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".