Group 2 will be presenting tomorrow the theme of how we as teachers, students, and administrators can work to nurture a sense of belonging within a school community, across schools within a local community, and across the world within our global community. We will spend some time discussing alternative schools, so following are some <short> links you can go to to learn more about some of the more popular alternative education programs.
Review of Open Educational Resources
Here is an article from 2008 discussing MIT’s OpenCourseWare, Creative Commons, and other OERs and how they have been affecting education.
Reading: The NETP
I have been reading the National Educational Technology Plan and here are some ideas I’ve noted:
2 Main goals: By 2020, 1) raise the proportion of college graduates from 39% to 60%. 2) Get all students, regardless of race, income, or neighborhood, to graduate from high school.
We need to rethink 3 things: learning, assessment, and teaching. There is a drive to rethink learning as connections and collaborations (much as Wenger believes, or Siemens). There should be core competencies, but students should get tailored learning experiences according to their interests. Students should be connected to parents, experts, others via technology. Assessment should be non-intrusive, formative, and real-time. Teachers should use technology to improve their own practice, by learning from others.
Rethink assumptions: 1) Why should education be seat-based or time-based? Why not organize around competency rather than rigid semesters/years? Why not do other schedules instead of “you have to be in your seat at 7:30 until 10”? 2) Why group students together by age? Why not by competency? 3) Why group students into separate academic classes? Why not combine math and reading together? 4) Why are classes all the same size?
Goals put forth by the administration (that I think are relevant to our class):
1. Revise, create, and adopt standards and learning objectives…that reflect 21st century expertise and the power of technology to improve learning.
2. Design, develop, and adopt technology-based content, resources, and online learning communities that create opportunities for educators to collaborate for more effective teaching.
3. Develop and adopt a common definition of productivity in education and more relevant and meaningful measures of learning outcomes and costs.
4. Rethink basic assumptions in our education system that inhibit leveraging technology to improve learning.
5. Design, implement, and evaluate technology-powered programs that ensure our students progress through K-16 and emerge prepared for the workplace and citizenship.
Class Today 3/30/2010 Team 2
These past two weeks have been chock full of great stuff, and we’re excited to lead the class in discussion! Following is an outline that we’ll be using:
Wenger Article Debriefing (5 min)
This week we finished off Wenger’s book. We read about (among other things) participation versus non-participation, modes of belonging, learning communities, and education. We’ve bulleted a few questions that we raised while reading and invite the class to add some more that we can discuss later today.
- Why do students not participate?
- Is non-participation different from refusal to participate?
- Is non-participation necessarily a bad thing?
- How can we “anchor imagination into a learning community” and harness students’ engagement into the classroom?
- Why do we do the things we do? What imaginative and alignment purposes guide our actions?
- What is the trade-off between having multiple viewpoints involved in engagement and having a single alignment and purpose?
- What is the relevance of schools in creating communities of learning?
- Does participation require that someone respond to me?
The TLT Symposium (15 min in groups, 20 min as class)
“There is no point going [to the TLT Symposium] unless the new perspectives we gain in the process can find a realization in a new form of engagement upon our return” (Wenger, p. 217).
We have just discussed the symposium as a class, but we want to discuss what we’ve learned this week from Wenger and “remix” that with what we’ve learned from the Symposium. Let’s break into groups, talk about our experiences, and then come back together again as a class to discuss what we’ve learned.
Example: One of the TLT projects involved assigning medical students a project to film patients with chronic illnesses. How did this project enable those students to not only be formed by learning medical knowledge but to be transformed by learning how to engage with members of a community they would ordinarily not engage with? Did this project make them better future doctors? Why or why not?
Implications for CI 597 (20 min)
- How has your being a member of this community classroom changed your identity? Your imagination? If you haven’t changed, have you really learned anything?
- Despite the fact that we are a community of learning, some students still feel disconnected from other students, from the class as a whole, and from the “multi-semester, ongoing conversation.” Why is this?
- We have been divided into teams. How has this impacted our community as a whole? Has it been a good thing? Bad? In what ways?
- Let’s talk a little bit about the first iteration of CI 597 and how we relate to it.
- Who will continue to participate after the course “ends”? Just the techies? Theorists? How will the end of the semester affect our community?
- How can we change our class to enhance learning (the creation of identity through engagement)?
