Online k12 conf. talk -- "Keeping the LIteracy in 21rst Century Literacies

Keeping the Literacy in 21rst Century Literacy
by Drew Schrader

Intent: Introductory strategies for addressing traditional literacy goals in high school, while using web 2.0 tools to foster student engagement. Aimed at "busy teachers".

Diigo for social bookmarking
Screentoaster for easy screen capture [Cool, I've been wondering how to do screen captures!]Prezi


Think alouds (to model metacognition strategies for reading) -- Using Screentoaster -- Easy to use at Screentoaster.com; nothing to download -- Runs online -- Just create an account and then click "Start recording". Can include voice and video. Can upload to Utube, or screentoaster can host on their own site, or you can download as a .mov file and use on your own computer.

Annotated text (to help students pick out important information by highlighting it, or to draw their attention to a particular text feature by using sticky notes) -- Use Diigo, then send students the link. [I'm still slightly confused about Diigo -- once one person highlights the article, will a random person who accesses that article on the open Internet see the highlighted version, or the original version? I assume the original version, but is that correct?]

Mind-mapping -- To plan / brainstorm and then organize ideas for writing -- Use Prezi -- He says students have found it intuitive and seem to like using it. [I'll have to try it again. The first time, I somehow made my whole presentation shrink to a tiny size, and then I couldn't figure out how to undo that!]

Too easy to "put neat tools ahead of good practice", rushing out to try a new tool with your class without really having a significant learning goal in mind for it. [I'm so glad he's addressing that; that seems like a big danger to me!]

He highly recommends the book _I Read it but I Don't Get It_ by Chris Giovanni (sp.??) for working with adolescents on reading issues. The reading theory in his talk is heavily influenced by this book.

Following a Tweet link -- Custom Search Engines and Clipnotes

I followed one of Dennis' Tweets to this link:
http://mrgsclassroomreflections.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/trying-to-reinvent-the-wheel/

It's a blog post by a teacher of students with learning disabilities and emotional behavioral disabilities, who has experimented with creating a custom search engine, and using some tools that allow you to clip and present short bits of text, for his students because their own "filters" aren't that good due to their disabilities. I wonder whether these tools would also be good for elementary aged students, since their judgement also isn't always that good (due simply to their ages).

Example projects I like (briefer)

I was in the middle of writing this post, and I had saved periodically, but somehow I closed that window without saying "Publish", and now I can't find my saved stuff! Very disappointing! My original post had all sorts of annotations, but now I'm just going to try to paste in a couple of the links if I remember which ones they were:

http://mrkelln.wordpress.com/
I really like the informal tone ("you guys") of this blog, where a middle school teacher writes to his students about projects they are doing that integrate curriculum with having students use lots of cool digital creativity tools.


http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=162321
Cool PictureTrail stuff documenting classroom activities

http://rrfournier.wikispaces.com/
Useful information that staff need at certain times every year.

(Hey, the earlier draft just came up, and I posted it. Very strange.)

Example projects that I like

http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=162321
Third-grade teacher's class blog, with PictureTrail stuff.

http://mrkelln.wordpress.com/
A middle school teacher writes TO and about his classes. He's experimenting with incorporating lots of new technology (Moodle for science lessons, Voicethread, etc.) in ways that the students learn the technology and use it themselves for projects. I like the informal tone of his posts to his students -- "you guys", etc. Interesting and kind of inspiring site.

http://msgee.edublogs.org/
An interesting example of using a class blog to motivate students. The teacher posted about reading strategies she was teaching, and her third-graders posted about their implementation of those strategies.

http://math8geometry.wikispaces.com/
Eighth-graders each made one page of a geometry wiki. Each page teaches one concept well. Interesting, and I bet the kids enjoyed doing it, but I bet they learned more about making a wiki page than about geometry overall from this project. Fun and a good way to learn technology, but not necessarily an efficient way to learn the geometry itself.

PictureTrail

The graphic (picture cube thing) that I just mentioned is apparently called PictureTrail. It takes lots of forms, not just a cube.

Cool picture cube graphic

Often I find the idea of including graphics more overwhelming than enticing, but this blog

http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=162321

(which was one of the example projects that Dennis gave us links to) has one that even I really like -- a rotating picture cube thing. Cool!

