encourages students to “steal” and cite ideas from each other’s hypothes.is annotations
This is a neat idea, but do you think that this inhibits some of the students from annotating to their full potential? If I had a great idea, I might save it for myself instead of having someone else "steal" it.
Perceptual Learning - Training the brain to better perceive the information it is getting from the eyes.
This would be the optimal learning experience, for me.
“'Makerspace' is just a modern term for project-based learning,” he said, adding embracing this teaching style in today’s classroom is “a part of good pedagogy.”
If only 2% – 5% of all faculty and their students (who are doing renewable assignments) were active creators and improvers of OER, that would likely be sufficient.
«Les professeurs qui publient dans une revue disciplinaire n'ont pas toujours le temps, ni la reconnaissance, pour publier dans d'autres publications sur leurs projets ou leurs innovations pédagogiques, explique Anastassis Kozanitis. S'ils le font, ces publications hors discipline ne sont pas reconnues pour leurs demandes de subvention. C'est un frein majeur à la diffusion des recherches dans le domaine au Canada.»
Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist
How can we modernize our current education to fit the unknown needs of the future?
but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”
Or even a better question: How do we use these tools to help children learn, and acquire skills that they need?
Most of the universities combined the software with human instruction, but a few courses were delivered entirely online.
Interesting dichotomy.
nothing we did is visible to our analytics systems
If it’s not counted, does it count?
In this Discussion blog you will find: #DevtIDEAS Debates videos and summaries (a series of live online ‘webinars’ that brought several practitioners and researchers to debate and share new ideas), editorials from key global international development researchers and and practitioners, and a collection of posts that feature multimedia videos and graphics.
Development as a field continues to evolve. Ideas that turn into experience generate new ideas and lessons. New ideas inform new experiences, and these are typically debated by those involved in development work.
You can read and watch the debates and discussions that took place over the past two years complementing the IDRC publication International Development: Ideas, Experience, and Prospects.
Volunteer Coaches recruit teams of girls to work with female mentors.
A lot hinges on those mentors. Apparently, they’re not exclusively technical, which might be an important point. The mentoring is a big part of the learning experience, surely. But there’s a certain level of complexity involved when we start discussing mentorships.
It shifted its work to faculty-driven initiatives.
DIY, grassroots, bottom-up… but not learner-driven.
learning agenda on learning analytics
Learning analytics cannot be left to the researchers, IT leadership, the faculty, the provost or any other single sector alone.
An executive at a large provider of digital learning tools pushed back against what he saw as Thille’s “complaint about capitalism.”
Why so coy?
R.G. Wilmot Lampros, chief product officer for Aleks, says the underlying ideas, referred to as Knowledge Space Theory, were developed by professors at the University of California at Irvine and are in the public domain. It's "there for anybody to vet," he says. But McGraw-Hill has no more plans to make its analytics algorithms public than Google would for its latest search algorithm.
"I know that there are a few results that our customers have found counterintuitive," Mr. Lampros says, but the company's own analyses of its algebra products have found they are 97 percent accurate in predicting when a student is ready to learn the next topic.
As for Ms. Thille's broader critique, he is unpersuaded. "It's a complaint about capitalism," he says. The original theoretical work behind Aleks was financed by the National Science Foundation, but after that, he says, "it would have been dead without business revenues."
MS. THILLE stops short of decrying capitalism. But she does say that letting the market alone shape the future of learning analytics would be a mistake.
a debate over who should control the field of learning analytics
Who Decides?
What teachers want in a data dashboard
Though much of it may sound trite and the writeup is somewhat awkward (diverse opinions strung together haphazardly), there’s something which can help us focus on somewhat distinct attitudes towards Learning Analytics. Much of it hinges on what may or may not be measured. One might argue that learning happens outside the measurement parameters.
timely
Time-sensitive, mission-critical, just-in-time, realtime, 24/7…
Data “was something you would use as an autopsy when everything was over,” she said.
The autopsy/biopsy distinction can indeed be useful, here. Leading to insight. Especially if it’s not about which one is better. A biopsy can help prevent something in an individual patient, but it’s also a dangerous, potentially life-threatening operation. An autopsy can famously identify a “cause of death” but, more broadly, it’s been the way we’ve learnt a lot about health, not just about individual patients. So, while Teamann frames it as a severe limitation, the “autopsy” part of Learning Analytics could do a lot to bring us beyond the individual focus.
Low-shot visual object recognition
While generally misused today, analytics can (theoretically) be used to predict and personalize many facets of teaching & learning, inc. pace, complexity, content, and more.
