For this week's Individual Assignments, in addition to our normal reading homework, we were asked to explore the It’s a Wild Ride! online learning unit available at (http://www.intel.com/education/projects/wildride/index.htm.) and to view the institutions vs. collaboration and/or How cognitive surplus will change the world. We were then to post reflections in your blogs about these items as well as for each of the strategies studied this week: Cooperative Learning and Reinforcing Effort.
It's a wild ride! seems like a pretty cool (though also very involved) multi-disciplanary educational project. I liked the break-down between the Science, Math, Social Studies and Language Arts disciplines. The sub-task projects were fairly straightforward and fun. All in all, this was a very in depth and well thought-out project that included some great links to other online resources. The resources were engaging and informative.
The Shirky video on Institutions vs. Collaboration was an extremely interesting, informative and thought-provoking (plus, the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island sounds like fun!). Clay Shirky is quite the public speaker! He was able to educate me on several different and varied topics (80/20 rule, the Ballmer vs. open source deiscussion, bloggers are or aren't journalists? and the short history of tagging, to name a few).
The Shirky video on Congnitive Surplus was an interesting video. Cognitive surplus, as presented in the video represents the combination of people's ability to donate their freetime and talent to commit to large scale shared projects (like the positive civic worldwide example that he gives at the beginning of the video or the communal Lolcats craze!) and the increased availability of media tools (that aren't being used to help us consume) that can be used to create and share ideas. (On a side note, Lolcats crack me up and can bring a swift end to one of my son's crying fits or tantrums!!! I love them for it!)
As usual, I will attempt to complete the reading reflection portion of the blog entry based on my previous experiences as a student and as the supervisor of some hard-working coast guardsmen. For Cooperative Learning, the first (and most obvious) example from which I can draw upon would be the groups that we employ in this class and several previous courses in this cohort. The use of these small groups has assisted me immensely. As one of the few non-teachers in this degree program it is great to hear the discussions of the teaching professionals as we attempt to complete our assignments. Where I can hypothesize and attempt to turn my experiences on the student side of the equation into ideas and possible actions for the teaching side, my fellow group members are able to almost immediately recall or postulate the usefulness and feasibility of one of these technology implementations in the classroom setting.
Reinforcing Effort strikes as being very similar, in spirit, to Providing Recognition. Perhaps, once again, this is based on my position outside the traditional education profession. While recognition can be a form of reinforcing effort, I find that it is hard to put my finger on this concept in my daily life due to the fact that the work product that my subordinates produce directly affects the marks that they receive and therefore affects their possibility of advancement and their career. The effort is automatically known to be paramount.
Please provide comments (especially on Reinforcing Effort, I fear I may have missed the boat on that one!).
I could not help but see your plea for help :) I am not good myself at recognizing effort. I have really been working on mentioning to students on an individual basis things I see that is good and stands out. However, I feel like I focus on kids that struggle and forget to recognize those who are always doing what they should be doing. I see you are not a teacher so I am not sure how reinforcing effort could work in your career. But I agree and feel you are correct when you say reinforcing effort is a lot like providing recognition. However, it is on a more personal level than a public level.
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