George Siemens has released a well-written white paper on connectivism that should be on most people’s to-read list.
I’ve been a fan of connectivism since my teacher prep days. I think a lot of it has to do with what kind of teacher I was before I started formally training to become one. I think it’s a very relevant teaching philosophy for today’s society of open learning.
Also, the idea that people store knowledge in their network is interesting and so true. We’re all nodes in the fabric of knowledge.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Teaching methods at 7:39 AM EDT
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A colleague of mine developed this great little Hangman game that helps students review properties and theorems. He’s always thinking up neat little tricks to help students learn!
(If you’re a nearby community college looking for a good professor, you really ought to check out Jim! He’s fantastic!)
Posted by Rebecca as Games at 8:17 AM EDT
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When I meet a new student, I like to talk to them and find out how school is going. Oftentimes, they’ll tell me that the subject they’re studying in the center is one they don’t want to work on becasue they don’t like it. It’s too hard. It’s stupid. The teacher is stupid.
These students are so afraid to deal with the subject that they often dig themselves neat little holes by not turning in homework and then failing exams. That’s when they come to spend a few months with us. We try to explain to them the importance of doing the homework, even offering homework support. If the student thinks the subject is too hard, they’ll balk at every turn (even when they start doing it and do it well).
As you can imagine, with over a year of this under my belt, I really identified with this article on how to approach tough subjects. I’ve always been the sort to get past difficult subjects quickly, just to get them over with. For those many, many students I know who think avoidance is better then confrontation, these steps are something that might just get printed off and stuck in my box!
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning at 8:16 AM EDT
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One of the things I love teahcing is how to study. Now, becasue everyone operates differently, it’s pretty tough to give everyone a “one size fits all” solution for every situation that comes up in studying.
It’s not just a matter of the student, but the teacher and their preferred styles as well. The best we can do is educate students to recognize various teaching styles, and to figure out how to best use that to their advantage to help them be successful in a class.For those of us who are out of school and enjoying meetings, company assemblies, and recreational lectures, these are just as relevant to make the most of what we hear.
This is a great article that focuses on how to approach note-taking for lecture formats, including reading promotional (or previously covered) material beforehand to prepare and review your notes as soon as you can once you leave the lecture.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning at 7:51 AM EDT
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When I was an undergrad working on my teaching certificate, I had a wonderful math methodologies professor who taught us something very important the first day of the first math methodologies class.
The most important math skills you can teach a child are place value and ratios. A great deal of math builds on one or both of these foudational skills.
It took my becoming a math tutor to understand what he was trying to tell us, but it’s slowly sinking in. It’s amazing how often, if a student is having difficulties, we back up to either doing a refresher of place value or ratio skills. Dr. Drum had it right. So many math skills become simpler if you have a good handle on both place value and ratios!
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Teaching methods at 7:34 AM EDT
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It often amazes me how many terms I have grown up with from other areas of my life keep wandering into education. The first, and I’m finally making my peace with it (after a fashion) is the term “artifact”. I actually ahd to go to a dictionary to find out the full meaning of the word in order to accomodate this seemingly out of place use of the term.
The one I’m now wrestling with is “taxonomy”, a method of classifying. It’s been on my mind off and on for the past few months thanks to tagging and talk of folksonomies (or personomies). All of these odd terms that seem to have appeared becasue people felt that there was no term that truly fit the activity being described.
I’m still sorting out all of it in my own mind, but this article on defining taxonomy does a great job of comprehensively explaining the somewhat simple job a taxonomy can fulfill in the development of an informtaion architecture structure.
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management, Information Architecture at 8:17 AM EDT
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I’ve come to two rather horrifying discoveries this week:
- Fractions were not covered on the state’s graduating exam.
- It’s acceptable for a seventh grader to have no grammar knowledge.
The first was perhaps the worst, because I confirmed it with three different students. This test is being prepared as the one that controls whether or not a student graduates from high school in this state, and there were no fractions on it. One of my colleagues suggested marching on the state capital in protest, and I had to agree with him wholeheartedly. Fractions are one of those things that you really can’t get by in life without knowing. Ranks right up there with proportions.
The second was a bit more tolerable, if only because I suspect, “No, they really never taught us what a noun is,” actually translates to, “I don’t pay attention in class, and never have.” I was actually confronted with a twelve year old who had no earthly idea what a noun was. He honestly thought an adjective was an action word. I almost started crying right there, and the student felt badly that he’d driven me to near tears. He never once said he’d been joking with me, which made it worse. (He’s the kind of kid who loves to pull silly pranks.)
I was actually furious after he walked out and I thought about our conversation. When I was twelve, I was diagramming sentences in both English and Latin. For those who have never known the sheer joy of diagramming a sentence in English, it involves putting words into a graphic organizer; the placement is determined by the part of speech. For Latin, we had to create a chart where each line had one word from the sentence, and we had to fill in the line with part of speech, case/tense, gender, number, and special notes, before we were allowed to translate the word.
I just really can’t wrap my mind around not having fractions on a high school exit test or being a junior high student with no clue about grammar.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized, Current Affairs at 8:57 AM EDT
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When it became popular to write Harry Potter fan fiction first became popular, a wonderful article was written about the benefits of young teens flocking to this creative outlet. Students who previously refused to write, or were even terrified of the writing process, were suddenly embracing every inch of it to create their stories.
They peer reviewed each other across the world, and forced each other to become better writers. These peer-improved writing skills were transferring across to the academic setting. Life was happy. (As someone who spends anywhere from two to five hours of her week peer editing for a couple of teenaged fan fiction writers, I can assure you that this trend hasn’t died out. From my extensive time reading fan fiction, though, I can also tell you that not everyone is so diligent in accepting helpful bits of advice.)
Now, there are more teens writing online, mostly maintaining personal accounts on sites like LiveJournal, Xanga, and MySpace. These teens will tell you they are blogging or keeping an online journal. What they’re really doing is keeping an online diary, and making it public. (For an interesting discussion on why keeping a journal differs from keeping a diary, please read this.)
Because it is their own thoughts they are trapping for all the world to see, they don’t feel particularly concerned with inconveniences like grammar or spelling or conventions. The need to pursue a certain level of excellence is actually shunned in some of these circles, and they’re bringing it into their writing. Yes, the worlds of keeping an online diary and writing fan fiction are colliding, with frightening results.
Where those who wrote fan fiction once sought to become better writers through peer review, they now seem to feel that any advice, regardless of how nicely it is presented, is a personal attack, and wars erupt.
In my own opnion, this sems to be a set back to the wonderful atmosphere of peer learning that fan fiction once enjoyed.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized, Learning methods at 7:39 AM EDT
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