Why I take notes on some of the articles here

I really like reading articles this way: I have the article open in one window on one side of my screen, and my blog open in another window on the other side. I read a little bit, then take notes and / or comment, then read some more, etc. -- Just like teaching "active reading" strategies to students, I feel like I get a lot more out of the articles, this way.

I certainly don't do this for every article -- that would take forever. And, right at the moment my wrists, shoulders, and fingers are starting to hurt -- NOT GOOD! So, it's just about time to stop taking notes, for tonight, even if I keep on reading. I really do like reading online this way, though.

Why creativity and information literacy together?

Why was Session 4 on both Creativity AND Information Literacy? These seem like very different topics. Right now it is the information literacy stuff that interests me the most. So much of web 2.0 "creativitiy" seems to involve pictures, movies, or sound -- I am more interested in text.

Social network for teachers using web 2.0 resources

This site

http://www.classroom20.com/

is a social network for those interested in using web 2.0 resources in schools. I don't currently feel like I have time for an online social network. I doubt that this is the most efficient way to learn, even though it says it strives to be beginner-friendly. It might be good for being inspired -- maybe I'll join it later if I do my creative sharing project on project-based learning. (Or, maybe not.)

Classroom 2.0 site for live shows to learn about web 2.0

This site

http://live.classroom20.com/

has hour-long live web learning shows about topics involving using web 2.0 resources. I'm not sure I'm ready to devote an hour at a time at home in such a structured way, yet -- that is, I often spend many hours at a time at home on this course, but I kind of like being free to jump from one thing to another at my own pace.

Maybe I'll try it out in the summer.

Blog on helping elementary students develop their search skills

I followed a link from

http://21cif.com/

to a blog post about ways to provide elementary students with search experiences that are well suited to helping them develop their skills. It's at
http://internetsearchchallenge.blogspot.com/2009/10/for-elementary-students-challenge-is.html

One big challenge for younger students is vocabulary. On average there are 5 words to describe an object or action, so it's common not to initially think of the same one that the author used. Younger students may have trouble thinking of lots of synonyms. Also, 2-word searches are much more effective than one-word searches, but can also lead you astray faster if you don't pick the "right" two words.

Older students often don't try looking for different keywords either, though.

You can create a "stocked pond" for kids to practice in using Nettrekker.com or creating a custom search engine. They will have an "authentic" search experience with a high likelihood of success.

Comments on 21rst Century Info. Fluency Home Page

I'm reading the article from Session 4 entitled "21rst Century Information Fluency". It' s partly an advertisement for a self-paced online course on finding online information. It only costs $29 and sounds really good! I might try it at some point. (Is this the same as the "Investigative Searching 20/10" course that the article mentions? It cites statistics that in just 8 hours or so, participants noticeably improved (statistically significant changes) their ability to locate information online. Cool!

http://21cif.com/

You can preview the course by logging in as "guest". I'll do that when I'm not so tired.

I followed a link to a blog post about ways to provide elementary students with search experiences that are well suited to helping them develop their skills. I think I'll put this in a new blog entry, though.

Comments on 21rst Century Info. Fluency / Illinois Math and Science Academy

This is a link to a very highly reviewed site full of resources to help students and teachers get better at online research. [Added later: OK, I've read some of the articles, now. This is a GREAT site for personal and teacher background information about information literacy on the internet, starting with pretty basic stuff! There are probably also useful student things, here, but so far I LOVE the teacher information! It's so clear, readable, and well-organized! And, hallelulah, the part that I started reading is a really good match to what I currently know and want to learn. Yay!!] Here's the link:

http://www.21cif.imsa.edu/rkit/newRkit/gettingstarted.html

It has a new address, 21cif.imsa.edu = 21cif.com, because it's become a private project.

There are some free "kits". (The kits seem to be fully available online, and consist of related sets of teacher articles, student activities, etc.) For example, I looked at the first one, "Getting Started". It looks at how to avoid getting out-of-date information (I think), searching vs. browsing, etc. It includes six model lessons (grades 3-12) that have been transformed ("easily", they say -- But I'm not clear on why we should assume that digital is better) into digital lessons. There are some challenges that I think are meant to be fun ways that students or teachers can test their developing search skills.

OK, these topics look WAY COOL! I wonder if I can delve more deeply into these and then use them in one of my final projects. (Right now I'm at least as interested in developing my OWN teaching skills as my students'!)

