Tania Sheko's List: Connected Courses

• After years of experimenting with social media and praising the learning potential of these tools, Wesch realized that they don’t automatically establish either genuine empathy or meaningful bonds between professors and students. Using social media is but one of the many possible ways to connect, but the message that Wesch’s experimentation brings is that only genuine connections may restore the sense of joy and curiosity that we hope to instill in our students.

• What is a course? What is a class? What is a community? What is the relationship between those three questions and an even more basic one that is rarely asked in higher education: How do we learn? I
• we first need to step back and think about the conventions of education that we have inherited and to ask the big “why” and “how” questions of those conventions.
• What is the purpose of the institutions and structures of learning that support and are supported by higher education?
• may not be the most effective ways to learn the content and method of new ideas, and their application to the world beyond the classroom?
• ven some of the most effective teachers might not be doing all that they can do to take advantage of the new, connected, social, and interactive ways in which people learn online today.
• commons-based peer production
• new knowledge commons

5 more annotations...

• syndication, it is based on a means of one site letting another know that there is something new, a way for machines to talk to one another called RSS, Really Simple Syndication Or Rich Site Summary
• when we create a WordPress aggregation hub as part of a Connected Course, we use an add-on called Feed WordPress.
• When Feed WordPress gets an affirmative answer, it creates a new post on the hub site that has a copy of the content from Alan’s most recent post, plus some extra information, like a link back to the original, the date time it was published, and all of the tags or categories Alan may have used in his post.
• You can aggregate anything that generates updates as an RSS Feed.
• What Kind of Information Are You Syndicating? Mostly we are talking about blogs that participants in your course will use to manage their own content. But there are some more questions…
• Will you prescribe the blog platform or let participants choose their own?
• All of these options can be supported with Feed WordPress, it cares not what platform is used. All it cares about is consuming RSS.
• And so, they have a mix of content and you want to offer them the ability to say, “Hey, for this course, I’m just going to put post everything in a category on my blog for Howard’s Course.”
• Getting the right feed for these can be done, but requires some savvy intervention
• n a Connected Course, you will have a portion of it that is content you create about the course- content, syllabus, assignments, announcements. And then you have this blog of stuff coming in from your participants:
• Mostly, categories are a logical way to organize your course content.
• Feed WordPress can bring all of that in, and map it to categories and tags in the hub site.
• Feed WordPress has the capability to say, if a blog post comes in that has a tag or a category or both, we are going to convert them ALL to tags on the course site:
• So all of the syndicated content can be represented visually with tag clouds.
• If we know in advance of ways we want to group participants blogs, we can create a category view of all blog posts from Section 005 or from participants from the University of Timbuktu

13 more annotations...

• There is wide agreement that we need new models of education suited to this historic moment, and not simply new models of schooling, but entirely new visions of learning better suited to the increasing complexity, connectivity, and velocity of our new knowledge society.
• Fortunately, we are also able to harness the same technologies and social processes that have powered these transformations in order to provide the next generation with learning experiences that open doors to academic achievement, economic opportunity, and civic engagement.
• Specifically, we now have the capability to reimagine where, when, and how learning takes place;
• to empower and motivate youth to pursue knowledge and develop expertise at a pace, to a degree, and on a path that takes advantage of their unique interests and potential
• and to build on innovations across a growing spectrum of learning institutions able to support a range of learning experiences for youth that were unimaginable even 15 years ago.
• We propose a new approach to learning -- connected learning
• What would it mean to think of education as a responsibility of a distributed network of people and institutions, including schools, libraries, museums and online communities?
• education as a process of guiding youths’ active participation in public life that includes civic engagement, and intellectual, social, recreational, and career-relevant pursuits?
• take advantage of the new kinds of intergenerational configurations t
• Connected learning
• three learning principles,
• three educational values
• three design principles
• Equity
• Full Participation
• Social connection
• learning is meaningful when it is part of valued social relationships and shared practice, culture, and identity.
• connected learning seeks to harness and integrate the learning that young people pursue in the spheres of interest, peer relations, and academics based on the following three learning principles
• Interest-powered
• peer interaction is engaging and participatory
• Peer-supported
• Academically oriented
• Connected learning recognizes the importance of academic success for intellectual growth and as an avenue towards economic and political opportunity.
• Connected learning mines and translates popular peer culture and community-based knowledge for academic relevance
• design principles
• Shared purpose
• Production-centered
• actively creating, making, producing, experimenting, remixing, decoding, and designing,
• fosters skills and dispositions for lifelong learning and productive contributions to today’s rapidly changing work and political conditions.
• Openly networked
• link together institutions and groups across various sectors,
• Learning is most resilient when it is linked and reinforced across settings of home, school, peer culture and community.

30 more annotations...