Connected Course Design at Virginia Commonwealth University
educators and students alike have found themselves more and more flummoxed by a system that values assessment over engagement, learning management over discovery, content over community, outcomes over epiphanies
This Systems or "factory farming" approach to education seems antithetical to (and virtually guaranteed to flummox) a community-based, engaged, serendipitous and spontaneous learning explosion in traditional Higher Ed. Where are some cracks and crevices where the System has failed to snuff out the accidental life of learning?
more student engagement beyond the walls of a school.
Guest users in Moodle - can we make it easier to get them into the space to engage with students? No more boring forums when the community members or guest speakers in a f-2-f class can contribute. What about a Google form for requests? Is there a way to limit guests to only one forum?
I have Serious Rant-y Thoughts on requiring that students inhabit public spaces in professional contexts, and I do wonder how much a class hashtag is useful beyond self-promotion of the course and its amazing instructor.
You may consult input from amazing people like @GoogleGuacamole and @actualham who have very intentionally integrated (not just mentioning or requiring) Twitter use in their courses and implicated its value in students' connections with their professional network.
Atl=xtifl= 0MAXPOOL(RELU(CONV(Etl1)))l >0(1)^Atl=RELU(CONV(Rtl))(2)Etl= [RELU(Atl^Atl);RELU(^AtlAtl)](3)Rtl=CONVLSTM(Et1l;Rt1l;Rtl+1)(4)
Very unique network structure. Prediction results look promising.
Unsupervised convolutional neural networks for motion estimation
the LMS is a platform students will never again use outside of school
Unless we integrate such a platform in something else.
similar to picking texts for the course well in advance
Though the advice makes a lot of sense, leaving it aside makes for a very empowering experience.
“learners must be actively engaged in learning” to achieve deep understanding (Barkley, Cross, & Major, 2005, p. 10).
This might be a useful reference for further study into active learning
2013 article about Douglas Hofstadter, who has continued to pursue an understanding of the human mind through experiments with AI.
the algorithm was somewhat more accurate than a coin flip
In machine learning it's also important to evaluate not just against random, but against how well other methods (e.g. parole boards) do. That kind of analysis would be nice to see.
Both Udacity and Knewton require the human, the learner, to become a technology, to become a component within their well-architected software system. Sit and click. Sit and click.
Identifying issues important in their lives and community, and deciding on one to address
Sometimes this takes weeks or even months. I remember taking a walk with an art teacher several years ago, and I asked him how a particular student was doing in his class, and specifically what he was working on because it was hard for me to figure out how to get him connected to my work in English. It was November, just before Thanksgiving, and my colleague said, "I haven't figured out what his project will be yet," he said, before going on to explain a couple of things he had tried without success. I was struck with how patient he was being in letting the project come to the student, and not forcing him into a prescribed curriculum. Waiting is so hard, yet the work produced once there is a "flow" for a student makes it worth the wait. This has strong implications for school structures however! We need to be with students for longer periods of time. It also has implications for how groups work together. Perhaps a student who hasn't found his/her project yet can help others?
High unemployment■■Racial discrimination■■Neighborhood violence■■Deportation of undocumented immigrants■■High cost of college attendance■■Juvenile justice
Funny thing is, one can imagine that students -- at least my students in the Bronx -- would come up with a similar list. They have! But you can't bring it to them. There are shades and subtleties that are important in any group's list of topics. Like my students wanted to explore why people from the Bronx are not treated the same as people from elsewhere.
To borrow a phrase from libraries and archives, how do we get to a point where we curate connections rather than curating content?
connections over content. yes!
Mistakes are not just opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new. Before there can be learning, there must be learners. There are only two non-miraculous ways for learners to come into existence: they must either evolve or be designed and built by learners that evolved. Biological evolution proceeds by a grand, inexorable process of trial and error — and without the errors the trials wouldn’t accomplish anything.
My experimentation with open pedagogy – and my attempts to guide students’ learning with/in and across open platforms – was a social endeavor that invited reciprocal networking.
Generally the literatures related to transformational learning hinge on active student engagement in the learning process and on students assuming responsibility for their learning. Transformative learning, self-directed learning, experiential learning, and collaborative learning, each of which aims to enhance students’ engagement,are some of the pedagogical approaches that are widely described and evaluated in the literature. In addition to active student engagement, another key feature of transformational learning is transformational teaching. In order for students’ role to change, the role and responsibility of faculty must change as well.
Active learning, engaged learning, experiential learning, and owning the learning best happens with transformational teaching.
