Social media, the democratisation of knowledge and physiotherapy. Can they play nice together?

Dear researcher, which side of history will you be on? | Mendeley Blog – Annotated

• technology is finally at a point that if we don’t use it now, then we are holding back the progress of science
• The dominant mode of communicating research results is through peer-reviewed literature. This dates back to more than 300 years ago when scholarly societies formed and needed a way to present their findings
• Publishers are already experimenting with the models, but they are waiting for something before going full force. They are waiting for us, the researchers
• We could choose to publish in only Open Access. We could choose to reward tenure for Open Data. We could choose to only reward publications or data that are proven to be reused and make either a marked economic or research impact. Instead, we choose to follow a model that promotes prestige as the primary objective
• Each time we hold back data or publish research that isn’t immediately open to all, we have chosen to be on the wrong side of history.
• We could wait for policy changes from the top, but that is neither a timely, nor guaranteed solution
• It is not uncommon to see research that is already two years old before it sees the light of day. This cannot be good for the progress of science.
• “Article-level metrics” (ALM) is one step toward weaning the addiction that we have with journal impact factors. Here, we disassociate the significance of the article from the prestige of the journal that it is packaged in
• One way to promote the sharing of knowledge, and thus be on the right side of history, is through reputation metrics. Unlike previous measurements for impact though, this would be designed to reward researchers who contribute to Open Data and science online
• Platforms such as Mendeley can have a hand in meeting both the first and second conditions. Mendeley is more than just a reference manager, it is also a system that aggregates the metadata of millions of documents and provides authors the opportunity to promote their works
• Those researchers who openly and quickly publish research or data for download will be rewarded.* Those who do not will adapt or risk falling into obscurity. As we wait for policy changes to be enacted by the top, we must act at the bottom to encourage a behavioral change in how we share our knowledge

Supporting learning in unexpected spaces. – Annotated

• All of our attention is focused on real and virtual classrooms and we often neglect the space between the lecture theater and the LMS. Attention, I think, needs to be given to unacknowledged learning and teaching places. Around the water cooler, between computer terminals, seated in the cafetaria, texting on mobile phones, waiting on strategically placed benches, posted on signboards, relaxing in a residence hall etc.
• Learning designers need to think between the corridors and computers, and ask how can these spaces be used to support learning.
• Where discussions and clarification took place either in the lecture / tutorial / virtual room, teachers and students that use networked digital devices can conduct their teaching and learning seamlessly across both physical and virtual spaces, synchronously and asynchronously
• learning designers also need to find a way to support the creation of informal learning space between the virtual world and the classroom place.
• If our attention is focused only between the real and virtual classrooms then it’s likely that we’ll fail in our attempt to use these new spaces constructively
• don’t forget about the inbetween spaces and ask how you can support students freedom to engage in self-directed and independent learning outside the formally planned and tutor-directed activities

Brian Holmes’ research blog: Online learning Communities – Annotated

1037. The Link Between Teaching and Research – Does it Exist? « Tomorrow’s Professor Blog

• Faculty members with strong research records and below-average teaching routinely get to be full professors, while outstanding teachers with below-average (and sometimes average) research productivity don’t get tenure
• Depressingly many research papers are published that have little or no impact on technology or society and are never cited by anyone other than their authors
• If university administrators were being honest, they would state that they need massive amounts of external research funding to function, the chancellor of a university that proclaimed teaching to be of secondary importance would have to face some hard and unwelcome questions, so what happens instead is rationalization
• There is no logical reason to expect productivity in research and effectiveness in teaching to be closely related, since research and teaching have different goals and require different skills and personal attributes
• The goal of research is to advance knowledge, while that of teaching is to develop and enhance abilities
• Excellent researchers must be observant, objective, skilled at drawing inferences, and tolerant of ambiguity; excellent teachers must be skilled at communication, familiar with the conditions that promote learning and expert at establishing them, approachable, and empathetic
• Having both sets of traits is clearly desirable but not at all necessary to succeed in one domain or the other
• Moreover, first-class teaching and first-class research can each consume well over 40 hours a week, so that time spent on one activity is inevitably time taken from the other
• It should therefore come as no surprise if studies reveal no significant correlations between research productivity and teaching effectiveness

• Argument: Research productivity correlates positively with teaching effectiveness. Fact: Wrong. Correlations between numbers of papers and grants and measures of teaching quality such as student evaluations, peer evaluations, and learning outcomes are mostly negligible and sometimes negative

• Argument: Research-intensive universities provide the best undergraduate education. Fact: Wrong. In reality, significant negative correlations have been found between a university’s research orientation and numerous student learning and satisfaction outcomes

• Argument: Only active researchers are sufficiently current in science and engineering to be viable teachers. Fact: Never demonstrated, and almost certainly wrong

• Argument: Faculty with active research programs bring their research into the classroom and use it to inform and enliven their teaching. Fact: Usually wrong, especially in undergraduate classes, and when research is integrated into teaching it’s not always a good thing. Most current research is well beyond the scope of all but advanced graduate courses, and rigid curricula make it challenging to bring in new material

• Argument: Research experiences enhance undergraduate education. Fact: True for some students. No supporting evidence exists for this presumption; in fact, much undergraduate research directed by research faculty has students functioning more as unpaid lab technicians than as true researchers

• In short, the unwritten rule that all university faculty should be active researchers places unreasonable and unhealthy demands on faculty members; weakens departmental teaching programs; keeps potentially outstanding teachers from devoting enough time and energy to teaching to realize their potential; deprives students of some inspirational and possibly life-changing instructors, mentors, and role models; and is unsupportable by either logic or research

The Future of Education is Here » Blog Archive » Robert Redford, Myths, and the Future

Some of the skills that today’s learners will need to demonstrate in order to be successful in the future:

• Flexible Thinking: In a world in which future workers are likely to have as many as eight careers or more in their lifetimes, lifelong learning will be essential but flexibility of thought will be equally critical, enabling individuals to move seamlessly from one transition to another
• Multiple Interpretations: The New Civic Discourse driver from the 2020 Forecast depicts a world in which continuous, bottom-up communication will be the norm, bringing an ever-widening circle of individuals with divergent views into contact with one another. If this dialogue is to be fruitful, not fractious, we will need to develop a new capacity for dialogue which includes the capacity to see multiple perspectives
• Willingness to Experiment and Learning from Mistakes: Dynamism and acceleration are hallmarks of our current age. To innovate in this world, rapid beta-building and the habits of mind such as a willingness to experiment and reframing of “mistakes” as failures, to “mistake” as learning opportunities will be required
• Visual and Spatial Abilities: If we are to make sense of the vast amounts of knowledge we are creating, the knowledge era must become the visual era. We need to develop the capacity to bring multiple streams of information together in new ways to provide sophisticated and elegant pictures of complex situations

