Week 3 Wrap; Week 4 Preview

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks for another terrific class last week, where we explored Connectivist-inspired learning environments and wrestled with who we thought might be best served by these different spaces. Two themes stood out for me. The first was equity: what kinds of social, intellectual, technical, and financial capital does a student need to take advantage of a new technology innovation? The second was the relationship between technology innovation and broader reform: what kinds of technology innovations can advance learning in our current ecology of education, and what kinds of innovations require broader reforms to be impactful? For more answers to that questions it's possible to look through our articles at 123helpme.org.

By the end of today, you should have sent me your first participation rubric, either by sending me the Word doc, or posting it somewhere and tweeting or emailing me the link.

For next week:

First, on Tuesday, I’ll be giving a talk on MOOCs at the Dalai Lama Center For Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT with Jonathan Haber (who took 4 years of college courses through MOOCs in a year last year) and Sanjay Sarma, the director of the office of Digital Learning at MIT. It’ll be Tuesday, 4:30-6:00pm, 4-231. Monks and MOOCs, should be a trip. You are all invited.

To study the Learning Management System, we must go into the Learning Management System

By Wednesday, you should view the four videos that John Hanson courageously and kindly prepared on Item Response Theory in canvas, at bit.ly/t509canvas2104 and you should complete the accompanying questions. There are some other readings and viewings: a few pages from Holland on MOOCs, an anti-LMS manifesto from Jim Groom, and then a terrific video from Sonia Livingstone about her anthropology of a school recently implementing an LMS. Pay close attention to student and family feedback! Finally, spend 20 minutes over two days using Khan Academy–be sure to get an account and login so you can see how it tracks your data.

Finally, by Friday, you should submit your first project proposal/deliverables/rubric. It needs to be submitted in Canvas, so we can use the peer review tool the following week to experience peer assessment.

Really enjoying getting to know you all through your contributions, sharings, and project ideas.

Best,

Justin