We shouldn’t forget mental health

The researchers had asked their students this question:

• What characteristics are essential for effective teaching from the student perspective?

Analyzing and combining reasonably synonymous characteristics, researchers isolated the top nine for online and for face-to-face students.

ONLINE	FACE-TO-FACE
1. Respectful	1. Respectful
2. Responsive	2. Knowledgeable
3. Knowledgeable	3. Approachable
4. Approachable	4. Engaging
5. Communicative	5. Communicative
6. Organized	6. Organized
7. Engaging	7. Responsive
8. Professional	8. Professional
9. Humorous	9. Humorous

Respect is number 1.  More important than knowledge!!! The ability to communicate and engage are high on the list but respect dominates all other characteristics in effective teaching, in the students opinion. Interesting that Faculty spend, on average, 22 years acquiring enough knowledge to teach at the university level. How much time do we spend on respect?

The same top nine characteristics are common between online and face-to-face students, with only the order for the two bolded characteristics changing.

Responsiveness is more highly valued online, moving five positions. Which is not surprising considering all the  mobile devices and connectivity of today.

Use this google doc (https://docs.google.com/document/d/157sDCWbhFxDmUa4iPDXGBRfiSW_kpLvZbV19L_9qxWk/edit) to add your ideas, comments or questions while attending this prezi presentation. This is often called a back channel, an informal channel of communication.

Hopefully the wireless won’t fail us in this room.
Please use this link to follow me as I present. I have never tried this before so it will be interesting to see if it works.
http://prezi.com/7qadvbeevjaj/present/?auth_key=eguvfnv&follow=qobcg0fuokjo”

Don’t worry if it doesn’t work… you can use this embedded prezi below

This makes sense to me. I always called it intuition but hunches on the back burner or tucked away in the back of the mind is an interesting concept.

Collaboration, sharing hunches, moves a society forward. Our sharing communities, like social bookmarking, blogs, wikis and video sharing is great proof of creating good ideas.

Of course there are failures, but in failing we learn.

In this article, Papert mentions ‘the importance of teachers learning alongside students’

“What we need is kinds of activity in the classroom where the teacher is learning at the same time as the students and with the students. Unless you do that, you’ll never get out of the bind of what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do when they went to school.” (Papert, 2001)

The times have changed. What/how we learned in school is not always applicable in today’s or tomorrows world.

Teachers have to be learning at the same time as the student. The only constant in life is change and therefore knowledge is does not stay stagnant . It moves forward and changes depending upon it’s context. Therefore, teachers have to be life long learners and keep learning.

Papert brings up the example of the well known robot wars that many engineering and science students participate in. Every robot is unique and therefore every situation/problem is unique. It’s never been there before. And that’s very different from the classroom situation where we teach static material. “We’ve been there before. The teacher is not learning anything because the teacher knows that already. And this is a very bad situation for learning.” (Papert, 2001)

“Again, one of my favorite little analogies: If I wanted to become a better carpenter, I’d go find a good carpenter, and I’ll work with this carpenter on doing carpentry or making things. And that’s how I’ll get to be a better carpenter. So if I want to be a better learner, I’ll go find somebody who’s a good learner and with this person do some learning.” (Papert, 2001)

Same would be true for graduate students. If the student wanted to be a better researcher then he/she would seek out a researcher.

As Sir Ken Robinson mentions in his TED talk, Changing education paradigms. “We are trying to meet the future by doing what we did  the past” We stayed in school because we were told that if you got educated you could get a job. The more education the higher the pay. This is not always a reality today and the students know it. “you are better having a degree but it is not a guarantee anymore”

My job, my passion did not exist when I was in school.  The path I took to get were I am today was unique and I did not have a map. This is the reality of many people and of our students. We don’t know what lies ahead. I believe we need to teach the students to be life-long learners, creative thinkers and problem-solvers or as Sir Ken Robinson calls it “Divergent Thinkers”. We must model that behavior and become learners ourselves excepting the fact that there is more than one correct answer and more than one way of doing things.

It got me thinking about how I approach it.

1. 1st I hear about an Educational Technology through my social networks, twitter, LinkedIn groups, FaceBook ect.
2. I’ll go to the site and explore
3. I’ll watch any videos about the product on youtube or Lynda.com
4. I’ll think about how it can be used in the classroom and if it is any better than what I am already using.
5. I’ll try it.
6. Again, I’ll think about how it can be used in the classroom and if it is any better than what I am already using.
7. I’ll try to anticipate if it will be sticking around for a while. Some products just come and go and aren’t used anymore. It is important to look at the dates of things posted or comments. That way you know if something is still being supported. Students hate wasting their time learning a technology that is outdated… as do I.
8. I’ll try it in the classroom but I’ll put it in as a possible product for the students to try. I usually give the students a list of web2.0 technologies that they can use. For example, we create concept maps and I’ll give them a list of online web2.0 tools they can use. MindMister, Gliffy,

Are you tired of dealing with information overload in your work? Perhaps you’re looking at it from the wrong perspective. Clay Shirky, professor and author, says, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”

The task now is to create your own information filters.

“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…”
Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968)

Personal Learning Networks are individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.

The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective networked learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them. It also helps us to work smarter.

I use this blog as one of the tools to collect my personal learning “ah ha” moments and it doesn’t matter to me if people read my blog.It becomes a place where I come back to to rethink and revisit videos, quotes, and ideas that I think go together.

I found a blog post by Harold Jarche where he goes into his idea of Network Learning even deeper: http://www.jarche.com/key-posts/personal-knowledge-management/

When I say “I found it” what actually happened was Ihering Alcoforado bookmarked/shared the link on the Diigo group, e-learning2.0. Diggo emails me daily a list of links from the groups I subscribe to. I quickly skim the email and click on anything that sounds interesting to me. If I need to include it in my Personal Learning network, then I bookmark it or if I want to reflect then I post it to this blog.

Now that is, as Jarche puts it, using:

• Seeking – using my network to find knowledge
• Sensing – making sense/evaluating of the concepts
• Sharing – posting it to my blog, twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn