Teaching Our Way to a New Way of Thinking

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Teaching Our Way to a New Way of Thinking

• Thom McCain

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(No Transcript)
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Overview

• Intro and background
• The Vision Thing
• Lessons Learned in the trenches
• Living in the Information Age
• Designing Usable Information Resources on the Web
• Internships
• Policy making/lobbying
• Research Center Partnerships
• Politics of University change

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Whats the end in mind?

• Transform the context for student learning
• Provide authentic experiences for learning with
  technology
• Encourage and model collaborative work
• Combine skill training with problem solving
• Relax and fuel the chaos
• Require public student performance of learning
• Develop credible assessment and evaluation

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Constructivist Principles

• Student exploration vs. Faculty direction
• Interactive vs. Didactic lessons
• Extended blocks of learning vs. Short blocks of
  time
• Multidisciplinary subjects vs. Single subjects
• Authentic Tasks vs. Universal issues
• Heterogeneous groupings vs. Ability groupings
• Performance based assessment vs. Mastery of facts

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The most important issues are human, not technical

• Encourage students work to be public -- invite
  the neighbors in
• Be sure the learning drives the technology
• Work on your human network
• Social needs of the participants
• Collaborative work processes

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Definitions and Perspectives

• Education should facilitate student learning.
• The critical components of learning include
  students, teachers, resources and context.
• Contexts both constrain and facilitate learning.
• Connected learning is the preferred term to
  describe the dynamics of technology-mediated
  learning.

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Contextual Issues of Digital Media and Learning

• The interdependence of technology, markets and
  policies of communication media define their own
  unique spatial and temporal biases.
• Digital media have characteristics that
  distinguish them from other media resources and
  connecting devices for students and faculty
  including interactivity, immediacy, multi-media
  and hypertext, organizational culture and values,
  and digitalization.
• The trajectory of change in digital media is on
  an exponential development curve.
• There is tension in transforming higher
  education between the needs for both efficiency
  and creativity.
• Successful learning in information rich contexts
  requires successful collaboration.
• Ownership of intellectual property is a major
  challenge for connected learning.

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Learners, Content, Teaching and Pedagogy

• The information society can be characterized as a
  context of information abundance. Most
  educational institutions are based on assumptions
  of information scarcity.
• Problem-based learning, constructivism, and
  educational reform all suggest that the
  connections between and among faculty, students
  and resources, require a different approach than
  the one that has been traditionally practiced by
  educational institutions.

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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the
lighting of a fireW.B. Yeats
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The motion picture is destined to revolutionize
our educational system and. . . .in a few years
it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the
use of textbooks.Thomas Alva Edison, 1922