From DSC: As a follow up toThe Chegg situation is worse than you think [Feldstein](which discussed cheating, buying answers, selling answers, proctoring software, and more), it seems to me that one of the challenges that we face in our teaching and learning efforts has to do with the transformation of our students: Helping them move from a K-16 world to the world of work. The below graphic tries to capture that idea.
What I mean to say is that our learners’ future clients don’t care about our learners’ ability to cram and score high on tests and then forget about topic XYZ. They want our learners to know and be able to apply topic XYZ in order to solve their problems/issues/needs. (Not to mention that being able to cram and do well on a high-stakes test is not nearly as helpful as spacing out their retrieval of topic XYZ over a much longer span of time.)
I hope that our students are hearing/experiencing from us: “We’re on your team. We’re here to help you.” And being transparent with our teaching techniques is key (i.e., here’s WHY I’m assigning this item or asking you to do this activity).
Radio.Garden — with thanks to David Pogue for this resource
This is the COOLEST. A Google Earth-type representation of the planet. Every green dot is a radio station. Click any dot to listen in. It’s like cultural teleportation. You could spend hours with this thing… https://t.co/rdEHUUfgvkpic.twitter.com/VJgyzVClJD
Michigan residents 25 and older who don’t have a college degree can now apply for funding to cover community college tuition costs or skilled trades training scholarships.
The initiative, known as the Michigan Reconnect program, is being funded initially by a $30 million appropriation in the state budget that had bipartisan backing from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Republican-majority legislature.
From DSC:
I was reviewing an edition of Dr. Barbara Honeycutt’s Lecture Breakers Weekly, where she wrote:
After an experiential activity, discussion, reading, or lecture, give students time to write the one idea they took away from the experience. What is their one takeaway? What’s the main idea they learned? What do they remember?
This can be written as a reflective blog post or journal entry, or students might post it on a discussion board so they can share their ideas with their colleagues. Or, they can create an audio clip (podcast), video, or drawing to explain their One Takeaway.
From DSC: This made me think of tools like VoiceThread — where you can leave a voice/audio message, an audio/video-based message, a text-based entry/response, and/or attach other kinds of graphics and files.
That is, a multimedia-based exit ticket. It seems to me that this could work in online- as well as blended-based learning environments.
On Wednesday morning [1/13/21], the iPhone maker said it would invest in a series of programs: a learning hub for historically Black colleges and universities (both online and brick-and-mortar, in Atlanta), an Apple Developer Academy to teach coding skills in Detroit, and a $10 million check toward venture capital funding for entrepreneurs of color.
#survivingcovid19 #reinvent #highereducation #futureofhighereducation #60yearcurriculum #costofhighereducation #alternatives #innovation #learningfromthelivingclassroom and many more
From DSC: My brother-in-law, Bob Bender, captures a lot of great trains out atrailroad-journal.com. He has an artistic way of capturing the scenes and he provides a lot of interesting background/information for each picture. If you like trains, you should check his site out!
In this episode staff writer Sara Weissman shares a story that focuses on the digital divide for Native Americans by bringing in voices of tribal college leaders and their students during the COVID 19 pandemic.
Many don’t know but Native American colleges and universities have long struggled with the worst internet connectivity in the nation while ironically paying the highest rates for service. Hear first-hand how students from Diné College and other institutions are currently affected. Carrie Billie (Big Water Clan), President & CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) and Dr. Cynthia Lindquist (Star Horse Woman), President of Cankdeska Cikana Community College in North Dakota, break down the data and lay out critical next steps necessary to address the digital divide.
Many don’t know but Native American colleges and universities have long struggled with the worst internet connectivity in the nation while ironically paying the highest rates for service.
From DSC: When will there be justice!? Let’s join in and make amends and provide the funding, concrete assistance, products, and services to Native American colleges, universities, and communities. Some potential ideas:
For the short term, could there be Loon balloons deployed immediately to provide free and stronger access to the Internet?
Could our Federal Government make amends and do the right thing here? (e-rate program, put Internet access in, make policy changes, offer more grants, other?)
Could Silicon Valley assist with hardware and software? For example:
Can Apple, HP, Microsoft, and others donate hardware and software?
Can Zoom, Adobe, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and others donate whatever these communities need to provide videoconferencing licenses?
Could telecom providers provide free internet access?
Could MOOCs offer more free courses?
Could furniture makers such as Steelcase, Herman Miller, and others donate furniture and help establish connected learning spaces?
