Posted on 9th September 2009 by Judy Breck in Networks and Schools We Have Now
learn, linear, network, textbook
Students jump around in textbooks—or whatever source for the subject they are learning. This revelation from a textbook study is stated in an article this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education and quoted at the end of this post.
Online knowledge aggregation – - the golden swamp – - is NOT linear. When subject knowledge goes openly into the internet, it settles into the network matrix that lets it link up among its internal ideas and with related webpages. In the internet knowledge cannot be forced into the usual linear ruts of textbooks. Eventually we are going to get to the place where teaching uses the natural networks of knowledge online — where students can learn by following patterns of interconnecting ideas. Professors will move beyond lining up bits of what they know in textbooks to optimizing links among their concepts online.
Meanwhile, this is progress, quoted from The Chronicle:
Edward H. Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, said in an interview that the new e-textbooks were developed based on an ethnographic investigation of student study habits done by the company. He said the company learned that students often do not study in a linear fashion, but instead jump around in the text, whether in print or electronic textbooks. “One kid in a biology class said, ‘I don’t read the chapter. I just look at the art. If I understand the art, I go on to the next art. If I don’t understand the art, I read,’” said Mr. Stanford. “When he said that, it made perfect sense to me, but until he said it, I had never thought about it that way.”
Posted on 4th December 2008 by Judy Breck in Connective Expression, Findability and Learn nodes
learn, node
At GoldenSwamp.com’s sister website Learnodes.com I work to develop ways to connect learners with superior open knowledge content online. The latest two learn nodes I have built have something new: Flash animation so you can click out to the Internet from a pattern of illustrated discs directly to related content.
These 2 first animated learn nodes are based on news that relates to science. Take a look:
The Flash swf animations do not yet work on mobile phones, but I included the smaller image and put the links in the text so these learn node posts work fine on my iPhone coming directly in through the Safari browser. Building these nodes as animations takes time, but they have the permanent value of becoming independent connecting assets for their subjects out in the open global commons. Their tags and content attract search engine bots. Visitors are able to find the learn nodes and click through them to the six excellent nodes each one offers for its subject.
Posted on 28th July 2008 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge, Networks and Open Content
learn, learning, Learning Handbook, network, online, read, reading
Under the full title Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? this week’s New York Times article about adolescent Internet reading has been emailed most by readers. In the second “Most Popular” category “BLOGGED,” the online reading article comes in second to Blogging’s Glass Ceiling. A detail from one of the illustrations to the online reading article is shown above this post; the full illustration, full size is here. The image source is New Literacies Research Lab of the University of Connecticut.
The illustration, and the parts of the New York Times article that discuss online reading, are excellent introductions into the connective powers released by reading within a network. Very much is said and written about the social networking teenagers are doing. This time the focus is on the networking of ideas and knowledge that operate online. There is a rich resonance between the networking of abdominal anatomy in the illustration and the networking of the same ideas in the mind of the learner who views and reads these online materials.
My guess is that the article is “Most Popular” with NY Times readers because it does a very good job of explaining something that I, for one, think is the Internet’s most useful gift to the younger generations: engagement of knowledge in network format that mirrors their mind in content and context. As the kids will tell us, it’s awesome.
Posted on 23rd July 2008 by Judy Breck in Connective Expression, Emerging Online Knowledge and Networks
learn, Learning Handbook, node, synapse
For education, or any cognitive content, in the new cloud concept for the open Internet the action is at the node level. Education’s traditional trees of subject matter and curricula cannot hold their form in the mushy dynamics of the content cloud that is billowing up from multiplying server farms. These old forms of resources can be placed on static webpages, but bundled as they are, the elements of ideas these static pages warehouse cannot effectively participate in the pattern forming emergence of networked learning resources.
In the illustration for this post, I combined a graphic of a learn node with an image of a synapse from the work of the Sanger Institute’s team on Genes to Cognition. The team is led by Dr. Seth Grant who has given permission to use the graphic to illustrate ideas about Net content. It is compelling to compare the synapse and the node in the cloud where related bits of ideas are present at the same url. Without the interconnections at the smallest unit in the Net cloud, there are no patterns — there is no emergence of concepts and context. This fact resonates with what the Sanger team says about synapses:
The synapse the junction between nerve cells is the most important component of the nervous system. It not only transmits electrical information between neurons, but also is responsible for converting the electrical signals into biochemical changes of long term memory. Using proteomic methods, our laboratory and others have characterised the composition of synapses, which are made of 1-2000 proteins. These proteins are organised into multiprotein complexes that act as molecular machines.
Educators are challenged to get into this same kind of investigation, into using node level connectivity to form learning resources in the cloud.
Posted on 2nd May 2007 by Judy Breck in Open Content
course, design, harry, learn, mit, potter, tootbrush, toy
Harry’s brush is from Toy Product Design projects described here in Massachusetts Institute of Technology Opencourseware. MIT invites you to see how this team approach to teaching toy design takes place:
“Each team began the toy-design process by creating concept drawings of three different ideas for dental products. The team members then made sketch models, which are quick and simple models used to test their ideas. With customer and mentor advice, the teams then chose two of their ideas for which they further developed the most critical design elements. Finally, each team made an alpha prototype of their best concept that worked and looked like a real product.”
Engineering
