I will get the course materials and have interactions with peers and teachers via a moodle online course.

Here is the course description, for those interested:

This course will introduce a rubric for evaluating the quality of educational research
and the implications of the research for practice. Basic knowledge of social science research methods (such as those studied in an educational or sociological methods class) is a pre- requisite for the course. The course will not cover how to do original research, although you will learn the criteria for quality studies. Students will pursue readings in their own interest areas within the field of educational technology (which may include integrating technology into curriculum, teacher professional development, education leadership issues in implementing technology programs, global education, STEM+ education, etc.). Students will publish reviews of publications into the ISTE Technology Research Exchange (or, TREx) database
– as such, students are referred to as TREx “contributors” while the teachers for the course are “moderators.” TREx will be searchable to contributors, ISTE members, and the general public for accessing research findings on educational technology. In taking this course, contributors help build and learn about TREx, improve their skills in reviewing literature, find resources to support grant and advocacy efforts, and connect with other practitioners in a professional network.

I’m sure I’ll be learning some interesting stuff the next few weeks…

I got a weekly-update newsletter email from the Peer Instruction Network, that I recently joined and they quoted a (“fantastic”, sic!) question I’ve asked when joining the network… so that other members can give me their answers, via a special POLL… how cool’s that!!!

II. Social Sciences Members Spotlight

Social science disciplines most frequently registered

• Education: 78
• Psychology: 53
• Economics: 40

Bob at University of Luxembourg posted a fantastic question on www.peerinstruction.net relevant to the social sciences.

He asks, “How do you develop ConcepTests for knowledge domains where it’s less obvious what are the established theories, facts and opinions?”

First, for those of you who do not know, ConcepTests are short conceptual questions used in Peer Instruction. Once a teacher poses a ConcepTest, students are first given time to formulate responses and then asked to discuss those responses with each other. The process requires students to think through their reasoning first and then provides them with opportunities to analyze their reasoning with their peers, but does not require a correct answer.

There are many different types of ConcepTests. For example, discussion starters, opinion polling on gray area issues, outcome prediction questions (IF,THEN, etc), and even textual analysis. We find students are just as engaged in these questions as in questions where there are “right” and “wrong” answers.

III. Peer Instruction Network Member Poll

Click here or copy and paste this link (bit.ly/pinetpoll) into your browser to:

• Respond to Bob’s question

But I still know what it all was about, even though I cannot remember all the details of the text that I had written…

I’ve corrected the orthography of ONE word in the Luxembourgish edition of Wikipedia on Serge Tonnar, a musician I’ve been listening to quite a lot recently.

I agree with anybody who would say that changing one letter is not a huge contribution… but I felt that not correcting this orthographic error would have been a mistake, especially for someone who has “promised to become an active and pro-active wikipedian”

To my big surprise, I had to discover that “educational media” was not (and still is not) defined and explained on Wikipedia!

I do think that this concept needs to be included because 1) it is a concept that I encounter on anext to weekly basis, so it needs to be defined in any respectable encyclopedia and 2) it needs to be distinguished from the concept of educational technology (which has an entry in Wikipedia).

At a more personal level, I would love to able to send people over to Wikipedia when they ask me what I mean by educational media (or edmedia in short)…

Once a week, let’s say every Wednesday morning during my commute to Walferdange, I look up a concept on Wikipedia that is on my mind that morning (for whatever reason), and check if an entry exists.

If I don’t find an entry, then I will blog about it here and try to argue why it would be beneficial to have an entry about that concept on Wikipedia. Eventually, if I convince myself or you do, I will then start an article about that concept…

If there is an entry, then I will check if all the presented information is correct, to my best knowledge, and eventually I will edit the article… and blog about it here…

We’re currently writing up a manifest to answer this call and try to convince our fellow academics to join us in making a small, but valuable, contribution to this growing body of shared collective knowledge…

(Virtually) everybody uses Wikipedia these days as a reference tool, so why not putting some effort into making it better every day?

Afterall, we, as academics, are in a rather privileged position when it comes to knowledge, its creation, production, publication and discussion… and we should contribute to the education of the global community, because we do believe that knowledge is power!

