Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Deutsche-Welle Best of the Blog (BOB) Awards 2011
Lina Ben Menhhi is the winner of the Deutsche-Welle Best of the Blog (BOB) Awards 2011. She won the prize for her 'online reportage of the abuses committed by the Tunisian regime during the uprising that sparked' the Arab Spring. This blogger did not confine herself to her computer; she drove to remote towns where the uprising had begun, and documented the deaths. Her blogis:http://atunisiangirl.blogspot.com
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Gabe Zichermann's TED talk "How games make kids smarter" I found, conceptually speaking, very useful because it is relevant to the explorations we've done on gaming as an allegory for the classroom.
Before you watch, I thought I'd point out the thematic gist of his talk, but if you're in a hurry jump to minutes 7-9:00 and 11:20; they are more convincing parts of his argument.
The talk envisions the classroom aesthetically and functionally organized by what he calls "(game)ification," which sounds goofy to say aloud, but does capture technology's predisposition to port human experience into a virtual gaming environment. He goes over neuroplasticity, polyglots, fluid intelligence, and then into the classroom (compelling). Later, he speaks on the functional uses of principles of gaming-reality. Using a specific examples from the integration of gaming into car dashboards to a much more intriguing "speed camera lottery" in Sweden, Zichermann's gaming-reality has some unique, incentivizing, application-side techniques that could, once appropriated for the classroom, come in handy. [Take a look].
I want to take a minute to talk GOOD magazine. They do a lot using infographics. I think as teachers, infographics might be new gold-standard of the modern handout, combining the visual as well as the educational into one document.
Well, GOOD had a redesign the report card contest (winner pictured).
They also had a redesign a recipe contest (pretty awesome).
Before you watch, I thought I'd point out the thematic gist of his talk, but if you're in a hurry jump to minutes 7-9:00 and 11:20; they are more convincing parts of his argument.
The talk envisions the classroom aesthetically and functionally organized by what he calls "(game)ification," which sounds goofy to say aloud, but does capture technology's predisposition to port human experience into a virtual gaming environment. He goes over neuroplasticity, polyglots, fluid intelligence, and then into the classroom (compelling). Later, he speaks on the functional uses of principles of gaming-reality. Using a specific examples from the integration of gaming into car dashboards to a much more intriguing "speed camera lottery" in Sweden, Zichermann's gaming-reality has some unique, incentivizing, application-side techniques that could, once appropriated for the classroom, come in handy. [Take a look].
I want to take a minute to talk GOOD magazine. They do a lot using infographics. I think as teachers, infographics might be new gold-standard of the modern handout, combining the visual as well as the educational into one document.
Well, GOOD had a redesign the report card contest (winner pictured).
They also had a redesign a recipe contest (pretty awesome).
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Weimer's Recommendations for Self-Reflection
I’ve been struggling to root out the tools discussed by
Weimer in chapter 3.
The Learning and Study Skills Inventory by Weinstein,
Shulte, and Palmer is owned by H&H Publishing, and is not available without
cost.
Likewise, the Perceptions, Expectations, Emotions andKnowledge about college inventory (PEEK) by Weinstein, Palmer, and Hanson is
also owned by H&H Publishing.
The Classroom Work Style Inventory by Kinsella and Sherack
only returns a citation from Learner-Centered Teaching when googled, so it’s a
total loss.
Fortunately, I had a bit of success with the other two tools.
I located the paper referenced on the Deep or Surface Learning Tool by Biggs, Kember, and Leung. The assessment itself is included as an appendix at the end of the paper.
For the Active
Learning Inventory by Fleming and Mills, I found both a copy of the paper as referenced, and what I believe to be an updated web tool of the questionnaire,
that I thought provided interesting results.
Please post other student self-reflection tools that you like or have used as a comment. Possibly we could generate a list for the class at some point?
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Just World Books - specializes in publishing blogs
http://www.justworldbooks.com/
http://www.justworldbooks.com/about-ushttp://justworldbooks.mybigcommerce.com/index.php
Greetings - here are the links above (please note that I posted them correctly - they are "hot" links! yay!) for the Just World Books that I mentioned during our class yesterday. Helena Cobban, the publisher, specializes in publishing collection of blog entries into books and it makes great reading!
Here is an excerpt below from an interview with the publisher, Helena Cobban:
Q. How has your experience as a longtime blogger at Just World News informed the philosophy of Just World Books?
Helena: Well, I loved blogging from the moment I started doing it back in early 2003. I was doing it then during a period where a lot of people started blogging about international affairs, and it became a global community. There’s this wonderful guy, Reidar Visser, who’s Norwegian, who writes about Iraq, and there’s Juan Cole in Michigan, and then there are people in the Middle East, in China, in Africa – all around the world – writing about international affairs in a completely new way: almost real-time conversations about what’s going on. As I was doing this, I noticed that there was some fine analysis and writing on blogs: really up-to-the-minute, immediate, vivid, and well-informed. [But] you read it and then it gets packed down in the archives…So one of the things that I did when I founded Just World Books in 2010 was to make some of that fine writing more easily accessible to people by pulling it out of the archives, putting it in a forward chronological order, and actually working with the writers themselves to “curate” their work. I think I’m one of the first people in the world of text to use the term curating for what my writers do, which is exactly analogous to what the curator of a museum exhibit does. You take a series of pieces and compose them, either thematically or chronologically, and add a little explanation of what’s going on, that frames and gives meaning to the texts that follow...
I found this to be really powerful – as soon as our writers started rearranging their pieces in a chronological order, then you got a narrative, a sustained argument that is not necessarily easily discernible if you just read one of the pieces, or if you read one piece today, and one piece tomorrow, and a piece next week. In each case, we’ve ended up with a wonderful final text that is a whole lot more than the sum of the parts... And it also encourages writers to take their own blogged oeuvres more seriously.
An example of one of Just World's Publications -- Gaza Mom
Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between
by Laila El-Haddad
Publication date: November 15, 2010
With Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between,
El-Haddad takes us into the life and world of a busy Palestinian
journalist who is both covering the story of Gaza and living it—very
intensely. This book is El-Haddad’s self-curated choice of the best of
her writings from December 2004 through July 2010. She was in Gaza City
in 2005, watching hopefully as the Israelis prepared their withdrawal
from the Gaza Strip. She covered the January 2006 Palestinian
elections—judged ‘free and fair’ by all international monitors. But
then, she watched aghast as the Israeli government, backed by the Bush
administration, moved in to punish Gaza’s 1.5 million people for the way
they had voted by throwing a tough siege around the Strip.Good example of academic/scientific blogging
For all those science and engineering types in the class, the blogs hosted by the AGU Blogosphere are an excellent example of blogging being used well by academics as a place where scientists, engineers, and the public can interact about issues related to the geosciences.
Thought some of you might enjoy.
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