It is easy to allow technology to replace memorization and other skills. We should be mindful of what we allow it to replace. Martin Luther King had a large store of writings memorized -- and it served him well when he wrote the Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
We need more tools that will aid skill development instead of replacing useful skills. Spaced repetition software to assist memorization is one example. Phrase-by-phrase music training programs are another. The same ideas can be applied to memorization of text.
Researchers have tracked student emotions while using Crystal Island–a game-based learning environment– and used that research to predict how students will react in other learning situations
We should have control of the algorithms and data that guide our experiences online, and increasingly offline. Under our guidance, they can be powerful personal assistants.
Big business has been very militant about protecting their "intellectual property". Yet they regard every detail of our personal lives as theirs to collect and sell at whim. What a bunch of little darlings they are.
The Student-Centered Lecture
A PLN is a self-directed system meant to support lifelong learning through the development, maintenance, and leveraging of digital networks.
Connected Learning is based on the notion that learning is about expanding the connections between people and information within a learner's personal network
Providing Transformative Personalized Student Learning Opportunities as a Path Toward Equity
We are naturally creative and curious. We just have to build systems that nurture our inherent abilities. Schools do not do that.
Not only do schools not do that, traditionally they have "taught" creativity and curiosity out of students.
networked discovery of connections would be at the center of both the learning environment as designed by faculty and the learning environment as experienced by students
Would love to hear Campbell or Kuh elaborate on this. Identifying "connections" as more important than identifying content/information? A new way for searching the Internet? Mining connections among content/people? Mining the connections I've made among content/people on the Internet?
the clumsy and often linear arrangements often impede students from digesting each other’s comments and engaging in organic dialogue.
Small Blog On Networked Learning
What is “Connected Learning?”
Koranic school
My understanding of what happens in Koranic schools is very limited but friends in Mali have described a process by which they had learnt the Koran by heart before they knew the meaning of any of the words. Something similar has been discussed in terms of the Bhagavad Gita.
Do adults (and which adults) have the resources necessary to pursue learning opportunities?
An opportunity for library outreach? Public libraries offer access to lifelong learning resources already. Could they go further with offering assistance & promoting advantages?Problem is that their resources are very limited.
the use of networks is gradually nudging aside more traditional problem-solving approaches based on the marketplace and the choice of a small leadership group or “hierarchies.”
As Fung explains, wicked problems require “multi-sectoral problem-solving” and ways to remove the barriers to “pooling knowledge and coordinating action” through the formation of networks that connect organizations.7
Can't be solved without being "connected."
And this leads me to another thought- it seems like in our field there is this desire to go big, to scale, to teach hundreds of thousands, to affect an entire sector. Scale at the dimension is really only achieved by a process of mass duplication where the level of heart-felt connectivity is probably low.
Team-based, contextualized learning underlies the instruction for each track;
“We wanted to create threads between courses so that students can understand connections,”
Blurring the lines between where one course stops and another starts.
Ranty Blog Post about Big Data, Learning Analytics, & Higher Ed
A Framework for Identifying and Evaluating Openly Networked Connected Learning Course Designs
Connected Learning & Integrative Thinking: Teaching History at Virginia Tech
True personalized learning calls for a "rethinking and redesign" of schools, which could require them to overhaul classroom structures and schedules, curricula, and the instructional approaches of teachers, Mr. Calkins of EDUCAUSE argued. For instance, in an effective personalized learning model, teachers' roles are more like those of coaches or facilitators than "content providers," he said.
Of course, no mention of curriculum
"Technology can help provide students with more choices on how they're going to learn a lesson," Ms. Patrick said. "[It] empowers teachers in personalizing learning" and "empowers students through their own exercise of choice."
And that is the problem, right...the "how they're going to learn a lesson" part. It's still "our" lesson being personalized for them. The agency piece is choosing how they get to "our" lesson. That misses the point.
Many times, the work we do as educators is actually taking away some of the most powerful learning from our students.
The future of learning analytics, a future in which it is not passé, is one in which learning comes before management
Crafting Connected Courses
Rhizomatic learning as an open pedagogy
Questioning the metaphor. Right there with you.
Most recently I have been learning from two new-to-me online communities of practice – Wattpad for Writers and DeviantArt for Artists. Their online designs and supportive networked ways of working prompt me to continue thinking about the power of open ways of working in such communities.
So powerful to look at people engaged in networked learning "in the wild" in order to design interest-driven learning in classroom settings.
