Be of Use

Over break I kicked the tires on Udemy for the first time. Being that Big Data and Personalized Learning are my current obsessions I choose Educational Big Data and Learning Analytics as my first class. Above is a video from that class - I was surprised I had not seen it yet. Warning - it is put out by Ericsson - but they aren't selling broadband plans with it ( at least not directly). There's plenty of good sound bites in here, but Sugata Mitra's line toward the end jumped (19:07) off the screen at me - "the teacher needs to step back and say, 'today's topic is this, now open your notebook and figure it out.'" An exciting (at least for me) and simple statement on his vision of education. I have hear and read a lot about holding  students and adults responsible for their own learning. Frankly I think that there's a lot of focus on student learning and not near enough on teacher learning. This statement certainly asks the learner to own it.

My New Year's Resolution for 2012 was to blog. Well from a legacy grading point of view I'll give 35 posts a gift C+. This past semester I've been assigned to dive into assessment - because after all its 50% of my job. What Stiggins writes about that really has peaked my interest is students owning their own assessment. Makes all the sense in the world, but I never thought about the power of that. This is a good way to view blogging - as the assessment of how you're doing/what you're doing. Miguel Guhlin said its more about getting his thoughts down and reflecting more than anything. So perhaps I can use blogging as 1) a means of self eval and reflection ad 2) as an example to teachers of self-evaluation. I believe for 2013 I need to blog more frequently just to get in the habit of writing to find a rhythm/voice. Another thing I've noticed from other edubloggers is that depth is so important. Some of my posts were less than what is expect out of myself for wor