Five Pedagogical Practices to Improve Your Online Course Written by: Rob KellyPublished On: February 8, 2014 Because online courses have fewer opportunities for the spontaneous, real-time exchanges of the face-to-face classroom, online instruction requires a deliberate approach to design and facilitation. As Bethany Simunich says, “Online, learning doesn’t happen by chance.” 1. Using a backward design approach, Simunich has instructors consider what types of activities will enable students to demonstrate that they have achieved the course’s learning outcomes. Depending on those outcomes, the best approach might be an individual assignment or one that involves collaboration in small or large groups. 2. The instructor needs to design the discussion to give students a way to enter the conversation. What is the purpose of this discussion? Dividing students into small groups can help students get involved in the discussion. 3. Where are you now in your understanding of this concept versus where you were at the beginning of the course? 4. 5.
Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis A client of ours -- a small, not-for-profit, economic justice organization [EJO] -- used social network analysis [SNA] to assist their city attorney in convicting a group of "slumlords" of various housing violations that the real estate investors had been side-stepping for years. The housing violations, in multiple buildings, included: raw sewage leaks multiple tenant children with high lead levels eviction of complaining tenants utility liens of six figures The EJO had been working with local tenants in run-down properties and soon started to notice some patterns. The data I will present below is not the actual data from the criminal case. The EJO worked with the tenants and city inspectors to assess the buildings and document the violations. Figure 1 below shows how a building came under new ownership. Figure 1 The blue links in Figure 2 show ownership/business ties for each LLC. Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4
Metaliteracy.org Mobile Teaching Versus Mobile Learning (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) Key Takeaways Higher education historically has focused on instructors teaching rather than students learning, an ineffective approach that could seriously hamper the promise of mobile learning. Successful student learning emerges from active engagement, connection to the students' prior knowledge, and simulation of real world experiences — all facilitated by engaging learners' senses through multimedia. Higher education should stop thinking about these powerful mobile multimedia devices as only consumption devices — to live up to the promise of mobile learning, students should use them as production devices. In both the 2010 Horizon Report1 and the 2009 annual ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology,2 which has a whole chapter focused on mobile devices, the vast majority of examples about how students and faculty were using mobile devices in their classes discussed alternative modes of content delivery. My face scrunched up. My eyes bulged. "Not really." Endnotes
The Next Big Social Network Is You - The BrainYard Three trends just now emerging will alter the social network landscape. Oh no, not another social network! Between all the noise about Facebook's upcoming IPO, the Twitter censorship imbroglio, and Google +'s constantly shifting privacy and identity policies, is the business world really ready for more social networking? Yes, and here's why. The race to acquire lots of LinkedIn contacts, Facebook connections, and Google+ and Twitter followers can quickly lead to social networking fatigue, as you spend your day updating activities, responding to various email platforms, and aligning your networking activities with business goals. Three trends emerging now will change that picture. 1. The big networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn really don't want you to leave their confines. While there are many new companies trying to address social network exhaustion, one of my favorites is Nimble. 2. How large of a social network do you want to manage? In his book, "Who’s in your Orbit?" 3.
Metaliteracy 20 Must-have iPad Apps for Student Researchers and Academics March 25, 2014 As a post-graduate student researcher I find myself spending more time using iPad for doing many of my academic related work.When I first bought iPad my goal was just have a mobile reader for my PDFs and never thought that this little machine would be of so much help to me in my studies.That being said, I want to share with you some of the important apps that every student researcher should be able to use. I featured under each category a few options for your to choose from. Productivity apps 1- Google Drive Google Drive is one safe place for all your stuff. Upload photos, videos, documents, and other files that are important to you, then access what you need wherever you go, on any device. ToDo for iPhone and ToDo for iPad has a beautiful, simple interface and is full of features (projects, sub-tasks, due-dates, categories, etc), while remaining simple to use. 3- Evernote Dropbox lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. 1- Kindle
The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? Eager to find out what impact blogging and social media could have on the dissemination of her work, Melissa Terras took all of her academic research, including papers that have been available online for years, to the web and found that her audience responded with a huge leap in interest in her work. In October 2011 I began a project to make all of my 26 articles published in refereed journals available via UCL’s Open Access Repository – “Discovery“. I decided that as well as putting them in the institutional repository, I would write a blog post about each research project, and tweet the papers for download. Would this affect how much my research was read, known, discussed, distributed? I wrote about the stories behind the research papers – the stuff that doesn’t make it into the official writeup. So what are my conclusions about this whole experiment? Some rough stats, first of all. The image above shows the top ten papers downloaded from my entire department over the last year.
Introducing transliteracy Tom Ipri + Author Affiliations Transliteracy is recent terminology gaining currency in the library world. It is a broad term encompassing and transcending many existing concepts. Because transliteracy is not a library-centric concept, many in the profession are unsure what the term means and how it relates to libraries’ instructional mission and to other existing ideas about various literacies. Transliteracy originated with the cross-disciplinary Transliteracies Project group, headed by Alan Liu from the Department of English at the University of California-Santa Barbara. The essential idea here is that transliteracy is concerned with mapping meaning across different media and not with developing particular literacies about various media. Basically, transliteracy is concerned with what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Transliteracy is new enough to be unknown to many in the library profession. Transliteracy is very concerned with the social meaning of literacy.
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