Multiple choice test

MC test

An interesting text from Twitter Jeroen Bottema:
I don’t need to tell you, but the United States is one of the most tested countries in the world, and the weapon of choice is the multiple-choice test. While many scorn them because they don’t allow an opportunity for learning, multiple-choice tests have become a staple in the U.S. — from college admissions to the popular television program Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Multiple-choice questions are an accepted institution. Yet we know little about where they come from. When researching materials for my book, Save Our Science, I stumbled across their not-so-nice origins.
Testing Testing 1-2-3

Most of us have experienced a multiple-choice test. <a href=" More …

Web literacies

Dough Belshaw

Into the wild – Technology for open educational resources

By Amber Thomas, Lorna M. Campbell, Phil Barker and Martin Hawksey (Eds). December 2012

Reflections on three years of the UK OER Programmes.

Between 2009 and 2012 the Higher Education Funding Council funded a series of programmes to encourage higher education institutions in the UK to release existing educational content as Open Educational Resources. The HEFCE funded UK OER Programme was run and managed by the JISC and the Higher Education Academy. The JISC CETIS “OER Technology Support Project” provided support for technical innovation across this programme. This book synthesises and reflects on the approaches taken and lessons learnt across the Programme and by the Support Project.

This book is not intended as a beginners guide or a technical manual, instead it is an expert synthesis of the key technical issues arising from a national publicly-funded programme. It is intended for people working with technology to support the creation, management, dissemination and tracking of open educational resources, and particularly those who design digital infrastructure and services at institutional and national level.

More publications on OER and OPen Education on
Jisc Cetis Publications

What do we teach? Happy Easter

Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, says the goal of education today  should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.  (nytimes)

Students must learn to be  curious, persistent, and willing to take risks. They must be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.”

We teach and test things most students are not interested in, maybe nothing in school is exciting for your child. and will never need, and facts that they can find on internet and will forget as soon as the test is over.

So  xMOOCs for young students which are  build to teach facts only is a diasaster to education.  Of course some facts and basic skills are needed, but the facts and information should be learned in a connecivist way, because of the need for connectivist skills and creativity, innovation and curiosity.

We could ask some ethical questions when universtities and colleges are using xMOOCs to teach students.

Do  these courses teach students the right skills and habits?

These xMOOCs are still experimental, so schools should be carefull when applying these experiments to students. Scientists do have standards and regulations for exposing testees (subjects) to experiments.

Testing for facts makes students learn facts and kills curiosity and motivation.

Image The Moongate Garden, designed by architect Jean Paul Carlhian, Smithsonian Wash DC.

Digital Citizenship, digital literacy

In the 21st century digital literacy  ( No Dutch page on this subject in Wikipedia) belongs to the basic skills of the educated person. It is a prerequisite in order to function in the information society. Digital literacy demands, like language skills and numeracy, a formation process that everyone must go through for a long time. Therefore it is an important subject in the curriculum. Current courses in this field do not prepare students for the information society. The government must implement a comprehensive change in secondary education to improve digital information and communication. Otherwise the Netherlands will be lagging behind and leading position as a knowledge and innovation economy will be in danger.
(Bron )

In 1997, Paul Gilster wrote a book entitled Digital literacy (New York: Wiley).

Digital Citizenship has aspects and components:
Digital Access: full electronic participation in society.
Digital Commerce: electronic buying and selling of goods
Digital Communication: electronic exchange of information.
Digital Literacy: process of teaching and learning about technology and the use of technology.
Digital Etiquette: electronic standards of conduct or procedure.
Digital Law: electronic responsibility for actions and deeds
Digital Rights & Responsibilities: those freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world.
digital civil rights.
Digital Health & Wellness: physical and psychological well-being in a digital technology world.
Digital Security (self-protection): electronic precautions to guarantee safety.[http://digitalcitizenship.net/Nine_Elements.html]
Digital identity, Bonnie Stewart
Digital networking and connecting

source image: http://ace.nsw.gov.au/social/being_skilled/being-skilled-foundation-skills/

