“Some people talk in their sleep, lecturers talk while other people sleep.” – Albert Camus
Flipping your class
When considering whether to flip your class, consider this: No one says you have to flip every single lecture. In fact, it’s probably easier inside your department politically if you just flip a couple of lessons.
Can you think of a few homework activities, that through the semesters, your students have always found especially challenging? Maybe those lessons should be the ones you flip. That way they can complete the assignments within a group in the classroom and with you and/or your TAs right there to help out.
There are some other advantages to only flipping a few classes as well. Throwing in a few flipped classes now and again will keep things fresher for the students. Having change-ups like this is more likely to create situations where the students are successfully learning in your class. Remember, humans learn when active, alert and practicing… not by sitting behind a desk and falling asleep.
Connected Learning with live and archived conversations
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Add-ons are now live
Add-ons for google docs and spreadsheets are now live here on campus. Read about it more from my previous blog entry.
Using TED-Ed to re-envision massively online or flipped courses
Dr. Margaret Schedel had wanted to flip her classroom before the whole MOOC concept starting sweeping SBU, so it seemed like a plan to try not only flipping her class, not only by recording the standard lectures and using class time to work on the hands-on parts of computational arts, but also by making those lectures open to a wider audience using Coursera. This allowed for a massive group of students to synchronously go through the class with her own face to face students. Grading is accomplished through simple computer grading assessments and through peer assessments of larger projects. A large amount of student interaction is accomplished via forums.
Changing things up a bit, we thought we would now try to take those same videos and put them through the “create a lesson” process of TED-Ed. These lessons go up into the wild as asynchronous content – though a class can still assign them to be completed according to whatever schedule is chosen. The world still has access. They have computer graded assessments built in – that can bring you back to the video for a video hint if you get the answer wrong. It also has discussion forums, to interact with the instructor or other students. Here is the first lesson that we put together based on the week 10 set of videos:
An instructor can create lessons like these, using any youtube video. This is really powerful.
Coursera Partner’s Conference
Dr. Meg Schedel is over in London presenting for Stony Brook University at the Coursera Partner’s Conference.
Meg’s selfie at our poster.
31 March – 1 April, 2014 | London, England
Co-hosted by the University of Edinburgh and the University of London
The second annual Coursera Partners’ Conference brings together university officials, faculty members, instructional designers, program managers, technology specialists, and teaching support staff from across our partner organizations for two days of lively discussion about MOOCs, online and blended pedagogy, and emerging trends in higher education. It is intended to provide an opportunity for members of the Coursera community to learn from each other and share their experiences in designing, creating, and delivering MOOCs, and to discuss the rapidly transforming landscape in higher education.
Kickstarter – Oculus Rift – Facebook
Kickstarter – Oculus Rift – Facebook
“Meanwhile, there seems to be an obvious question of economic justice here. The original Kickstarter backers of Oculus Rift might not have been explicitly granted shares in the company, but the company wouldn’t exist without their initial contribution. About 10,000 people gave Oculus $2.5m between them. I for one am struggling to think of a good reason why each of them shouldn’t get a proportional share of that $2bn sale.” — Steven Poole, The Guardian
TEDActive 2014 “The Next Chapter”
As the principal license holder for TEDxSBU, I had to attend a full blown TED event in order to raise our attendee and sponsorship caps at our own event. So – I went to TEDActive in Canada. TEDActive is kind of like a regular TED conference wrapped in a makerish package — but more than anything else, it’s a younger and far more of a social crowd. I, myself, am not all that terribly social – so that part was largely lost on me. (Plus, I’m getting older – but let’s not go there.) Also, I’m not looking to network to find a new job and some of that was happening as well.
However, I did benefit from Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman being lured to the satellite location based on the promise of it being more fun – so WIN!
Some other things that I learned about TED… one never goes to TED.com and then searches for a talk about juggling or magic tricks (at least I can’t imagine many people doing this sort of thing, without also picturing them piling out on mass from a VW bug while wearing funny shoes). BUT IF YOU WERE TO DO SO… you would find many talks, including some from these fellows who have been invited to TED 6 times now:
There were however the standard talks of “ideas worth spreading” and I certainly enjoyed those. Some of them have been released into the wild now including:
and
I’ll post more of my favorites as they are released.
From the SXSWedu session: Keeping the Promise of Educational Technology
“I want to ask a question. How many of you think the the children from those lower two dots in the united states [high poverty rates], are going to Khan Academy, and, is that going to change if Comcast wires up their households? I think that’s laughable. It’s not enough to put it out there. You have to actively engage the students. You have to do the things that don’t scale.” — Vivienne Ming
New Google Doc Add-ons
Click to watch the promo video
Includes a citation add-on that could be very useful. I don’t see it as an option yet here on campus, but it was just released… so perhaps soon!
More information:
http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2014/03/add-ons.html