I read the linked article on browsing a live page vs. searching a cache. I'm tired and not catching everything right now. One thing I understood was that each search engine's crawler visits pages on a different schedule. The blurb about the page refers to the cache, but the title link at the top is to the live site. The live site might no longer be presenting the information in the blurb -- you might have to browse around the site to find it. Sometimes if a web address changes, the major search engines can lose their links to their archived copies. Sometimes a broader database such as archive.org, or a more specific one such as mathforum.org, can maintain those cached pages for much longer.

I read the linked article on browsing vs. searching. Browsing means clicking links from page to page. It's slow, "primitive', and speculative. Both skill (scanning and choosing keywords) and luck are involved. (This makes me feel better. I occasionally enjoy browsing -- when I'm not looking for particular information but rather just pursuing interesting threads for the fun of it. What helps is rich content in an area I'm interested in, links that aren't broken, and no particular time pressure or need for an actual product or specific answer. Examples include the Holocaust course that I took from Facing History and Ourselves a couple of years ago {"Enjoy" doesn't fit the type of content in this case, but I did find it deeply involving and never begrudged the hours and hours that I spent following links and reading well beyond the course requirements}, and also the evening that I spent following links about project-based learning earlier in this current course. . . . On the other hand, when I am trying to find particular information, especially if there's any time pressure, browsing feels very slow and time-consuming -- like I'm being sucked into a great big black hole without really understanding how. This article helps to make that feeling make sense.)

Oh, I think I understand: When you do a search in a search engine, the search engine is ALWAYS relying upon its archived pages for what results to return to you. For breaking news, it will take a while for the archiving crawlers to come across the relevant articles.

Google is a database. (You know, I never thought of it that way. I just thought of it as a search engine. It's a database; that's why you can use the Google search box to locate specific live pages.)

There's a reference to a Deep Web search. I think that means that you try to dive deep, not wide, by typing in a fairly simple search term and then continuing your search using one of the sites that comes up as your new "base". . . . Later, one of these articles says that Deep Web searching means looking for information that will be in a different database than the one you start out in.

Having a good vocabulary is useful for browsing because the author's words may often be different or more general than the keyword that you first think of.

The article says that browsing may require a lot of backing out of deadends, which "requires patience, persistence, and time." This is part of what frustrates me when i'm actually looking for the answer to a specific question or for specific kinds of information.

The article describes the "typical search experience" as querying a search engine, then choosing among the results and clicking the title links to go to the live pages. That's what I've almost always done. However, the linked article "Cache Advantage" lists some really intriguing advantages to clicking on the link to the CACHED (archived) page, instead: the link will never be broken (Yay!!), the page retrieved will definitely match the snippet description, and the keywords that match the query will be highlighted (which can be helpful for younger students who aren't very good at scanning large blocks of text, yet). . . . Cool; I never thought of these advantages! And, earlier it implied that many sites are crawled quite frequently, so I don't think the information would be very out-of-date.

Some search engines: Google, Yahoo, Ask, JSTOR and the WayBackMachine.

This article http://www.21cif.imsa.edu/rkitp/newRkit/databases/search_archive.html also contains some basic practice activities for students about searching caches.

The query site:animal.discovery.com meerkat "uses a special operator to search only animal.discovery.com for occurrences of meerkat".

OK, next I want to read one of their articles on queries. It will have to wait, though, because I need to "pull back a couple of levels" and check out some other areas from last session's readings. I have enjoyed this browsing so far tonight, though. I LOVE this site, and can't wait to learn more from it!!

Notes and comments on Seymour Papert's article on educational games

This is from a link from Cluster 4-1 of Session 4.

One thing I wonder as I'm starting to read -- It's a 1998 article -- Haven't "educational games" changed a lot since then? (I'll have to check out the related presentation for more up-to-date info.)

"Shavian reversals—offspring that keep the bad features of each parent and lose the good ones" -- The idea is that this is all too common: Educational games that have the WORST features of both schooling and video games, instead of the BEST features of both.

