I'm still pondering about how to do something more systematic with Diigo. It's been a fun time for pondering; I will credit Connected Courses with helping me re-discover the joys of RSS and all the power it offers for cool content combinations and re-use. And since so much of this week's material came from participating in Connected Courses, I'll tag this blog post as #ccourses.
Trust, Agency, and Connected Learning. From Jesse Stommel, one of the very best things I read this week. Very thought-provoking and inspiring. See also Jesse's comments in the Inside Higher Ed article about ProQuest below.
Dammit, the LMS. Detailed, thought-provoking post from Michael Feldstein that generated responses in turn. Here's my response, and here is one from Jonathan Rees: I want to break free.
Transforming Talk in the 21st Century. Fabulous article from Sean McHugh on asynchronous dialogue! It provides extensive excerpts from a fabulous-looking dissertation online here: The Construction of Shared Knowledge through Asynchronous Dialogue by Rebecca Ferguson.
Why? Why use digital technologies? Why not just use pen/pencil & paper? Another great post here from Sean McHugh.
Teachers’ Most Powerful Role? Adding Context. Fantastic article by Shawn McCusker at MindShift about "Teacher as Conductor in the Classroom Orchestra."
Network a Shared Experience of Creating Together. This post from Joyce Kincannon ends with a powerful question: What can you imagine being openly networked will do for your students? See also Setting Climate Matters, another great post from Joyce about setting climate for creating a community of learners.
Prompts to Help Students Reflect on How They Approach Learning by Maryellen Weimer at Faculty Focus. Great article with a lot of good prompts. I learn so much from asking my students to reflect about the learning that goes on (or doesn't go on...) in my classes!
What We Can Learn from Unsuccessful Online Students by Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti, again at Faculty Focus. I would argue that this applies equally to ALL students, not just online students!
Accidental Exposure. Important news on the ProQuest/Amazon saga, but there are still unresolved issues; see Jesse Stommel's remarks at the end of the article.
Curation for participation: an eight-step guide to curating open scholarly content. PDF free download from the Centre for Higher Education Development in South Africa.
The Blogosphere lives! From David Weinberger: in praise of blogs!
Where Did Soul-Sucking Office-Speak Come From? Mwahahaha. No comment except to say this is a great article. And I love the URL. Look for the numeric at the end.
Professors’ Place in the Classroom Is Shifting to the Side. I wish we knew more about what was happening at OU in this regard. 1500 full-time faculty: where do we stand?
APLU Panel: Effects of digital education trends on teaching faculty. A presentation by Phil Hill... and he's right: we're not playing the corner anymore — we're now loose in the house!!!
Why It's Time to Give Up Grades. AGREED. Here are my thoughts: Colearning and the Dilemma of Grading; One Solution: Don't Grade!
Co-Learning about Co-Learning. A nice post from Howard Rheingold on the theme of Connected Courses this week.
On attending a conference by Twitter. A detailed G+ post from my friend Anne Lewis about the uses of Twitter; it matches up very much with my experience of Twitter too.
Building an Online Personal Teaching Network. This is a wonderful infographic from Bernard Bull about "imagining opportunities to teach in the digital world."
12 Months to Becoming a Digital Age Educator. Another great post from Bernard Bull with suggested topics to explore month by month.
15 Ways to Help Your Students Forget What You Teach Them. And yet one more from Bernard Bull; he's been sharing old posts via his Twitter stream. This is a wonderful one: very therapeutic irony!
Keep on Co-Claiming. Some powerful thoughts from Alan Levine on what we house online and what we co-claim elsewhere.
On courage that is in-and-against work. Beautiful post from Richard Hall; not a new post, but I found it just this week. Inspiring thoughts here "to face-down those who actively dissociate, in our outsourced lives, abstracted by money and productive work, and the tyranny of the clock, and the poverty of capital."
WriteAbout: Social Publishing for Classrooms. Incredibly exciting project from John Spencer and his colleagues!
Reflections on Being Woman in #HigherEd #EdTech. Very inspiring post from Michelle Pacansky-Brock!
The Real Student Debt Problem No One is Talking About. Very scary stuff: grad student debt: "Graduate students now collectively owe as much as 40 percent of the estimated $1.2 trillion in outstanding student debt, according to the New America Foundation, even though they make up only 14 percent of all university enrollment."
Why Google wants to replace Gmail. I've been thinking a lot about RSS lately... and this article asks some hard questions about Google and RSS: "Say goodbye to the unmediated world of RSS, email and manual Web surfing. It was nice while it lasted. But there's just no money in it."
Swimming against the stream. More great thoughts on RSS from Jon Udell: "Can we regain the control we lost? Do we even want to? If so let’s appreciate that the RSS ecosystem was (and, though weakened, still is) an open network powered by people who make explicit choices about flows of information. And let’s start exercising our choice-making muscles. I’m flexing mine again. The path of least resistance hasn’t worked for me, so my vacation from RSS is over. I want unfiltered access to the publications and people that matter most to me, I want them to be my best filters, and I’m available to return the favor. I may be swimming against the stream but I don’t care. I need the exercise."
Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone with You Forever. An old post at a LiveJournal blog... but sadly very relevant to the education world today.
A review of MOOCs and their assessment tools. I have no interest at all in MOOCs per se anymore, but I'm also interested in what Tony Bates has to say about online learning, even MOOCs: "More disturbing for me though is the argument Chauhan makes for assessing everything except what participants learn from MOOCs. With the exception of automated tests, all these tools do is describe all kinds of behaviour except for learning. These tools may be useful for identifying factors that influence learning, on a post hoc rationalization, but you need to be able to measure the learning in the first place, unless you see MOOCs as some cruel form of entertainment. I have no problem with trying to satisfy students, I have no problem with MOOCs as un-assessed non-formal education, but if you try to assess participants, at the end of the day it’s what they learn that matters. MOOCs need better tools for measuring learning, but I didn’t see any described in this article."
And for some multimedia, I am simply in awe of this video: Welcome to my PLE! Listen to this student explain just what how a personal learning environment works. BRILLIANT.
And for a graphic today, here is some gorgeous street art from Philadelphia: Secret Book by J. Serantitis.
