Is badging the needed paradigm shift in evaluation?

Is badging the needed paradigm shift in evaluation? ? Learning Journal:

Our systems of tracking learning don?t hold up when we move to a more informal learning strategy.?Our competency evaluation systems don?t seem to be nuanced enough to be helpful, and they certainly aren?t consistent across multiple raters.?We all agree, I think, that what is really important is whether or not employees ?know? something ? and more to the point ? whether or not they are capable of ?doing? something (knowing at what level of proficiency would be a nice bonus). A badging strategy may get us there.

Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences? Collaboration is what we do nowadays: get over it

Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?

Results form the reserach revealed that frustration is a common feeling among students involved in online collaborative learning experiences. Perception of asymmetric collaboration among  teammates was identified by students as the most important source of frustration.

Clive Shepard responds:

This caught my attention because I'm a great believer in and keen user of this approach. My experience has been extremely positive and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Anyway, the authors claim:

Despite the pedagogical advantages of collaborative learning, online learners can perceive collaborative learning activities as frustrating experiences.

The study was carried out with 40 students on a Masters course in E-Learning at the University of Catolunya. In spite of the title of the report the degree of frustration was not that great:

Overall, respondents occasionally felt frustrated.

This is obviously a concern although it did not spoil the course as a whole:

Scores for frustration with regard to the perception of participating in an appropriate and satisfying training program showed that the majority of respondents felt little effect. None of the participants responded that they felt very effected.

So, not a deal-breaker then, but what were the causes of frustration for some? Well, the major items were:

• imbalance in the level of commitment, responsibility, and effort
• unshared goals and difficulties in organization
• difficulties in communication/dialogue in terms of frequency
• problems with negotiation skills
• imbalance in quality of individual contributions
• excess of time spent and workload
• conflict and problems in reaching consensus

Sound familiar? Yes, because this is what happens in one way or another every time we interact with other human beings to get a job done. I'm not sure if humans have an instinct to collaborate, but our ability to work together has certainly contributed greatly to our success as a species. Unfortunately we have contradictory tendencies - selfishness, laziness, competitiveness for starters - which tend to get in the way of collaboration, but by and large we get by.

Being able to collaborate is an essential life skill, particularly in the era of Wikipedia and open source projects. Those who don't do their bit will find themselves low down the list when collaborators are chosen and at a disadvantage in such a networked world.

So, I'm not remotely put off the die of collaborative learning activities. I say collaboration is what we do nowadays, so get over it.

Vive la révolution: Designing online learning for the 21st century

Designing online learning for the 21st century

APRIL 24, 2012 BY TONY BATES 8 COMMENTS

According  to Tony Bates, campus-based teaching has changed very little.  Meanwhile, distance education has rapidly advanced, and is grabbing an increasing share of the post-secondary market.

The challenge then is for campus-based teaching. What is the best way to use the campus experience when students can learn mainly online? How can we make the best of both worlds as a teacher?

Here are Tonys thoughtful suggestions

21st century skills

Although I don’t like the term, it is a handy way of describing the kind of skills that need to be embedded within a discipline area, if learners are to function effectively in 21st century society.

I argue that these are not generic skills but skills that need to be directly adapted and integrated within a particular knowledge domain. For instance, problem solving in medicine is different from problem-solving in business. Skills require opportunities for practice and development. The core 21st century skill is knowledge management, the ability to find, evaluate, analyse and apply information, although almost as important is independent learning. These are skills that can be taught, or perhaps more accurately, facilitated.

A small design team contracted by Volkswagen

Changing technology

I described the following changes in technologies:

• LMSs are changing, moving from a ‘course in a box’ to a loose collection of tools from which an instructor chooses (see: Why learning management systems are not going away)
• examples of the use of the following:
  • WordPress, blogs, wikis and e-portfolios for learner-generated content;
  • video and audio to help learners move between the concrete and abstract and back again;
  • open educational resources, which challenge our conception of curriculum and ownership of content; and
  • virtual worlds.

