Month: February 2012

The story behind 3 presentations: #cetis12, #dml2012 and #TEDxWarwick

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

Update: slides and audio for #cetis12 presentation now available!

Doug Belshaw presenting at PELC11

Apologies for the relative drought here over the past couple of weeks. I’ve been working hard on some presentations that I think you’ll want to see.

You know what? I’ve been at JISC infoNet almost two years now but something I’m still getting to grips with is the different peaks and the troughs over the academic year. They’re just not the same in Higher Education as they are in schools. For a start, some of them are my own choice.

This past few weeks have definitely been a peak for me, one that will last until mid-March. All of my writing energy recently has been going into preparing three talks I’ve got coming up:

Are Open Badges the future for recognition of skills? (JISC CETIS conference, Nottingham, 23 February 2012)
Why we need a debate about the purpose(s) of education (DML Conference, San Francisco, 1 March 2012)
The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies (TEDx Warwick, Coventry, 10 March 2012)

So, three different topics in three very different formats. The Open Badges talk tomorrow is part of a wider session and will be fairly relaxed and informal. The Purpos/ed one is an Ignite talk where I get 5 minutes (exactly!) to talk about my subject. I’ve got 20 slides and they’re advanced automatically every 20 seconds. Eek!

Finally, and the one I’m most excited about giving, is my TEDx Warwick talk. I’ve been using and adapting the advice in Nancy Duarte’s books Resonate and Slide:ology to help get my message across. I haven’t quite finished this one yet (and I’d better get a move on because they want my slides two weeks in advance!)

I hope you understand, therefore, why updates here might be quite light until March 11th. I’ve posted a couple of quick things over at literaci.es over the past week and I’ll make sure I update my conference blog. Other than that, why not get involved in the OpenBeta process for my new ebook, if you haven’t already? And, if you can, why not join me at TEDx Warwick?

Image CC BY-NC-SA foto_mania

Tools and processes

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

I see this a lot.

(click for larger version)

I appreciate the sentiment here. It’s an educator trying to share some tools in an organised way with some other educators. But mapping them against Bloom’s Taxonomy. Really?

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification of learning objectives within education proposed in 1956 by a committee of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom.

[…]

It refers to a classification of the different objectives that educators set for students (learning objectives). Bloom’s Taxonomy divides educational objectives into three “domains”: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (sometimes loosely described as knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/hands respectively). Within the domains, learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels.

(Wikipedia, accessed 21 February 2012)

Why is Flickr under Remembering when it can be used for mashups under a Creative Commons license? Surely VoiceThread can be used as much for Evaluating as Creating? How does Google Earth, in and of itself, promote Analysing?

Tools, by themselves, rarely develop higher-order thinking skills. It’s all about the processes around them and the context in which they’re used.

I’ve seen lessons and lectures that were captivating and really pushed students forward using no more than a blackboard and a piece of chalk. Similarly, I’ve seen some that used almost every conceivable piece of technology under the sun and students made little or no progress.

So educators, if you’re going to use a specific framework to present some tools or some ideas, please make sure that you understand the nature of that framework.

Image CC BY-ND Samantha Penney

Teaching the fourth “r:” webmaking as a vital 21st century skill?

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

Teaching the Fourth 'R'

On Thursday evening I listened in to a fantastic ‘fireside chat’ with author Cathy Davidson. She was in conversation with Michelle Levesque (mostly) and Mark Surman about what she considers to be the 4th ‘R’: algoRithmic thinking.

Session link: http://lanyrd.com/2012/CathyDavidson

Cathy’s fantastic. She’s an educational celebrity yet sharp, funny and incredibly warm. I had the amazing good fortune to interview her last year about her latest book, Now You See It whilst I was in New York for the Mobility Shifts conference. If you haven’t read that book yet, do so – I highly recommend it.

The audio should appear embedded below and the MozPad/backchannel/liveblog is available here.

[display_podcast]

More about this by Cathy Davidson: