Archive for the ‘Learning’ Category
Using keyboards before pencils
Swedish first-grade children in a pilot project are starting to read, learn and network socially. They’re doing this – successfully – by writing on PCs and discussing their texts with peers and teachers. With that in mind, their teacher Annika Agélii Genlott has experimented with letting first-graders learn to read by writing on a computer before learning to write by hand. The idea is that handwriting demands dexterity and motor skills that many six-year-olds lack. So writing with a pencil has been postponed until second grade. And if Genlott’s approach is right, these kids aren’t stressed by attempting to learn too many mental and motor skills at once.
Schools into Global Learning
It’s time for global learning to go beyond food, flags and festivals. Our panel of experts share their ideas for taking international mindedness to the next level.
International perspectives can really make learners reflect on their own as well as others’ contexts particularly when schools collaborate on a more personal level. Through eTwinning and social media I have seen at first hand how fantastic friendships can blossom.
Learning design – making practice explicit
New technologies have immense potential for learning, but the sheer variety possible also creates challenges for learners in terms of navigating through an increasingly complex digital landscape and for teachers in terms of how to design and support learning interventions. How can learners and teachers make informed decisions about what technologies to use in the design and support of learning activities? This presentation will consider this question and present a new methodology for design – ‘learning design’, which aims to shift the creation and support of learning from what has traditionally been an implicit, belief-based practice to one that is explicit and design based. Learning design research at the Open University, UK has included the development of a set of conceptual design views, a tool for visualising designs (CompendiumLD) and a social networking site, for sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs (Cloudworks). An overview of this work will be provided, along with a discussion of the perceived benefits of this new approach to educational design.
Educational Software and Learning – Subversive Use and Volatile Design
Discussions about the use of information and communications technology (ICT) based learning environments often assume that use is defined, or at least severely constrained, by the inherent intentions of the designer. However, typical uses of educational software involve a subversion of the designer’s intentions to match contextual needs. Designers should consider designing for subversive use, recognizing that users fit the use of ICT environments into contextually tuned ‘situated’ learning environments. In this sense, good design is volatile design, i.e. design which changes with contextual use. These ideas are illustrated with reference to a range of ICT learning environments.
How Open Education Can Transform Learning
As the open education movement grows, the ripple effects of what it means for teachers to take control of what they teach is being witnessed across all spectrums in education. Customizable content, sharing and becoming part of a community, and deconstructing entrenched ideologies about what constitutes quality learning materials — these are just a few paths that the open education movement is creating.
Long is worried that all the available resources online will get into the hands of those who already have means, leaving those who don’t even further behind. “Those who have leverage, power and resources are going to pull it off, and those who don’t will be further marginalized in terms of opportunity,” Long said. If the debate is tangled around issues like “public versus private versus charter, we’re going to wake up sooner rather than later with a massive discrepancy.”
Supporting the Reading of Research in Online Settings
Public Knowledge Project – PKP – is experimenting with ways to improve the online reading environment for research and scholarship for a wide range of readers through the use of “reading tools,” which connect what’s being read to related research, media reports, and government materials, providing a context for critical engagement, with studies underway involving policymakers, humanities scholars, high school teachers, college students, and members of the public.
A good deal of the emerging research literature concerned with online information resources focuses on information retrieval, which is concerned with user strategies with search engines to locate desired information. This study takes up the question of what happens once readers find what they imagine they have been looking for when the subject of their search has been the research literature. It will investigate how journal websites can be designed to better support the reading of research in online settings for a wider range of readers than has traditionally been the case with research.
instaGrok – A new way to learn
instaGrok basically lets you punch in any search term and get a neatly formatted and interactive experience as search results. We believe that learning should be fun! So we are dedicated to building innovative technology to enable engaging, safe and personalized learning.
- finds age-appropriate educational content on any topic presented with interactive multimedia interfaces
- generates quiz questions based on student’s research activity and skill level
- supports creation of research journals and concept maps for learning assessment
Transforming learning and development
Corporate learning and development is at a crossroads as it faces unparalleled cost, budgetary and environmental pressures, while at the same time it is blessed with the most exciting opportunities in a generation. In this video, Clive Shepherd looks at the most common problems being faced by l&d, develops a vision for the future, explores six strategies likely to help in achieving that vision, and sets out the steps that need to be taken to get started.
Dialogical media learning
As Paolo Freire has written:
In order to understand the meaning of dialogical practice, we have to put aside the simplistic understanding of dialogue as mere technique … dialogue characterizes an epistemological relationship. Thus, in this sense, dialogue is a way of knowing and should never be viewed as a mere tactic to involve students in a particular task … dialogue presents itself as an indispensable component of the process of both learning and knowing.
Although throughout history, learning has been connected to storytelling, the new media that now surround educators and learners have forced us to pay attention to, and to change, how education is conceived. Transmedia learning invites students into stories in ways that they were unable to do before digital technologies existed and the Internet allowed us to connect in so many ways, so quickly.
