Asking For Directions

I got this video via email, not sure what it’s origins are but thought I would share it here since it’s pretty funny. And it involves a dog, how could I resisist ;-)

What Lies Behind My Digital Moniker “Mapetite”

Soul4Real recently bared her soul and shared the story of how she came to adopt “soul4real” as her digital persona. Much like her, “mapetite” and variations thereof, has been my digital moniker since the time I established a digital identity.

If memory serves me right, someone else came up with it, a French tourist no less ;). While in college, I learnt French as my second language, and one day, while my classmates and I were rehearsing some French songs to perform at a reception, we were “discovered” by an elderly gentleman, a tourist from France, visiting Chennai at the time. He had heard us singing and followed the voices to where we were. Of course he took pictures galore, and sent us all copies, all the way from France, and in the accompanying letter, he referred to me as “ma petite Vidya”. And the moniker stuck ;-).

Now, the comical sidebar to this anecdote is that I tried to perform a high kick during dress rehearsal - we were all attired in natty blue pencil skirts with crisp white shirts and red bows for the colours of the French flag - and I fell right on my derriere; we decided not to include it as part of the performance ;-).

Learning By Doing, Learning in Context?

The theme of the ELI 2008 Online Spring Focus Session is “Real-World and Technology-Rich: Learning By Doing, Learning in Context”.

I’ve spent the past hour or so watching a text-heavy slideshow scroll by, while the presenter spoke at length (at least she didn’t read from the slides), and we answered a couple of polls, one of which let me find out that most common stereotype for a scientist is an individual with crazy. The backchannel, as usual, was way more interesting than the actual discussion. And now, toward the end of the presentation, a whiteboard has come up where we can write in words that “reflect what we learned in the prior session”.

So where was the opportunity to “Learn by Doing” and “Learn in Context” for the participants?

And The Meme Goes On…

I’m cutting to the chase here because, it’s my first time being tapped/tagged for a meme - I need to work on the online efficacy of my E personality, it’s taken this long? ;-). And so, here we go!

1. This is the first time I’ve been tapped for a blog meme. Given that I’m social networking junkie, one would think it would have happened earlier, but I have blogging arrhythmia, I blog when I feel like, and usually after long intervals of time, so it’s really not that surprising :-). And yet, it happened, and I went giddy with delight, followed by a state of decision paralysis: What five things about me do I want to share? What do they already know so I can steer clear of being repetitive? And so on and so forth…

2. Which brings me to my second thing (is it good English to start a sentence with “Which”? Gardner, Barbara, don’t go English prof” on me ;-)): Most of you have seen the extroverted, fiery me (according to my Indian horrorscope, my rising sign is Leo and my moon sign is Sagittarius), but few of you know - I think - that I can over-think things (like above) when my anal, perfectionist, detail-oriented Capricorn/Virgo side kicks in (according to my Western horrorscope, my rising sign is Virgo and my moon sign is Capricorn, or is it the other way around?). On the other hand, I inevitably cry at the endings of each episode of Ghost Whisperer, actually, any teary scene in any movie or TV show. That’s the sappy Pisces in me, my sun sign. Thankfully, both my Western and Indian horrorscopes agree that I’m a Pisces.

3. And thence to my third thing: We didn’t get a television set at home till I turned 15, but our neighbours in Mumbai had one and every Saturday, as a child, I would head over to watch the Saturday night movie. If it was a tear-jerker, I wouldn’t cry there, but I would come home, settle into my favourite spot behind the door leading to the balcony, and bawl my heart out to my heart’s content. Its family-lore now, and my aunts and uncles take great delight in recounting that story over and over to my friends, my husband, and I suspect my nieces will hear it eventually too!

4. Speaking of nieces, mine turns one in a few months, June to be exact, but what’s really exciting is that her name - Diya - is contained in mine and we also share the same Indian star sign known for its obduracy, I beg your pardon, tenacity ;-). In India, naming the child is a significant event and name are chosen with great care and deliberation. My brother for instance, was named “Arvind” because when he was born, he was so fair, his pink feet looked like little lotus petals (Arvind means “lotus” in Sanskrit). So I asked my parents why they chose Vidya for me; they don’t remember. But here’s what it means: Knowledge and wisdom. And my last name loosely translated is “eternal god”. So I guess that makes me “Wise and Eternal God(dess)”, at least in this lifetime ;-).

5. And so we come to family. I wrote a post a while ago about how I was blessed to have had a liberal arts upbringing, and consequently, music was and is a big part of my life. At one time, we had seven musical instruments at home: two sitars (I learnt Hindustani music on the sitar for five years), a tanpura, a harmonium (I would accompany my father on the harmonium while he sang), a tabla, a harmonica, and a flute (these latter three were my brother’s musical passions at the time). My maternal grandmother still plays and teaches the veena, my mother is taking singing lessons at this time, and I hope to start taking guitar lessons soon.

