(The recording starts two minutes into Misty’s session because I was so excited about hearing her presentation that I forgot to hit the “record” button in the control panel.)
Feel free to also use the wiki page to post links to any handouts or evaluation forms you’d like other students to be able to access.
As a reminder, the second round of presentations starts this afternoon at 4:00. The Elluminate room will open at 3:30 for today’s presenters (Rachel, Melissa, Matt, and Breanna) to login, test out their audio and video, and pre-load any PowerPoint, graphics, or video files they plan to use in their sessions.
See original post on Posterous at http://lrnd6820.posterous.com/research-project-materials-and-recordings
I’ve heard from a couple of students suggesting they are just a little nervous about presenting on their class projects in Elluminate.
If you are, too, or if you haven’t had much experience presenting in Elluminate, you may find it helpful to view this quick orientation before your presentation session:
(Once presenters are in the session, I will grant them moderator privileges so they can access all the Elluminate presentation tools.)
The “rooms” will open half an hour early for you to come in, upload any PowerPoint or PDF files you plan to use in your talk, and test your audio and video. You can also e-mail me files in advance to upload on your behalf if you would prefer.
If you’re still struggling with how to structure your talks, I suggest focusing on the following points (in no particular order):
– The topic you explored and why it interested you;
– Key ideas, themes, and data you found in your investigation;
– Points of connection between what you found and learning theories we explored in 6820 this semester;
– Implications for learning designers; and,
– Suggested authors and resources for classmates who want to learn more about your topic.
I also encourage you to build in a few minutes for questions and informal discussion within your time slot.
Also, don’t forget to create and share a “feedback form” for use by participants and viewers of your session. You can post these to the wiki, your blog, or both. Please plan to share a link to your form at the start of your session. Please also note that a couple of students, due to extenuating scheduling circumstances, will be viewing (and reviewing) presentations from session recordings, so a few of you may get some of your peer feedback a day or two after your actual session. I’ll be posting links to the recorded versions of the sessions to our class wiki as soon as the recordings have processed.
To make sure everyone has a “live” audience, we’ll expect to see you online for at least the sessions you signed up to evaluate unless you and I have made special arrangements in advance. However, I encourage you to login and participate in as many sessions as possible. I think you’ll be interested in hearing what your colleagues have found, and that they will appreciate your support and feedback.
Below are links for participating in the live Elluminate sessions for presenting final LRND 6820 projects.
The rooms will open half an hour before the scheduled start times for presenters to login, upload any presentation materials, and test audio and video.
A sign-up sheet for times for presenting your final projects has been posted to the course wiki (BGSU login required.)
Please sign up for a time to present your project by entering “edit” mode and writing your name in the appropriate space.
While you’re on the wiki page, please also sign up to be a peer reviewer for at least three of your classmates’ projects. (You are encouraged to view and comment on all of the presentations, but you are only “required” to participate in three of the reviews.)
I will be setting up Elluminate sessions for all of the time slots, which you may use to present your projects. However, if you would prefer to use something other than Elluminate to present, that’s fine, too. Just let me and your peers know in advance how to access your session by posting instructions to your blog and tweeting a link to that post using the #lrnd6820 hashtag. (If you plan to use Elluminate for your session, but have not previously presented using Elluminate, you may want to give yourself a practice session. LearnCentral.org, a free, education-focused social network sponsored by Elluminate, gives each user a free “vRoom” with all of the Elluminate tools. With the free account, you are limited to having only four people in your “vRoom” at a time, but it’s still a handy tool for practicing your Elluminate skills and working with small groups.)
Please remember to develop a brief (3-5 question) “feedback form” tailored to your project to collect comments and suggestions from viewers of your presentation. (I suggest using something like the form creator in Google Docs for this purpose so you can share a link in your session and embed your form wherever you post your project. Here’s a brief tutorial on how to create and share a form using Google Docs.)
As a reminder, your projects are due by midnight Sunday, December 12. Projects can be “submitted” either by posting them to your blogs or to the “Research Projects” page on the course wiki. Please remember that papers should be formatted in APA style, and should be accompanied by an annotated bibliography of your references.
If you have any last-minute questions about your projects, please feel free to e-mail me, send me a message on Twitter, or look for me on Skype.