I like to think of this type of experiment as a form of "blended learning," where you're blending elements of 3rd space learning into formal schooling.
gender neutrality, creativity, imagination and tinker time are the basis for learning
Not just for Carrie Anne Philbin’s CS classroom. For so many approaches to learning, these principles help a lot.
Regarding the major obstacles for higher education, blending formal and informal learning is considered one of the solvable challenges
Clearly also very important, if not more so, at the secondary level.
Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.
“Search is the cornerstone of Google,” Corrado said. “Machine learning isn’t just a magic syrup that you pour onto a problem and it makes it better. It took a lot of thought and care in order to build something that we really thought was worth doing.”
Pictures of Philosophy
You don’t have to do everything yourself!
Theprincipleismerelythisthatdifferentsubjectsandmodesofstudyshouldbeundertakenbypupilsatfittingtimeswhentheyhavereachedtheproperstageofmentaldevelopment.
You would think that this was obvious, but in some schools and universities we are as far away from that as we can be. Learning is not a treatment to be undergone, yet...
This is the entry point for everyone's oscillating learning wave.
There is no single correct way to implement personalized learning
You mean Knewton isn’t the only way to do things? Or that Knewton will adopt all sorts of different methods?
We analyzed the relationship between students’ level of online engagement, and traditional learning metrics, to understand the effectiveness of discussion forums in the context of flipped classrooms.
Sounds like something interesting for Dr. Jeremy Dean.
most e-learning systems
very important.....relevant to thesis
Dweck’s message is that we can’t just adopt a growth mindset and forget about it, and simply praising effort regardless of actual progress is completely counterproductive. Successfully cultivating a growth mindset is an ongoing process that consists of teaching strategies for growth and praising effort thoughtfully, rather than regardlessly.
"Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. It's the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement." -- Carol Dweck
n and d
What do n and d mean?
Offering students the possibility of experiential learning in personal, interactive, networked computing—in all its gloriously messy varieties—provides the richest opportunity yet for integrative thinking within and beyond "schooling."
Yes, yes, yes. Networked learning IS experiential. I am always on the lookout for opportunities to facilitate those experiences - for my students and myself, and consider every embrace of glorious messiness a significant victory.
Moreover, the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery is itself a form of experiential learning, indeed a kind of metaexperiential learning that vividly and concretely teaches the experience of networks themselves.
With a wide open network, it also makes the world look smaller.
This is a great essay by Gardner Campbell. I'd add more notes. But every time I try, I start sounding like a crazed revolutionary. Like this...
Ask not how you can be a more suitable corporate drone. Ask how you can knock them down a few pegs.
The computer is an unprecedented partner for the human mind. We've barely begun to tap its potential. Stop trying to turn it into television.
Stop training kids to do what they're told. Teach them to teach themselves and one another.
Go into your nearest college or university library. Ignore the computer stations and the digital affordances. Enter the stacks, and run your fingers along the spines of the books on the shelves. You're tracing nodes and connections. You're touching networked learning—slow-motion and erratic, to be sure, but solid and present and, truth to tell, thrilling.
What a beautiful and evocative series of sentences!
“The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself.”
Quote from Daniel Dennett
Apprendre à programmer permet aux enfants un nouveau rapport aux technologies: de consommateur interactif de manuels scolaires numérisés à la capacité de créer des ressources éducatives numériques et même des mini-jeux.
UT Austin SDS 348, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Course materials and links: R, regression modeling, ggplot2, principal component analysis, k-means clustering, logistic regression, Python, Biopython, regular expressions.
Python interface to the R programming language.<br> Use R functions and packages from Python.<br> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpy2
The whole organic nature of learning experience through the #walkmyworld learning events meant that I learned what I needed to learn as I needed to learn it. It wasn’t a top down dictate of learning outcomes because the outcomes were determined by the process. It is a revolutionary concept — yet as ancient as Aristotle. Learning should never be measured solely by standard outcomes; people learn, and I mean really LEARN, when they discover for themselves what they know, what they want to know, and how they want to know it.
constructivism (Jean Piaget) - Learners must actively construct their body of knowledge, their schema, through experience and reflection. When we encounter a new idea, we can do one of three things:
social constructivism (Lev Vygotsky) - emphasized that building knowledge is a social process
constructionism (Seymour Papert) - Learning works best when we are publicly building artifacts -- of any kind whatsoever. While communicating with others, we get valuable feedback, and learn to put thoughts in various concrete forms.
“The key is deliberate practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.”
Peter Norvig's definition of deliberate practice, from "Teach Yourself to Program in 10 Years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html
focus groups where students self-report the effectiveness of the materials are common, particularly among textbook publishers
Paving the way for learning analytics.
