Wednesday, January 02, 2013

My Word for 2013

  • Connect–I spent August connecting with other teachers nationwide. When August was over, I stopped. I miss it terribly and realize that while I am not great at connecting generally, I am good at being helpful. I will connect with those I already know through the channels I already have. I will connect with those I don’t know but follow. I will be helpful and grateful as my primary tools for connecting.

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Sunday, August 12, 2012

James Howard Kunstler on Why Technology Won't Save Us | Jeff Goodell | Politics News | Rolling Stone

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James Howard Kunstler on Why Technology Won't Save Us | Jeff Goodell | Politics News | Rolling Stone

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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Tuesday, May 08, 2012

New World of Informal/Unstructured Training

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Jenna Wortham: What I Read - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire

    • I wake up around 7 or 7:30 a.m. and check the news on my iPhone. I usually sleep with my laptop nearby, but the phone is quicker.
    • I've set a few select Twitter feeds to push their tweets to my phone via SMS from 7 in the morning till 2 at night.
    • I listen to music while I get dressed. I’ve done that since high school. It prepares me for the long day ahead.
    • During the ten minutes it takes me to walk to the train, I’ll quickly check Twitter for the news of the day, Tumblr for reactions to the news and Instagram for social news, to see if anything is heating up that might make for a good daily story or blog post -- a big news event, a backlash to something, a particularly timely meme, viral video or some other important topic.
    • During the first half of my commute, I listen to podcasts on my ride into the city. I use a terrific app called Instacast to keep track of the ones I like
    • I also read most of the New York Times through our iPhone app on my commute in.
    • I try to absorb at least an article a day.
    • For the second leg, I start preparing myself for the office. I reply to as many emails as I can in the last 15-20 minutes of my ride.
    • Once I get to work, around 10, I open Twitter and Facebook -- these stay open throughout the day and I stick my head back into them repeatedly to keep an eye out for any news that might be bubbling up.
    • I’ve got several secret Twitter lists that I use to help filter the news. The two that are the most useful contains all the founders, investors and start-ups that I'm keeping a close eye on and the other is full of reporters, tech and beyond, whose work I admire, so that I can see what they're tweeting about and linking to.
    • I favorite about 50 things (or more) a day on Twitter -- articles to read, ideas I liked, books to read, songs. I use ifttt recipe to send my Twitter faves to my Gmail inbox so I can sift through them later.
    • While I skim, I take notes the old-fashioned way: With a fine-point Sharpie and a stack Post-it notes. I do a lot of pattern matching -- emerging themes among new start-ups, the types of companies that are getting funded, a VC or entrepreneur catches my eye -- and make a note or a list, and I keep these in a row on my desk for easy reference.
    • For my beat, I need to see what new service or app is bubbling up and pay attention to how people are using the web, their mobile devices and new technologies, but it can often take awhile for things to catch on, so I'm constantly monitoring for that groundswell when a new service or behavior breaks out beyond my professional and social circle and starts to catch on in a bigger way.
    • often take photos of these handwritten notes and file them in a separate folder on my iPhone for easy perusal later.
    • I keep a fresh Steno notebook for each cluster of stories and blog posts I’m working on each week, and I always keep a graph-paper Rhodia notebook on me for longer to-do lists, general observations, story ideas. I avoiding spending a lot of time in my inbox -- it’s the equivalent quicksand -- so instead, I keep an eye on the emails to address anything urgent that comes in and make a list of people to reply to via email during a late-afternoon coffee break or before bed at the end of the night.
    • f there's no breaking news that requires immediate attention, I'll file a blog post or two and then transition into interviews and reporting for the features I'm working on that week and calls and meetings with sources that last until late afternoon, when I have lunch. Then, I’ll go back to those same sites and see what I’ve missed.
    • During lunch, I check in on my favorite writers. In my regular rotation each week: Willa Paskin at Salon, Mary H.K. Choi at MTV and Wired, Edith and everyone at The Hairpin, Mat Honan at Gizmodo, ParislemonAmanda Peyton on Tumblr, Robin Sloan’s blog, Shortform blog, Chris Dixon, Silicon Filter, Anil Dash, Waxy.org, Liz and Peter at All Things D, Guernica, The New Inquiry, Jonah Lerer, Clive Thompson, Vulture’s Mad Men and Game of Thrones recaps, The New Yorker’s Culture Desk, the picks of Longform, Rembert Browne and Jay Caspian King at Grantland, Anthony de Rosa at Reuters, David Carr and Brian Stelter, RConversation, Daring Fireball, Farhad Manjoo, Fred Wilson, Matt Buchanan and John Herrman at BuzzFeed FWD, Matt Stopera, Whitney Jefferson and Katie Notopoulos at BuzzFeed, Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic, Rebecca Greenfield at The Atlantic Wire, Tim Carmody at Wired, Kashmir Hill at Forbes, to name a few
    • I really admire iPad apps like Longform and Percolate. Lately, I use Pocket or Flipboard to see if I can unearth any new content that I should be paying attention to, although between Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, I get sent down enough unusual and satisfying rabbit holes to keep me awash in new content.
    • At the end of the day, I crave time away from the screen. I’ll go on a run, or to a show, or a tech event or a drinks thing to catch up with friends -