Good luck! I look forward to reading your work and seeing your presentations.
See original post on Posterous at http://lrnd6820.posterous.com/presentation-sign-ups
Hello, LRND 6820 students. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving holiday and are coming back from the break rested and ready for an interesting conversation this week.
As you recall, we briefly touched on connectivism early in the semester through our reading of a couple of chapters from Siemens’ book Knowing Knowledge, in which Siemens contextualized connectivism by comparing it with other major learning theories including behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. (If you need a little refresher, it might be helpful to re-skim Breanna and Wesley’s summary of that reading, which I’ve pasted below.)
Melissa will be serving as our discussion facilitator this week. To start things off, she has created a Prezi in which she summarizes key points from the article and offers some conversation questions. A copy of her Prezi is embedded below. We’ll use Melissa’s blog as the hub for our conversation this week, but, as always, feel free to use Twitter to share and comment as well. Since connectivism is a popular topic right now, comments on Twitter may draw in perspectives from outside of class, which is always welcome. (Melissa, please keep an eye on your blog comments queue and Twitter this week.)
I know that, outside of this class, some of you have participated in some discussions about connectivist ideas in Terry’s class. However, if this is a brand new topic to you, you might enjoy the CommonCraft-style YouTube video below by Wendy Drexler, which provides a brief introduction to connectivism from the perspective of a hypothetical “networked student.”
Since, as always, we’re looking at connectivism through a lens of learning design, I’d also like you to explore a couple of additional resources that explore the theory introduced in the primary reading from “applied” points of view.
The first is a presentation by Stephen Downes, who has been a partner of Siemens in introducing and developing the theory of connectivism. In this set of slides, he discusses “pedagogical foundations for personal learning.”
I like this presentation for a couple of reasons. First, it helped me develop a clearer mental picture of how connectivist principles could be embodied in real learning situations. Second, it focuses heavily on personal learning environments, so I thought it might inspire some additional reflection on your own PLE projects give you some ideas for continuing the development of your PLEs. (As a “heads up” to those of you enrolling in my research methods class in the spring, we’ll spend some time on integrating research-related activities into your PLEs, so, beyond your own informal learning, there will be value in maintaining and refining your PLEs beyond LRND 6820.)
A link to an MP3 file in which Downes narrates and expands on the text and graphics in the slides is below the embedded slideshow. You might find it helpful to listen as you read.
Finally, I’d like you to take a look at Wendy Drexler’s article The networked student model for construction of personal learning environments: Balancing teacher control and student autonomy, in which she outlines an instructional model inspired by connectivism, expanding on the idea of the “networked student” introduced in the YouTube video and introducing a concept of a “networked teacher.”
As you read it, try to put yourselves in the proverbial shoes of both the student and the teacher, and think about how “design” could help you succeed in each role. In other words, drawing on Roy Pea’s ideas about “embedded intelligence,” how could you “embed” scaffolds in tools you might offer to students or trainees learning in a connectivism-oriented learning environment?
Coming Up
Believe it or not, we’ll arrive at our last set of readings for the semester next week as we explore a pair of articles from Scardamalia and Bereiter exploring the potential role of technology in helping students not only “learn” pre-existing knowledge and pre-defined skill sets, but in helping them become creative problem solvers and active participants in the process of creating “new” knowledge. (A positive way to end a semester, I think, and also a nice transition for those of you gearing up to focus on knowledge creation yourselves via your masters projects and theses.)
Finally, remember that your final projects/papers are due by midnight Sunday, December 12. You can either submit these via e-mail or (preferably) post them to your blogs or to the course wiki so that others can view them. Later this week, I’ll post a sign-up page for time slots for your presentations of your presentations during BGSU’s finals week.
That’s all for now. I hope you enjoy this week’s readings. I look forward to chatting with you about them online and to reading your summary blog posts at the end of the week.
As always, if you have questions, feel free to e-mail or Skype me, or pose your question via Twitter using the #LRND6820 tag.
See original post on Posterous at http://lrnd6820.posterous.com/the-weekly-november-29-december-5
Matt will be serving as our discussion facilitator this week, so please check out the overview Prezi he has prepared for us below. Please use Matt’s blog post on this topic as the hub for online discussion this week. As usual, your blog posts synthesizing the reading and weekly discussion are due Sunday night.
As you read the article, crosscheck Pea’s ides with your own experiences and reflections about how the tools you use and the environments with which you interact influence your thinking and learning. (For example, think about the “affordances” of the tools you selected for inclusion in your personal learning environment. Does their design influence how you think about organizing information? Think about all the content generated by members of this class throughout the semester as Pea discussed “artifacts.” Also, think back to your experience in the VoiceThread debate a few weeks ago. How were cognition and intelligence “distributed” by your group? How did the tools and resources you used influence your strategy?)
I look forward to talking with you about this reading at Matt’s blog.
Full List of PLE Links
If you weren’t able to find all of the PLE demos by your classmates, a full set of links is below. They are all definitely worth checking out.
Believe it or not, next week is already Thanksgiving! Since it’s a holiday-shortened week for BGSU and many of you will be traveling, there is no new reading assignment for next week.
Please use the time you would typically spend during the first half of the week reading and posting on the weekly readings to work on your research projects.
If you would like to set up a time to meet one-on-one via Skype or GoogleTalk to talk about your progress and get feedback on your project work so far, I’m open to scheduling individual appointments on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I’m available during the day all day on Monday until 4:00, Tuesday afternoon, Tuesday evening, and all day Wednesday until 5:00.
If you’d like to block out half an hour or so, just make a request in the comments below with a time that works for you, or send me an e-mail or direct message on Twitter. If you have an outline or draft material that it would be helpful for me to look at in advance, please also send me instructions on how to access it. I’d be happy to talk with you and hear how things are progressing for you.
That’s it for tonight! I hope your week is off to a promising start.
See original post on Posterous at http://lrnd6820.posterous.com/the-weekly-november-15-21
Following up on yesterday’s post, I wanted to add just a few of my own random thoughts on UDL based on the discussion and activities last week, and share a few reminders about the PLE presentations next week.
The Week That Was
Frank provided an excellent introduction to the principles of Universal Design for Learning, along with opportunities to see some of the principles applied in actual curriculum modules.
In student blog posts, everyone expressed seeing value in the application of UDL principles, both for making online content accessible to people with disabilities and for enhancing learning for all. I hope that, as you read the Edyburn article and explored the CAST resources Frank suggested, you saw some connections with the findings from the Cisco report we read earlier regarding effective strategies for enhancing learning with media.
One of the elements of UDL that I find particularly appealing (and that Matt also commented on in his blog post) is its consideration of “affective networks.” Learner motivation is such a critical element for success, yet consideration of learner motives is often given short shrift. (Think back to the Hardre article on motivation we read. Can you see connections between the issues in that article and the coverage of affective networks in UDL?) When learners have choices about how to pursue a learning objective — not only because they can choose to use media that play to their strengths, but because of a relationship between choice and persistence. When learners have a sense of ownership and control, they are more likely to persist when they encounter challenges. Their tolerance for frustration increases, making them less likely to quit before mastering new material than they would be if they perceive the learning process as being highly prescriptive. This is true for students with disabilities (who often face frustrating circumstances others do not) and everyone else when attempting to grapple with particularly challenging content. (Look for this theme in the Dai and Renzulli article this week on giftedness as well.)
Another interesting thread I noticed running through some of the discussion comments last week was a criticism that the UDL resources we explored did not adequately address students who may learn best “kinesthetically” through physical experiences and hands-on activities. (Good observation.) I wonder if we’ll see that gap addressed soon as technology for making devices more physically aware becomes more common place and as tools for producing media that users interact with through “natural interfaces” become popularly available. For example, a few years ago, using physical movement and feedback in educational media was science fiction. Now, however, devices like iPods and iPads perceive touch and can track their own physical positions, movement, and orientation to the ground and the user. The new Xbox Kinect add-on allows game players to compete in virtual environments using only natural body movement to maneuver and interact with objects within games. Can you envision ways these technologies could be used to create online learning opportunities for students who learn through movement and physical experience that wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago, either by “augmenting reality” or providing more immersive experiences in virtual worlds?
Finally, I wanted to share a couple of interesting popular media articles that I happend to stumble across on the same day and which I thought provided interesting contrasts on how people incorporate technology into their lives and cognitive processes. Specifically, these two pieces deal with memory.