It’s educators who come up with hypotheses and test them using a large data set.
And we need an ever-larger data set, right?
learned from experience
a good example of the kind of insight that big data is completely blind to
Not sure it follows directly, but also important to point out.
I will investigate the details on this, including the relevant contractual clauses, when I get the chance.
taking a swipe at Knewton
Snap!
they are making a bet against the software as a replacement for the teacher and against big data
a set of algorithms designed to optimize the commitment of knowledge to long-term memory
numbers have to be interpreted by those who do the daily work of classroom teaching
The challenge, of course, is how to balance concerns of the Hawthorne effect with privacy.
Regular readers know that I am a big fan of the standard-in-development.
From 2013
If Knewton were doing more of this, I wouldn’t be as critical.
As usual, @AudreyWatters puts things in proper perspective.
Hoping for interprovincial collaboration on the development and indexing of educational resources. Lots of potential and maybe a few less hurdles.
purchasable à la carte
How many units of learning per dollar?
Personalized course materials made possible by real data
Soon, data will make learning outcomes for these courses highly transparent
to offer just lectures
when outcomes are non-transparent
Before Common Core.
Unbundling has played out in almost every media industry.
And the shift away from “access to content” is still going on, a decade and a half after Napster. If education is a “content industry” and “content industries” are being disrupted, then education will be disrupted… by becoming even more “industrial”.
wring out every ounce of performance
Now think of it with a learner in mind.
Series of webinars on the pedagogy of Web annotation.
increased investment in professional development and teaching-friendly tenure and promotion practices
Even those who adopt a taylorist model to education may understand that “it takes money to save money”.
The Innovator's Mindset, George Couros
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
They're hiring: https://openai.com/about/
Black Culture is Cool, So Why Aren't Black People? has received over 20K views. It was written for a freshman writing class at Cornell University taught by Dexter Thomas, Jr..
Big Sur is our newest Open Rack-compatible hardware designed for AI computing at a large scale. In collaboration with partners, we've built Big Sur to incorporate eight high-performance GPUs
The most popular project for the MUA to tackle was Learning Analytics
Although Dougiamas claims Moodle already has what is needed in the form of logs and reports: no need for Caliper or xAPI.
Lambda Solutions [Corrected.]
Oh? They were quite present at MoodleMoot. Wonder what their ties are. Clearly, their solution isn’t free software. Nor is it pushing Open Standards for Learning Analytics.
Drupal seems to have outstanding community building and support practices.
http://drupalladder.org/ladders<br> Drupal Core Ladder "This ladder teaches essential skills for contibuting to Drupal 8 Core." This is the first time I recall seeing an open source software project with planned pathways for potential contributors.
Contributor profiles, Jobs, and Marketplace pages.
help build a community that functions as a collective pool of knowledge and possibility
literary Facebook
a study by Stephen Schueller, published last year in the Journal of Positive Psychology, found that people assigned to a happiness activity similar to one for which they previously expressed a preference showed significantly greater increases in happiness than people assigned to an activity not based on a prior preference. This, writes Schueller, is “a model for positive psychology exercises similar to Netflix for movies or Amazon for books and other products.”
elementary school children become increasingly inattentive in class when recess is delayed. Similarly, studies conducted in French and Canadian elementary schools over a period of four years found that regular physical activity had positive effects on academic performance. Spending one third of the school day in physical education, art, and music improved not only physical fitness, but attitudes toward learning and test scores. These findings echo those from one analysis of 200 studies on the effects of exercise on cognitive functioning, which also suggests that physical activity promotes learning.
TPOT is a Python tool that automatically creates and optimizes machine learning pipelines using genetic programming. Think of TPOT as your “Data Science Assistant”: TPOT will automate the most tedious part of machine learning by intelligently exploring thousands of possible pipelines, then recommending the pipelines that work best for your data.
https://github.com/rhiever/tpot TPOT (Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool) Built on numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn, and deap.
Nanodegree Program Summary Machine learning represents a key evolution in the fields of computer science, data analysis, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. It has quickly become industry's preferred way to make sense of the staggering volume of data our modern world produces. Machine learning engineers build programs that dynamically perform the analyses that data scientists used to perform manually. These programs can “learn” based on millions of experiences, all rigorously and numerically defined.
Via @Willis3James
learning spaces
SUNY
Wait… Any connection to SUNY Learning Commons?
grows exponentially.
As we get into “Big Data”, individual datapoints become less important.