TLT Symposium: Using blogs as ePortfolios
I attended the seminar on the use of the Penn State Blogging community in designing portfolios for pre-service teachers. Dr. Zembal-Saul started by explaining a bit about the history of portfolios and the affordances that the web offers. Essentially, teacher educators wanted to have a way to allow students to perform four tasks: 1) to select learning outcomes and compile evidence for them [develop curricula], 2) to develop a philosophy of teaching, 3) to reflect upon their own practice, and 4) to develop an ongoing conversation with others of the teaching profession. In the early days of the web, the College of Education used tools such as Dream Weaver to develop websites for the students to create and post their portfolios, but quickly found these platforms to be too cumbersome and difficult for the average person to easily use. The discovery of the Penn State blog was, as Dr. Zembal-Saul put it, “an Aha! moment.” Now pre-service teachers had a space where they could record their learning, reflect upon it, and share it with the rest of the Penn State community, future employers, and the rest of the world.
Maria White, one of the first students to have used the blog ePortfolio system throughout her entire teaching program, spoke about her experiences with the system, walked us through her own portfolio, and answered questions. One thing I really thought was useful was that all of her course work for several different classes was included within this blog, divided into categories. Although she did not explicitly mention it, this would be a useful way to turn homework in to the right professor (through the use of an RSS feed gathering from only one particular category), while simultaneously providing a compendium of knowledge and experience gained throughout one’s education. Although I am not a pre-service teacher and am not required to create an ePortfolio, after seeing this presentation, I am excited to create my own public record of my own learning experiences here at Penn State.
Group 2 Synthesis Presentation
Here’s our synthesis video. We’d like you to all post questions and comments on YouTube as you watch it, then we’ll discuss those comments as a class after the video.
Learning and Growth through Disruption
In only a few weeks, I have already found this class to be disruptive in the sense of interrupting my usual routine and mode of thought, forcing me “out of my comfort zone” (as Michelle wrote). I am very comfortable with reading books, listening to lectures, and memorizing and organizing information in preparation for a test. After all, I’ve been doing these things for twenty years. I am comfortable attending class once or twice a week and then taking a break from class through the rest of the week as I work on other things. I am comfortable checking my email a few times during the course of the day, usually when I am expecting something. And I am very comfortable in unplugging myself from the world over the weekend so that I can just spend time outdoors or just be solely and completely with my wife and baby girl.
Introduction: Mark Baker
Ah well, we’ll see if this goes to the right place or not.
I’m Mark Baker, a first-year student in the Educational Psychology program here at Penn State. I’m currently living in a slightly dilapidated second-story apartment in “historic downtown Bellefonte” along with my wife Nikki, our ten-month old daughter Evelyn, and a slough of rats, ladybugs, and beetles. Notwithstanding the unwanted tenants, I’m loving it here; it actually reminds me of home in many ways. I’m originally from a small town in Montana (though we would call it a city over there) and so the rural nature of central Pennsylvania is pretty much what I’m used to. My wife, however, hails from Washington D.C. and so I think she gets bored sometimes (especially being stuck in Bellefonte without a car). Our daughter keeps us on our toes as she continues to learn to walk, talk, and generally amaze the heck out of her parents.
As a first-year student, I am not really sure what my academic interests are yet. Broadly speaking, I enjoy learning and teaching (I taught for Kaplan for two years). I’m working on some research now in the areas of written argumentation and persuasion, and also teacher efficacy in multicultural classrooms. In my undergraduate education, I did some research into learning strategies, such as speed reading, concept maps, and mnemonic devices. I’m also interested in statistics, psychometrics, and standardized tests. It will be interesting for me to learn about how disruptive technologies can be used to assess learning, not just facilitate it. And then there’s a vague, rather fuzzy interest called “technology.” Now I’m not really a techno-buff, unlike the majority of our class (or so it seems to me). At this point in the course I am realizing I am still stuck in Web 1.0 and frankly I don’t really know how to use this one-button Web 2.0 yet. I don’t own any smart phones or even a laptop. Our home in Bellefonte has no internet connection. Yet I believe that educators and educational researchers should have at least a working knowledge of how to use the technology that students are increasingly demanding within the classroom. That’s one reason I’m here (as well as to relay that knowledge to the rest of my department), and honestly I think this will be a challenge for me as someone who really isn’t used to being connected to anyone outside of my family and a handful of close friends, let alone the whole world.
Another challenge I’m already beginning to see is one of a shift in basic philosophical worldview. As a student in psychology, “learning” has been defined for me as an individual increase in knowledge. And that’s the liberal, cognitive viewpoint. It is a whole other paradigm to view learning as a social construction, a conversation, a relationship. I’d never heard of Vygotsky before last semester. I guess he was always overshadowed by the more popular (at least in psychology) Russian Pavlov. Even in ed psych we mostly study individual differences, individual learning patterns, etc. It is a drastic step to discuss community. Nevertheless, I am excited to be taking that step.
Lastly, just a couple of fun facts about me are that I play the trombone (quite well, I think), I am an amateur magician, and I speak Spanish fluently (I lived in Bolivia for two years). I look forward to getting to know all of you in the next few months!