photo courtesy Flickr user moqub
I’m spending the week in Denver at the Educause annual conference. I’ve heard a number of things that relate back to what we’re learning in class. It’s great when I recognize a learning theory or instructional method that I might not have caught before. Here are a few of the things I heard from presenters that rang true:
- Real learners construct their own knowledge
- Successful courses depend on active community of learners
- Learning Affordances of collaborative tools: Participatory, Decentralized (folksonomy vs. taxonomy), Emergent, Network Effect
- LMS tools are very instructor-centric. Info is pushed out. Students are very good at interacting with this as they’ve done it all their lives. But engagement doesn’t get at anything real–it’s a stimulus response. Need to get deeper and get in contact with each other.
- Even if you’re doing the automaticity drills the bigger picture needs to be in view, if not the student is too focused on extrinsic motivation (the grade).
- The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change, but chronic inconsistency
- Good leaders are not optimists in that they don’t deny the brutal facts but they don’t lose the faith that they will prevail
- We need not only a to-do list, but also a stop-doing list
- We are not imprisoned by our mistakes, circumstances, setbacks, economy, cards we’re dealt or staggering defeats. We are freed by our choices, and the ones that nobody can see.