What is the correlation between levels of student responses to each other and outcomes?
Levels and types of responses. Just read such an analysis, based on Brookfield and Preskill’s “Conversational Moves”.
read by any Caliper-compliant system
Or any Learning Record Store.
Caliper WordPress plugin
How long before we get such a thing?
most blogs have a feature called “pingbacks,”
Annotations should have “pingbacks”, too. But the most important thing is how to process those later on. We do get into the Activity Streams behind much Learning Analytics.
prior learning assessments
The new frontier!
adaptive learning with multiple levels of support.
technology-assisted differentiated instruction
Personal Learning Record will define how to represent, capture and leverage user activity, including ratings, test results and performance measures in a distributed learning and work environment.
Resource Repository Network will create a resource graph of learning/training resources data from multiple sources and formats including live and dynamic data
Sounds pretty close to Comète.
e-learning technologies and standards: SCORM, LOM, IMS-LD, IMS-CC, IMS-QTI, IMS-CP, LDL, SLD
Standards matter.
Besides the piece’s content, the interactions which happened through a layer of Diigo annotations were quite interesting.
Might want to add yet another layer to this old discussion.
They found that students were most engaged in school while taking tests, doing individual work, and doing group work, and less so when listening to lectures or watching videos. In addition, the students were most engaged and reported being in a better mood when they felt that their activities were under their own control and relevant to their lives. The researchers conclude that teachers can encourage more flow in their classrooms through lessons that offer choice, are connected to students’ goals, and provide both challenges and opportunities for success that are appropriate to students’ level of skill.
Real learning, says Shernoff, requires student engagement—of which flow is the deepest form possible—and that involves a combination of motivation, concentration, interest, and enjoyment derived from the process of learning itself—qualities that are essential to Csikzentmihalyi’s definition of flow.
But one place where we might not find too much flow these days, sadly, is in American schools. For years, the learning conditions in classrooms have been practically antithetical to the conditions people need to achieve flow and all the benefits that come with it. Especially in the era of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing, schools have often favored regimentation over self-directed learning, making it harder for students to get deeply engaged with topics that interest them. Paradoxically, these trends might be undermining the kind of student achievement they were designed to promote, and could even be causing student burnout.
possible partner in online learning initiative
I have the feeling we do not need to use models as complicated as some outlined in the text; we can (and finally will have to) abstract from most of the issues we can imagine. I expect that "magic" (an undisclosed heuristic, perhaps in combination with machine learning) will deal with the issues, a black box that will be considered inherently flawed and practical enough at the same time. The results from experimental ethics can help form the heuristic while the necessity for easy implementation and maintainability will limit the applications significantly.
The importance assumed for collaboration within NL has almost become ubiquitous and is frequently seen as unquestionably desirable.
Not always desirable
Over time these things you write up start to form a deep network that helps you think.
follow the lead of the sciences
Again, I don't get all the anti-science rhetoric and anti-intellectualism when it comes to talking about teaching. Was active learning invented in science classes? No. Was John Dewey a scientist? No. Either way, does any of that mean that we should reject something because it was done in the sciences or said by a scientist?
There are whole journals devoted to research on teaching humanities topics: history, philosophy, writing, literature, etc. All ignored in this article.
Eliot was a chemist, so perhaps we should take his criticisms with a grain of salt.
Again, there is plenty of research showing that active learning is better in areas other than the sciences and math. See the section on History education in the free book How Students Learn, for example: http://www.nap.edu/read/10126/chapter/3
or the book Doing History, or work by Sam Wineburg and other history education researchers.
vogue
I wouldnt't call it a "craze" or a "vogue" when people have been arguing for it for over 100 years and there are now thousands of empirical research articles demonstrating that it is superior to traditional lecture. Rejecting active learning in favor of traditional lecture is akin to the 19th doctors who rejected the idea that they needed to wash their hands: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/healthcare/
2014 study showed that test scores in science and math courses improved after professors replaced lecture time with “active learning” methods like group work
It's not just math and science. There are studies showing active learning is better than lecture for history teaching and other areas, too. Here's just one: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:IHIE.0000047415.48495.05#page-1
From knowing to learning An immediate outcome of this transition is that we no longer ask, “Do students know this?” Instead, we can ask, “How do students learn this?” Giving students learning activities as an assessment has the benefit of assessing a meaningful aspect of their learning, that is, their ability to make sense of new challenges. This paradigm is often termed preparation for future learning assessment, or PFL.
