Jeffrey, L. Atkins, C. Laurs, A. & Mann, S. (2005). eLearner profiles: Diversity in Learning. Ministry of Education, TeLRF project report. Available at: http://cms.steo.govt.nz/eLearning/Projects/Tertiary+eLearning+Research+Fund.htm you need to scroll down the page.

What I liked about this research report is the comparison between student preferences for traditional lectures, tutorials and blended forms of online and f2f learning. You may find that these findings mirror some of the feedback you may be getting from your students about online learning. For example, they do not particularly want to be self-directed and do group work. They want lectures and are not particularly keen on online learning which can cause them a lot of anxiety. This is a NZ-based project

\”The sample size was 1811 and came from six universities, five polytechnics or institutes and six private training organisations.\”

Also the researchers categorised the learner profiles as: cognitive voyagers, strategic competitors and multimedia collaborators. If you read the executive summary of the report you will get the gist of the different profiles.

The researchers measured things such as extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, learning styles, dependent versus independent learning preferences, achievement motivation, relativistic reasoning rather than factual,working collaboratively rather than alone, time poorness, global versus sequential learning and reflective versus analytical and much more. It is a fascinating study. I hope you will take a look. Do you believe that this is the same situation for your students.

Open Pedagogy – A model for Open Education Practice 
Models that are developed to describe Open Education Practice must include the concept of openness in learning and teaching, as this needs to be understood before practitioners can engage with open education. Five principles for openness informing the adoption of open education practices are described by Conole (2013). The approach:
1. facilitates a broader approach to being ‘open’;
2. enables dialogue around learning and teaching ideas and strategies;
3. uses social media to facilitate “collective aggregation”, potentially benefiting learners and teachers over time;
4. supports digital scholarship through sharing good practice and peer critiquing; and
5. encourages spontaneous innovation, creativity and different viewpoints.

Open pedagogy as a theoretical basis for open education also needs to be considered. From my perspective, and according to Conole’s (2013) work on openness, an open pedagogy has eight interconnected and dynamic attributes. These include:

• technology that is participatory (Web 2.0 and mobile) – includes social media and applications  used by mobile devices;
• people who have trust in others’ work, are confident and demonstrate openness;
• innovation and creativity – involves spontaneity and a willingness to adopt another view and different approaches;
• sharing of ideas and resources freely so that knowledge and materials can be disseminated;
• connected community so that practitioners can network and become part of a community of practice;
• learner-generatedness – facilitating learners’ contributions by enabling and encouraging them to create and share information, resources and ideas;
• opportunities for reflective practice –  initiated by participation in critical analysis of practices, professional learning and connection with others’ perspectives; and
• peer review – the open critique of others’ work and scholarship.

These attributes are shown in the diagram. The ability to freely access resources and Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute them (known as David Wiley’s four Rs, 2013) is essential for these attributes to be enacted and is an integral component of an open pedagogy.  Wiley (personal communication, IT Forum, 2014) is not in favor of using the term ‘open’ to describe something unless it is clear how it differs from the norm. Each of the attributes for open pedagogy, as shown, can arguably occur separately and without being linked to open pedagogy but in this model, they are interconnected and contributing holistically to open practices. This model assumes that the conditions, as described by Wiley (2013), for open pedagogy are met.

Pedagogy 2.0
Another pedagogy that integrates well with Open pedagogy, relates to the use of social software tools for learning, and is claimed to be part of implementing what McCloughlin and Lee (2008) label as Pedagogy 2.0. They consider that this pedagogy includes the following: 

• Content – learner-generated;
• Curriculum – dynamic with formal and informal learning;
• Communication – open, peer-to-peer, and multifaceted;
• Process – situated, reflective, and inquiry based;
• Resources – multiple informal and formal global media sources;
• Scaffolds – support for students from a wide ranging network;
• Learning tasks – authentic, personalized, learner-driven, and experiential (adapted from McCloughlin and Lee (2008, p. 2).

As you can see, Open pedagogy and Pedagogy 2.0 are very similar. They both rely on a dynamic, and innovative learner-generated curriculum design. Content is generated and shared by learners who participate actively in learning that is relevant to them, creative and able to be personalised. Open methods of communication and interaction are used within a global community of learners who provide peer support and review. However, Open pedagogy places more emphasis on the concept of open practices such as openness, sharing,  connectedness and reflective practice.

