Digital Student Writing (Tags #change11 #potcert11 #evomlit)

Upfront disclaimer and confession: this post has nothing to do with current or even recent lesson topics in either Change 11 or Program for Online Teaching. Aha, serendipity alert: inadvertently, I seem to be in sync with the POT Wk 20 topic, instruction design. 

 

Whatever, Digital Student Writing and the perennial problem of getting students to write are germane and central both to the declared focus of this blog and online or computer assisted learning (whatever the current nomenclature flava is). Moocxtination (just made that up, more or less a mashup of MOOC + destination) is less clear, especially without a map or well beaten path to follow. For now, I'm relating it online writing and study groups (e.g. in areas such as GED, ESL, college prep, continuing education, DIY PD, etc. that I have perhaps futile hopes of adapting MOOC model to)


Taking where learners write from the most and are more comfortable writing strikes me as a logical starting point. It's like planning a drainage systen: first see where the water wants to go (or not) and then design accordingly.

Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students :: WIDE Research Center, Michigan State University

This white paper reports initial findings from a Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center study entitled Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students. These initial findings are drawn from a survey of students enrolled in writing classes at a sample of US postsecondary institutions.

Turning Kids From India’s Slums Into Autodidacts | KurzweilAI

Turning Kids From India’s Slums Into Autodidacts

December 6, 2010

Source: The Wall Street Journal, Dec 4, 2010

Replacing the medieval habit of schooling — one teacher telling a bunch of children what to think — Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist whose self-learning experiment inspired the film “Slumdog Millionaire”– is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves, so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer.

Dr. Mitra asked a class of poor Tamil-speaking kids to use the Internet, which they had not yet encountered, to learn biotechnology, which they had never heard of, in English, which they did not speak. Two months later he was astounded at what they had taught themselves.

On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams. To go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, or the “granny cloud” as he calls it: amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online.

And now, Mitra’s Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) are going global.

Read original article

via kurzweilai.net

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