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Thursday, April 26, 2012

Open course in digital storytelling enjoys modest success | Inside Higher Ed

MOOC stands for 'massively open online course' And the emphasis is on massive. One at Stanford University had had enrollment upwards of 200,000.On the smaller side,Jim Groom's MOOC, DS 106-digital storytelling, had only a few hundred. But it definitely is something new under the pedagogical sun.  It is all about imagination, folksonomy, and creative chaos.  Reminiscent of the Occupy Movement, these courses represent a case study in leaderless, emergent organization.
 
The characteristics of this 'new new thing'  include: no textbook, no lectures, and a student-driven course design where  F2F attendance is optional. Students are free to design and re-design the course on the fly. Remix is encouraged and social upvoting of others' works a la Reddit and Digg is built in. Weekly assignments are student created. F2F students are required to create assignments and tutorials for skills need to complete them. Groom points out that there are over 1300 learners are online who get no course credit yet they produce the majority of the assignments.
 
Jim Groom has lofty hopes for this revolutionary course model, "The goal of DS106 is to teach students how to be creative, capable Internet citizens, able to consciously shape their own identities and narratives online. Minus the modicum of structure and authority exerted by the instructors, the course operates much as the Web does." Or as he calls them the three C's: community, collaboration, and coordination.

Canadian MOOC pioneer George Siemens remarks that Grooms course is different from the Stanford model. "The MOOCs at Stanford and Udacity are instructivist,” says Siemens. “Learners largely duplicate the knowledge base of the educator or designer.” In other words students are following in the instructor's learning footsteps much like the silhouettes of shoes in old dance studios showed learners the steps. What Groom and company are doing is to create an environment for learners to construct their own steps.

Is there a place at Western for such a course? Is anyone out there willing to facilitate? Is there something in your discipline that you have been dying to collaborate on in a similar open environment? I would love to work with someone to do this. You can get in touch with me at terry dot elliott at gmail dot com.
 
 

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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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I’m not a participant, I participate! « In dubio

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

teaching in china - Google Search

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Saturday, January 28, 2012

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)

  • These “recipe cards” for Project/Problem Based Learning are intended for teachers to use with K12 students in groups, as well as individual students.Each card creates student learning categorized as TimeTravelers, Artists & Inventors, Historian Challenges, StoryTellers, ProblemSolvers, Scientist Challenges, Career & Tech Ed.The cards are meant to help teachers integrate core content and deeply embed creativity, problem-solving, and collaborative learning in each student, with or without the use of technology tools.The core content pieces are the basic ingredients with which teachers can cook delicious content for their hungry learners.Teachers are able to customize the driving questions in each of the content areas to fit the unique needs of their learners. The cards guide teachers through the basic steps of the project, with ideas and suggestions for best practice.The tips & tricks help establish a safe and respectful learning environment every single day of the year.