Source: TED Ed

We are huge fans of TED Ed: Lessons Worthing Sharing. The short, animated videos on a variety of topics deliver the perfect dose of information to help students with content areas. Because educators write the scripts for these animations, they hit that sweet spot of just enough to make the point while engaging the eye as well. We also routinely publish some of these videos that don’t necessarily fit into our curriculum on our Humanities Enrichment Tumblr. As a result, our students have become big fans as well.

This summer, TED published a host of videos about grammar that we thought were extremely helpful with our learners. Two deal with punctuation, and the others talk about word usage. Emma Bryce is the author of three of the four, and she has a real knack for simplifying tricky grammatical problems.

When To Use Apostrophes 

In the first video, entitled “When To Use Apostrophes,” educator Laura McClure reviews the sometimes complicated usage. The visuals make it easy for learners to understand.

How To Use A Semicolon

Emma Bryce’s’s video called “How To Use A Semicolon” explains the correct way to use the semi-colon, and the animator, Mark Storer, creates a playful character that knocks out periods as if in an arcade game. She “clarifies best practices for the semi-confusing semicolon.”

When To Use Me, Myself, and I

In Bryce’s second video, she addresses “When To Use Me, Myself, and I.” Once again, she skillfully clarifies the different role each one plays in a sentence, even though all three refer to the same thing.

How Misused Modifiers Can Hurt Your Writing

The last Bryce video, called “How Misused Modifiers Can Hurt Your Writing,” follows in the same vein as the others. She uses her expertise to explain how misplaced modifiers create ambiguity. The animation makes it easy to see how words, phrases, and clauses in the wrong places create problems instead of adding helpful information.

Source: PBS Learning Media

In the modern era, presidential debates have become must-see theater. In many cases, these general election showdowns have produced critical moments to determine the November outcomes. Even at their most pedantic, these debates are rare opportunities to hear the nation\’s leaders speak directly to citizens and to each other. Voters can judge how the candidates handle themselves on the world\’s largest stage.

The first debate between Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump at Hofstra University (down the road from us here on Long Island) on Monday, September 26, 2016, is predicted to shatter television viewing records. Not incorporating this event into a day\’s lesson, therefore, would constitute educational malpractice.

Source: Watch The Debates

Teachers need to foster in their students an appreciation for civics. They need to guide young people toward understanding rhetoric and messaging. They need to use policy discussions as springboards to social awareness and future voting choices. One way to do this is by incorporating the practices of game interactions. This \”gamification\” approach to learning puts students in the driver\’s seat.

Source: PBS Learning Media

Fortunately, PBS has put together two terrific resources to bring the debates to life. The first is \”Watch The Debates\” from PBS Newshour. It allows users to view and interact with every candidate confrontation since 1960. Students can watch full encounters or highlights, and they can respond with their own verdicts.

The second resource is \”Join The Debates,\” from PBS Learning Media. This site provides educators with a poster and toolkit to stage student dialogues in their own classrooms. Based on the Harkness Method and Spider Web discussion, these detailed guides allow children to reenact the debate format. Kids become owners of their own opinions, and they gain a better appreciation of the rigors of presidential parleys and the complexities of global issues.

Source: Asbury Park Press

Aside from the physical drama and the halftime theatrics, the Super Bowl provides prime fodder for data analytics. The enormous volume of communication and marketing around this shared cultural moment offers a case study for exploring numbers and significance.

These days, graphs are no longer the sole purview of math class. This fall, for example, we spent a “math week” in social studies talking about how historians incorporate statistics and charts in probing the details behind pivotal events. Similarly, the Super Bowl bridges academic disciplines as an appealing touchstone for students to get excited about analytical reasoning and data design. That’s how right-brained and left-brained mindsets can merge perfectly in a contemporary STEAM study.

Some examples of lessons and visual aids that use graphs and charts include:

• Is There A Visual Thinking App? Charts, Graphs, & The 1:1 Classroom
• The School Of Big Data – Choosing The Right Graph
• I Love Charts – Discovering Stories Hidden In Numbers
• A Taxonomy Of Graphs

Source: Yellowfin

On Super Bowl Sunday, 1.25 billion chicken wings are expected to be consumed. The number of tweets is predicted to top 25 million, up significantly from the 13.4 million last year. And the average American is projected to consume 2,400 calories of Super Bowl chow.

The emphasis here is on the visual presentation of numerical sets. Graphic literacy (or “graphicacy”) means that learners can “read” the grammar of lines and bars. Understanding trends and anomalies are key skills in interpreting mathematical and scientific figures.

