Social capital research has continuously demonstrated that early career exposure, network development, and mentorship also matter in early career success and throughout an entire career.
Exposure, networking and mentorship...these are three huge opportunities for post-secondary institutions to strategically embrace. These are key indicators of success outcomes and higher ed has a competitive advantage, especially in-person and residential campuses.
Searching as exploration. White and Roth [71 ,p.38] define exploratory search as a “sense making activity focusedon the gathering and use of information to foster intellectual de-velopment.” Users who conduct exploratory searches are generallyunfamiliar with the domain of their goals, and unsure about howto achieve them [ 71]. Many scholars have investigated the mainfactors relating to this type of dynamic task, such as uncertainty,creativity, innovation, knowledge discovery, serendipity, conver-gence of ideas, learning, and investigation [2, 46, 71].These factors are not always expressed or evident in queriesor questions posed by a searcher to a search system.
Sometimes, search is not rooted in discovery of a correct answer to a question. It's about exploration. Serendipity through search. Think Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, and Latif Nasser from Radiolab. The randomizer on wikipedia. A risk factor of where things trend with advanced AI in search is an abandonment of meaning making through exploration in favor of a knowledge-level pursuit that lacks comparable depth to more exploratory experiences.
1. It’s not about physical vs. digital, but synchronous vs asynchronousIn L&D teams’ minds, the big split used to be between training that happened in-person and training that happened online.
In general, being able to adapt to asynchronous styles of working and learning will be important
Our institutions are colonial systems, the ivory towers render the people leading and running them to become disconnected from the very public they are supposed to be representing, ending up only serving themselves. “Do we have to burn it down and start again? Do we have to completely recalibrate it from the inside?
For my more advanced students, they need to learn research skills: how to locate, evaluate, and use information. Online learning offers great opportunities for that, including with what’s going on in the news right now.
...how to function independently in the world too.
Then there is the option of getting students to talk to each other online on discussion boards and videoconferences. Some students adapt to it quickly and like it. Some don’t, because it feels impersonal. You have to be patient with that and give them some time and space to adjust.
Introverts v extroverts. Oil and water. They've always differed, always will. Maybe this virtual, personalized learning movement will finally allow introverts to stop feeling so defeated in the presence of extroverts who live so much more loudly than they do. Finally, they'll be able to live peacefully in their own mind, undisturbed by the stress of feelings like you need to be more extroverted to fit in.
Btw: I'm not encouraging each party to distance themselves from each other all the time. What I am saying is that when value is trying to be distributed, distribute it however it'll best be received. Then, later, once teaching time is over, they can socialize in traditional ways... IF that's what they want to do.
Rizga: How have you been translating this online?Moore: It depends on the student. Some students work very well asynchronously. They are very comfortable working alone on a draft; I make color-coded comments in a word document or their PDF, and then I send it back. Some students need me to explain things to them in person before I send them the comments; we’ll do a video or audio chat. Others need even more interaction: I’ll hook them up to a videoconference, and we’ll go through all the comments together. Some students I need to refer to a grammar-brushup program or a YouTube video on how to do some of the mechanical stuff like uploading papers online.
Sounds like Mrs. Moore deserves a raise! This woman knows what's up! She represents the future while living in a community that (probably) latches on to tradition.
Any of you big city school systems reading this? If you are, hire her. You can probably pay her less than what your other teachers are earning and still give her a bump in pay compared to what she's earning in Mississippi.
The other big issue is that many of the teachers don’t have the skills to teach online.
Sorry, but this begs the question...
Should teachers who don't have the skills to teach online be teaching at all? If they can't, they're either not qualified for the job or they're unwilling to put in the effort required to learn.
We are in the midst of the most sweeping education experiment in history. The coronavirus pandemic has forced the majority of the U.S.’s 3.6 million educators to find ways to teach without what most of them consider the core part of their craft—the daily face-to-face interactions that help them elicit a child’s burning desire to investigate something; detect confusion or a lack of engagement; and find the right approach, based on a student’s body language and participation in the classroom, to help students work through their challenges.
There's a reason education fails so often: teachers teach students as if they all have identical interests and learning styles.
There's no such thing as a one-size-fits all solution to any problem. Everyone knows that. Even dumb people do. Yet there are our educators, the people we're supposed to depend on to set the table for our lives, to show us what's important, what we she commit to memory for the rest of our life or else that life's gonna die having led a dumb life, because you didn't do what you were told to do way back when: understand everything the teacher told you to understand, yeah, even if you didn't give a fuck about what's coming out of her mouth. Learn that shit anyway.
Oh, and learn it how I say you should learn it too. Sit in that seat, lock your eyes on me, and take notes at a speed that's equal to or faster than the rate of my speech... just like all the students around you are (trying) to do... because everyone learns new information in the same way... right?
Then, you have to think about accessibility issues. How will my vision-impaired and deaf students access it? Have I put everything in print? Do I have to put in some audio? There are whole series of checks you have to do for different access issues.
Sure, new problems will surface. But so will solutions. And hopefully, in the end, there will be fewer problems using the new approach than the old.