a great deal of informal learning is taking place both on and off campus via the online social networks that have attracted millions of young people.
- As more of learning becomes Internet-based, a similar pattern seems to be occurring. Whereas traditional schools offer a finite number of courses of study, the “catalog” of subjects that can be learned online is almost unlimited. There are already several thousand sets of course materials and modules online, and more are being added regularly. Furthermore, for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.
- Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
- All of these institutions are practicums—places where knowledge is created and stored and transmitted. But are they reflective practicums? Are they evaluating what they do and engaging in anything resembling cycles of continuous improvement? Are their reflections being systematically captured and shared?
- An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons
- The original World Wide Web—the “Web 1.0” that emerged in the mid-1990s—vastly expanded access to information. The Open Educational Resources movement is an example of the impact that the Web 1.0 has had on education. But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.
- In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focused on helping students to build stocks of knowledge and cognitive skills that could be deployed later in appropriate situations.

11 Nov 08

newlearning » home

New Technologies Means New Learning (or should it be New Ways of Learning?)

Does it? I think it does, and I have some ideas about how the use of new technologies changes how we learn, but I'd like to elicit what others think before I write too much here.

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03 Nov 08

Innovate: e-Learning and Action Research as Transformative Practice

Recent Internet developments and advances in networking have encouraged students' collaboration with other students and instructors, increased students' access to experts, and provided an array of learning resources. Despite the evident potentiality and d

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e-learning transformation technology collaboration action-research teaching learning

An interesting article showing what can be done with technology in the transformation of teaching and learning. - willstewart on 2008-11-03

Recent Internet developments and advances in networking have encouraged students' collaboration with other students and instructors, increased students' access to experts, and provided an array of learning resources. Despite the evident potentiality and dynamism of these emerging technologies, however, studies indicate that while teachers in higher education are making use of e-mail and Web resources, other technologies, such as wireless solutions and conferencing tools, are used to a much more limited extent (Collis and van der Wende 2002).

We-think: The power of mass creativity - Charles Leadbeater

We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.

Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for

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06 Oct 08

Collaboration Tools | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage,

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29 Sep 08

270+ Tools for Running a Business Online - Mashable

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03 Jul 08

udutu | online learning simulations made easy

Create online courses quickly and easily for your corporate training and development program. Small business can enjoy this affordable online authoring tool by offering online courses to their customers. No technical knowledge required. elearning, myudutu

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28 May 08

Why I Migrated Over to Twine (And Other Social Services Bit the Dust)

or the past few months I’ve been an active member of Twine.com; a beta semantic web app riddled with AI to help us organize, share and discover information. The beta is still under heavy construction, but at this point in time, I’ve migrated entirely

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04 Apr 08

Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Wiki collaboration leads to happiness

hey say a picture is worth a thousand words and I think this one sums up the power of wiki collaboration better than any 1,000 word essay ever could. The model is courtesy of Chris Rasmussen at US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. I presented this

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29 Feb 08

21 Days of Wiki Adoption

Your competitors are using wikis. Your customers are using wikis. So are other employees in your organization. You need to use wikis too. It’s where your future is. And I’ll show you how.

The latest post appears in the player, and all posts are list

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Wikia - Wikis from Wikia - Join the best wiki communities

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The strength of garden walls | a touch of frost

We have seen a lot of interest and activity in wikis at our institution over the past year. Much of that interest is due to the ease of use of wikis (although the wiki software we use - mediawiki - could be a lot more intuitive) and to the ease with which

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wiki wikis learning collaboration

19 Jan 08

Knowing Knowledge: Home

Knowledge is changing. It develops faster, it changes more quickly, and it is more central to organizational success than in any other time in history.

Our schools, universities, corporations, and non-profit organizations, need to adapt. We need to chang

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