Exams 2.0 January 21, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos.add a comment
Clarence Fisher on his Remote Access blog has posted some interesting characteristics of what a evaluation might look like for a classroom 2.0 school. He makes a great point about how much attention everyone has been giving to teaching 2.0 and not so much to evaluations 2.0. Below is a selection of ideas from the post:
- posting the exams online and letting the kids work things out over a few days
- letting students gather information from any source: library books, textbooks, their personal learning network
- the exams would include both knowledge and skills components for each subject area
- exams that are multi disciplinary and problem based or focused
- students may be required to post something online or use a tool such as ustream and feedback might be collected from various sources
- this feedback might offer the students an opportunity to revise and improve the work they have completed before calling something a “final draft”
- the students themselves might be involved in designing the assessments, giving them an opportunity to have input regarding what they feel are the big issues and important learnings they have worked with so far in the school year
My personal favorite is the last one. I think there is a lot to be learned by having the students design the assessments. You have to know a lot about a specific topic to know what is important enough to assess. To this list I might add group work. Evaluations can be made for the team and the contributions of individual members. What would you do if you could redesign assessments from the ground up in your classroom?
http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2008/01/exams-20-1.html
Google Generation January 19, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Data, Opinion.add a comment
Ars Technica has posted a review of a study by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee that provides some interesting insights into the habits of kids born since 1993. Here is an excerpt:
So what’s true about the Google generation?
- They like to cut-and-paste. ”There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
- They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
- They multitask all the time. ”It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”
Not surprising to me is the observation that young students are not experts at searching, especially when it comes to choosing good search terms. Vocabulary, and life experience, play a role in knowing what terms to use when searching. Both of those qualities are in short supply for the youngest students. I can remember creating my own chart of words and how they were related to each other at a very young age. I did this for my own information, to help in constructing my own world view. I knew then that words played a big part in how I understood and interacted with the world. I’m not confident that many young people would see any benefit to constructing their own diagram of connections for the concepts or words that comprise their personal cosmology.
The challenge in the classroom hasn’t changed from the time I was a child. We still need to open doors and show our students that they do indeed have a brain, that they can make up their own mind, and apply various tools (rationality, artistry, intuition, spirituality, compassion, passion, etc.) to that end. The sources of information may be changing from printed material to digital, but the challenge remains the same.
Wikia January 19, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Tools.add a comment
Would you like to get in on the ground floor of a new user-driven information-focused community? Sarah Houghton-Jan has posted a quick review of Wikia on her LibrarianInBlack blog. Wikia is a search engine that relies on the end users, those who are searching, to determine the validity of the results. Authority and trust will play a major role in the success of failure of this searching community effort. It has a long way to go before it becomes a serious alternative to something like Yahoo or Google, but it is a good example of what can happen when the users decide for themselves how technology will be used and what value it has. The more value the Wikia users place in the system, the better the system becomes, much like del.icio.us. Will you Wikia? If there is enough return on your investment, I’m sure we all will.
http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2008/01/wikias-baby-ste.html
2007 Crunchies January 19, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Link Collections.add a comment
The Crunchies are awarded by TechCrunch for the best of 2007. These awards cover web 2.0 and other innovative technologies. If you want to know the best of 2007, and the glimpse such awards give us for 2008, take a look at the list of award winners.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/18/2007-crunchies-the-winners/
Power to the Doctors January 18, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos, Opinion.add a comment
The New York Times published a story about a group of doctors who were concerned about an email that is making the rounds that includes questionable medical advice. They could have deleted the email as spam like we all do, or they could try to do something about it. So they crafted their own response to the original email with clarifying information.
Now Dr. Parker has decided to wage his own Internet campaign. He and two colleagues have crafted their own missive and released it onto the Internet. Their hope is that the same forces that propelled the first message to popularity can also be used to debunk it.
The idea here isn’t that we should be teaching our students the correct information (a good idea) but that we should be empowering them to make a difference in the world. There are limits to what each of us can do, but those limits are greatly diminished when we help our students find their voice and forum to join in the ongoing conversation. By engaging them at the level of their own passions, we provide them with the opportunity to persuade, dissuade, convince, and to be convinced by others. That’s when education makes a difference.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/doctors-take-on-a-notorious-e-mail/
Google Skepticism January 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Data, Opinion.1 comment so far
TechCrunch is reporting that a study from the University of Southern California Center for the Digital Future shows that only 51% of people trust the information returned by search engines. This is down from 62% a year ago. In addition, Internet users see online sources of information to be more important than other media like TV and newspapers.
I’m not ready to make too much of the numbers, but if these statistics are accurate, I think it is healthy to be skeptical of all information sources, especially ones we use the most. I see this as good news for education as it stresses the point that all facts and media (including text books) should only be trusted to the extent they can be verified.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/search-atheism-on-the-rise/
Inspiration January 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos.add a comment
I find myself being inspired more and more by Silvia Tolisano’s Langwitches blog. She has a terrific post today called “We Have Come a Long Way” which details several wonderful examples of how technology integration is making a difference in the lives of teachers and students. I was very impressed with the embedded Google presentation, “Kitty Cat, Kitty Cat What Do You See in Egypt?” If you are wondering if technology integration is making a difference, this post is well worth the read.
http://www.langwitches.org/blog/2008/01/17/we-have-come-a-long-way/
Flickr + LOC = Great January 16, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Tools.add a comment
A new resource from the Library of Congress and Flickr provides a great way to find primary source images and also invites participation on the part of visitors by tagging the images.
The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.
