TP Blog article on PowerPoint Presentations: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, by S.H. Kaminski, 2003, http://www.shkaminski.com/Classes/Handouts/powerpoint.htm
”Presenters fail to establish ethos, their most powerful appeal. “
Posting on the Tomorrow’s Profeesor Blog by James L. Cooper, Graduate Education Department at California State University to support faculty and administrators in fostering student engagment including findings from “What Matters in College? Four Critical Years Revisited (Austin, 1997)”:
Curriculum played little role in student success. It was student involvement, fostered by student/student interaction and student/faculty interaction that predicted student success. These findings should guide course and program planning.
I’ve been involved in a JISC webinar all this week (an online seminar for an hour each lunchtime – see Peter’s Informaticopia blog for session details) and have been surprised how difficult it has been to concentrate. If you put aside the inevitable interruptions from people thinking you are just listening to music, and the phone calls, there’s still something about it which distracts me.
I think the main problem is having the text chat facility – I’m not so good at listening, thinking and typing at the same time (or listening, thinking and reading) – one of them gets lost, so I tend to miss what the speaker is saying while I’m ‘asking a question’ or ‘listening’ to another audience member comment.
This leads me on to conlclude that I’m clearly not a digital native/net generation/homozappien and, perhaps contrary to what David White mentioned in Thursday’s session, this multi-multi-tasking ability in “today’s youf” is a significant ability. It also made me wonder if a study has been done on accidents caused by use of mobile phones while driving, separated into age-groups – perhaps we will see an increased ability of young drivers to multi-task at the wheel without increasing their likelihood of having a crash. Or perhaps homozappiens are just good at spreading concentration evenly over many tasks, so in the end none get what they deserve?
Great presentation by James Farmer at education.au exploring how eLearning environments (from Computer labs to threaded discussions and MCQ quizzes to VLEs such as Blackboard) are tending to encourage teachers to perpetuate a transmissive model of education and how we might foster engagement and empowerment in teachers and learners using a blogging environment instead. He refers to the “Community of Inquiry Model” (Rourke et al 2001) that stresses the importance of social, cognitive and teaching presence in any effective learning encounter.
