Just picked up an a great looking set of links from twitter. To late to fully check out tonight.
While schools can provide low-income students with warmth, food, supplies, and a knowledgeable teacher, asking students to bring essential work home with them may remove those pillars of support from their educational process. Further, making in-class work dependent on progress made at home invites that stress into the classroom and diminishes the positive effect of those support structures that the school has put in place.
Powerful post especially as closing the gap is in the news today. Interesting criticism of flipped learning too.
The system lets students choose their own path through a course, selecting the assignments that interest and challenge them. At its heart is a tool, called the “grade predictor,” that helps to “manage some of the chaos” of such a personalized system. The grade predictor also helps students figure out what they need to do to reach the classroom goals they set for themselves.
GradeCraft also aims to give students the ability to fail without detrimental consequences. There are many assignments to choose from, so any students who do poorly on one can find plenty of other tasks to redeem themselves. Instructors, meanwhile, can allow students to revise their work.
Echoes of DS106 and Derek Robertson on failure here.
I don’t live in a box. I know that teens and adults use different devices for different purposes. But I was still surprised by how unbalanced their responses were compared to what mine (and I suspect most other adults) would be.
Some nice pupil produced diagrams about the devices they use. I wonder if we will miss the sort of skills pointed to in the second link in this post.
One of the things I love about open education in general, and open educational resources in particular, is the creative potential they offer to find, use, reuse, create and recreate such a wealth of diverse content and resources.
Lorna Campbell: Creativity, serendipity and open content | Open World
The post has some lovely examples of sources of surprising stuff, great rabbit hole links to dive into. Most of the sources could easily be used to inspire some digital creativity, storytelling or practise using media tools. Or just for a little silliness!
it is seldom about technology designers’ a priori plans for a technology, and more about users’ unexpected practices with it. That, to me, is the most fascinating and useful basis of research inquiry.
via Brief statement on ‘Digital Wisdom’ | Ibrars space.
I love ‘unexpected practices’ it is why we need flexible technology in Learning and Teaching.
My favourite use for word when I was teaching primary 6 was as a poor man’s vector editor, Sandaig Otters » Seeing Stars, and I’ve often been surprised by how pupils and teachers bend unsuitable software to their needs.
About 20 years ago at an education conference one of the speakers said: “To be literate is to fully inhabit a culture”. At first it felt a little affected or a bit too “luvvie” for my liking. Over time however I have repented. I find it useful rather than struggling with new words like “learnacy”.
via Digital literacy | NET BLOG.
I really like this idea of literacy covering the whole of a culture. It seems to hint at avoiding any worrying about the word digital and accepting that it takes it place in a range of areas we can be literate in. We can escape the worry about being too luvvie by considering the range and Types_of_cultures.
I would say that it might be worth rethinking “comments” on student blogs altogether – or rather the expectation that they host them, moderate them, respond to them. See, if we give students the opportunity to “own their own domain,” to have their own websites, their own space on the Web, we really shouldn’t require them to let anyone that can create a user account into that space. It’s perfectly acceptable to say to someone who wants to comment on a blog post, “Respond on your own site. Link to me. But I am under no obligation to host your thoughts in my domain.”
from: Men (Still) Explain Technology to Me: Gender and Education Technology
Some great reading on the train this morning. I’ve tended to swallow whole the idea of making being one of the best ways of learning. As usually with things that you hold dearly but perhaps without a lot of analysis it is nice to read some different opinions.
The bloggers here are thinking at a much deeper level that I venture, and I recommend following the links.
I started on Hapgood.
What would happen if we got over our love affair with creators? What would happen if we collapsed the distinction between maker and taker, consumer and producer, not by “moving people from consumption to production”, but by eliminating the distinction? What if we saw careful curation of material as better than unconsidered personal expression?
“Users” | Hapgood
Which linked to this:
You see critiquing isn’t a review where you let fly with your opinion, no the purpose of the critique is to make the work stronger, better, and more fitting.
Critique & Creation | Heart | Soul | Machine
Then:
Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labour—primarily caregiving, in its various aspects—that is mostly performed by women.
Metafoundry 15: Scribbled Leatherjackets
And:
A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Maker culture, with its goal to get everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving, by continuing to enforce the idea that only making things is valuable. Rather, I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.
Why I Am Not a Maker – Atlantic Mobile
Finally:
I’m always fascinated to see how my work in ed-tech is deemed “emotional” or dismissed as merely “cultural analysis” – gendered descriptions of what I do (subtly, overtly) perhaps.
Re-Building the Blog
I’ve not come to any conclusions here but it makes me think.
I got up this morning and didn’t make the bed, made some breakfast and just caught the earlier train. This let me make the walk from Waverley down to work rather than catch a bus.
Watching the scaffolders run scaffolding up a new building, helping complete the Architect’s vision, hoping to get to work in time for the barista to make me some coffee before the first meeting.
As I walked I am making this list; Wondering if a found poem is made, our national poet is called the Scots Makar; If I write a poem from the names of boats in a harbour am I a maker or curator; Artists, it seems to me, depend on other artists, critics, curators and caregivers for their making.
Finally I am thinking about DS106 Art on the couch my friend Mariana’s thoughts about learning thro critique.
Despite all the pushes to “bring Twitter to the classroom” and calls to have Twitter “replace traditional professional development,” I’m less and less convinced that’s a good idea — or at least, I’m more and more convinced that we should not rely solely on Twitter as the site for online PD or for online educator community. Both can and do exist online — PD and community — but I’d wager the best place to find both remain on educators’ blogs. I wonder if, in fact, “the future of professional development” might be a “return to blogging.”
via Is Twitter the Best Option for Online Professional Development? from the Hack Education blog.
That would be a nice development in 2015. I’ve blogged a lot about twitter and while it continues to be a good tool, I’d go along with the questioning of best. I suspect our professional standards are looking for a bit more depth too?
Some recent links from my Pinboard. Mostly related to open resources.
n December last year the British Library released over a million images on to Flickr Commons. …
… The Curious Images event held yesterday offered a whirlwind tour of the reuse of the images by artists, researchers and other institutions and of the challenges that tracking use and finding appropriate images continue to pose.
GIF IT UP was an open competition to find the most excellent GIFs reusing openly licensed images and video from the collections searchable on the sites of the two digital libraries.
I think there is real potential for teaching about open licensing, copyright while having some fun and learning a bit about image editing through the creative use of openly licensed media.
I keep a tumblr of enviable stuff, here are a couple of recent quotes I’ve stashed there:
Openness helps here. Open technologies allow users to innovate without permission. Open licensing is just part of that open technology jigsaw; open standards another; open access and accessibility a third. Open interfaces accessed sideways. And so on.
from: Mixing Stuff Up | OUseful.Info, the blog…
Which give me an excuse to link to OPEN SCOTLAND – Promoting the development and adoption of open education policies and practices in Scotland. #openscot and http://declaration.openscot.net/. It looks like thinkgs migt be opening up here.
The best way to learn something is to start doing it. Don’t wait for full knowledge to come to you. Often it won’t. Just pretend you know what you’re doing, and hit the walls. That helps define the shape of the problem. Make it small enough that you can start solving it right now, without waiting. Each part of the problem is smaller than the whole thing. And tell yourself you can do it, because you can.
from: How to do new things
And a couple of bonus links from pinboard:
Everyone is miserable. We are uninformed. We are lonely and scared. and to lighten the tone:
Muvi X-Lapse for time lapse panoramics | Jon Gill, I’d love one of these.