I will blog about our way of reacting to this call in order to 1) document, reflect and share my personal experiences with you, my readers and 2) gather your comments and reactions. So I really hope you’ll give me your thoughts to feed on…

By the way, if you have any ideas for good reasons to get more academics onto Wikipedia, please send in your thoughts!

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge is an open online course that over 12 weeks explores the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. Participation is open to everyone and there are no fees or subscriptions required.

[http://cck11.mooc.ca/]

This event got my attention for various reasons:

• I’m currently giving a lecture on Education in the Digital Age and I’m very much interested in the transformative effects that ICT and digital media can/could/should have on our current educational systems and in the effects that they already had/have on learning processes in the everyday lives of so many people around the globe (even, or mostly, outside of formal educational settings). So I thought it might be profitable to “take” this cck11 course and see what new inspirational ideas this experience might yield in and for me…
• Moreover, I’ve been a student of connectionism since the late 1990ies, working in the lab of Axel Cleeremans (a former student of one of the founding fathers of connectionism). Therefore connectivism as a theory of learning and teaching sounded like something familiar yet new to me. It appears to me as something that I might want to explore deeper, because it nicely connects (pun intended) with my existing expertise and with my current research and teaching activities.

I’ll keep you posted about my learning experiences on this blog… I will for instance try to explore the idea of how “successful” my learning will be… because I’m currently also giving a course on the “successfulness” of teaching methods & strategies and I’m more and more becoming aware of the lack of proper empirical research on this aspect of many “pedagogical recommendations”… I see a lot of wishful thinking in pedagogy and little empirical evidence of the claimed results and outcomes.

I’m really looking forward to this course and the people & ideas that I will likely encounter on this journey… You’re welcome to join too, it’s open and free!

http://openlibrary.org/

I’ve started to contribute my modest share of time by referencing the books I’ve been editing for the last few years, containing my students written reports on their works on Lev Vygostky’s approach to learning and education. Okay, that may seem to be a bit self-serving, but hey, who else is going to add “my” books to the OpenLibrary?

I hope to add more books to this library in the future… because I do think that it is a great project to create a digital archive of ALL books, if it only were to be able to search for any book in a free and open database…

A must-read for my first year BScE students!

It comes from the name of the man who invented the “cooperative bank” principle… Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen (see here for full details about his bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Wilhelm_Raiffeisen)

I could’ve thought about such a possibility, but it strangely never came to my mind that the bank could be named after a person… nice to know…

Here is the article itself… my comment can be found below the text…

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-ceo-schmidt-no-anonymity-future-web

But you, my dear blog readers, don’t have to go there, you can easily read on here and see what I’ve had to say/write about anonymity and privacy… Keep in mind that I wrote it for a public audience @networkworld.com – where I’m hardly a recognized or even known author…

Anonymity and privacy are two different, even if connected, concepts and we should not confuse them here! Anonymity is something that was “invented” or incidentally generated at a very large scale with the advent of the Internet, where people “come together” on a global scene that would “normally” (i.e., without digital technology) not have met… of course here I am anonymous in the sense that most of you (who read what I write) will not know me, personally… Imagine a pre-internet equivalent of this situation… Imagine we would meet, in person, for some reason, on a “forum”, a public place… and I would start telling you what I’m currently telling you now… how could I expect to be anonymous? in the sense that nobody would know that it’s me who’s performing the act that I’m performing… of course, to most of my audience, I would probably still be just some human being, that they don’t really know; but it would be possible to determine that I’m the source of this performance… in that sense I would not be anonymous… I think that’s what Schmidt is referring to, that it may seem reasonable (I don’t necessarily agree on that…) to re-establish AUTHORSHIP for acts done in the public place, which has been the “normal” state of affairs for ages and was clouded by the possibilities of the world-wide-web and the huge amount of people between which every single human author was hidden…

That’s a very different thing than privacy… Privacy is the right to be the author of certain acts in private places, disclosed from the public place and not meant to be directed to other people than those intended by these very acts… In a private place you rarely act in an anonymous way… people you direct your acts towards CAN generally very well tell (you or anybody else who cares to ask) that YOU were the author of that act… but we generally expect them not to tell anybody else, not involved in these acts… It thus seems to me, that “normally” privacy leads to non anonymity…

