Blogumzug/ Blog moved
Hey everyone,
I now have a new blog: Gedankengarten. It won’t be focused not only on university topics but also on everything else that concerns me. As the title says: it will be a garden of thoughts.
Hope to see you there!
“Nine great reasons why teachers should use twitter”
This is the title of an article by Laura Walker. You can find here: Nine reasons…
I think this article gives some good reasons why it can generally be a good idea to use Twitter. And she points out something I think is very important: How much you profit and enjoy Twitter depends on the quality of the posts by the people you follow (however, in my opinion it’s not hard to find “good twitteres”….well, I just checked the public timeline and changed my opinion: it’s definitely work to find people worth following them).
However, from my point of view the article doesn’t offer arguments to use Twitter especially in educational contexts – or in other words: I can’t see the specific benefit yet(!) to use Twitter as a teacher.
Task #4: Learning theories
I finally completed the last task and wrote a small article about Social Learning. When I searched for useful links about that topic I recognized that it is much discussed in the context of e-learning. Didn’t expect that but of course it makes sense, especially when you look at games.
The MMS-Wiki…
It took me about 20 minutes to find out how to create a new page!! Can’t believe it (and feel a bit stupid). And the help pages don’t really offer help…look yourself:
http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/epedagogy/mmswiki/index.php5/Help:Contents
Now my article about Social Learning takes another while to be written…
Task #1: Experience with E-Learning
Well, by now, I do have quite a lot of experience with E-Learning I’d say…However, my first contact to E-Learning (and not only using EduCommSy as a container for seminar-materials) was at a seminar concerning media pedagogy and the question whether it is a profession in 2007/2008. We worked with the Blackboard-platform. I remeber using it wasn’t easy in the beginning, you had to have a STINE account and the handling wasn’t really intuitive. We had to do small research projects ourselves and to document our working process with a function of Blackboard which was quite similar to a blog. I enjoyed doing that (and if I remember it correctly I was the one with the most posts…)!
What I didn’t like about Blackboard is that the lecturer was able to retrace one’s tiniest movements or activities, respectively.
Final task, part 2: Learning theories
Here’s part two of the task:
Lately I was learning captial expenditure budgeting and afterwards asked myself, which learning theory describes what happens when I’m sitting over my notes and putting the stuff in my head (or when I read a book and thereby learn something).
In the case of captial expenditure budgeting one can’t call this learning, because it was more of gathering information and getting those in my head (or should I better say “memory”?). What’s happening there is in my opinion best explained via the “Standard Memory Model” (Sternberg, R.; Williams, W. (2002): Educational Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. p.269). It consists of the sensory registers, the short term memory (STM) and the long term memory (LTM; ibid., p. 270. See also the article on Cognitivism at the MMS-Wiki). So, I imagine what happens when I read about the formular for the actuarial return is that my eyes grip it (sensory register), it’s then somehow moved to my STM and (that didn’t happen yet) processed to my LTM. Unfortunately my book doesn’t give information about how this processing from one memory to the others happens. One probably has to refer to neurobiology in order to explaining that.
Learning (I just had to remember myself) is “any relatively permanent change in thought or behaviour that occurs as a result of experience.” (Sternberg, R.; Williams, W. (2002): Educational Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. p. 268).
When I read “Wer bin ich? Und wenn ja, wieviele?” (R.D. Precht 2007) something additionally happens: I learn (at least most of the time 
). For example recently that Freud sniffed snow and that most of his publications are unscientific. As I already know a bit about Freud, the theory of the “Connectionist Model of Memory” (Sternberg, R.; Williams, W. (2002): Educational Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. p. 281) offers a very good explanation. It is again not really a learning theory…
Sternberg and Williams speak of a network e.g. of propositions where “information is stored via a series of interconnected nodes” (ibid.). A node is activated by a stimulus (in my case “Freud”) and other connected ones are also activated (maybe my feeling of rejection towards him and especially his attitude towards women). This phenomenon is called “spreading activation” (ibid., p. 282). The repeated use of a interconnection between two neurons strengthens it and thereby information is anchored deeper.