One is from Wired, and chronicles the life of Piotr Wozniak, a Polish software developer, who created an application called Super Memo. Super Memo is based on the work of German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who discovered a “spacing effect” that applied to memorization. In a nutshell, Ebbinghaus found that rote memorization can be improved dramatically in most people by optimally timed repetitions of information. Wozniak used Ebbinhaus’ work to create an algorithm upon which Super Memo is based. Super Memo’s magic, then, lies in its ability to repeat exposure to the same material for its users at just the right time. According to Wired, Wozniak now uses the software himself and is essentially living an experiment to explore the limits of the brain for memorization. While he has successfully mastered extraordinary amounts of information, the software has come to dominate his life, as he shuns activities and attachments that might interfere with his availability for interacting with content stored in Super Memo at the optimal time according to the algorithm. (By the way, a similar tool is now built into the web interface for Amazon Kindle.)
The contrasting article is a post from the Evernote blog. Evernote is a software application for computers and smart phones for capturing and organizing notes, web pages, photos, and voice memos. The post describes how Patrick Jones uses the software to help compensate for severe memory problems stemming from a series of eight concussions. Due to his injuries, Jones lacks the internal ability to do the kind of memorization Wozniak has organized his life around. Instead, Jones has figured out strategies for using software to “offload” the task of remembering to software. Jones relies on computer hardware to store information he needs to remember, and then uses tools like Evernote, a mind-mapping application called Curio (which can be used to visualize connections among bits of information stored in Evernote) and desktop search engines to recall and reconstruct information. While Jones suffers physical symptoms from his injuries such as fatigue and headaches, he maintains a full-time job as a chaplain, hikes, travels, and runs his own foundation.
I thought the stories were interesting. One man, with a normal capacity for memory, has almost become subservient to technology, while the other man (with a significant disability) who uses technology very differently from the first man (but with a somewhat similar goal) is liberated by it.
As noted in my previous post, Misty is facilitating our reading this week on “Snowflakes, Living Systems, and the Mysteries of Giftedness.” After reading the article, please view Misty’s overview presentation and respond to her discussion questions via her blog. Don’t forget to write and share your summary blog posts by Sunday night synthesizing the reading and the discussion throughout the week.
Coming Up
Next week is our week of PLE presentations.
As a reminder, the requirements for the PLE project and presentations are included in the slides below.
Rather than try to coordinate “live” presentation sessions, we’ll go with asynchronous presentations via screencast in which you provide a narrated “guided tour” through your PLE based on the project requirements.
Please remember that a component of the assignment is providing feedback on the PLEs and presentations of at least five of your peers via comments on their blog or posted screencast. To allow everyone ample time and opportunity to view and review screencasts, remember to post your screencast by 9:00 PM this Sunday night, and to keep your screencast to a length of 15 minutes or less.
If you are new to screencasting, a few easy-to-use tools you may want to explore are Screencast,Jing, or Snapz Pro X (for Mac users only.) All three offer free basic or trial versions which should suffice for this project. (BTW, for a quick overview of screencasting, check out Terry Herman’s session at the NWO Symposium on Saturday.)
Aaron has already posted his PLE screencast, which is embedded below. It’s a good example, so please check it out. (Thanks, Aaron, for posting early!)
If you have any questions, as always, please post a comment or send a message via Twitter.
That’s all for now. I hope to see some of you on Saturday at the Symposium and wish you a good (and healthy) week.
See original post on Posterous at http://lrnd6820.posterous.com/the-weekly-part-2
Hello, all. Your faithful instructor has been felled by a crushing cold bug and associated headache, so the full “weekly” will be delayed until tomorrow following a couple of rounds of orange juice and NyQuil (but not in the same glass, because that would be gross.)
For now, though, take a peek at the overview and discussion starter Melissa has put together for us on the reading this week:
Hello again. It’s week 10 in LRND 6820. Happy early Halloween to everyone! With the warm weather here in Columbus the last few days, it’s hard to believe that the end of October is almost here despite the daily loss of daylight hours. The semester is flying by!
The Week That Was
As you know, last week was VoiceThread debate week for digital learning theory, in which we critically explored the research around Nicholas Carr’s thesis that “Google is Making Us Stupid.”
