6-Thoughts+&+Ideas

This is an area that I want to use as "random thougts"/ "to do" area. As I am reading, I am thinking of ways to apply ideas at work from better developing my team to working with my teams in our call centers. Ideally I can remember to house all my thoughts and ideas here so i can follow up on them as I have time.

- Create a wiki through SharePoint for sales agents to share effective selling techniques. 1. check with web team on system abilities/limitations 2. identify 1st 2-3 topics 3. consider management including time, censoring, summary presentations, how to engage users, etc

Module 2: I noticed several times when Otto responded to other students or me that he would do a few things that I think helped the learning process. He would confirm whether or not the current thinking was on the right track, or not. He would either pose additional questions or suggest additional reflection when he noted an opportunity to theorize or reflect at a deeper level. He would also restate the task when responses got off track.
 * __How to increase student autonomy and pedagogical value__**

I think this reflects a few things: ___
 * in order to add value to a dialog and help students achieve the greatest pedagogical benefit, teachers need to be more than "content experts". They need to have theorized and reflected on the content, asked and answered challenging questions for themselves and, when responding to students, avoid taking full ownership for the "final answer" (something more likely to occur in expository teaching.
 * The empathy that Holmberg referred to (module 1) comes across in these responses, but it is important to ensure that this understanding and support doe snot diminsh the need for autonomus learning on the part of the student (also something I see in expository learning where the teacher takes too much ownership for the learning or over-empathizes to the point where student accountability and adherence to minimum performance standards is diminished.

During this semester, I started using a wiki at work to create a collaborative site use SMEs for a particular content area and, while a work in progress, it is going well so far.

I also started working with my team of instructional designers and trainers on creating and teaching programs with an **increased focus on student autonomy** and pedagogical soundness. The core of this for me has been the ability to question at a deeper level, better utilizing recall of prior knowledge when teaching new concepts, and separate, but related to this course, I started looking at how sensory, short-term, and long-term memory work. (I found some interesting material on this in a book titled Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson).

12/6/09: I just posted my annotated bibliography after spending a couple of days reading through various articles and papers. The topic I choose centered on improving the level of autonomous learning in the classroom (or in DE) centered on effective questioning techniques. My intial goal was to find ways to get our trainers to do a better job at tapping into Bloom's higher levels of cognitive domain. So many of their questions (including many written by my instructional designers) focus primarily on knowledge and comprehension and do little to engage the learning in any type of critical thinking. It was interesting in reading these articles (and considering how we addressed this throughout class) to be able to ID ways students can/should be accountable in utlizing the same critical or reflective thinking questions as teachers. My experience so far has been that (for most) this is not an easy skill to build (or at least not quick), but once trainers understand the concept, there is a marked, positive difference in how they conduct their classes.