I’m not trying to argue that the web should become an all-public place, where no privacy is possible… I just think that we probably need some processes that will allow, under legal circumstances to be clearly defined, to establish authorship and personal identity… I don’t like to be fooled by other people, who can hide their identity or even fake to be somebody else… On the other hand, the end of anonymity does not logically have to mean that everything an identified or identifiable author does should be automatically and directly disclosed to a wider audience than the intended audience…

—–

“innovative Fingernavigation” sieht anders aus…

Es war zu erwarten, dass die “grösste” Luxemburger Tageszeitung “mit der Zeit gehen” würde und als App für das iPad kommen musste! Das Resultat ist aber mehr als enttäuschend! Von innovativer Fingernavigation, wie man es vom iPad gewohnt ist, und auch bei anderen eNewspaper und eMagazine Apps gesehen und erlebt hat, kann man hier leider überhaupt nicht reden… Zoomen mit dem Doppelklick ähnelt hier von der Animation her dem was man nur als sehr unsanft und unästhetisch bezeichnen kann! Das Blättern der Seiten ist genau so abgehackt und den Lesefluss hemmend. Nur gut, dass die vorliegende Version der App gratis ist und die täglichen Inhalte bis September 2010 auch gratis zur Verfügung stehen… man glaubt zu ahnen weshalb! Es wird dringend nötig sein das Konzept der eNewspaper zu überdenken, denn momentan sieht es einfach so aus, als ob die pre-press print-ready Dateien einfach in eine iPad App geladen werden, ohne dass jemand sich wirklich Gedanken gemacht hätte wie man mit dem iPad mit Inhalten interagiert. Frei nach dem Motto: Mal schnell eine iPad App ins Netz stellen, damit man Vorne bei ist… Nationale “Medienriesen” wie das Wort können sich so etwas wahrscheinlich noch leisten und trotzdem erfolgreich sein…

—–

Track 1: Dudelange – Bettembourg (6,7 km)

Train: Bettembourg – Luxembourg

Track 2 : Luxembourg – Diekirch (36 km)

Sleeping at: Camping « Op der Sauer » – Chalet pour 6 personnes

Address: Route de Gilsdorf L-9234 Diekirch

URL: http://www.campsauer.lu

Day 2 – Tuesday, 24 August 2010

Journey: Diekirch – Echternach

Distance: 28 km

Sleeping at: Youth Hostel Echternach

Address: Chemin vers Rodenhof, L-6487 Echternach

URL: http://youthhostels.lu/?t=34

Day 3 – Wednesday, 25 August 2010

Journey: Echternach – Nittel (DE)

Distance: 36 km

Sleeping at: Weingut-Gasthof-Pension Aloys Dostert-Schmitt

Address: Kirchenweg 5 D-54453 Nittel/Mosel

URL: http://www.dostert-schmitt.de

Day 4 – Thursday, 26 August 2010

Journey: Nittel – Remerschen

Distance: 25 km

Sleeping at: Youth Hostel Remerschen

Address: 31, Wäistrooss L- 5440 Remerschen

URL: http://youthhostels.lu/luxemburgish-youth-hostels/schengen-remerschen/10_114_EN.html

Day 5 – Friday, 27 August 2010

Getting home to Dudelange by car

Social-constructionist ‘intellectuals,’ and perhaps even the ‘radical ism-ists’ culture warriors of The New York Times Book Review might counter that science itself is but one more ‘superstition.’ But as Sir John Krebs points out below, Dawkins won’t have any of this cultural relativism. Krebs quotes one of his favorite passages, not out of The Selfish Gene but from the book River Out of Eden:

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don’t.

via Edge.org – http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge178.html

I’ve tried to post a comment on his blog, but so far it didn’t appear there, so I’d like to use my blog to publish my reaction to his article. Because I really think that he misses an important point when trying to refute this “silly position” about teachers and their need for technology.