As every educational institution searches for ways to blend STEAM proficiencies into the curriculum, the pop draw of the Super Bowl can be just the ticket to grab kids’ attentions in discovering the day’s dynamic details. Any of the tables or diagrams below would be terrific examples to show on Monday in kicking off a week of visual STEAM activities. The logical reasoning of numbers meets the illustrative narrative of the liberal arts:

Source: The New York Times

Super Bowl ads often get the most attention from both football diehards and passing revelers alike. This interactive tool from the New York Times allows students to compare a timeline of percentages as they parse the media blitz across the years.

Source: Yellowfin

The media literacy component of Super Bowl mayhem cannot be overlooked. Many avenues exist for teachers to guide students in realizing the emotional tug of advertising during this high profile event. Yellowfin has designed an easily understood graph of Super Bowl ad prices to engage any student.

Source: Yellowfin

For aficionados of the sport itself, Yellowfin has assembled a horizontal bar chart of MVP winners by position. The results are familiar enough to let the content drive the comprehension. In other words, even the youngest mathematicians can expect QBs to win awards, and thus the extended blue bar becomes a visual signifier for their predictions. 

Source: Yellowfin

For strategists of team offenses, bubble graphs can blend with traditional tables to illuminate the choices of quarterbacks in certain situations.

For other Super Bowl educational resources, we recommend these posts:

• Teaching The Super Bowl: Social Media Literacy
• The Other Super Bowl Commercials And The Power Of Student Voice

Dr Ruth Clark runs a training and consultancy website. There are lots of courses you can enrol in but they are pretty expensive. The graduate certificate in Applied eLearning does much the same and is a lot cheaper so we are really lucky to have this qual in NZ.

here is a link to an article by ruth clark on harnessing virtual communities. 
It has some good pointers about keeping learners engaged during a standard virtual lecture/session averaging 60 minutes:
1. maintain a lively pace
2. visualize your content
3. incorporate frequent participant responses – you will notice in the audio lecture on cognitive processing she asks lots of questions and uses polling a lot and she also gets participants to do activities during the session.
4. use small group breakout rooms.
it is a short article and worth a look.

My comments on the audio: Personally i think such long lecture sessions are a bit much but I was only listening to the audio and she did have slides – she seems to do a good job of getting input from the class using text only. The participants don\’t seem to feature on the audio so cant have used mics. some interesting stuff about cognitive load and learning styles. e.g. differences between learning styles of different learners are minor in comparison to the ways our brains are set up to process information overall. She talks about the modality principle – best learning is when you have audio to explain visuals.

See also an article I stumbled across about A Learner-Centered Approach to Multimedia Explanations: Deriving Instructional Design Principles from Cognitive Theory. By Moreno, R. & Mayer, R. (2000). This is published online in the Interactive Multimedia Electronic journal of computer-enhanced learning…phew.

The diagram of working memory was informative.illustrates how words and images move from sensory memory to working memory and into long-term memory. Remember working memory can only hold so much information and is easily overloaded.
Dr Ruth Clark also said that cognitive overload can occur if several modalities. For example, the use of visual, text and audio together causes a redundancy effect because we are overloading the visual processing area. using audio and text together is better but use of one modality at a time is best.
Dr ruth does not like people multitasking e.g. checking emails when in VC and likes texting in VC to be on task not texting to each other off task or privately. she says this causes split attention effects.
see what you think when you listen to the audio.
——————————————————————————–
also a link to a presentation (pdf) called: Leveraging the virtual classroom
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AND her new book at the bookstore.

The New Virtual Classroom:
Evidence-based Guidelines for Synchronous e-Learning

This definition is simple, yet the concept is more complex than realised at first. What are these open education resources (OER) and how did they come about? What is their potential for learning and teaching? How can they be created, used and managed in our educational organisations? Why could they potentially improve quality and innovation in education? What are the benefits and what are the barriers? Who should be doing this? This series will hopefully assist you to identify the meaning of open education practices and find answers to these questions.

A history
To understand what the terms Open Education Resource (OER) and Open Education Practice (OEP) mean, it is necessary to look back at how the concepts has arisen. The arrival of the Internet probably triggered the widespread use of this term because it was considered a disruptive technology when it landed on our educational doorstep many years ago. This “global platform” disrupted or changed how learners and teachers could access and share information and materials, and encouraged a new culture of learning.  A culture where learners could access any materials they needed with or without the help of a teacher, and share anything and everything (Thomas & Seely Brown, 2011).

Disruptive technology 
A term attributed to electronic tools that change the way we think, act and work. The Internet has led to significant changes in society and is therefore regarded as disruptive as are many technologies associated with it.    