I enjoyed watching your presentations, and thought your final products were terrific. Both teams went far beyond the sources cited by Carr, and used a nice combination of research and logic to make their arguments. Your actual VoiceThread presentations were nicely polished. (The rebuttals were particularly impressive since, unlike your initial postings, you had a very limited time in which to complete them.)
It was also interesting to see how you used online tools to collaborate. The affirmative team made good use of a wiki to both organize itself and to develop material in private for public presentation via VoiceThread. I also got to watch Aaron and Breanna compose the the negative team’s first presentation in real time in Google Docs. I have used Google Apps many times and for many projects before, but I had not yet had the opportunity to see multiple people edit a document simultaneously (outside of the soon-to-be-defunct Google Wave.) While watching and chatting with them via the built-in instant messaging feature, it made me wish tools like this were available when I was teaching language arts and communication classes to high school students. Being able to read and give feedback on a final written product is one thing, but being able to work with students while they’re writing and also to “rewind” the edits of a document step by step to see the process students went through to get to a final product opens the door to a lot of new possibilities from a teaching perspective.
Another interesting takeaway observation for me was the value of using a mix of both synchronous and asynchronous tools for collaborative projects. While both teams ultimately put asynchronous tools to productive use, several students commented in their blog posts at the end of the week that having a “live” meeting face-to-face or via Skype or Elluminate at the beginning of the project would have been helpful in getting organized and making sure each member of the team had a shared vision for the end product and a clear sense of which team member would be responsible for each project element. (Doing this was “suggested,” and I know that there were some attempts by students to organize these live meetings, but it sounds like it might be a good idea to actually build a live meeting into the project requirements for future semesters.)
It was also nice to see people using various online tools in combination (search tools, wikis, shared documents, e-mail, bookmarking tools, Skype, etc., not to mention VoiceThread itself.) In my view, one of the characteristics of a truly web-literate student is the ability to thoughtfully select (and combine) tools appropriate for accomplishing a particular task. This is an area where I’ve seen a lot of progress among LRND students over the course of the semester. While we often (and rightly, for the most part) say that online learning is “not about the tools,” I hope this project has helped underline the value of incorporating an appropriate variety of tools into the learning experiences you design in the future, especially when your goal is to help learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to grapple with “open ended” problems and answer questions that don’t have a single “right answer.”
Finally, I was pleased that both teams uncovered arguments and articles I had not encountered previously related to the topic of the debate, so I got to learn a lot of new things last week as well. Since the activity was “competitive,” it made sense that each team would keep it’s resources “secret” from the other prior to and during the debate. However, now that the debate is over, please either open the worksite you used to prepare for the debate to members of the other team (so, the wiki for the affirmative team and the Google Doc for the negative team) or add links to the resources you found to our shared Diigo group library. I think both teams found resources that students will find future uses for related to other projects.
Most of you also shared in your shared in your summary blog posts that your own views on the topic of the debate are not “black and white.” To try to synthesize across blog posts a bit, to the extent that the arguments resulted in a consensus, that consensus would be as follows:
The hyperlinked nature of the web as a medium DOES influence how we interact with information and ideas, and probably does have some influence on how we think.
However, while there are some risks and unintended consequences associated with online media, the potential benefits of the web for learning are far greater.
Whether or not Google and the web as a whole make a person smarter or stupider depends largely on whether or not a person (a) has the skills to needed to find information efficiently (b) knows how to evaluate information (from online AND offline sources) critically, and (c) has the skills needed to monitor and regulate their focus and attention. (All of which can be cultivated and improved with the help of good learning design, teaching and mentoring, and guided reflective practice. Thus, the ultimate impact of the web on human thinking will depend largely on people like you.)
Of course, your individual blog posts go much deeper than the three bullet points above, so I encourage you to browse each other’s reflections. I’ve highlighted some particularly good points and added a few comments and questions using the Diigo highlighter and sticky note tools. To view these, visit the LRND6820 Diigo group. Please feel free to add your own comments or argue with mine.
I also thought some of you might enjoy the video below. Much of it (I think) is intended as satire, and I certainly don’t agree with all of it, but I did find some of it funny after the week’s debate.