"The result is shown in a rash of ads that go like this: "Our Software Is So Much Fun That The Kids Don't Even Know That They Are Learning" or "Our Games Make Math Easy." . . . What is best about the best games is that they draw kids into some very hard learning. Did you ever hear a game advertised as being easy? What is worst about school curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge into little pieces. This is supposed to make learning easy, but often ends up depriving knowledge of personal meaning and making it boring." --> Summary: Kids like games that are challenging, not games that are easy. Kids dislike school not because it's easy, but because the fragmentation of learning into little tiny pieces makes it seem irrelevant and therefore boring. Too many "educational" games make learning fragmented and easy instead of cohesive and challenging!

In contrast, game designers' "livelihoods depend on millions of people being prepared to undertake the serious amount of learning needed to master a complex game. " He says that kids like learning that's challenging, as long as it's also highly engaging and the challenge has to do with solving a bigger problem that's interesting to them. [I get an image of those Dungeons and Dragons -style games where players are trying to find tools and clues to figure out how to get to the next level of the dungeon. Personally, though, I don't like games like this. . .]

[As I write this, Dennis is talking about Second Life being used to treat PTSD in returning veterans. That's really cool!]

www.papert.org/article... [Unfortunately the whole link isn't coming through.]

More, later.

Notes on Creativity Survey Results

Most people say they feel comfortable bending the rules some of the time.

Very few felt a need to find one right answer.

People were split on wanting things to be logical, and on idealism versus practicality.

Almost everyone likes to "work hard and play hard", including trying out new ideas.

People were quite evenly split on "playing with new teaching techniques" versus concentrating on "teaching students what they need to know". On the other hand, just about everyone said that they "embrace exploring" new teaching techniques.

People generally either disagreed about needing "conformity, consistency, and shared values" at work, or had no opinion on it. Maybe that was a confusing question, to get so many "Neither agree nor disagree" responses, or maybe it just seemed like too much of a loaded question.

A lot of people don't mind being wrong in public, but a fair number either do or said they weren't sure.

Most people in this group say they see unlimited potential for creativity in their teaching.

Practiced with Twitter and Diigo today; learned about Google Docs

Today four of us (Karen, Shelley, Sue, and I) met after school for a couple of hours to help each other with course stuff and explore together. It was both very helpful and very enjoyable! They were interested in Twitter and I hadn't done much tweeting, yet, so we went there first. We reviewed how to follow someone, and set it up to follow each other. We also learned how to send private messages, how to block someone unknown who tries to follow you if you don't want them there, etc. Finally, we explored some of Dennis' tweets and used Diigo to bookmark one about a link that seemed especially useful.

With Diigo, Suzanne showed us how to use Google to find it on a computer where neither the Diigo Toolbar nor Digolet is installed. We highlighted the URL of a web page we liked, then pasted it into the box on the right-hand side of the Diigo My Library page to add a bookmark in Diigo to that page. I discovered that all of the text I had highlighted earlier in the Smartstorming article had, indeed, finally made it to my Diigo library page. I'm still confused as to why the highlights only sometimes show up when I revisit the actual article page, though.

Finally, I checked out Google Docs for the first time. It looks really useful! I'm constantly emailing myself things between home and school, but this might make that unnecessary. I still need to figure out where some of the formatting stuff is, such as a ruler to set tabs and indents with. I made a trial document and invited the others to help edit it, though, and Sue did -- that was neat! (Now I have to think about what sort of shared writing space you would use for what: Google docs, a wiki, or a blog; when would each one be most appropriate?)

I have yet to experiment with Google Reader or RSS feeds.

Notes and comments on Student STEM (ISTE) article

1.
"a. apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products, or processes.
b. create original works as a means of personal or group expression.
c. use models and simulations to explore complex systems and issues.
d. identify trends and forecast possibilities."

Comments: (a) is obviously good; (b) really excites and motivates kids -- Still need to balance time constraints, though, no matter how valuable this is. (It's very well-worth doing and I certainly do it with kids, but it would work better with a curriculum that was deeper and less broad.) (c) and (d) are interesting; I don' t think I've done that as much in teaching, except with obvious tools such as line graphs.

2. Students communicate and collaborate using digital tools, including with experts, and including globally and cross-culturally.

Comments: The "experts" part is cool! (Where do the experts find the time, though?) The cross-cultural part certainly has potential (maybe, I hope) to make our world a more understanding and peaceful place in the future. Isn't language a potential barrier, though, especially at the elementary level?

3. Students select and use information and tools effectively.

Comment: Essential; takes much instruction and practice over many years.