Edublogger

Human or machine, what must we teach? #etmooc

Farmers used to sit on their tractors and plough for days. Now tractors do plough on their own, because some farmers invented an automated system. My neighbor is a farmer and he does milk 200 cows on his own. He has a computerized milking and feeding system.
Lots of jobs can be done better by machines and cheaper than by humans.(thanks Vanessa)
What should our children learn and what shall we teach them? Imagine a world of automated machines for almost every task, what should humans do in that world?
Maybe we do need humans to make these machines, to invent the machines and to replace them or repair?
We would need people to care for other people. But some surgery is done best by machines.
Kind of science fiction coming true?
Or as Dave Cormier writes “I want us to be passing on the ability to choose. The will to understand. The work ethic required to engage at something for long enough to understand it. The sense of responsibility to believe that you should do that for yourself. I don’t care about the content or the rules associated with it… those we can find.”?

Sterotypes

Knowledge of today writes: “
People are not being educated; they’re being tested for levels of obedience. School is about memorizing what you are told short term and repeating it. The bulk of how you are graded is by completing daily work. Obedience is, in fact, work force’s most important quality in a worker bee.”
Is this what xMOOC’s do to students? With video and quizes, medals or badges for compliance? Is a xMOOC student just learning what someone else wants them to learn?
At the other end of the spectre we find student autonomy.
But what of the expectations of the student? If we look outside the context of the classroom, we find that learning happens whenever it can, in whatever order is necessary, in response to real performative needs. … The promise of MOOCs lies not in what the format lets us do, but in what the format lets us question: Where does learning happen?
What is the right way of organizing education?

Stereotypes in a MOOC, pedagogy #etmooc #mooc #edsmooc

What stereotypes do designers of MOOCs use when designing? What stereotypes do educators and teachers use in schools?
What is the meaning of these stereotypes?
Some xMOOCs seem to view upon their students as followers or consumers.
Stephen Downes in the old Daily made me think of this subject again, by writing about Noam Chomsky. “Our kids are being prepared for passive obedience, not creative, independent lives.”.

My question: Is education a means to prepare obedience? What should educators teach about being human? Is education equal to be prepared for a job?

We can begin simply, with an assertion made by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, that MOOCs facilitate “knowledge production rather than knowledge consumption”, and that this automatically shifts the pedagogy from teacher to student — or rather, participant. 

Education as  instrumental: “Education is how to make sure we’ve got a work force that’s productive and competitive,” said President Bush in 2004. “Countries that outteach us today,” as President Obama put it in 2009, “will outcompete us tomorrow.“

In part because of budget cuts, hundreds of thousands of students in California’s three public higher-education systems are shut out of the gateway courses they must pass to fulfill their general education requirements or proceed with their major. Many are forced to spend extra semesters, or years, to get degrees.
Under the legislation, some of the eligible courses would likely be free “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, like those offered by providers like Coursera, Udacity and edX; others might come from companies like Straighterline, which offers low-price online courses, or Pearson, the educational publishing and testing company. (NY Times3/13/2013)

Or a liberal arts education: “of what a college should strive to be: an aid to reflection, a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others”

Or something different from both?

Open letter to a teacher

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Dear colleague,
On your website I do find great and useful educational material  that I would like to use. It is great stuff. But you have a copyright sign © on your website.
Now I do not know why you’ve put that copyright mark there. But now there is a problem because I am not allowed to use your beautiful material  because you explicitly want to apply copyright.
So I cannot tell you whether I like using your material in my lessons, because I am not free to use it. Because that is what a copyright notice  on your site stand for anyway?
Maybe you have good arguments as to why you want to retain copyright on your website, which is unfortunate.
Maybe you really want me and other teachers to use your educational materials. The copyright sign © an obstacle.
You could delete the copyright symbol and add a copyleft sign or creative commons. Then I can use your great materials, I would really appreciate it.
It is important that you make very clear which rights you want to apply, because if you just leave it copyright laws apply.