    Tags: ProjectBasedLearning, project based learning, LifePractice, pbl


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Friday, January 27, 2012

Friday Links of Note

Friday Links of Note

Friday inks pic

 

 

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Sunday, January 08, 2012

Newspeak Reminders from "A Word a Day"

From: Henry Willis (hmw ssdslaw.com)
Subject: Newspeak and Papier Deutsch

Before the Bush Administration gave us the phrase "enhanced interrogation" another administration used "collateral damage" to refer to the killing of civilians -- who had, by some process of word magic, lost their identity as humans to become merely "damage", like a broken window or a fallen tree. The Nazis did the same thing on a far more barbaric scale with terms such as die Endlösung, which turned mass murder into a bloodless impersonal noun.

This is not just another example of the bureaucratic degradation of language, although that is certainly part of it. As Orwell said in his great essay on politics and the English language:
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.... Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

Or if you want to go back further, then we can quote the words that Tacitus put in the mouth of the Celtic chieftain Galgacus:

"To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace."

Henry Willis, Los Angeles, California

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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Saturday, December 03, 2011

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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Saturday, October 01, 2011

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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Saturday, September 24, 2011

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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Monday, September 05, 2011

Textbooks Are Killing Me!

    I’ve been thinking of how we might shape a new model of for texts that might lower the materials cost of higher education and thereby make it more accessible who find it cost prohibitive. Certainly, I realize tuition far out-paces course materials as an item on students’ higher ed budgets. Still, every bit helps.

    Some steps I took:

     
    • I downloaded Amazon’s student app and used it in the COOP to scan course texts for their Amazon.com partners. Where the Amazon texts were less expensive, I added them to my cart. (This was the case in all but two instances.)
    • When I got home, I compared the items in my Amazon cart with used versions available through amazon. Whenever possible, I chose the used version.
    • I took advantage of amazon’s offer of 6 months of free Amazon Prime membership for students. This secures free 2-day shipping and other as of yet unknown “deals.” (When selecting used texts, I only purchased those qualifying for Amazon Prime.)
    • When it was possible, I purchased the Kindle version of texts. I’ll be reading them on my iPad, but I’d take advantage of the new Kindle Cloud feature if I didn’t have a Kindle or iPad.
    • I opted against texts that were recommended but not required (with the exception of the APA style guide).
     

    As a result, my possible costs of $600 ended up at around $450. That’s a chunk of rent or more than a month’s worth of groceries.

Give it a try next semester and then lobby your friendly, neighborhood academic departments to work with students to help in every way they can. 


What's the Fuss with Google "Suggested Users"

There has been quite a bit of discussion about Google+'s "suggested users" list.  Seems to me as just another pretty much accepted way to populate an otherwise empty social network until you get the chance to fill in the blanks, but others have pointed out that many of the suggested users have empty streams.  Why suggest empty streams, Google?  Seems a bit half-assed or beta-assed if you will. Maybe somebody at Google realizes if you can't do something useful then do something that appears useful.

Audrey Watters remarks, "I’m not on it [the suggested lists], and I bet you aren’t either, particularly if you’re an educator — because, well, there aren’t any educators on the list."  But she also points out that Twitter's suggested user list has few if any educators.

She also points out that

Google’s Bradley Horowitz — de-facto spokesperson for the new list — does recognize that there isn’t an “extreme knitters” group. In a post yesterday, he says he wants to assure extreme knitters — along with everyone else who isn’t a tech or pop culture celebrity — that the fact that Google doesn’t recognize your interest group is “a bug.”

Don't get mad just make your own list.  Isn't that what the Circles are?  I have a circle for my CoopCatalyst folks.  I curate my own list of folks for #edchat and for a freshman comp class I am teaching this fall.  Do like Audrey Watters "suggests"-- curate your own circles. 

In Facebook you might be using 'Pages' (although I think that whole edifice rides on the shaky ground of having been first out of the gate).  In Twitter you can create your own lists although they haven't been all that handy for me to use regularly.  So what's the dealio about raking Google+ over the coals?  Keeps 'em honest, I guess.  