And that my friends, are five things you didn’t know about me before, I hope. Here’s who I’m tagging to keep this meme going: Sarah Robbins, Barbara Ganley, Laura Blankenship, Jennifer Navarette, Brian Yuhnke.

Two Million Minutes

On the heels of Did You Know 2.0 comes Two Million Minutes, a documentary that tracks the lives of six students, two America, two Indian, and two Chinese as they go through four years of high school (hence the 2 million minutes) in their respective countries. It i examine the value Americans add to the global economy, and the impact these students are likely to have on the economic futures of their home countries.

Executive producer Bob Compton, a venture capitalist for 20 years, was inspired to make this documentary after visiting India and China a few times for his business ventures. Impressed by the calibre of the employees, he decided to visit the schools and discovered that high schoolers in Indian and China were ahead of their US counterparts by 2-3 years. According to compton, global education standards are ahead of the US and especially in India and China, two of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Neil Ahrendt, one of the students in the documentary, in conversation with GMA anchor Robin Robers, claims that it is not entirely untrue that he has been portrayed as unmotivated in the film; he says there is not enough challenge in the school system to motivate him to expend more effort than was necessary. Bob Compton claims the film is not an indictment of the school system in the US, rather, it’s a closer look at the way the students in each of these countries allocates the time available to them over four years of high school.

Creating Significant Learning Experiences With Moodle

Frameworks for Higher Ed

• Learning from a cognitive science perspective - what do we know know about the learning process that we didn’t before.
• Principles of good teaching.
• Principles of instructional design
• Goals of higher ed.

How People Learn

• Knowledge is constructed
• Importance of foundational knowledge
• Role of metacognition - understand the learning process, how to get the students thinking about their learning process.

Create Significant Learning Experiences
Establish foundational knowledge, that you then apply to higher skills learning as well as other aspects of life.

There is the human dimension where they care about learning and develip skills so that learning is a lifelong process.

Fink’s taxonomy is not hierarchical, all the elements are available and impact the learning process.

Examples

Journaling - Reading Reflections Exercise
Post questions on the reading for students to respond to:
Main point of the reading, what info you find surprising and why, and what is confusing and why?

Due at the beginning of class, not graded but give students credit for doing it. Allows you to adjust class time and address sticky points or focus on active learning activities.

Allows students to see how knowledge is constructed, assess their own knowledge.  Allows the faculty to see what’s going on in the students’ heads; increases student-faculty contact.

Journaling can also be used in the affective domain to establish community; also to help them set goals and create a map to achieve those goals.

Using RSS Feeds to Bring Current Events To the Classroom
Allows students to see the relevance of what they are learning to the external world and current events.

Problem-based Learning
Using Moodle facilitated problem-based learning. Creates a cyclical process where students work with each other on projects and problems to consider what they do and don’t know and construct knowledge on it.

Becoming Intentional Learners
The course is just a channel to help students learn how to become lifelong learners. Students, inherently, do not have a clear idea of what it is to be an “intentional learner”, they need a framework to get them there.

Create a “knowledge survey” to assess student’s prior learning/understanding of the material. Student’s don’t actually respond to the quiz question, they let you know if they know the answer, maybe some of it, or not at all. Can be used to assess their confidence in their prior knowledge of the material to be covered. Used to evaluate what students already know before coming into the course.

New opportunities for significant learning

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A Comedian’s Take On How Not To Powerpoint

Can Blogging Facilitate Writing Integrity?

Ensuring that students turn in original written work is a concern on many a campus these days and tackled in many diverse ways. One approach is to have students “pledge” their work to indicate that it is indeed original.

My reservations on “forcing” integrity on somebody aside, I have noticed, that in both my classes, where I ask students to blog rather than write a paper, at least thus far, the work has been original and I’ve had no reason to believe otherwise. And I wonder if there’s something inherent to blogging that somehow facilitates this?

I’m not sure that a first year student (I team teach a first year seminar class) necessarily factors in the notion that blogging implies writing for a larger audience, while blogging, so that may not be why this is happening.

However, I do think that the informal writing style that blogging lends itself to plays a role in that it allows them to think about and engage with the material and perhaps do more research because of that? Student in my class today mentioned that he did far more research and reading for his second blog post than he did for the first so he could improve. So there may be some validity to this theory of mine.

I’m not negating the benefits of making them write papers with appropriate bibliographic resources here, but trying to ascertain if the model in and of itself still works with this generation of students? Given that they are more likely to turn to Wikipedia or Google scholar, how do we leverage that intuitive behaviour to incorporate good information literacy skills? How do we make it less forced and more natural? And if we do so, and in the process also teach them to validate their information sources, would we induce better and more honest writing?

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Shift Happens

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How To Explain Social Bookmarking To Your Dad

I wish I’d found this video when I tried to explain it to my Dad, but considering he’s off and running something worked ;-). For those of you who are still trying, the video might come in handy.

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