Jun 262008
I will be leaving to Greece shortly to attend ICICTE in Corfu. The following is an early draft of a paper I wrote for the conference that outlines some of the processes and early feedback I received regarding a graduate course I recently taught, EC&I 831.
Comments are welcome and encouraged. Keep in mind that this is an early draft and there are likely many errors. It was a paper written a while ago BEFORE I had much of the new data in (which I am working through right now). I have only shared it at this point as I enjoy making my writing processes as transparent as my teaching.
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I had a quick read through the paper as I’m cleaning my room for the end of the school year.I agree with one of your end points that the collaborative nature of the class hasn’t ended with the class. I believe that we are still connecting through email, blogs and comments as well as reaching out to our network for assistance in our professional life. Thank you for a wonderful opportunity to expand my world.
Great article. I will be sharing this with my colleagues here. I am co-teaching a class this summer and fall that is basically a student success class for students going into health information management. We are introducing them to Bb, Elluminate, web 2.0 tools (blogs, twitter, delicious bookmarks), and Second Life as these are tools that are used later on in the program. The idea is to teach all the tech early on and leave the content to the content instructors. The class has no papers, it is portfolio assessed, and the students walk out of the class with a portfolio of tools and network building skills.
[...] Draft of Article: Open, Connected, Social [...]
I enjoyed reading the article by Dr. Couros. As technology continues to explode, it will be interesting to see how quickly we are able to adjust our tools for learning. Different from traditional learning, distance learning affords students education through the presentation of material; however it also provides the additional bonus of learning technology at the same time. In many ways it becomes a 2 for 1 deal in learning. For me personally I have gained so much through taking online courses because I have been challenged to learn new material and present the material using a variety of technological tools. I once was afraid of technology, “give me the chalkboard” and I would have been happy, but now I am able to use what I have learned online to increase my knowledge base and value as an employee.
As a participant of the course, I enjoyed reading this paper. I am pleased to say that the learnings I did in this course have inspired me to keep plugging at meaningfully integrating technology into my teaching. I am quite excited to be one of five teams of teachers in our districts to receive a SMART Board in the fall. The only thing better would be a one-to-one laptop program.
I am busy creating wikis to support our new Math Makes Sense program for my grade seven class in the fall. I love the how Web 2.0 encourages us open up to the world.
Your paper is an example of this. What a great way to make the writing process real, for I believe that feedback from others is what makes me a better writer, reader and for that matter thinker!!
[...] Couros has posted a paper – Open, Connected, Social – Implications for Educational Design – for an upcoming conference based on his successful (and distributed) online course. He’s [...]