Re: [xmca] Fwd: [Air-L] what should an introductory course cover in "Internet Communication"?

[Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>]

Mike
Outcome Based Education is assessment driven. It tells you what and how to
assess, but has virtually no theory of learning except that it is
"facilitation" and group work is gospel. The teachers, of course, would want
to teach to the assessment (test), but the assessment is not the same as
teaching.Children are also supposed to be assessed on how they work in
groups, but when you have 40 children in the class and up to ten groups,
this is very difficult to do. The result is that children don't learn to
read properly and never write anything for themselves. The original reason
for such a strange"theory of instruction" is the need to regularise the
education system across school and adult basic education. (Hence the
facilitation and group work.)

This is not true of a small minority of private schools who have gone their
own way teaching the children to read and write and do math. Their children
do staggeringly better than the rest of the students.

South Africa has had this system for 13 years and even the best students who
go to university have really struggled. We now have a new curriculum that is
heavily content driven. It will be put into effect in 2012, and will be the
third change in 15 years.

It is not clear whether this new curriculum, which is heavily oriented
towards math and literacy will make a difference.  South Africa came *stone
last *on the last TIMMS and PIRLS (Science maths and language
internationally benchmarked tests).The suburban children scored well, but
they constitute a tiny minority of the schools. The USA children came in the
middle, and the Finnish children came out top. I think there was about 80
countries.

Instead of doing "tests' or "exams" the children do Assessment Tasks, which
means that they do tests without sitting in silent rows.The whole system has
slid into a remedial level system, as the children have become political
fodder. The teachers have "change fatigue", and just want to be left alone.

(I read up a bit about the Finnish system.  Each class has two teachers.
The first teachers teaches the new concept, and then the second teacher
re-teaches it to the children who didn't really understand, while the first
teachers works with those who did understand.It didn't say HOW they teach.)

So that's where a system which has no theory of instruction gets you. Have
you ever tried to "facilitate" a small child into learning how to read? This
is a total mystery to me.

Carol

On 31 October 2010 05:04, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> I do not usually pass along mail between lists, but sometimes the overlaps
> seem particularly
> provoking. I have not listened to the lecture. My sensors go up at the
> words
> "Authentic Assessment"
> followed by  "assessment-driven focus". In light of our discussions here
> about conditions that promote
> learning and development as a two-way multi-party affair, wouldn't be
> interesting to see how Mr. Allen's
> play out in the design of online *learning*.?  .... no mention of
> instruction except that it is assessment driven.
>
> Hmmmm, how do you do that?
> mike
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> You may want to listen to this lecture by Matthew Allen at OII
>
> "Authentic Assessment in the era of Social Media: ideas and applications
> from Internet Communications"
>
> "Matthew Allen will briefly review why an assessment-driven focus on online
> learning is important, and how authenticity might be developed in a world
> of
> social media, before presenting several examples of current and proposed
> assessment practice in an undergraduate Internet Communications course."
>
> http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/?id=344
>
> Cheers,
> Julian
>
> *** Please note that I am changing my email address. You can now reach me
> using reach@julianhopkins.net ***
> ++++++++++
> Blog: www.julianhopkins.net
> Twitter: @julianhopkins
> Skype: julhop
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 13:37:31 -0400
> From: Tery G <teryg93@gmail.com>
> To: Air-L <air-l@listserv.aoir.org>
> Subject: [Air-L] what should an introductory course cover in such a
>       fast-changing field?
> Message-ID:
>       <AANLkTimEdzCXXs+6SUn+wJY_0or+_ykJhFqqULyNMqGE@mail.gmail.com<AANLkTimEdzCXXs%2B6SUn%2BwJY_0or%2B_ykJhFqqULyNMqGE@mail.gmail.com>
> <AANLkTimEdzCXXs%2B6SUn%2BwJY_0or%2B_ykJhFqqULyNMqGE@mail.gmail.com<AANLkTimEdzCXXs%252B6SUn%252BwJY_0or%252B_ykJhFqqULyNMqGE@mail.gmail.com>
> >
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi all,
>
> I asked a while back about acceptable resources for one of my classes. I've
> heard offline from a few people who are currently designing courses similar
> to mine, and who asked what I covered. We thought that might be an
> interesting question to ask on this list.
>
> Background on my course: I teach in a Media Arts department and the class
> is
> called Digital Media Literacy. I designed it years ago, and I could not
> find
> a single model for it, so it would be especially interesting for me to hear
> now what people do or would do in this type of course.
>
> The course is designed to introduce our freshmen to both the concepts and
> some of the tools we use to create digital media (so it's a 100-level
> course). Some of the class is spent on tools, currently Audacity for sound,
> Photoshop for images, Quicktime for video, and Keynote for presentations. I
> introduce them to at least three browsers, so they stop thinking IE *is*
> the
> web. There are a handful of other utilities that we use: file transfer
> programs, SnapZPro, etc. We do a quick history of the internet and of the
> web (including the internet gift economy, though it barely exists anymore).
> We cover file compression, types of compression, and when and why they need
> to compress files.
>
> The more I read about search engines, the more I want them to understand
> about these tools that they use to gather the information they use to live
> their lives, let alone write their papers. So, we cover search engines in
> general, and Google in particular. Then we use the library databases. I'm
> still following the controversy about whether and how PowerPoint affects
> the
> way we think, so we read and talk about that. We look at copyright issues
> and Creative Commons licensing. We look at net neutrality. I'm probably
> forgetting something; I don't have my syllabus in front of me right now.
>
> I've been staying away from things that seem trendy to me, and that I have
> not been able to see academic value to, like Twitter and Second Life. I
> included each once, but didn't get enough out of it and you can't include
> everything . . .
>
> Their final project is a multimedia presentation on a topic of their
> choice,
> as long as it's related to digital media or media arts. They critique each
> other's presentations as they build them, so this is a sneaky way of
> working
> in more material while also giving them more practice with the tools we've
> covered all semester.
>
> So the question from me, and some others on the list, is -- if you were
> designing this type of course, what would you put in?
>
> Best,
> Tery Griffin
>
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