1031. Gaining Factual Knowledge « Tomorrow’s Professor Blog

• The foundations of any discipline are its definition, knowledge base, terminology, structure, methodology, and epistemology
• While traditional teaching methods, especially lecture and readings, are quite efficient at “delivering” this kind of information, the question is whether “delivery” is enough
• there are two essential tasks to foster student achievement: help students see the relevance and importance of the information, and make it understandable
• the dimensions of teaching that are the strongest correlates of student achievement are: 1) preparation and organization; 2) clarity of communication; 3) perceived outcome of the instruction; and 4) stimulating student interest in the course content
• Teachers must possess a great deal of different kinds of knowledge:
• The first is “content knowledge,”
• The second is “pedagogical content knowledge,” or understanding of pedagogy, teaching and learning, and its application to the discipline
• Finally is “curricular knowledge,” an enhanced version of the latter where the teacher has a repertoire of strategies, materials, approaches, and alternatives that are called on to help students learn
• the teacher provides both the organizational structure and the appropriate level of complexity for the students
• However, structuring and organizing information and activities does not mean exercising complete control over all aspects of the course
• Incorporate motivational strategies into your teaching, using activities that allow students to find information, to organize it in meaningful ways, or to use it, all have the potential to provide opportunities for success and intrinsic motivation
• When students passively sit and listen to 50 minutes or more of a lecture, they have little investment in learning except to do it in order to pass a test and get a grade
• You can exhibit skills that help students to see structure, to relate topics, and to organize information
• A teacher who says, “This is how we approach a problem in our discipline” or “This is how I would go about answering this question,” is showing students a process that is transferable
• Even when dealing with knowledge level objectives, a teacher can show students how topics relate to and build on each other
• Content-heavy courses may not seem to be the right places for instructional methods that have been shown to enhance conceptual learning, but conceptual understanding can often help students make sense of the facts, terms, and organization of the subject
• When you ask students to organize information or place it in context (and that, in itself, can be a team assignment) you help them to construct more complete knowledge
• Concept maps (14) are useful at this level because they provide a structural picture of the relationships of information and concepts
• When the objective is for students to learn basic facts, the assessments you choose should provide direct evidence of knowledge
• they should also link that knowledge to deeper understanding of the material
• Courses that most often require students to learn basic information are frequently offered in the first year and in large-enrollment settings
• Your students probably have little experience with the content and they may not have sophisticated learning skills
• You cannot wait until mid-semester or later to assess learning
• When you and your students know what needs attention, both teaching and learning become more efficient
• assessment with feedback is most beneficial for student learning
• the objective is not simply to determine right or wrong, but rather to focus on why a given answer is correct and on the process used to arrive at that answer

Gilly Salmon’s Five Stage Model: a useful referrence « Mollybob Goes To School

• Salmon’s model moves away from the increasingly dated notion that the effective eLearning can be achieved through static learning objects (Downes 2005), and takes a social learning perspective with particular emphasis on communities of practice, providing a framework to support Wenger’s assertion that “learning cannot be designed: it can only be designed for – that is, facilitated or frustrated” (1998, p. 228).
• Salmon’s model is also reliant upon scaffolding, extending Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (in Attwell 2006) proposition with the model’s structure implying that the moderator acts as an initial scaffold who gradually shifts responsibility for development to the learning community under their guidance, with learners developing their own scaffolding based on relationships with many within the community, and eventually, beyond the community.

Building Trust in Your Online Community | Remote Access

• Lead by Example
• It is an essential part of our jobs to model what we would like to see
• Get Personal
• Be willing to share of yourself. Share your stories and your life
• be willing to be open
• Be Honest
• you need to be willing to share your thoughts and opinions about things
• Accept that You’re Human
• Learn for mistakes and move on
• Be Knowledgeable and Share
• Share of yourself and of your passions. Make your presence in a space one that has personality and share what you have
• Share the things you find online
• Maintain Consistency
• Maintaining consistency will allow your students to be comfortable in your space, understanding what happens there and able to concentrate on what they are being asked to do
• Let it Go
• Be prepared to see cycles between students and even within the contributions of single students
• Don’t Give Up
• How can we change what we are asking them to do in order for them to grow into their roles

Personalizing Learning – The Important Role of Technology — Open Education

• “My job is to present the material in an interesting and meaningful way,” he would say. “It is the student’s job to learn that material.”

