Comments on: The New Curriculum Map

By: Classroots.org - SPACE PANDA 2010

Classroots.org - SPACE PANDA 2010 — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:20:47 +0000

[...] map this year will look more course-specific than last year’s meta-map, which I think is still a useful model for project-based work. Here’s an early draft of this [...]

By: Chad

Chad — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:08:16 +0000

I’m catching up on comments – thank you for your patience!

My wife’s reseach can be found at http://nowviskie.org/research/.

Best,
C

By: Christian Tietze

Christian Tietze — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:16:15 +0000

You may know tools for bibliography maintenance which rely on the BibTeX format, which is most useful when combined with LaTeX typesetting/writing. A very nice and popular freeware program to manage BibTeX is JabRef (or BibDesk for Mac Computers). I don’t know if this is of any help to you since I know nothing about your class wiki but I guess a proprietary format like BibTeX doesn’t cooperate well with the open structure of a wiki, whatever it’s used for in the end. For my private and student writing and reading I learned to love both LaTeX and BibTeX as they’re open, plain-text formats. As I said, I know not a thing about your work in detail, so I better wait for more specific information before I just keep on ranting about random stuff

I’d love to hear more about your wife’s dissertation, though. Is it available online? I tend to find not a thing of help when in search for information about knowledge management.

By: Chad

Chad — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:47:07 +0000

I agree; shortly we will have to figure out how best to collect and share the resources we find for a documentary project. Services like Edmodo are good in the present, but old links tend to get lost in the timeline. Some combination of physical and electronic portfolios maintained by individuals and the class as a whole will need to be developed and refined. Maybe an annotated bibliography on the class wiki? I’ll keep thinking and making note of what the students’ find most useful. Thanks for the comment, Christian! (Much of my wife’s disseration was about ludic, re-combinant mechanisms for reinterpreting information in light of new connections, and she loves the German language, so I’ll quiz her about zettelkasten tonight.)

By: Christian Tietze

Christian Tietze — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:24:30 +0000

To me, ‘collecting new information’ and ‘publishing new work’ are black boxes. Publishing is a rather creative process which takes a few core skills (i.e. skills that empower writing). The process of collecting is the most important and most difficult part for me. I currently try to develop a good way of collecting information, own thoughts and notes on literature in a neat way, imitating what a zettelkasten does (i.e. German for box of index cards which, when used long enough, makes generation of ideas possible by combining existing notes in a seemingly unrelated manner; a zettelkasten creates and reveals relationships we may never have thought of).

In my opinion, a working structure is key to a successful collection process. Most people at University just store their project-related files in a folder, ponder the information, then they write. Eventually, the folder is deleted. Often times not even the paper written is saved for later use or reference.

Probably you could elaborate on collecting and managing information further. I think there’s lots of room for improvement in people’s and pupil’s skills.