In the mid-2000s, when Web 2.0 tools and approaches emerged as a phenomenon, they enabled global sharing of information, knowledge, ideas and also the materials that educators created (Brake, 2013). According to Conole, de Laat, Dillon and Darby (2008) the arrival of “new forms of mobile, internet and social software technologies” enabled “distributed collaboration” and a new direction for learning and the way we could  “consume and produce new artefacts’ (p. 511).  This changed the status quo. Teachers and learners could now interact more easily, share their work and collaborate in the learning environment. This disruption, or as some practitioners believe, innovation, led to the Open Education Resource (OER) movement and the Cape Town Open Education Declaration inviting managers and practitioners to engage with open educational resources (Open Society Institute & Shuttleworth Foundation, 2007 –  http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/). Presently, 2712 signatories have contributed to the Declaration.

Otago Polytechnic signed the declaration in 2008 when educational development work at the organization was foremost in international efforts for Open Education (Blackall & Hegarty, 2011).
In the declaration, open education is described as more than open educational resources and is regarded as a mechanism that makes use of open technologies to “facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues” (para 4). It also has the potential to change not only how we teach and learn but also how we assess. 

How has history changed Open Education Practices?
Disruptive technologies are the foundation of open education resources and practices. They can be a good thing for pedagogical innovation and act as a catalyst to transform practice (Conole, de Laat, Dillon & Darby, 2008). However, the changes may occur too fast and exceed the rate at which teachers can adopt them confidently or before the infrastructure of an organization is prepared enough to manage them.  Ruth Jelly has compiled an overview of the literature and therein presents a number of case studies describing the evolution of the open education movement in Open Education Practices: A User Guide for Organisations and Individuals written by Leigh Blackall and edited by Bronwyn Hegarty (2011).

Out of the disruption caused by open education resources, web-based social learning and informal learning was born. Participation is the core component of social learning. Knowledge and understanding is constructed through the conversations and interactions learners have with others, generally about issues and actions (Brown & Adler, 2008). The focus shifts from what is learned to how people learn, and the connectivity amongst learners is enhanced. 

In the new culture of learning, the “stable infrastructure of the twenty-first century” has become a more dynamic infrastructure where technologies are changing constantly (Thomas & Seely Brown, 2011, p. 17). Even so, learning environments in this new culture do need boundaries and structure. These need to be designed to inspire the learner to move freely within the educative opportunities provided, regardless of whether this occurs in formal education or in everyday life (Thomas & Seely Brown, 2011).

This new wave of learning is considered by Thomas and Seely Brown (2011) to be “arc-of-life learning”, where play, questioning and imagination are pivotal to the continual quest for knowledge (p. 19).  The key is that learning occurs seamlessly between the classroom and everyday activities. Most importantly the concepts of ‘play’ and ‘tinkering’ are encouraged so that learning throughout life becomes more like a game; it is fun. This new culture of learning requires two things, according to Thomas and Seely Brown (2011), firstly, ready access to a network of information and secondly a “bounded and structured environment” with unlimited scope to experiment (p. 19).  To facilitate this, open and collaborative networks and communities and openly shared repositories of information that are readily accessible and in which anyone can participate are essential. In the new culture of learning, engagement in the process is key (Thomas & Seely Brown, 2011). 

Having “time and permission to play, openness and learning from play” were key themes that emerged from case study research conducted into digital information literacy by Jeffrey, Hegarty, Kelly, Penman, Coburn and McDonald in 2011 (p. 394). For participants, engagement in accessing open digital web-based networks and platforms led to a transformation in how they learned and in their personal development. 

Keeping openness in mind when designing learning is also discussed by Conole (2013) and she acknowledges several challenges associated with this, for example, the varying definitions and lack of agreement on what the term means. Some aspects of openness were explained in part one of this series using a model for Open Education Practices.

Source: ASIDE, 2015

Education is smack in the middle of an earth swell of change. No matter how hard the system tries to maintain a rigid set of evaluative assessments, something has to give. Otherwise, we will lose too many teachers over restrictions, and worse, too many young people who know that outside of school the freedom to learn, experiment, and create exists.

Source: ASIDE, 2015

Sure, we know that the fundamentals of reading and writing are key to understanding complex information. We are not advocates for throwing the baby out with the bath water. But perhaps the recent change in Finland to dump teaching subjects in favor of topics should send shockwaves through a system that constantly tries to reinvent itself with nothing more than new standards.