Features of web 2.0

• learner authoring and control
• collaboration and sharing
• collective intelligence
• low cost, adaptable software
• rich media
• portability and mobility

Educational implications

• learners have powerful tools
• personalization and individualization of learning
• open access, content, services
• development of knowledge management skills
• a power shift from instructors to learners

A new paradigm for learning: from e-learning 1.0 to 2.0

Stephen Downes’ articulation of e-learning 2.0:

• learning managed by the learner
• peer-to-peer collaboration
• access to open content
• learning demonstrated by online multimedia assignments (e.g. e-portfolios)
• development of 21st century skills

Role of instructor

Three possible roles (at least):

• none (Downes; Siemens): students are autonomous/self-directed
• guide on the side
• in control

What kind of course? How to decide

Four deciding factors:

• teaching philosophy
• students you want to reach
• nature of subject matter
• resources available

© Tony Bates, 2012

‘Advanced’ online course design

• knowledge management
• open content within a learning design
• student-generated multimedia content
• assessment by e-portfolios

Who decides what kind of course?

• instructor; program team; senior management?
• decisions at program level; a progression from dependent to independent to inter-dependent learning
• could we design one course/program for all types of learners in various delivery modes?
• what process/mechanisms does the institution have for making these decisions?

Conclusions

• we know how to teach well online; follow best practice
• however, we also need to innovate: incrementally and evaluate
• innovation in teaching needs to be rewarded more
• systematic training of both instructors and senior administrations is essential for success

Lastly, in all the institutions I went to the audience in general agreed that:

• we are not teaching in ways that fully engage learners
• instructors are not fully leveraging the potential of technology for teaching
• instructors are not adequately trained or skilled in using technology for teaching.

There are clear signs though that the revolution is beginning to happen: vive la révolution!

Google Officially Launches Google Drive

You can check out Google Drive now for yourself at drive.google.com/start

Google is offering all users 5GB of storage on the service for free. If you need more than the 5GB, then it is offering several tiers of storage options. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage also expands to 25GB.

Google Docs is now built right into Google Drive, which means you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you’ve shared content with someone else, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and you’ll receive notifications when other people comment the items you’ve shared.

One interesting feature of the service is smart tagging, which allows you to tag items stored on your drive. So, if you’ve uploaded a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge to your drive, the next time you perform a search for the bridge then your photo will show up along with other results. Drive also uses image recognition, so if you drag and drop photos from your recent vacation into Drive, you can later search for locations you’ve visited and those photos will show up.

Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, Drive can also recognize text in scanned documents. That means if you’ve scanned in a page from an old book, for instance, you can search for words in that document.

When it comes time to access your files, the service can open a variety of different files types – 30 of them to be exact – within your browser, regardless of whether or not you have the required software installed. Supported file types include PDFs, HD video, and things like images from Illustrator and Photoshop.

You can install Drive on your Mac or PC , and use the service via an app on your Android phone or tablet. Google also has plans for an iOS app in the future. Blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.

51 Ways Google Docs Can Help Faculty

Here are 51  tips for getting the most out of Google Docs as a Faculty member, with ideas and tricks for collaboration, sharing, and staying productive.