How might faculty members and staff within higher education contribute?
How could churches, synagogues, and such get involved?
Could the rest of us locate and donate to charities that aim to provide concrete assistance to Native American schools, colleges, universities, and communities?
We need to do the right thing here. This is another area* where our nation can do much better.
From DSC…by the way, another title for this blog could have been:
WIN-WIN situations all around! The Theatre Departments out there could collaborate with other depts/disciplines to develop highly engaging, digitally-based learning experiences!
The future of drama and the theatre — as well as opera, symphonies, and more — will likely include a significant virtual/digital component to them. While it’s too early to say that theatre needs to completely reinvent itself and move “the stage” completely online, below is an idea that creates a variety of WIN-WIN situations for actors, actresses, stage designers, digital audio/video editors, fine artists, graphic designers, programmers, writers, journalists, web designers, and many others as well — including the relevant faculty members!
A new world of creative, engaging, active learning could open up if those involved with the Theatre Department could work collaboratively with students/faculty members from other disciplines. And in the end, the learning experiences and content developed would be highly engaging — and perhaps even profitable for the institutions themselves!
Though the integration of acting with online-based learning materials is not a new idea, this post encourages a far more significant interdisciplinary collaboration between the Theatre Department and other departments/disciplines.
Consider a “Dealing with Bias in Journalism” type of topic, per a class in the Digital Media and Journalism Major.
Students from the Theatre Department work collaboratively with the students from the most appropriate class(es?) from the Communications Department to write the script, as per the faculty members’ 30,000-foot instructions (not 1000-foot level/detailed instructions)
Writing the script would entail skills involved with research, collaboration, persuasion, creativity, communication, writing, and more
The Theatre students would ultimately act out the script — backed up by those learning about sound design, stage design, lighting design, costume design, etc.
Example scene: A woman is sitting around the kitchen table, eating breakfast and reading a posting — aloud — from a website that includes some serious bias in it that offends the reader. She threatens to cancel her subscription, contact the editor, and more. She calls out to her partner why she’s so mad about the article.
Perhaps there could be two or more before/after scenes, given some changes in the way the article was written.
Once the scenes were shot, the digital video editors, programmers, web designers, and more could take that material and work with the faculty members to integrate those materials into an engaging, interactive, branching type of learning experience.
From there, the finished product would be deployed by the relevant faculty members.
Colleges and universities could share content with each other and/or charge others for their products/content/learning experiences. In the future, I could easily see a marketplace for buying and selling such engaging content. This could create a needed new source of revenue — especially given that those large auditoriums and theaters are likely not bringing in as much revenue as they typically do.
Colleges and universities could also try to reach out to local acting groups to get them involved and continue to create feeders into the world of work.
In improv, the only way to “fail” is to overthink and not have fun, which reframed what failure was on a grand scale and made me start looking at academia through the same lens. What I learned about failure through improv comes back to those same two core concepts: have fun and stop overthinking.
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Students are more engaged when the professor is having fun with the materials (Keller, Hoy, Goetz, & Frenzel, 2016), and teaching is more enjoyable when we are having fun ourselves.
“Never in my 33 years of teaching did I ever think it would be like this,” the Muskegon High School teacher said of virtual learning, which the district is using this semester to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.
“It’s a huge learning curve.”
With Michigan K-12 schools back in session for the fall – some virtually, some in-person, and some a mix of both – students aren’t the only ones doing the learning this year. Amid this unprecedented school year, teachers are learning some new things along the way, too.
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3. Virtual learning has exposed the depth of Michigan’s digital divide Systemic gaps in technology access among school districts around the state left thousands of students at a disadvantage this year, despite efforts by educators to fulfill short-term connectivity needs during virtual learning.
From DSC: These are just a couple of reasons that I say that Rome wasn’t built overnight. But it’s great to see that tools are being added to teaching toolboxes and learners’ toolboxes as well:
“It’s easy for them to get onto Zoom now, they can go onto Google Classroom and go into the lesson right along with us,” she said. “I’m surprised at how smooth it’s running now.”
The justice gap in the United States is striking. It ranks 103rd out of 126 countries in accessibility and affordability of civil legal services, according to a World Justice Project survey. More than 80% of those in poverty, as well as a majority of middle-income Americans, receive inadequate civil legal assistance, the nonprofit Legal Services Corporation found.