Greg's P&T portfolio
Commercial publishers and content producers say there's reason to doubt the quality of open resources
Have they demonstrated so clearly that their textbooks have enhanced learning? Oh, wait. They set the criteria by which we assess learning and push for their own brand of Learning Analytics, so…
"If you leave those there it will make a mess and make me spill things. That's one reason we don't let you bitches behind the bar."
Well.. that's a little over the top.. Was the waitress ever told previous to this situation to make sure to remove the bottle caps? If you want the waitress to use the space like you do out of routine, then teach the waitress the rules of keeping the area clean before you leave the bar unattended and she has customers to serve.
Our design model builds on this approach by focusing on supports and mechanisms for building envi-ronments that connect learning across the spheres of interests, peer culture, and academic life.
To follow up on design supports
Connected learning addresses the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning, intergenerational disconnects, and new equity gaps arising from the privatization of learning. In doing so, connected learning taps the opportunities provided by digital media to more easily link home, school, community and peer contexts of learning; sup-port peer and intergenerational connections based on shared interests; and create more connections with non-dominant youth, drawing from capacities of diverse communities.
assuming learners have access to the web, and resources to connect
Connected learning is a model of learning and social change that is not defined by a specific technology, tool, or technique. Instead, connected learning is defined by a commitment to social equity and progressive learning, and seeks to mold the uptake of new technologies and techniques based on these commitments.
a model of learning and social change. as well a set of design principles?
Bottlenecks are important because they signal where students are unable to grasp crucial ways of knowing in our fields.
connect in- and out-of-school learning
break down divide between intellectual work of school and organic inquiry of students
Connected Learning, has emerged as a powerful way to connect fragmented spheres of a young person’s life—interests, academic and work opportunities, and peer culture.
Bennett Merriman, young entrepreneur and director of a workforce management company, told a recent higher education conference that connectivity in our work place is important. He recommended that students should spend time developing their networks throughout their studies.
Flexibility
Some connection with SAMR, unbundling, “open learning”… With diverse learners whose constraints may affect institutions, there’s a fair bit of talk about new(ish) tech-infused approaches to distance education. As with many other things, not much of it is new. But there might be some enabling phenomena. Not sure how gamification fits, here. Sure, open play could allow for a lot of flexibility. But gamification is pretty much the reverse: game mechanics without the open-ended playfulness.
Hands on
This might be the most explicit link to constructivism and constructionism. Not only is it about “learn by doing”, but it’s about concrete action in the physical world. Can’t help but find it limiting and restrictive to mention “3D Printing” as the main component. After all, FabLabs got started without 3D printers and the Maker movement has a lot of stuff which has little to do with 3D Printing. But it’s hard to argue that 3D Printing haven’t attracted attention, in the past couple of years. Sexier than laser etching? As Makers often point out, there’s a lot in the movement which is really very similar to what was happening in shop class. Though the trend may sound new, it’s partly based on nostalgia. A neat aspect, though, is that much of it can happen through learners’ projects cutting across class boundaries. Sure, we’ve known about project-based learning for a while. You do a project for a class or a series of classes. But how about a personal pathway (cf. “individualism”, above) through which learners add learning experiences around a central project? Learning Circles can make that into something really neat.
Individualism–
Customisation: the “personal” era. What with “personal learning networks” and everything “self-”. Does sound like a major trend. What’s possibly most interesting, though, is the framing. To some of us, the term “individualism” may carry some negative connotations. It could be fairly neutral, in a context like this one, or deemed positive (prefixed with “rugged”), but it’s an interesting choice, here.
"What really is our role as professors?" he asks. "Is our role to simply give out information and people will use it as they wish? Or is our role to honestly and truly help guide people to be who they are and how they will live their life?"
learning is the act of recognizing patterns shaped by complex networks
Knowledge is, on this theory, literally the set of connections formed by actions and experience.
the learning is the network
Learning is considered a “. . . knowledge creation process . . . not only knowledge consumption.”
The capacity to know is more critical than what is actually known
We’ll have an even more humane, ethical, productive, and effective version of the courseware when we come out of the pilot in Spring term.
Yikes. Sounds a little scary.
This is a really useful visualization of the Multi Class SVM loss
What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction.
It's that "special direction" that becomes the key to organizing a curriculum. How do we help students to attach their interests to a direction in their lives? Or am I wrong to think that Whitehead, here, is pointing to a learning experience that connects interest with being of use in society, with political activism.
Great information on student dashboard design!
