Future of Education Participation

Dave Cormier is doing a presentation on “Snowclones, Clichés and Memes” with live active participation. We’re pretending that we’re in a class 10 years in the future. This is live blogged, although I’m not trying to get everything he says.

Dave used a pageflakes page to discuss rather than doing slides in Elluminate:
http://www.pageflakes.com/cormier/11091021

What are snowclones?

Phrases with a structure that have been changed. (Update: OK, that was a really crappy definition, but I really had some trouble understanding the concept. Snowclones are structured phrases where the structure stays the same but the specifics change, like in the example below.)

Example:
Original phrase: “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”
Snowclone: “Wikis and podcasts and blogs, oh my!”

Disposable Learning Objects: When learning takes a long time to develop, it’s out of date by the time it’s ready. Disposable Learning Object is created at the simplest level, locally, and can be tossed if it isn’t any good.

And of course, we had technology difficulties during the presentation…

Disposable Learning Objects also lets people record their mistakes, which can be valuable.

This is related to PLEs–dynamic, individualized learning.

When you first ask students to be active learners, people first react with anger, then disgust–they think you aren’t capable of teaching them anything because you aren’t simply pouring knowledge in your brain.

Allowing us to post on any site with tagging means 65 people can all actively participate at the same time, as well as allowing a public record of what we discussed and learned.

(My thoughts: This was a cool idea, but hard to do in 30 minutes, especially with technology problems.)

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6 thoughts on “Future of Education Participation

  1. I’ve seen protopage too, but I haven’t really used either one much. My iGoogle homepage is my home base online. I can definitely see the advantage of something like Pageflakes or Protopage for sharing and interacting as Dave had us do though.

  2. Hi Dave,

    No worries; I understand being in a house full of geeks. 🙂 I have no room to judge. After all, my Dave and I became friends playing D&D.

    This was a creative presentation today, and I enjoyed the process. I often find that online seminars require so little of my brain that I can do two other things at the same time. With your presentation, I had to devote my full attention to keep up with what was happening.

    Thanks for being brave enough to try something totally different with us. It was fun!

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