Infiltrating the Walled Garden
May 02, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Wm. Beasley
Learning Management Systems (LMS) are walled gardens. They provide substantial control over the environment in which learning activities take place, and at first glance this appears to be a good thing. For this reason they are often relatively appealing to faculty members beginning to make the transition from fully traditional classroom instruction. The level of control is familiar… but it is also misleading when taken in the context of the full learning process (see “Hack the LMS: Getting Progressive” for more on this).
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Learning Management Systems (LMS) are walled gardens. They provide substantial control over the environment in which learning activities take place, and at first glance this appears to be a good thing. For this reason they are often relatively appealing to faculty members beginning to make the transition from fully traditional classroom instruction. The level of control is familiar… but it is also misleading when taken in the context of the full learning process (see “Hack the LMS: Getting Progressive” for more on this).
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The Four Noble Virtues of Digital Media Citation
April 24, 2012 | Filed in: Literacies
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our ideas about pedagogy, teaching practices, and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative academic publishers depends on our sharing ideas as part of a much larger project or conversation.
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In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our ideas about pedagogy, teaching practices, and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative academic publishers depends on our sharing ideas as part of a much larger project or conversation.
Read More...How to Storify. Why to Storify.
April 14, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
Storify describes itself: “Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.” It’s a beautiful description and yet we’re not sure we buy it. For us, Storify feels more like the layer beneath social networks. The layer where the archiving (not the “amplifying”) happens. Story doesn’t “drive” or “build” thinking. Story organizes and maps thinking. The power of Storify, then, is in its ability to cohere and preserve, to create a blueprint for a much wilder and more disparate conversation happening on the web.
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Storify describes itself: “Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.” It’s a beautiful description and yet we’re not sure we buy it. For us, Storify feels more like the layer beneath social networks. The layer where the archiving (not the “amplifying”) happens. Story doesn’t “drive” or “build” thinking. Story organizes and maps thinking. The power of Storify, then, is in its ability to cohere and preserve, to create a blueprint for a much wilder and more disparate conversation happening on the web.
Read More...Document Sharing and Markup
February 13, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Pete Rorabaugh
Text becomes our voice in digital space. In the land-based classroom, we speak. In the online classroom, we compose. What we write, the way that we write, and our interactions with the writing of others determines who we are in the online or hybrid classroom. Critical pedagogy, the tradition of progressive, socially and politically conscious teaching, asserts that our voice is an expression of our power. As such, the way we write establishes an authority about which we should be conscious.
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Text becomes our voice in digital space. In the land-based classroom, we speak. In the online classroom, we compose. What we write, the way that we write, and our interactions with the writing of others determines who we are in the online or hybrid classroom. Critical pedagogy, the tradition of progressive, socially and politically conscious teaching, asserts that our voice is an expression of our power. As such, the way we write establishes an authority about which we should be conscious.
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