The Wiki Way Of Learning

Enabling readers to see how wikis' content and content creation processes can be harnessed for instructional design, this collection represents an important advance in improving education through collaborative technologies.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains the public-license Wiki sources discussed in the book plus the means to run them as stand-alone or using the industry-strength Apache Web server, as well as complete Perl and Apache server packages for both Linux and Windows. Contents: two perl programs, ActivePerl and IndigoPerl; three different stages of customized basic QuickiWikis; additional Wiki packages, PythonWiki, Ruby, and RWiki; Apache HTTP server version 1.3.

In this digital age, faculty, teachers, and teacher educators are increasingly expected to adopt and adapt pedagogical perspectives to support student learning in instructional environments featuring online or blended learning. One highly adopted element of online and blended learning involves the use of online learning discussions. Discussion-based learning offers a rich pedagogical context for creating learning opportunities as well as a great deal of flexibility for a wide variety of learning and learner contexts. As post-secondary and, increasingly, K-12 institutions cope with the rapid growth of online learning, and an increase in the cultural diversity of learners, it is critical to understand, at a detailed level, the relationship between online interaction and learning and how educationally-effective interactions might be nurtured, in an inclusive way, by instructors. The Handbook of Research on Online Discussion-Based Teaching Methods is a cutting-edge research publication that seeks to identify promising designs, pedagogical and assessment strategies, conceptual models, and theoretical frameworks that support discussion-based learning in online and blended learning environments. This book provides a better understanding of the effects and both commonalities and differences of new tools that support interaction, such as video, audio, and real-time interaction in discussion-based learning. Featuring a wide range of topics such as gamification, intercultural learning, and digital agency, this book is ideal for teachers, educational software developers, instructional designers, IT consultants, academicians, curriculum designers, researchers, and students.

The book concerns the ways in which the new media shape communication along with educational expectations and practices in foreign language classrooms. Although foreign language learners have cheap and easy access to information and ways of communication, they also wrestle with problems that have always accompanied language learning. The focus of the book is two-fold. On the one hand, the authors demonstrate how using social networks, videoconferencing, mobile phones, wikis, and computer-mediated interaction contributes to the development of language skills, negotiated interaction, autonomy, and intercultural competence. On the other, they discuss “old” issues pertaining to the role of vocabulary, corrective feedback, textbooks and inner speech in the process of language learning and use. Every chapter reports original empirical research on issues related to the new media and old problems in foreign language teaching contexts in various countries, and with respect to various age groups.

Wikis can bring people from around the world together to collaborate on online projects. Wikis also offer a great opportunity to practice using technology to produce and publishing writing. Readers of this book will learn how to create, edit, and manage a wiki. They will find out how to use photos, text, sounds, and videos to convey ideas and share information with their group. They will also learn the importance of sharing the workload with team members.

This monograph examines the nature of active learning at the higher education level, the empirical research on its use, the common obstacles and barriers that give rise to faculty resistance, and how faculty and staff can implement active learning techniques. A preliminary section defines active learning and looks at the current climate surrounding the concept. A second section, entitled "The Modified Lecture" offers ways that teachers can incorporate active learning into their most frequently used format: the lecture. The following section on classroom discussion explains the conditions and techniques needed for the most useful type of exchange. Other ways to promote active learning are also described including: visual learning, writing in class, problem solving, computer-based instruction, cooperative learning, debates, drama, role playing, simulations, games, and peer teaching. A section on obstacles to implementing active learning techniques leads naturally to the final section, "Conclusions and Recommendations," which outlines the roles that each group within the university can play in order to encourage the implementation of active learning strategies. The text includes over 200 references and an index. (JB)

Experience and Education is the best concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education (Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received. Analyzing both "traditional" and "progressive" education, Dr. Dewey here insists that neither the old nor the new education is adequate and that each is miseducative because neither of them applies the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Many pages of this volume illustrate Dr. Dewey's ideas for a philosophy of experience and its relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators looking for a new movement in education should think in terms of the deeped and larger issues of education rather than in terms of some divisive "ism" about education, even such an "ism" as "progressivism." His philosophy, here expressed in its most essential, most readable form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, on that offers a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic.