…if you really want to make a difference in the world, you have to design outcomes. And that’s design that matters.
What a Tech Start-Up’s Data Say About What Works in Classroom Forums – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
Jeffery Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education shared an analysis of research conducted by Piazza, a start-up company that manages online discussion forums for thousands of courses, on online interactions among students and professors in 3,600 courses at 545 colleges and universities over a period of 18 months. The data revealed:
- highest gains in student understanding when discussion was less strictly marked
- students at highly selective universities are far more likely to ask questions anonymously than are students at other institutions
- the practice of asking students to post a comment to introduce themselves correlated with more-robust discussions
These finding are no surprise to those of us in the academic community who have been using online discussions to enhance both classroom and online courses. Perhaps now the dataset for this study is large enough to finally appease even the most vehement opponents to online instruction.
Then again…will there ever be enough data and evidence to fully convince the detractors of online and digital learning?
Inforgraphics are wonderful tools that can be used to visually convey a unique message, compile several thoughts and ideas into a single frame and to help people get a visual representation of your ideas. Sharing inforgraphics has also never been easier through blogs, twitter and Pinterest. Now even making infographics has been simplified by using one of the many of the sites listed on edudemic
Daphne Koller argues:
maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students’ minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them.
Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything is a Remix argues that Nothing is original. Ferguson states:
From Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, our most celebrated creators both borrow, steal and transform.
If you look at the act of remixing music, writing or other artforms you will see that people are simply taking aspects or artifacts in their environment and shaping and moulding those items to construct their own understanding of reality. To a constructivist this is learning. To be more specific this fits into the the realm of social constructivism because music and other cultural artforms are aspects of our social networks that help shape and mould society. The great thinker and educational refromer John Dewey argued:
“constructivists do not look for copies or mirrorings of an outer reality in the human mind”, but instead they rather see humans as “observers, participants, and agents who actively generate and transform the patterns through which they construct the realities that fit them.
Is remixing equivalent to learning or is it simply imitation or plagiarism?