Saturday, September 03, 2011

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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Sunday, August 21, 2011

Tech Tidbits: Kim Cofino's Disruptive PD Technology

Tech Tidbits: Increasing Teachers’ Digital Efficiency | always learning

Just finished a pedagogically provocative post on crowdsourcing "tech tidbits".  Kim Cofino gets a handle on what is needed in training now--something short, something cheap, something that builds tech capacity--to help us get the most out of the limited time we have to learn. And, neatest of all, she flies in under the radar with a truly subversive learning framework.

 
Who can argue that simple tools like using 'CMD+F' or 'CTL+F' to find something on a webpage or in a pdf is not important?  No one. In fact, in the short time horizon we will be generating a zettabyte of data in one year.  Any filtering tool that might help us dig through that midden mound is a very happy one. 
 
Cofino runs these PD sessions like "a fair". 
 
1.Fifteen teacher/trainers are seated waiting to teach one 'tidbit' listed below:
 
  • Creating labels in Gmail
  • Creating e-mail lists in Contacts
  • Install Google Notifier to set up web Gmail as your default email client (this has saved me hours of work)
  • Creating collections in Google Docs and organizing your files
  • Making a copy of a document & saving for yourself (to edit)
  • Sharing a collection with a group (made in your Contacts list) or a colleague
  • Make a Google Doc public, for linking on your class blog
  • Check the revision history in a Google Doc
  • Creating events in Google Calendar and setting automatic reminders via e-mail
  • Creating repeating events in Google Calendar
  • Importing the school’s calendar into your own Google Calendar
  • Creating a Google Reader account and subscribing to feeds
  • Create a bundle of feeds in Reader for each class you teach
  • Adding feeds to folders in Reader
  • Recording screencasts in QuickTime
2. Everyone (trainers and learners alike) has access to a shared Google Doc with the day's training agenda (topics and trainer contact info).
 
3. Teacher pair up with teachers in a cafeteria style.  Cofino compares this to speed dating only she calls it "speed geeking".

4. The teachers then become the trainers and new learner/teachers rotate in from the other "dates'. Reminds me of a tactic I used in middle school called "the wheel" where you have an inner core of teachers and an outer core of learners.  It really is a clever modification of jigsawing.  

5.  If one of the trainees felt they could teach one of the tidbits then they would put their name down on the Google Doc.  I am reminded of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society and Sugata Mitra's 'child-driven learning'
I hope Cofino realizes how utterly subversive this pedagogy is.  What's good for the teachers is good for the students, n'est ce pas?  And doesn't this model fit the world we live in better than the dead institution walking that passes for schools today?
 
6.  When you are done you have two very important results:  learners got to control what they wanted to learn (to a limited degree), learners got to share what they learned, and learners got a list of those with expertise to call upon.  The shared Google Doc would also serve as a place to add future learning needs and perhaps to share with parents and administrators and staff who might want to be a part of that learning community. 
 
Kim Cofino should get a big shout and a happy one, too.  This is a great PD framework as well as a model for what should be happening in our schools every day.  Perhaps this is just the trojan mouse we need to leverage the tipping point needed to turn our schools from bridges to nowhere (the 20th Century) to bridges to somewhere (the emerging future).  Or as Illich puts it, "Our present educational institutions are at the service of the teacher's goals. The relational structures we need are those which will enable each man to define himself by learning and by contributing to the learning of others." 

(Illich, Ivan. Deschooling society. Calder and Boyars, 1971. Print.)

 

 

Friday, August 19, 2011

Video/Multimedia/Streaming/Photos/Slideshow Curation: Yokto

I think this is a new idea under the sun.  Grab some videos online, some videos of your own creation, grab a picture, grab whatever and put it all in an embedded presenter.  Done.  Below is the first go at this on the topic of learning.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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Saturday, July 30, 2011

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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Saturday, July 23, 2011

Authentic Learning Group Diigo (weekly)


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