4. Students identify problems and collect and analyze data to help propose solutions.

Comments: Like the microfinance Kiva article we read in class. Very engaging as well as wonderful training for citizenship and leadership! Time and curriculum meshing, as usual, are issues to be dealt with.

5. Students use digital resources safely, legally, positively, and enthusiastically.

Comments: Certainly important.

6. Students can select, use, and troubleshoot both familiar and unfamiliar applications.

Comment: A good goal for teahers, too! :-) The trouble-shooting part can be pretty time-consuming and fairly frustrating, though.

Notes on ISTE article (Teacher Standards). (I had wanted to do this by using Diigo to highlight and capture highlighted blocks of text, but every time I try to do so, Microsoft encounters an error and briefly closes, then reopens without the highlighting!) The parts after the dashes are my comments.

1a. Creative thinking -- Yes, great!
b. Real-world projects -- Again, great!
c. Use collaborative tools to clarify student thinking -- What's wrong with "turn and talk"?
d. Use virtual environments with students and colleagues -- Why should that be a goal in and of itself?

2a. Use digital tools and resources with students -- Again, why is this a goal in and of itself? When it's useful, great. Sometimes old-fashioned methods are sufficient or even preferable, though.
b.Students pursue their own interests and manage their own learing -- A very nice goal that I like. How do you mesh that with state frameworks?
c. Address different learning styles -- Good potential here.
d. Formative and summative assessments -- Yes, unless a different method is more efficient and just as useful!

3a-c. Teachers model using technology for doing work, collaborating, and communicating with students/parents/administrators/each other. -- OK.
d. Model and teach how to evaluate information -- Definitely important.

4. Teach digital citizenship (copyright laws, etc.) -- Vey important. Kids must be taught very explicitly -- Young kids think that printing out material from a site counts as "research".

Make sure all students have fair access to digital tools -- Very important; count on public libraries to help.

Model global awareness by reaching out to other cultures -- But let's make sure that we also leave time for our local, in-person communities!

5. Teachers continue to learn about new digital tools and resources, and actively seek to learn about this stuff and promote its use -- OK, but remember that our primary job is to teach content and traditional skills such as reading / writing / math. I still think that it's possible to do that very well WITHOUT constantly seeking out the newest, "bestest" tech-savvy way of doing so! Time is a limited resource, and sometimes saving time by continuing to do some things using more traditional tools makes sense. We should be going for incremental change where it actually adds important new value, not incorporating technology just for the sake of doing so.

Feels like an online course

Another quick thing that I've been thinking about this course, is that it feels more like a very content-rich online course that I took (through Primary Source), than it does like any other in-person course I've ever taken. While I found the question-and-answer session at the beginning of our last class meeting very helpful, for the most part the place that I'm learning a lot is at home, reading articles and experimenting with the tools. Like the other online course that I took, there is way, way too much information to explore all of it within the time frame of the course (or probably ever), but when that doesn't feel overwhelming it's pretty cool to have been given so many new directions to explore. Thinking of it as a sort of an online-course-with-help-sessions makes me feel better about having to spend so much time outside of class in order to understand the tools.

"Minds on Fire" article and the structure of our course

I've been thinking about how the "Minds on Fire" article relates to the structure of this course. When I read the article, some phrases and ideas that jumped out at me were:

"Learning to be" a member of a social learning community -- learning its norms, etc. -- tacit knowledge. On the Web you can do a lot of this even BEFORE becoming an expert in the particular content area or skill involved.

Collateral learning / peripheral learning

Access to rich practice-based learning communities

What I'm thinking (sorry if this seems too obvious) is that that's probably a lot of how Dennis is hoping that we will experience this course. He's set up a large array of different ways for us to participate in online communities (even if it's mostly all our course community), and different tools to begin to explore a little bit at a time. We're figuring out, bit by bit, what sorts of things to write where in all of the online community venues, and we're developing this perspective partly by reading each others' posts. With the tools, it's quite possible to start to do "real" things already even though most of us are nowhere near experts with any of these tools yet (as when I tried out that Spezify site that someone -- I think Suzanne? -- mentioned, and lucked (?) into something truly useful for the writing project that I'm doing with my class right now). . . . In other words, one goal / philosophical underpinning of this course is for us to learn the material by experiencing and exploring it in exactly the way that this article says the web is really good at providing: through social learning communities that (unlike, say, a discipline in traditional academia) we can contribute meaningfully to even as beginners.

