New Threads

Old Threads, a photo by fras1977 on Flickr.

I sometimes think of the ideas I get from educational posts and webinars as multiple threads that I would like to weave together and incorporate into the online course that I teach.

Let me name some of these threads:
Mobile learning
Gaming
Self-directed learning

To be continued:

Try, try again.

This is a description of my unsuccessful attempt  to motivate the students in my online, graduate school course to write more insightful blog posts.  The course I teach is about integrating technology into the k-12 classroom. and the posts are usually reactions to specific Internet tools that the students had tried out in each mod.  After reading two of Daniel Pink's books, A Whole New Mind and Drive, about motivation, I decided to try to encourage students to give each other Kudos for exceptional blog posts.

Here is the situation.  Students were required to post to their individual blogs one or two times for each mod.  All students who posted on time (with good links, an image and multiple tags) received the same score.  However, the result is that those who blogged with really insightful ideas and those who did the minimum received the same score. 

I did not want to use a rubric because I feel there is too much subjectivity involved in judging "insightful ideas" and because it would require reading each blog post with much more scrutiny to arrive at a score.  As all teachers who evaluate essays know, this is a very time-consuming process.  So I decided to have the students give each other kudos for great posts and I created a Kudos forum in the learning management system.  Let mention that the students were not required to read each other's posts, but it was very easy to do so, since they each had a blog role of the blogs of all their classmates on their own blogs.

The result was very disappointing.  In the Kudos forum on the learning management system, there were very few kudos.  I wrongly supposed that a sort of competitive spirit would encourage students to try to write great posts in order to receive the adulation of their classmates and that they would read at least some of their classmate's posts in order to see how theirs compared.  That didn't happen.

I am rethinking the event and going to revamp it in some form in the future.  Any ideas would be most welcome.

Bring Your Own Popcorn!

Popcorn, a photo by Enokson on Flickr.

I recently learned of two great websites for using movie segments to teach English as a Second or Foreign Language. Claudio Azevedo gave a presentation through the Becoming a Webhead (BaW) course of the Electronic Village Online. Claudio is a movie buff and EFL teacher and teacher trainer at the Casa Tomas Jefferson Center in Brazil. He has created Movie Segments to Assess Grammar and Movie Segments for Warm-ups and Follow-ups which offer not only movie segments, but lesson plans and downloadable worksheets.  What a treasure of a website!

Open Content Licensing for Educators 2012

Hand in Compost from The Greenest Dollar

I came a little late to a fantastic week-long online workshop on Open Content Licensing for Educators (OCL4ED) about Open Educational Resources (OER) and Creative Commons (CC) but found plenty of ideas to reflect on.  In an introductory video called Learning4Content ,Wayne McIntosh, the founder of WikiEducator presents some of the key concepts of the course.

Although I have tried to "catch up" with some of the exceptionally well presented material in the course, I feel that I am unsure about two issues:
1.) The freedom I have as a university lecturer to share my materials.
2). How content creators can make a living.
Personally, I am unsure of the "ownership" of curricula that I create for my online courses taught through a university. Since what I create is the result of what I have learned from others through books such as Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms , A New Culture of Learning; dozens of free webinars; and free online courses such as those offered through the Electronic Village Online (EVO), I feel that I would like to freely share what I have learned.   However, I'm not sure to what extent I can legally to do that. Although some institutions such as MIT have made certain courses freely available on the web, the impression I get is that universities and school districts are in a state of flux regarding these issues.

The second issue that does not seem to be dealt with directly in the course is how people who produce content can successfully earn a living if they share it all freely. In the case of teachers and professors, perhaps nothing would really change if they made their curricula or projects freely available on the web with CC licenses. However, in the case of musicians, photographers or videographers, for example, I'm not sure how they would be compensated for their creations. Their creations are their source of income.  Even if they put an All Rights Reserved CC license on their creations, isn't it still quite easy to "pirate" their material?

Tools for Connecting Through Voice and Image

As part of the Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2012 session Becoming a Webhead, I am trying out various audio and video tools to evaluate their usefulness for teaching languages.  As I progress I will be adding to a Googledoc called Communication Tools which I created.  It is open to the public for additions or changes.  Feel free to contribute.

Right now I am embedding a short message that I created using AudioPal.  It was extremely easy to create, but what I want to figure out is whether it is possible to set it to mute.  I don't think it's a good idea to have audio turn on as soon as people open a blog because sometimes they are in a public or group setting and it can be distracting to everyone else.  So here goes the message I recorded using text-to-speech on AudioPal.  (BTW I discovered that in text-to-speech it is better not to use abbreviations because the voice doesn't produce them clearly).




OK. I can see that you have control over the playing of the audio. Now I'm going to try Voki.
Here's a link to a character and recording I created.  But I am also going to embed the same thing here to see what happens.



Ok.  Now let's see what Audioboo looks like.

Connections

In A New Culture of Learning  Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). The New Culture of Learning, the authors extol the benefits rather than the difficulties of the relentless pace of change that we are all experiencing.   In their eyes, A growing digital, networked infrastructure is amplifying our ability to access and use nearly unlimited resources and incredible instruments while connecting with one another at the same time (p. 17).

Two essential elements they focus on for purposes of learning are collectives and imagination. I'm going to comment a little on collectives and save imagination/play for another day.

In collectives constant interaction among group members, with their varying skills and talents, functions as a kind of peer amplifier, providing numerous outlets, resources, and aids to further an individual's learning (p. 51). ... But equally important is the ability to add one's own knowledge to the general mix.  That contribution may be large, such as a new website, or it may be a series of smaller offerings, such as comments on a blog or a forum post.  It may even be something as trivial as simply visiting a website.  But in each case, the participation has an effect, both in terms of what the individual is able to draw from it and how it shapes and augments the stream of information (p. 52).

This concept of learning through a collective sounds similar to George Siemen's theory of Connectivism which he posits in A Learning Theory for the Digital Age.  In this 2005 article Siemen's says, The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual. This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.

In rereading Siemen's article I discovered that Siemen's actually refers to John Seely Brown.  He comments that John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few. The central premise is that connections created with unusual nodes supports and intensifies existing large effort activities.  And Siemens concludes, This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism.

As I participate in several of the courses offered by Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2012, I find that I am learning through interacting with the participants in each course.  I can see that the participants in each are eagerly forming collectives.  As Thomas and Brown say, Unlike a classroom where a teacher controls the lecture, the organic communities that emerge through collectives produce meaningful learning because the inquiry that arises comes from the collective  itself (p. 54).

MOOCs

I am attempting to organize my links and get set up for the EVO (Electronic Village Online) courses that begins on January 9.  In the syllabus for the first week of Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments, I found a link to the video above in which Howard Reingold interviews George Siemens. 


In the video George Siemens gives a detailed explanation of a MOOC (massive open online course).   I have  tried to participate in some MOOCs in the past, but I think that I didn't understand the concept behind them well enough to get much benefit from them. I am now lurking in the 16th week of a MOOC called Change: Education, Learning and Technology and from here on I will  have a better idea of how to navigate the chaos, expand my own learning and contribute to the conversation.