1. Access your documents from anywhere
Whether you’re in your dorm room or the school library, you can access your Google Docs. Take advantage of this to make it easy to do your work on-the-go.
2. Use Docs reference tools: Take advantage of the Define option to use Docs’ built in dictionary, as well as a thesaurus and an encyclopedia available for use right in your document.
3. Go mobile: Google Docs is available on most smart phones, and has a number of capabilities available on the go.
4. Save to different file types: You can easily save your documents and spreadsheets to commonly used file types like DOC, XLS, CSV, and HTML.
5. Use keyboard shortcuts: With keyboard shortcuts, you can speed through all of your tasks in Google Docs.
6. Use templates: Google Docs has a template gallery for just about anything you can imagine, from anapartment bills organizer to a doc for organizing college visits.
7. Convert PDFs to images and text: Use Google Docs to make PDFs easily editable.
8. Create forms: Gather research information, ask for opinions, and more by creating Forms in Google Docs.
9. Search EVERYTHING: Search through pretty much everything you’ve got by searching Docs and Gmail together, thanks to Gmail Labs settings.
10. Autodetect links: Simply add links in Google Docs by having them automatically detected, instead of having to input full URLs.
11. Adding video: You can embed video in documents, slides, and more to dress up your presentation.
12. Insert photos with drag and drop: Instead of going through the process of attaching, you can just drag and drop files from your hard drive into the document, then wrap text around the photo.
13. Create graphs: Visuals are great tools for getting your point across. Using charts in Google Spreadsheets, you can create your very own information-sharing graphs.
14. Look up live finance data: In Google Spreadsheet, you can use special formulas to pull live information from Google’s finance service.
15. Self-update spreadsheets: In addition to inserting live finance data, you can create a live link to that data for a document that constantly updates itself as accurate.
16. Draw in Docs: Using Polyline, snap to guides, and other drawing features, you can easily create the images your documents need.
17. Insert facts: Using Google Spreadsheet, it’s easy to insert facts, like the population for a city, which is simply pulled through the Google search engine.
18. Simply add equations: Google Docs has found a way to make it easy for students to take notes in class, offering an Equations editor for adding equations onto your pages.
19. Embed Docs anywhere: Get a link to your document or spreadsheet, and you can embed or publish it anywhere, including Facebook or a class blog.
20. Just share: Get the ball rolling on collaboration through Google Docs by sharing your document through email links.
21. Turn it into a webpage: Download your document in HTML, and you can share it as a webpage with a minimal amount of hassle.
22. Chat away: In Google Docs, you can see anyone who is currently editing the document, and if needed, send a message to chat with them.
23. Team up with anyone: Using Google Docs, you can collaborate on a document with friends, classmates, and professors.
24. Share an entire folder: If you’ve got a collection of documents to work on together, just open up a shared folder that everyone can access.
25. Work on documents all at the same time
: Google Docs allows users to simultaneously work on a single master document, so you can come together with other team members and professors to work on a document at the same time.
26. Allow editing without signing in: If you’re sharing a document with classmates who don’t have a Google login, just make it available to edit without signing in.
27. Track visits: Using Google Analytics, you can track how much traffic a published document is receiving.
28. Set notification rules: Find out about the changes made by your collaborators on any given document by setting up notification rules.
29. Use Docs instead of emailing attachments: Rather than emailing revised versions of documents over and over again, you can just use Google docs and see revision histories.
30. Kick slackers off of a project: Simply remove collaborators doing more harm than good by clicking None next to their name.
31. Freeze to stop editing: If you’ve perfected certain rows and columns in your spreadsheet, just freeze them so they’re not accidentally edited.
32. Revert back to old versions: If your group doesn’t like a certain set of changes made, it’s very simple just to revert back to automatically saved previous versions in the revision history.
33. Save brainstorm notes for group projects: Get everyone’s ideas all together in one place by using Google Docs for brainstorming.
34. Use data validation: Make sure that your collaborators aren’t adding a mess to your spreadsheet by using data validation on shared documents.
35. Use color coding: You can change text colors based on rules, like setting green for one classmate, blue for another, and red for yourself.
36. Clean up your main Google Docs page: Move items to individual folders, and you can make your landing page a lot cleaner and easy to navigate.
37. Insert a bookmark: Make it easy to access other parts of your document, like a table of contents, by inserting bookmarks throughout.
38. Create subfolders: For an extra step of organization, create folders within folders.
39. Get color coded: Color code the names of your folders for quick and easy identification.
40. Get synched: Using tools like Syncplicity, you can get all of your Google Docs synched up with documents from Microsoft Office.
41. Create your own shortcuts: Put together shortcuts to launch Google Docs, create a new document, and even access frequently used documents in a flash.
42. Print multiple Docs at once: If you need to speed through printing several documents at one time, just download and open them as a zip file.
43. Quick View PDFs: When you see PDF files in search results, you can just Quick View them to open them up in Google Docs.
44. Check your translation work: Google Docs has added a translation tool, which can easily be used to double check your work when writing a foreign language essay.
45. Get a grade before you turn assignments in: Using Flubaroo on Google Docs, you can get quick feedback on your assignment, giving you a chance for improvement before you need to turn it in.
46. Write in full screen mode: Make your toolbar, menus, and other tempting distractions disappear by displaying your Google Docs in full screen.
47. Automatically correct your common mistakes: If you have words that you just can’t spell to save your life, set up a preference to automatically find and replace your mistakes with correctly spelled words.
48. Customize your styles: If you like a consistent look for your documents, set up a customized style so you don’t have to go back and fix it with every new document.
49. Work offline: Use the offline feature of Google Docs to work on the bus, plane, or anywhere you plan to go without an internet connection.
50. Save web pages to your Google Docs account: Turn any web page into a PDF for viewing later by using the send to Google Docs extension for Chrome.
51. Back it all up: Google Docs itself offers a great way to back up your documents, but it never hurts to save elsewhere, right? Back up and download all of your Google Documents and save them to a hard drive for safekeeping.

http://edudemic.com/2012/04/50-little-known-ways-google-docs-can-help-in-education/