Article on using online worlds in middle school

"Whyville" -- like Second Life, but designed for middle school students to collaboratively investigate science topics. http://www.edutopia.org/second-life-virtual-reality-collaboration
Graphics are simple, and it's considered easier to learn than Second Life.

A middle school English teacher uses Teen Second Life for literature circles! She finds kids very motivated, including struggling readers and writers and shy kids.

She also had students create avatar based on a Revolutionary War period person -- dress, background, etc. Eventually, the students got to wander around in Teen Second Life as their avatars, having discussions with characters from other books!

More "Young Minds" follow-up articles (elem.)

(1) Auburn Early Education Center in Auburn, Alabama -- Kindergarten classes do student-initiated multi-month investigations using both online and book resources! Every classroom has an interactive white board -- maps of Brazil, video clip of giant anaconda, etc.!

(2) "More Fun than a Barrel of. . .Worms?" -- A project-based elem. school. Kids highly engaged. Two big, publicly presented projects per class per year. Lots of curriculum interwoven; other stuff taught separately if it's really not related. Teachers say much more work (to structure experiences so that learning standards are met), but much more rewarding. (My redesigning-the-library-chairs project was supposed to be like this, though on a much smaller level. I am running into snags about whether or not anything can actually be done once we have results from our data, though. And, time is always an issue.)

Notes on additional links from the "Young Minds" article

(1) Early elem. teachers using Wii games to collect data for analysis, and a Wii geography activity. Kids very engaged! Most popular gaming platform right now -- inventive and intuitive.

(Each of these articles then has a box of links to related articles! Cool way of organizing info., but how am I going to stop reading and go to bed?)

(2) VOISE Academy High School (Chicago) -- based upon online opportunities used in school as a foundation of learning. "With tech as the backbone, designers say, VOISE will make learning what it should be: student directed, project based, rigorous, and relevant." 150 students per grade level 9-12 to maintain a small-school environment, but kids can take classes in tons of subjects through online providers! Some (me included) worry about how human connections will be maintained within the school if everyone is studying different things online. The principal is seeking teachers with experience in coaching or SPED, who presumably would be used to building close personal relationships.

Part 2 of article describes the curriculum as "all digital". Lots of tech and social issues at first. Many students entered with little or no computer experience. (Seems surprising. Due to poverty? . . . Oh, OK: 99% free or reduced lunch. ) Small class sizes are fostering a supportive academic community. (Article is written by edutopia.org.)

Need DSL or cable at home to access the school's networks, but where to get the money? So school is open Saturday mornings, and 40% of students come then by choice! (Interestingly, it says that they still "complain about school as much as any other kids", though. Maybe partly to seem "cool"?) Many had never used a computer before! (Wow, talk about a socioeconomic divide compared to Sharon, where I think even the kindergarteners go to the Computer Lab, and probably almost everyone has a computer at home.) Oh -- they did have Computer Lab once a week in elem. school, but it sounds like that didn't do much for them. (Interesting applications to my own family. I'm a parent of a five-year-old, and have been feeling that she has more important learning tasks at this age than those that could be accomplished on a computer -- so she never uses ours at home. I figured school exposure would be enough for a while. Maybe not?)

25% of their class time so far has gone to "establishing appropriate online behavior!" Students drift off task into online social interactions not related to their studies.

Self-paced learning, for ex. in math. Everyone keeps learning when the teacher has to focus on helping a particular student for a while. Also, more engagement when everyone is working at the level appropriate to them. Read-aloud feature is useful to low readers.

Notes and Comments on "Young Minds" article

CPA: "Continuous Partial Attention" (Linda Stone) -- "an artificial sense of constant crisis" from always having "to be a live node on the network", checking emails and texting and such. (Differs from multitasking, where only one of the tasks generally requires real attention.)

The author goes around the world hosting panels where students are invited to talk directly to their teachers about what works and doesn't work for them in education. They universally hate lectures and worksheets; they love collaborative and real-world projects. . . . (I still feel like to just give in to a CPA-style of teaching and learning is not the full answer, though. Speaking is a really GOOD method of communicating many sorts of things. Shouldn't we still expect our students to learn to learn that way, too, at least some of the time?)

