- What do you see as the higher education translation into k-12?
- You’ve all been to traditional conferences, did the back channel conversations (powered by social media) change the experience? What are some takeaways as it relates to your own future learning environments?
- Characterize your identity and relationship to the other TLT participants
- Did you get a sense that there was a clear TLT community based on your interactions with the people there? What sort of evidence can you state as to whether it is a community?
Course Stuff
Podcasting Activities: Trying to Think Big
- Discover and share podcasts within specific areas of interest
- Formal or informal interviews with students, faculty, professionals
- Focus group related to a specific topics
- Brainstorming and capturing group thinking
- Guiding people through tasks (audio only, screen cast, video cast)
Questions for 02.21.08
laggard = peripheral participant?
“An obvious principle of human communication is that the transfer of ideas occurs most frequently between two individuals who are similar.”
“learning takes place not so much through the reification of a curriculum as through modified forms of participation that are structured to open the practice to nonmembers” (p100).
Diffusion of Innovation and the Tipping Point – Who is Paul Revere?
Discussion Questions for Class on 02.07.08
When does a teaching environment become a learning community?
What does it mean to engage in meaningful activity that is focused on a goal in the context of school (k-12 or higher ed)?
Is there a real life identity that is separate or more real than the multiple online identities? Does this depend on the person? Is RL identity monolithic, and if not, what parts are the real parts?
What does a community of practice approach mean for collaboration in schools? How do you do assessment?
What is the impact of all this multitasking on students and their connection to communities? What about their identity?
How is it different to respond to these questions directly in the course blog versus posting into the Pligg environment?
Stealing from Cole (Again)
For those of you that don’t know, Cole was recently in San Antonio, TX for the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI 2008). Sounds like an amazing conference, maybe I will be able to go someday. Anyway, one of the speakers was Michael Wesch, the creator of the Web 2.0 video you watched the first week. I thought you might be interested in seeing him talk about his ideas and what he sees as the implications of a Web 2.0 world for his teaching. Here is the link. There are other good talks for you to take a peek at, in particular, Henry Jenkins is a well known media scholar from MIT, and there is a talk about the Horizon Report.
I have to admit as a person that was a classroom teacher K-12 and then spends a lot of time thinking about teaching and learning I am always a little frustrated by folks from other disciplines (i.e not education) that come to the “revelation” that lecture halls filled with students is not a good model. It also makes me sad that faculty without prior teaching experience end up reinventing the wheel in the name of innovative practice without ever considering that they are likely on the same campus with people that can help them think about what they are doing in interesting new ways.
Thoughts on Improving Pligg
As we work to make the Pligg space more powerful and flexible, we’ll be looking for your feedback. The first one we have is to create a tag / category that will allow for sorting via week. Leave comments to this post with your ideas for making this space work better for how the class is using it. It will only get better if you participate.
Comments are Active
I just wanted to let you all know that the Blogs at Penn State toolset is now working with visitor comments. If you want to turn on commenting, you can follow the directions here:
Pligg Site is Running
We were able to get all the blog RSS feeds publishing into the Course Pligg site this morning. You can bounce over there and click through aggregated content from class blogs, this blog, and some del.icio.us links tagged with ci597c. Please feel free to vote on items to push them to the front page and try out the comments while you are there.
Level Setting
As I was reading through introductions and other early blog posts I started to recognize a slight trend — the language of the course (on the technical side) is causing a little confusion. With that in mind I thought I’d add a post defining (in my own words) what a handful of this stuff is. This should probably be more of a wiki page, but for now I’ll just add a few definitions … comments should be working on the blogs today or tomorrow, so feel free to add thoughts as this grows:
- RSS — RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is an XML (extensible markup language) varient that allows content to be redistributed without any style associated with it. It is pure content that can be pushed around the web and redisplayed in nearly any other location. It is most commonly used to allow users to subscribe to websites (mainly blogs and news sites) so that fresh content is delivered to them in a single interface. In the same way you use an email client for reading new messages, an RSS (or news reader) is used to subscribe to sites and read newly updated content — all without having to visit the original site to find it. At the simplest level it is an incredible time saver … imagine having all the new content from 20 online newspapers delivered to one location only when newly published material is available? No need to surf to 20 sites, it comes to you. There are lots of other things about RSS that we will discuss in the coming weeks as well.
- Web 2.0 — This really isn’t one thing, it is more of a philosophy and approach to the way the web is evolving. We’ll discuss this in class today, but think back to when the web started and remember what a one way platform it was — updates were not regular, the common person did not have a voice online, and creating web sites was hard. Today the web is an open platform where anyone can not only consume content, but create it with ease. Look at the way the web has evolved into a platform for open participation — blogging, photo sharing, social sites (FaceBook and My Space), social bookmarking, and so much more. Web 2.0 is about people, it is Soylent Green.
- Pligg/Digg/Social Ratings — All of these types of sites are built around a very simple premise, that people (especially communities of people) can create a better source of relevant news than a single editor. This all started with Digg — mainly a news aggregator site (no original content, just content that is linked in from around the web) that allows the members of the site to vote content up or down. Content with the greatest number of votes (or diggs) end up on the front page and more easily discoverable. We’ve adapted this approach with our course Pligg site. Pligg is simply an open source version of Digg. Your blog posts are aggregated in (via RSS) to the site and each post can be voted on.
Welcome to the Course
Hi and welcome to our course site … you’ve arrived at the blog for C&I 597C at Penn State. Our course, Disruptive Technologies for Teaching and Learning will hopefully be an exciting opportunity to engage in a long-term conversation about how we can create new learning opportunities related to emerging technologies and design. Take a look around … both Scott and I will be posting all sorts of things here throughout the semester.