Daniel Spielmann's List: Make the Net Work

• submit work privately
• can be a destructive pedagogical practice
• people have to perform in the "real world"
• incorporate authentic, real-world types of experiences in the online courses
• relying on our previous experience
• many methods used in traditional classroom environments can be effective in an online learning environment
• teaching online has become an increasingly complicated process, requiring both a specialized pedagogy and a technological aptitude
• social interaction in online courses as a key success factor
• faculty eliminating opportunities for conversation by asking students to turn in work privately
• increase in educational impact without a corresponding increase in instructor workload

  • advantage of public feedback
• important role that feedback plays in formal education
• too often most people think of "public" versus "private" as simple binaries
• continuum from fully public to fully private
• public performance of student work in order to teach
• the point here is not to erase the broader notion of privacy but to attack the common misperception that everything the student produces in a classroom is private in all senses
• learning is largely a social process
• The arts and architectural education both maintain traditions of the studio critique, where a teacher and outside practitioners publicly comment on student work.
• The pedagogy underlying the idea of a studio critique or even the development of a portfolio — that is, a public showing and often public assessment/evaluation of one's work — should not be restricted to the arts or teacher education.
• students tend to work harder when they know their work will be viewed and judged by their peers or potential employers
• Depending on the LMS, the only time-saving benefit (that we can identify) is the ability to download (or "collect") all assignments in one zipped folder.
• evaluating student work publicly can help improve the instructor feedback as well as student satisfaction because students see the instructor's participation in the course shell responding to other students rather than wondering when their own work will be graded

  • public feedback makes the teacher's efforts more transarent for the learning group
• assignments customized to the student's personal background and interests can make it harder for students to "lend" their work to others in subsequent semesters

  • curbing plagiarism
• Cases of students openly sharing their work can help establish it as theirs and prevent others from claiming it while enriching it through peer feedback.
• Given the beginnings of a shift toward a more open and collaborative culture of sharing (open source software, open education, open social networks), students need to learn not only how to cite and credit others' work but also how to protect their own work.
• allowing students to learn from the direct assessment of not only their own work but also by reflecting on the work of their peers
• Using web-based tools such as Jing or Adobe Connect, students can present their work in a reasonable proxy for a classroom presentation, then later distribute it as they see fit.

  • Now, Google Hangouts and G+ Communities could also be used in some occasions.
• larger audience might include experts in the field who can provide authentic and relevant feedback
• if you choose to leave the safety of the LMS, you should ensure that you have prior consent from the students or give them the option to work under a pseudonym
• talk through the implications of making the blogs public to the world
• faculty can provide means by which students can protect their identity on the Internet while allowing the faculty, and the broader Internet community, to provide feedback and guidance on any work posted publicly
• public submission and feedback cycles for most types of work have proven to be a superior strategy in the online classroom
• Public posting enables students to see the work of their peers. Among other things, students can see differences in quality of work. This helps calibrate superior performance in the class, allowing all students to observe and model top performance.
• Students seem reluctant to turn in low-quality work in front of their peers.
• Visibility could discourage plagiarism because students would have to cheat in front of their peers.
• • Public postings increase the instructor's social presence in the course by allowing all students to see feedback on all assignments. Because students largely gauge instructor participation in a course on the amount of feedback provided to the class, public postings allow students to better estimate the total time commitment the teacher makes to the online course. Private feedback skews the appearance of faculty contribution because students can't view the actual amount of instructor feedback given to the class in total.
  • Public feedback by the instructor helps minimize workload by reducing the number of redundant comments across assignments.
  • Perhaps most importantly, public performance and accountability better model real-world conditions, where work ultimately is consumed inside a social system, by groups, publicly. In this sense, the public performance and feedback model provides students the most authentic practice available in a classroom — online or not.
• Teachers should mandate public performance and feedback unless they see a clear argument, whether legal or pedagogical, in favor of privacy.
• Learning is a socially situated practice.
• public submission of work and public feedback can increase faculty social presence without increasing the amount of work involved

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• Let’s say instead, I were to set up a process where I might say, “I do not know how to do ______ (a topic, skill)” who wants to spend ________ (amount of time) learning it with me? So not me as teacher, but a group as learning something in parallel.

• social bookmarking only makes sense if it’s done in the context of an active community
• d that they already had D
• perceived ease of use matter
• The look and feel of a site isn’t as important to many students as its functionality and ease of use.

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• highlighting and annotation is an opportunity to re-think educational affordances, particularly if you add social capabilities into the mix
• Part of the problem, I think, is the lack of strong, core educational use cases informing the design.
• for some students, marking up a book feels a little like vandalism
• But digital highlighting feels different.
• non-destructive and reversible
• the ability to highlight and annotate isn’t just incidental
• the ability to slice and dice the highlights of their classmates lets them learn from each other
• tag highlights and annotations
• aggregation
• communication
• filter on tags

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• patterns have emerged where low threshold participation amounts to collective intelligence
• reading alone isn't enough to fulfill our innate desire to remix our media, consumption is active for consumers turned users
• To Refactor, Collaborate, Moderate and Lead requires a different level of engagement -- which makes up the core of a community.
• it is important to distinguish the value of collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence
• When users participate in high enagement activities, connecting with one another, a different kind of value is being created.
• Participation in communities plots along a power law with a solid core/periphery model -- provided social software supports both low threshold participation and high engagement. 

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