(Does the fact that I found this article interesting but have NO interest in reading the various comments appended to it -- and sampling the first few didn't change that feeling -- say something about my readiness or lack of readiness to participate in social learning communities? I'm just not that interested in the chatter. . . I love the wealth of carefully crafted resources available on the web, and I MIGHT (MAYBE) find a particular blog with especially insightful posts interesting to follow, but I really have no interest whatsoever in the long laundry lists of brief comments by people I don't know that, for example, are appended to the "Minds on Fire" article. But then, I've never had any interest in the "Op Ed" page of a newspaper, either, or in the editorials themselves. I'm interested in reading facts --yes, I know there's whole fields of study around determining what's a fact, but I still like reading things that I believe to be facts -- and associated ideas, not the opinions of random strangers.)

Notes and Reflections on "Minds on Fire" Article

I didn't know that MIT and other universities had made so much course content available on the web for free. Cool!

Research shows university students who studied in groups were more engaged and better prepared, and learned more. (I think this leads to some not-necessarily-valid applications in teaching, though. Not everyone learns more through "turn and talk", for example. Sometimes the conversations are very superficial. Some students would learn more through "Pause and Write". We need to make sure to do both.)

"Learning to be" a member of a social learning community -- learning its norms, etc. -- tacit knowledge. Now this can happen even BEFORE becoming an expert.

Open Source software as an example of social learning. Start with "legitimate peripheral participation".

Similarly Wikipedia. (I wonder what the "higher level editing tools" that administrators have allow them to do?) Being able to see the process of successive contributions, and what was argued about, makes possible a new sort of critical reading todetermine reliability.

Virtual study groups in Second Life -- the terra Incognita project of the U. of Southern Queensland.

"Cyber One" Harvard Law School example -- three levels of participation. (But I'm not clear on this -- Were the Law School students who "attended the class in person" really in a real-world class, or was the entire thing done in Second Life?)

Digital StudyHall -- (DSH) -- rural and poor urban areas in India -- Lectures on videotape with local discussions.

U. of Michigan provost thinks his institution's academic impact is greatly extended by students' pre-existing social networks. (I doubt it. I doubt that much of what gets discussed on those networks is academic, except maybe for some philosophy courses.)

Faulkes Telescope Project gives students free accesss to excellent telescopes -- "Learning to be". Similarly "Hands-On Universe" (HOU).

VERY COOL: Bugscope Project -- Send a real bug; see it on a scanning electron microscope that you control! K-12! http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/

Decameron community of students and scholars studying and analyzing it together. "Legitimate peripheral participation".

Professor's experiment: Students did all their writing on public blogs. Quantity and quality improved when they were given the opportunity to read each others' blogs, and again when outside bloggers started following them. Students interlinked their papers and commented on each others' ideas.

"The Long Tail": In brick-and-mortar stores, 20% of the goods account for 80% of the sales, and maintaining the other 80% of the inventory requires relatively high costs for little return. In online commerce, the equation is reversed because inventory costs so little to store (in large distribution centers or just in digital bits!) Online learning opportunities are similarly much vaster than those available at any given traditional school. "Online niche communities of practice" are vailable to join -- "distributed cognitive apprenticeship".

However, many real-world [and presumably also online?] venues have information without reflecting upon it.

COOL: The online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/
is a "showcase of successful teaching and learning projects" supported by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

(I like the way this article periodically breaks up the text with an interesting graphic organizer-type diagram. I don't actually find these particular diagrams all that useful, but I like the way they break up the text and make it look friendlier.)

"Web 1.0" was the mid-1990's.

(What's a "mashup"? Is Wordle a mashup tool?)

SCARY: Types of economic opportunities may be changing too quickly for going back to school for retraining to be a viable option when an industry contracts and workers need to learn skills for new jobs in other industries!

Therefore, change "supply-push" model of getting knowledge into students, to a "demand-pull" model: participate in real work at a beginning level, "learning to be", collateral learning, access to rich practice-based (possibly online) learning communities, passion-based, often informal, with ongoing reflection due to being embedded in a community of practice. --> "Open participatory learning ecosystems". "Learning 2.0".

Second try:

Oh -- Is the "Labels" bar where we post tags?

First Post

OK, it's taking a LONG time to set up all of these accounts!

Am I supposed to be tagging this for the course? I know what the correct tag is (#i3cs21), but I don't know where to click to add a tag to a blog post, yet.