You can find more information about Connectivism at the MMS-Wiki.
Well, that are just two examples of incidents where I find learning theories in my everyday life… the more I read and write about it, I notice that one often talks about learning but it’s in fact information collecting…
Final task part 1: online session
Hey, it’s already the final task…the semester passed quickly again…
I read Anna‘s and Christine‘s blog and am really angry that I missed the session! However, I couldn’ change it – I had the flu with all the bad accompaniments.
So I tried to find out a bit about Adobe Connect. Concerning the screencasts you can find at Youtube, it seems to be a nice thing, but I’d be really happy if I could try it myself -> will ask Ralf or Anja.
Anna wrote that the session asked for multi-tasking qualities and I think I’d have felt the same as she did (see the following entry: http://annamo.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/pioneering-online-team-working/).
I have a couple of questions:
- Where can I get Alexander’s and Anja’s presentation?
- How did you log in to Adobe Connect? Do you have to be invited or do students have access to the program in general?
- mmmhh, forgot the others…Well it’s pretty late, so I will work on tomorrow,
Last but not least just a quick comment on screencasts in general: Unfortunately the picture quality is often very poor, even in professional ones. And when you switch to full scree mode, it doesn’t help really. That’s truely a pity! One exception – by the way- are the videos of the commoncraft people.)
Sitzung 20.01.09: Finanzielle Lage der Erziehungswissenschaft
Hier meine eigene kleine Linksammlung zum Thema, in Ergänzung zu dem, was ihr auf Ralfs Blog finden könnt.
Uni-TV Sendung vom Dezember 2008, mit einem Beitrag von FSR-Mitglied Florian Muhl (den konnte ich mir leider bisher (19.01.09, 15.45) noch nicht selbst anschauen, weil ich gerade an einem Uni-Rechner sitze…)
Ein Blogartikel zum Thema von Prof. Pazzini
Eine Notiz von 2004 (!), die das vorweg genommen hat, was jetzt Realität ist….
Task #5: work process of PLE-Group
Our new task for January 13th is to describe the process of developing our e-learning unit. As two of the three of us don’t need a credit we decided to keep our effort limited and not to make a film or similar. Because of that our working process is easy to describe:
Process
Anne and Majbritt met and elaborated a structure for the presentation and their PLE. Check Anne’s Blog, maybe you can find more details of this step there.
I worked on my PLE on my own as we had some communication problems at the beginning of our team work and for that I didn’ take part in the meeting mentioned above. It was Ralf’s suggestion to use Pageflakes as the tool to desgin my PLE, and I still think it was a pretty good idea .
During the seminar meetings we made agreements.
To clarify the details for the presentation we held two Skype conferences. Meeting online was helpful because one didn’t have to go to university, and in one case one we were able meet altough of our members was ill and couldn’t come to the seminar.
Challenges
- For me: To learn the ropes of Skype and Pageflakes – and I get deeper into it while I’m using it.
- In general: Our different claims -only one of us wanting a credit but I think we solved it well.
- the time coordination, because we are all quite busy.
Problems
- the communication (sometimes)
- a technical one: Anne and Majbritt couldn’t digitalize their mind map.
Lessons learned/Recommendations
- write down email adresses and Skype names properly and somewhere where you find it again
- ask your associate professor/tutor if you need support (always a good advice I think ) )
- check emails regularly and configure Skype to start automatically when you start your computer…(altough I don’t really like the second half of this point – does one always has to be available?)
Articles linked properly
During the last seminar meeting I noticed that the trackbacks for my articles about OpenID didn’t work. Now I’ve done it, just using hyperlinks so that everyone should find them as comments to Ralf’s posting “Past seminar meeting“. Maybe now a little discussion starts about the concept of OpenId .