I agree with you, totally! But I think you missed one important  point… Teachers have always been using technological tools for  teaching (also in the sense of supporting the learning process of their students). Books are technology, blackboards are technology, chalk is technology… These tools just don’t look like technology to us, maybe because they pre-existed us and we never thought of as technology… Still they have been tools to support learning and teaching ever since school-based learning was “invented”. Each historical period had its tools for teaching. You would probably agree that we all feel that “new”, digital, computer technologies are  somewhat RADICALLY transforming the way we access knowledge, compared to any previous technological invention… Nevertheless I do think that the invention of book printing must have had a similarly redefining effect on teaching/learning, because back then, printed books meant that you could have access to a body of knowledge WITHOUT the physical presence of your “master”…

Teachers have always relied on technology to teach, on technology that was available and appropriate at that time.

I’m heavily relying on the TPACK Model (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) to structure this presentation. I have also introduced the SAMR Model (Puentedura, 2009) to analyze/predict the added-value of different uses of (digital) technology for instructional purposes. The Instructional Software Functions Model (Roblyer & Doering, 2010) helps me to clarify the connections between Learning Theories/Teaching Strategies, Educational Uses and Software Functions. The Learning/Teaching Events Model (Leclercq & Poumay, 2005) will be used to distinguish between different learning events and the corresponding teaching events. I have tried to connect these learning/teaching events with Instructional Software Functions (Roblyer & Doering, 2010) and with ICT Potentials (Busana, 2001).

And now I’m sleepless after this exciting, stimulating and exhausting “explore and create” learning event… my brain feels like deconstructing, reconstructing, connecting, disconnecting, reconnecting and restructuring its soft- and hardware… I think I’ve learned quite a lot about Literacy, Literacy Instruction, Literacy Technologies, Instructional Technologies and Technologies for Literacy Instruction. Well, and I’ve learned a lot about how to use the Prezi Desktop program.

However the alarm clock will ring in exactly 1 hour… guess that’s been a productive night, but also a no-sleep- after-all night too… Let’s hope I’ll be fit enough in the afternoon to deliver the presentation…

I will probably be sharing the presentation online, very soon…

When you observe people performing a new task (“new” meaning here that they are not proficient at this task at the beginning) and you plot their performance (e.g., the number of correct answers) over time, then you will get a graphical representation of their learning curve.

If this curve is STEEP, well then you are facing a task where people can rapidly have large performance gains. That means that, at the beginning of the learning process you will see dramatic and fast changes in performance. Often we observe that after this initial boost, incremental performance gains become smaller and smaller, either because their performance has reached an optimal level (ceiling effect) or because it has reached an intermediate plateau…

On the other hand, if this curve is rather FLAT, well then the task is readily hard to master and it takes a lot of training to reach a somewhat expert level. Incremental steps in performance gains will be small and it will really take a long time before you can be called a master at this task.

How is it then possible that we have ended up with “steep learning curve” to be used as if it meant “a task where you need a lot of training to become somewhat good at it”? Well, my guess is that we often use our intuitive, concrete thinking processes to understand the world around us, and explanations that we construct about this world too… In this case, if we think of the learning curve in terms of the shape of a hill that we have to climb, then it seems rather plausible that a steep curve means that it’s very hard to reach the top, while a flat curve suggest that climbing the hill is fairly easy and doesn’t require a lot of effort…

What do you think? Has human intuition failed us again? And how can we counteract this fallacy?

I just bought “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Norman Doidge, a book that I wanted to read anyway, since I’ve been referencing to it in my seminars on the NeuroSciences of Learning…

12 eLearning Predictions for 2009 : eLearning Technology

Tony Karrer has listed on his blog, what he calls his 12 eLearning Predictions for 2009… I think establishing such a list is truly a heroic act in itself, because even if you get one prediction wrong, people will point it out to you… and omit to give you credit for your wisdom to correctly predict many other trends…

I also think that it would be interesting to compare and integrate his list with a section in Roblyer and Doering’s (2009) textbook on “Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching” called “Looking Ahead: What Developments in Technology Integration Are Emerging?”. Fundamentally an online list like Karrer’s, especially when you come back to it at the end of the year and evaluate it, is more valuable and up-to-date than any list printed in a paper-based textbook… for reason I think are obvious…

Posted via web from the material mind