Teacher in Development

One final bit for you to ponder over the weekend.

"A general concern appeared to be the desire to get people to use virtual museum resources.

I think this is the wrong question. People don’t want to visit your content. They want to pull your content into their sites, programs, or applications. This is a profound change, largely not understood by educators. We are still fixated on the notion of learning content, and we think we are making great concessions when we give learners control over content (and start to see them as co-creators). That misses the essence of the change: learners want control of their space. They want to create the ecology in which they function and learn. Today, it’s about pulling content from numerous sites and allowing the individual to repurpose it in the format they prefer (allowing them to create/recognize patterns). Much like the music industry had to learn that people don’t want to pay for a whole album when all they want is one song, content providers (education, museums, and libraries) need to see the end user doesn’t want the entire experience – they want only the pieces they want. We need to stop thinking that learners will come to us for learning content – our learning content should come to them in their environment."(gsiemens)

Fit that into your classroom, and you have a very interesting thing to think about don’t you? Teachers wonder how to sell their students on their subject content. Is that the right question to be asking? "How do I get them into x?" Connectivism Blog http://www.connectivism.ca/blog/57/tbping

Another gem via Kathy Sierra: The IT Training Doctor - A blog geared toward IT, but a very meaningful post for teachers to consider.
The IT Training Doctor: Harry Potter and the Trainer of Dire

 Really cool. And what can you learn for your classroom?

I’ve been reading a few posts from Autono Blogger which delve into assessment and testing. The first part of the trail, or where I picked it up anyway, begins here. Marco explores a variety of interesting topics: Unpacking touchy-feely assessment. Hoop jumping. A quick quote from this theme that I think is meaningful:

"students learn that "education" means jumping through hoops… not learning anything of value. I see this year in, year out in my own classes: students who, from the outset, don’t expect to learn anything of value (they seem to have given that hope up long ago) but only aim to pass the course; indeed, they are just "doing the time". "How many classes can I miss without failing? Have I missed too many classes yet?" These are the vital issues, not whether they’ve mastered the content or the target skills." (Naace Conference Blog � Computers in Education: An alternative view, Autono Blogger)

 Then the trail jumps here. Marco goes a little deeper into the "touchy-feely" thought he got started with in the first post. I totally agree with him there. I think the spirit behind recent conversation [see this blog, James’ "The Demise of the Red Pen" ] is not about hurting the feelings of students with feedback in red. It’s more around being meaningful in how we deliver feedback. Not IF we should. HOW we should.