Source: ASIDE, 2015

One of our mantras over the last few years with our learners has been to, “Look at more stuff. Think about it harder.” We don’t claim to take this as our own, but recently we felt compelled to revisit one of our favorite books, Look At More: A Proven Approach to Innovation, Growth, and Change, by Andy Stefanovich.

While we know that schools are not businesses, we also know that the insights Stefanovich tries to bring to companies apply to any institution with the desire to promote innovative thinking. His ideas and concepts cross over into any discipline. His fundamental formula:

 I + C = I, or Inspiration + Creativity = Innovation

This equation also applies to education. We seek to inspire our learners to use creative thinking to come up with innovative ideas; likewise, we hope to do the same with our approach to teaching.

To inspire others is, after all, why we teach. We rely on inspiration as the fuel for engagement. Just like a business, we want to encourage an environment of productivity for learners. To do this, we can no longer sacrifice inspiration for efficiency.

Source: ASIDE, 2015

The framework behind LAMSTAIH includes five key drivers, including mood, mindset, mechanisms, measurement, and momentum to push the thinking and change the behavior in order to extract new ideas.

The concept behind each “M” not only provides a way for leadership to look at the needs of an institution, but it also helps to promote innovative ways of teaching and learning. Educational conversations circle around many of the same ideas.

So perhaps we could learn a thing or two by looking at more, including the insightful description of the three kinds of curators mentioned the book. On the one hand we have the traditionalist, who is the keeper of objects with the role of making sure that people of the future benefit from the collection of knowledge, and the Zeitgeist curator, who captures the essence of today and connects it to the not too distant future. This sounds like the role of the teacher. And then there is the hunter-gatherer curator, who constantly searches for anything that interests him or her and shares it with the world. Sound familiar? This represents most of the learners we teach.

Source: ASIDE, 2015

So where are teachers and learners as curators? More importantly, where do we want to be? At the moment, many educators are in the middle, yet our students outside of school are hunting and gathering.

Life-long learning is far more like the migrating hunter-gatherer, and technology has opened that door. We need to harness that energy, that inspiration, and that understanding of the power of connections to explore ideas. We can’t keep kids from exploring, connecting, and learning; we want them to be inspired,

Source: ASIDE 2015

Community college students everyday interact with a range of materials: handouts, worksheets, outlines, templates, PowerPoints, etc. From the simplest to the most complex, these resources are sometimes the primary conduits for information and training. The design of these materials, therefore, matters. The visual presentation of instructional tools can make the difference between detachment and engagement, between reticence and retention.

Source: ASIDE, Tommy McCall

In creating both tangible and digital presentations for college learners, educators can ask themselves about the desired purpose, audience, and format of their materials. Similarly, considerations of layout, font, color, and alignment can make positive differences in conveying crucial concepts. A few notions to keep in mind include:

• Visual media bombard the modern eye
• Images increase the level of engagement and retention
• Design creates meaning and relationships
• The eye reads many types of “texts”
• Simple tools and techniques can aid understanding
• Emphasis, typography, hue, layout, and balance are key

Source: ASIDE 2015

We recently had the privilege of discussing these ideas with the faculty of the Department Of Reading And Basic Education at Nassau Community College (NCC) in New York. It was a pleasure speaking to them for their spring professional development. Our session was entitled, “The Benefits Of Good Design: Simple Strategies For Creating Elegant and Effective Materials To Engage Students.” All of the slides, links, and resources from our presentation can be found here.

Source: UN

While we know many schools are not in session, we felt it important to write about the United Nations’ Blue Heart Campaign on the second World Day Against Trafficking of Humans. The first was on July 30, 2014.

Source: UN

With the growing problem of human trafficking, particularly of women and children, this day hopes to raise awareness of the plight of these victims and to protect their rights.

The Blue Heart Campaign seeks to educate others about the impact of this crime on society by inspiring others to take action through a show of solidarity. We spend a significant amount of time talking with our students about human rights abuses that all too often seem a regular feature on the nightly news. Since the issue of human trafficking can be a sensitive topic, we are always in search of resources that we can use with our learners. The infographics in this post provide visual tools to help.

Source: UN

Last year, we did our own push to make students aware of the International Declaration of Human Rights and what they mean for them. We used the website Youth for Human Rights and watched each of the 30 videos. Our students were surprised by the information and statistics, and in their innocence, they could not fathom these violations happening today. This made a huge difference in their understanding of historical and current issues.

Source: UN

As we get ready to start the school year, we plan to continue to integrate human rights into the conversation, and we hope others do as well.