From DSC: If the public doesn’t have access to justice — and the majority of those involved with civil-based law cases (vs. criminal law cases) don’t — the system has failed. Throughout the last several years, I have thought about the topic of access to justice (#A2J) many times on my walks past the Michigan Hall of Justice building in Lansing, Michigan.
I am hoping that a variety of technologies can help address this problem — at least in part. The impact of the Covid19 pandemic is pushing us in the right direction, but it never should have taken that horrendous event to occur in order for such innovations and changes to take root.
6 “Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits.
Today, Wayne County Judge Tracy Green set aside the conviction of Lacino Hamilton who was wrongfully convicted of second degree murder and felony firearms in 1994. DNA testing facilitated by the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School Innocence Project was used to help win Hamilton’s release. Assistant Prosecutor Valerie Newman, director of the Wayne County Prosecutor Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, moved to have Hamilton’s conviction vacated and requested dismissal of all charges. The motion was joined by Hamilton’s legal counsel, Mary Chartier (Johnson Class, 2002) and Takura Nyamfukudza (Moore Class, 2013) of CN Defenders. Both are WMU-Cooley law graduates and well-respected defense attorneys.
LANSING, Mich. — Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, with campuses in Michigan and Florida, was named a top 10 law school for racial and ethnic minority enrollment in 2019 by Enjuris, a collection of independent legal resources for legal professionals.
Current and former Google employees are forming an online program aimed at preparing students for the workforce if they’re taking time off school due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It comes as many college students defer school as universities shift learning models to mostly online amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Google execs past and present have volunteered to mentor college students on topics ranging from career trajectory to how to stand out in virtual Zoom interviews.
Along these lines, see:
Google has a plan to disrupt the college degree— from inc.com by Justin Bariso Google’s new certificate program takes only six months to complete, and will be a fraction of the cost of college. Excerpt:
Google recently made a huge announcement that could change the future of work and higher education: It’s launching a selection of professional courses that teach candidates how to perform in-demand jobs. These courses, which the company is calling Google Career Certificates, teach foundational skills that can help job-seekers immediately find employment. However, instead of taking years to finish like a traditional university degree, these courses are designed to be completed in about six months.
From DSC: Also, to see some more changes to the learning ecosystems out there, set up a Google Alert (or something similar in Feedly or via another tool) for “Learning Pods,” “Pandemic Pods,” and/or the “growth of homeschooling.” Here’s but one recent example:
Life can be very hard for autistic, gifted and special needs learners. Autistic and gifted learners often times struggle in school because they learn very differently than their peers. These special learners need a personalized approach to their education that allows them to learn in their own way at their own pace.
Many times parents and students feel as if they are the only ones like them in the world. This can often times lead to isolation and frustration. It is important for all autistic, gifted and special needs to unite in order to support one another. We are named Academic Warriors because all our students are superheroes in a world that doesn’t always understand and/or appreciate them. We help our students to become strong, independent and positive learners despite what the world may think of them.
It is the mission of Academic Warriors to help create positive learning experiences and communities throughout the United States for autistic, gifted and special needs learners. We offer online courses, programs, private school and in person events that foster an unique learning environment that promotes unity among all our students and families. We strive to create online and in person learning communities in every state that will provide educational opportunities for all families of autistic, gifted and special needs students. Together we can create a better world for the autistic, gifted and special needs learner.
From DSC: As part of a homeschooling-based situation, my wife received the following item for one of our daughters (who needs additional/personalized assistance to learn). Simultaneously, she and our daughter sent them a Michigan Exchange Box. Very cool.
I believe my wife found this out at the following group in Facebook:
Some channels out on Youtube that have to do with learning: (and by the way, according to Jane Hart’s recent Top 200 Tools for Learning, YouTube is in the #1 spot for the 5th year in a row!)
“Horse Sense Tutoring Services is a unique resource that combines the power of Equine Assisted Learning with evidence-based reading and math strategies that engage the mind, body, and emotions in learning.We use the principles of discovery, experience, movement, reflection, and connection in partnership with our horse friends.
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Based at The Barn for Equine Learning…my program offers targeted reading, math, and basic horsemanship tutoring for students in grades K – 8. Horses become teaching and learning partners as students experience academics and social-emotional learning in a whole new way.
If you are looking for a unique tutoring and confidence-building experience for your child, PM for more information.Sessions are held outdoors and/or in an open barn setting.
(Small group field trips with an introduction to basic horsemanship skills are also available).
From DSC:
So these are just a few examples of how the learning ecosystems are changing out there! Surely, there will be more changes coming down the pike.