We found that dispersions of the triblock co-micelles in a decane:toluene (3:5 by volume) solution resulted in the selective dissolution of the central M(PFS60-b-PDMS660) micelle block, leaving short XLM(PI1424-b-PFS63) daughter micelles
Connects to AP Chemistry Learning Standard 6: Any bond or intermolecular attraction that can be formed can be broken. These two processes are in dynamic competition, sensitive to initial conditions and external perturbations.
Found on page 71 of the AP Chemistry Course and Exam Description:
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-chemistry-course-and-exam-description.pdf
BCPs assemble into a variety of different morphologies that are influenced by polymer molecular weights and block ratios, with further control possible through the manipulation of environmental conditions such as temperature, solvent, and concentration
Connects to AP Chemistry Learning Standard:2.B
Forces of attraction between particles (including the noble gases and also different parts of some large molecules) are important in determining many macroscopic properties of a substance, including how the observable physical state changes with temperature
Found on page 27 of the AP Chemistry Course and Exam Description:
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-chemistry-course-and-exam-description.pdf
solution
Connects to AP Chemistry Learning Standard:2.A.3: Solutions are homogeneous mixtures in which the physical properties are dependent on the concentration of the solute and the strengths of all interactions among the particles of the solutes and solvent:
Found on page 25 of the AP Chemistry Course and Exam Description:
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-chemistry-course-and-exam-description.pdf
Because dynein inhibition alone did not inhibit IAV uncoating completely, we investigated a possible additional role for the actomyosin system
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RST.11-12.8
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RST/11-12/
Whenever an observation is not fully understood, scientists try to analyze the issue from different angles. Here, the authors observed that the inhibition of dynein wasn't sufficient for inhibiting the viral uncoating completely. Therefore, they deduced that other factors were implicated with uncoating and decided to explore this possibility.
we noticed that another histone deacetylase, HDAC6, was also required for infection
Connect to Learning Standards: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13165&page=69
Progression for explanation. In a previous study, the authors observed that HDAC6 was required for viral infection. As a consequence, they continued to study the function of HDAC6 in deep detail.
With the risk of an influenza pandemic growing, it is increasingly important to understand virus-host interactions in detail and to develop new antiviral strategies (1).
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13165&page=43
Science can contribute to meeting many of the major challenges that confront society today, such as preventing and treating disease.
This course introduces students to the basic knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning methods of artificial intelligence.
The motion of probe particles trackedinside cells has been classified as subdiffusive,diffusive, or superdiffusive. Such classifications,however, obscure the distinction between ther-mally driven and nonequilibrium fluctuationsand are inadequate to identify intracellular ma-terial properties
Connected learning boils down to risk taking in the end. To quote colleague Jade Davis from her recent DML blog post, “I think the biggest risk in connected learning is Not Trying.”
While I’d struggle to tell you how I learn best, there is one question that I’d always be able to answer enthusiastically: What would you like to learn next? Right now I’m learning JavaScript and have plans to give Spanish another go. I should probably pick up those guitar lessons again soon as well. Thankfully we live in a time when it’s trivially easy to gain access to resources and to learning activities. The problem is finding out the ones that work best for you. Perhaps that’s why we carry around in our pockets devices that can access pretty much the sum total of human knowledge yet use them to LOL at amusing pictures of cats. What are the barriers here? I’d suggest there are three main ones: 1 Curriculum - the series of activities that build towards a learning goal 2 Credentials - the ability to show what you know 3 Community - the cohort of peers you feel you are part of, along with access to ‘experts’
How do I learn best? What resources are the best ones for me?
The “connected learning” term seems to derive from this infographic on connected learning and the folk who developed it. Their “What is Connected Learning” provides more of an overview, including principles (see the following table) and a research synthesis report.
That power is unleashed when teachers see the portfolio process as dependent upon the clarity of goals for student performance through their work in the liberal arts and professional education curriculum; when they attend to the quality of the assignments, projects and assessments that they provide for their students; and when they take the responsibility for teaching students the process of reflection and self assessment.
That's a lot to throw in here at the end. It does make me wonder about how focusing too much on assessment might become the tail wagging the dog, if you know what I mean. Because ultimately it gets back to working together to create quality assignments and teaching the process of self-directed learning.
Enter the Daily Mail website, MailOnline, and CNN online. These sites display news stories with the main points of the story displayed as bullet points that are written independently of the text. “Of key importance is that these summary points are abstractive and do not simply copy sentences from the documents,” say Hermann and co.
Someday, maybe projects like Hypothesis will help teach computers to read, too.
expanded learning schedules
Another common theme across foundations. Wallace is interested in this too.