  Implicit in his statement was the idea that it was the student’s role to adjust to the various styles employed by different teachers. Whether the teacher featured a lecture format or a hands-on approach was immaterial – the assumption was that students were the ones who needed to be flexible

• any failure on the student’s part to master the material was not the responsibility of the teacher
• students moved along as a group, each doing the same set of assignments, each expected to master the exact same set of learning objectives by a date set forth in the syllabus
• differentiating for a specific learner was perceived as showing favoritism
• today’s teacher is expected to adjust to the varied preferences of students so as to maximize the learning potential of each individual in the classroom
• Personalizing learning involves differentiating the curricula, including expectations and timelines, and utilizing various instructional approaches so as to best meet the needs of each individual
• The challenge is not so much what those elements consist of but how to piece the elements together to form a cohesive strategy
• But technology also plays a more important role in the personalization process. Ultimately it is the conduit for teachers to move to a learning approach that features materials developed for each individual student
• One of the critical elements to a cohesive strategy involves the concept of a learning platform
• First teachers must have a clear understanding of the learning needs of each student
• teachers must monitor and assess student progress intently
• Learning paths must then be created that match the aptitude and learning styles of every individual
• One of the first elements is increased communication among educators themselves as well as with their individual students
• That means increased use of email
• Better yet, it means posting that assignment online for students and parents to access directly
• No one educator could possibly create unique learning materials for every single student
• An expectation that all teachers are ready for such steps is destined for failure

Accessing e-learning resources in the NHS « e-LiME

• Whereas in Africa limited infrastructure is producing an information bottleneck, access in the UK is restricted by ‘denial of service’ restrictions placed upon a competent and fast modern system
• how do we go about managing the risks more effectively to allow NHS staff to access online learning resources and tools which many of us take for granted

Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning – Educational Research

• what processes people perceived as important for knowledge maturing within their organisation and how ell they though these processes were important. The two processes perceived as most important were ‘reflection’ and ‘building relationships’ between people. These were also the two processes seen as amongst the least supported
• The issue of ‘reflection’ is more complex. e-Portfolio researchers have always emphasised the centrality of reflection to learning, yet it is hard to see concrete examples of how this can be supported

We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

• the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades
• 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006
• As a result, instead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed
• The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication. Then, once it is published, it joins the multitudes of other, related publications that researchers must read and evaluate for relevance to their own work. Reviewer time and energy requirements multiply by the year
• The pace of publication accelerates, encouraging projects that don’t require extensive, time-consuming inquiry and evidence gathering
• Questionable work finds its way more easily through the review process and enters into the domain of knowledge
• Aspiring researchers are turned into publish-or-perish entrepreneurs, often becoming more or less cynical about the higher ideals of the pursuit of knowledge
• The surest guarantee of integrity, peer review, falls under a debilitating crush of findings, for peer review can handle only so much material without breaking down. More isn’t better. At some point, quality gives way to quantity
• Several fixes come to mind:
• First, limit the number of papers to the best three, four, or five that a job or promotion candidate can submit. That would encourage more comprehensive and focused publishing
• Second, make more use of citation and journal “impact factors
• Third, change the length of papers published in print: Limit manuscripts to five to six journal-length pages
• and put a longer version up on a journal’s Web site
• what we surely need is a change in the academic culture that has given rise to the oversupply of journals
• Finally, researchers themselves would devote more attention to fewer and better papers actually published, and more journals might be more discriminating

Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning – Educational Research

• the present ‘industrial’ schooling system is fast becoming dysfunctional, neither providing the skills and competences required in our economies nor corresponding to the ways in which we are using the procedural and social aspects of technology for learning and developing and sharing knowledge
• Personal Learning Environments can support and mediate individual and group based learning in multiple contexts and promote learner autonomy and control
• The role of teachers in such an environment would be to support, model and scaffold learning
• Such approaches to learning recognise the role of informal learning and the role of context
• Schools can only form one part of such collaborative and networked knowledge constellation
• institutions must rethink and recast their role as part of community and distributed networks supporting learning and collaborative knowledge development
• the major impact of the uses of new technologies and social networking for learning is to move learning out of the institutions and into wider society
• This is a two way process, not only schools reaching outwards, but also opening up to the community, distributed or otherwise, to join in collaborative learning processes
• At the same time new interfaces to computers and networks are likely to render the keyboard obsolescent, allowing the integration of computers and learning in everyday life and activity