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Category Archives: Conceptual Framework
High Low Tech @ MIT
“High-Low Tech, a research group at the MIT Media Lab, integrates high and low technological materials, processes, and cultures. Our primary aim is to engage diverse audiences in designing and building their own technologies by situating computation in new cultural and material contexts, and by developing tools that democratize engineering. We believe that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices, and our goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end, we explore the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design.”
Learning environments
“The learning science have converged on four major characteristics of effective learning environment: 1- they pose engaging, personally meaningful problems, 2- they allow learners to build on their existing knowledge,3- they are social experiences that blur boundaries between student and teacher, and 4- they constantly assess student learning, enabling the learning environment and the student themselves to make adjustments” (Bransford, 2000).
DiGiano, Ch., Goldman, Sh., Chorost, M. (2009). Educating Learning Technology Designers: Guiding and Inspiring Creators of Innovative Educational Tools. New York, NY: Routledge.
Google’s classroom of the future
Bamboo Dirt
“Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.”
User centred – FLIP the flip
http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture/
“Due to Khan Academy’s popularity, the idea of the flipped classroom has gained press and credibility within education circles. Briefly, the Flipped Classroom as described by Jonathan Martin is:
Flip your instruction so that students watch and listen to your lectures… for homework, and then use your precious class-time for what previously, often, was done in homework: tackling difficult problems, working in groups, researching, collaborating, crafting and creating. Classrooms become laboratories or studios, and yet content delivery is preserved. Flip your instruction so that students watch and listen to your lectures… for homework, and then use your precious class-time for what previously, often, was done in homework: tackling difficult problems, working in groups, researching, collaborating, crafting and creating. Classrooms become laboratories or studios, and yet content delivery is preserved (http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/3367).
A compiled resource page of the Flipped Classroom (with videos and links) can be found at http://www.scoop.it/t/the-flipped-classroom
The advantage of the flipped classroom is that the content, often the theoretical/lecture-based component of the lesson, becomes more easily accessed and controlled by the learner. Cisco in a recent white paper, Video: How Interactivity and Rich Media Change Teaching and Learning, presents the benefits of video in the classroom:
- Establishes dialogue and idea exchange between students, educators, and subject matter experts regardless of locations.
- Lectures become homework and class time is used for collaborative student work, experiential exercises, debate, and lab work.
- Extends access to scarce resources, such as specialized teachers and courses, to more students, allowing them to learn from the best sources and maintain access to challenging curriculum.
- Enables students to access courses at higher-level institutions, allowing them to progress at their own pace.
- Prepares students for a future as global citizens. Allows them to meet students and teachers from around the world to experience their culture, language, ideas, and shared experiences.
- Allows students with multiple learning styles and abilities to learn at their own pace and through traditional models.
One of the major, evidenced-based advantages of the use of video is that learners have control over the media with the ability to review parts that are misunderstood, which need further reinforcement, and/or those parts that are of particular interest. (Using technology to give students “control of their interactions” has a positive effect on student learning,)
It is important, though, not to be seduced by the messenger. Sal Khan is very charismatic and has produced good videos to explain some complex mathematical concepts. With the growth of open education resources via Youtube and Creative Commons, it is important to note that excellent video lectures have been and are freely/easily available. The Flipped Classroom concept, though, was not developed and articulated by Khan but by teachers such as Karl Fisch and Jon Bergman/Aaron Sams.”
Design Thinking
Design Thinking
http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/hacking-the-classroom-beyond-design-thinking/
Design thinking is an approach to learning that includes considering real-world problems, research, analysis, conceiving original ideas, lots of experimentation, and sometimes building things by hand (http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/03/what-does-design-thinking-look-like-in-school). The following graphic was developed by Design Thinking for Educators to explain the process of design thinking:
Abstraction pedagogy
Interesting blog post about the challenges youth face in coping with abstractions in learning.
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/teenagers-and-abstract-thinking-shawn-cornally
Crit on Hole-in-the-Wall
From Stephen Downe’s
“Unlike the Nobel Prize, which rewards people for work they’ve done, the TED Prize is basically startup money for work they’re going to do. This with the 2013 prize, which gives Sugata Mitra about $1 million to develop something called School in the Cloud. This recent attention has caused some writers to examine the initiative that made him Gates-worthy in the first place, the ‘hole in the wall’ initiative, where he put computers in public places in India and watched as kids taught themselves how to use them.
Audrey Watters, for example, says people should ask critical quesions, questions about “this history of schooling as Mitra (and others) tell it,” about “the funding of the initial “Hole in the Wall” project (it came from NIIT, an India-based ‘enterprise learning solution’ company that offers 2- and 4-year IT diplomas),” questions “about these commercial interests in ‘child-driven education’.”
Donald Clark assails Mitra’s work. “‘What we see is the idea of free learning going into free fall’ said Payal Arora. When Arora came across these two ‘hole-in-the-wall’ sites, accidentally in India, she discovered not the positive tales of self-directed learning but failure.”
Mike Caulfield offers heretical thoughts. “Mitra’s got a bad case of straw man disease here, but the most striking thing about his exposition is that he seems to believe our educational system was invented a specific time to solve a well-defined, identifiable problem: the production of clerical workers.”
I’m not as critical as they about the concept of what Mitra calls self-organized learning. After all, that’s pretty much what I’m up to. But I don’t think learning will be reformed from the top down with TED talks and Gates grants, because I have my doubts that the learning provided by the corporations of today will be any more enlightened tghan the learning created to serve the needs of corporations in Victorian England. (Photo: what’s left of the ‘hole in the wall’ project. Via Donald Clark.)”
http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca/2013/03/sugata-mitra-slum-chic-7-reasons-for.html
Learning analytics … questions
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Explanatory vs. Predictive
How does a good teacher know if a student is struggling with a concept in the classroom? We hope that they recognize signs of difficulty while reviewing practice work or are asked for assistance by the student (feedback, hints). If learning analytics are going to provide useful feedback then we should be measuring those feedbacks and requests for help. A click stream tells me if a student is using material but not why or what that interaction ought to achieve. A student might skip problems they already know – their lack of answering questions in a particular part of the course is not itself evidence of lack of understanding. Similarly, a student can struggle while working very hard to try and understand a concept. Their mere frequency of interaction does not in any way imply instructional success. Only knowing their clicks, or visits, tells us nothing about their intent, when they wanted help, if they got that help, or what feedback they were given (or should have been given). Consider the following questions one might want to ask:
- How often is the student getting questions right on the first try?
- Do they eventually get them correct?
- How often are they asking for help?
- Do expert teachers rate this skill is generally difficult?”
http://mfeldstein.com/if-you-like-learning-could-i-recommend-analytics/