Källkritk

"As more and more districts, give in and extend at least a little rope when it comes to the creation and participation of online learning communities more and more educators will need to understand how to develop a successful online learning community. In her recent interview for the  USDOE-supported Connected Educators site, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach author of The Connected Educator explains how to develop effective online learning communities."

Shona Whyte:
Leslie M-B is assistant professor of history in Idaho and has this thought-provoking post on using collaborative digital projects to improve the teaching and learning of history:

"To move beyond the era of content standards, we need to acknowledge—and convey to our teacher candidates—that one need not be an expert in a content area in order to teach it.  We already see this attitude in English classes, where the  literary canon has been in flux for some time. As an English teacher, I wouldn’t need to be an acknowledged expert on, or even a specialist in, Huckleberry Finn to teach it to junior high school students. Instead, I’d need to know how a novel works; I’d need to know how plot, characters, conflict, and other literary devices combine.  Knowing the history is necessary, too, but information about what was going on in the U.S. at the time Twain wrote his novel is only an internet search away.  I need not have learned it at some fixed point way back in tenth grade and filed it away until I required it in my own classroom teaching."

Much of this is of course directly applicable to the language classroom.

21st cntry skills teachers need: Can s-t relations properly form online?

Asking questions is a great way to enhance the learning process both in school and later on in life. Unfortunately the human fallacy here is that we sometimes don't feel the need to truly think before we ask these questions, which can lead to frustration, disappointment, and resentment—everything except learning the knowledge we seek—when we don't get the answer we were expecting. There is definitely a science behind asking smart questions, and this article lays it out rather nicely.

The library is one of most the perfect places for “beyond the classroom learning.” It is the place where students are, or should be encouraged to explore other worlds, to develop their imagination, to think about the impossible. This process of inquiry is what makes learning a beautiful thing and this crucial step, “the jewel,” is something commonly missed when teachers plan a new unit of work. Sometimes we fail to go back to the basics. We replace simple words such as “finding out” and “enjoyment” with “success” and “assessment.” Often teachers can forget about the process and cast their eyes only to the outcome.

Robin Good: What does curation mean from an educational viewpoint? And what is the key difference between "collecting" and "curating".

Nancy White (@NancyW), a 21st Century Learning & Innovation Specialist and the author of Innovations in Education blog, has written an excellent article, dissecting the key characterizing traits of curation, as a valuable resource to create and share knowledge. 

She truly distills some key traits of curation in a way that is clear and comprehensible to anyone.

She writes: "The first thing I realized is that in order to have value-added benefits to curating information, the collector needs to move beyond just classifying the objects under a certain theme to deeper thinking through a) synthesis and b) evaluation of the collected items.

How are they connected?"

Excellent definition. 

And then she also frames perfectly the relevance of "context" for any meaningful curation project by writing: "I believe when we curate, organization moves beyond thematic to contextual – as we start to build knowledge and understanding with each new resource that we curate.

Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.”

Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important.

So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard."

But there's a lot more insight distilled in this article as Nancy captures with elegance the difference between collecting for a personal interest and curating for a specific audience. 

She finally steals my full endorsement for this article by discretely inquirying how great a value it would be to allow students to "curate" the domains of interest they need to master.

Excellent. Highly recommended. 9/10

Full article: http://d20innovation.d20blogs.org/2012/07/07/understanding-content-curation/ ;