This Week
Our focus this week in class is “universal design for learning” or “UDL,” with our assigned reading coming from Edyburn. Frank will be facilitating things this week, and is kicking things off by sharing his overview presentation in a variety of formats with different media enhancements(true to the theme!), including a basic PowerPoint presentation, screencast, and podcast. All of these are available through our course wiki page, and individually at the links below:
I suggest starting by reading the article, then visiting Frank’s introductory blog post (where the online discussion questions for this week are also posted) here, then sampling his summary and critique in each of the formats offered. Afterwards, check out the resources and tools Frank has bookmarked in Diigo here related to actually creating curricula and learning resources based on UDL principles.
I am intrigued by the concept of UDL, because its ambitions go much further than simply take learning materials and environments designed for “typical” students “accessible” to students with disabilities and students from diverse backgrounds. Instead, the goal of UDL is to embed a variety of ways for learners to interact with curricula and so that the experience of every learner is enhanced, and to integrate technologies that are both “adaptive” and “augmentive.” (I think there’s actually a strong connection between Edyburn’s view of learning design and Barab and Plucker’s ideas about talent and intelligence, but I’ll let you get into the readings and online discussion before I elaborate on this further.)
As usual, participate in the running discussion throughout the week, and then synthesize key points of the reading and discussion in your summary blog post by Sunday night.
Coming Up
Next week, we continue on the theme of designing for diversity with a challenging but fascinating reading from Dai and Renzulli (library login required), this one focusing on “gifted” learners, but from a novel “systems” orientation that I think has interesting potential implications and applications for learning design. Misty will be serving as our facilitator for that article.
The following week, you will each be “presenting” your “personal learning environments” to the rest of the class. I’ll be posting instructions for signing up for a time slot tomorrow.
Finally, I want to put in a plug for the upcoming NWO STEM Learning Symposium coming up at the Penta Career Center in Perrysburg on Saturday, November 6, where Terry Herman, Sharon Shaffer, myself, and many others from the BGSU technology and education communities will be presenting. (Terry will be presenting sessions on screencasting. She and I will also be offering a session on simple tools teachers can use to increase parent and family engagement. I’ll also be co-presenting with Rachel Winters on “lessons schools could learn from Facebook” to increase student motivation and engagement. Your LRND 6820 peer Sharon Shaffer will also be presenting a session on PLEs.) For those of you in and around Bowling Green, this is a super convenient and affordable opportunity to learn and network with educators, administrators, and businesses involved in STEM education from around the state.
If you’re planning to attend, please let me know. Sharon and I have talked about trying to arrange a morning coffee or lunchtime meet-up as a rare opportunity to meet and talk in person. It would be great to see you there.
That’s all for now. Enjoy Frank’s materials, plug in to the conversation, and keep plugging away on your PLEs and research projects. As always, if you have questions, please feel free to post them as comments to the blog or contact me privately by Skype or e-mail. Have a great week!
See original post on Posterous at http://lrnd6820.posterous.com/the-weekly-10-lrnd-6820
Great job on the VoiceThread debates. I have been reading up on this topic for quite awhile now, but you exposed me to arguments and research I haven’t encountered before. You’ve given me quite a bit of new reading material to explore!
Now that the formal debate is over (although you should feel free to add on to the VoiceThreads) and you’re no longer tied to your assigned side, it’s time to process all the arguments and evidence and come to your own conclusions.
Prior to writing your individual blog posts for this week, please take a second look at the VoiceThread postings, browse the evidence shared by each side.
Then, in your blog posts, share (A) your current views (as a result of researching and listening to arguments on both sides) on the real effects on Web use on thinking and learning and (B) potential strategies for learning designers to use to ensure that the products they create are truly beneficial for the learners who use them.
Please also share some reflections on what it was like to try to collaborate with teammates online, your role in your team’s efforts, and any ideas or suggestions you have for making this project even better for future students.
Also, as a reminder, our reading next week is from Edyburn, 2005 on “Universal Design for Learning.” Frank will be facilitating our discussion next week, and will be sharing some additional tools and resources for you to explore. Some of the most creative applications of technology in learning to date have come out of this field, so it should be an exciting topic for our course.
See original post on Posterous at http://lrnd6820.posterous.com/voicethread-debate-wrap-up
