If you are also interested in instructional blogging, here is a good website: Instructional Blogging Best Practices and Case Studies by Learning Technologies Center of University of Arizona.

I do not like the Chinese title of the book. It does not truely reflect the contents of the book. I prefer to a direct translation of “ten basic principles of good parenting.”

Here are the ten basic principles for sharing and for my easy reviewing on the Web.

1. What you do matters. “Tell yourself that every day. How you treat and respond to your child should come from a knowledgeable, deliberate sense of what you want to accomplish. Always ask yourself: What effect will my decision have on my child?”

2. You cannot be too loving. “When it comes to genuine expressions of warmth and affection, you cannot love your child too much. It is simply not possible to spoil a child with love. What we often think of as the product of spoiling a child is never the result of showing a child too much love. It is usually the consequence of giving a child things in place of love—things like leniency, lowered expectations or material possessions.”

3. Be involved in your child’s life. “Being an involved parent takes time and is hard work, and it often means rethinking and rearranging your priorities. It frequently means sacrificing what you want to do for what your child needs you to do. Be there mentally as well as physically.”

4. Adapt your parenting to fit your child. “Make sure your parenting keeps pace with your child’s development. You may wish you could slow down or freeze-frame your child’s life, but this is the last thing he wants. You may be fighting getting older, but all he wants is to grow up. The same drive for independence that is making your three-year-old say ‘no’ all the time is what’s motivating him to be toilet trained. The same intellectual growth spurt that is making your 13-year-old curious and inquisitive in the classroom also is making her argumentative at the dinner table.”

5. Establish and set rules. “If you don’t manage your child’s behavior when he is young, he will have a hard time learning how to manage himself when he is older and you aren’t around. Any time of the day or night, you should always be able to answer these three questions: Where is my child? Who is with my child? What is my child doing? The rules your child has learned from you are going to shape the rules he applies to himself.”

6. Foster your child’s independence. “Setting limits helps your child develop a sense of self-control. Encouraging independence helps her develop a sense of self-direction. To be successful in life, she’s going to need both. Accepting that it is normal for children to push for autonomy is absolutely key to effective parenting. Many parents mistakenly equate their child’s independence with rebelliousness or disobedience. Children push for independence because it is part of human nature to want to feel in control rather than to feel controlled by someone else.”

7. Be consistent. “If your rules vary from day to day in an unpredictable fashion, or if you enforce them only intermittently, your child’s misbehavior is your fault, not his. Your most important disciplinary tool is consistency. Identify your non-negotiables. The more your authority is based on wisdom and not on power, the less your child will challenge it.”

8. Avoid harsh discipline. “Of all the forms of punishment that parents use, the one with the worst side effects is physical punishment. Children who are spanked, hit or slapped are more prone to fighting with other children. They are more likely to be bullies and more likely to use aggression to solve disputes with others.”

9. Explain your rules and decisions. “Good parents have expectations they want their child to live up to. Generally, parents overexplain to young children and underexplain to adolescents. What is obvious to you may not be evident to a 12-year-old. He doesn’t have the priorities, judgment or experience that you have.”

10. Treat your child with respect. “The best way to get respectful treatment from your child is to treat him respectfully. You should give your child the same courtesies you would give to anyone else. Speak to him politely. Respect his opinion. Pay attention when he is speaking to you. Treat him kindly. Try to please him when you can. Children treat others the way their parents treat them. Your relationship with your child is the foundation for her relationships with others.”

In this resource web: Teaching Resources and Publications, there are a handful of publications and tip sheets for classroom teaching. You may find something useful if you are a high-school or university teacher. For example, I also find this useful: Ten Ways to Make Your Teaching More Effective.

This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Glogoff, S. 2005. Instructional blogging: Promoting interactivity, student-centered learning, and peer input. Innovate 1 (5).

Principle 1: Good Practice Encourages Student-Faculty Contact

Principle 2: Good Practice Encourages Cooperation Among Students

Principle 3: Good Practice Encourages Active Learning

Principle 4: Good Practice Gives Prompt Feedback

Principle 5: Good Practice Emphasizes Time on Task

Principle 6: Good Practice Communicates High Expectations

Principle 7: Good Practice Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning

Lesson for online instruction:

1. Instructors should provide clear guidelines for interaction with students.
2. Well-designed discussion assignments facilitate meaningful cooperation among students.
3. Students should present course projects.
4. Instructors need to provide two types of feedback: information feedback and acknowledgment feedback.
5. Online courses need deadlines.
6. Challenging tasks, sample cases, and praise for quality work communicate high expectations.
7. Allowing students to choose project topics incorporates diverse views into online courses.

Conclusion: The “Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education” served as a practical lens for our team to evaluate four online courses in an accredited program at a major U.S. university. Using the seven principles as a general framework for the evaluation gave us insights into important aspects of online teaching and learning.

In this article: Bruffee points out:

Collaborative learning assumes instead that knowledge is a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers — something people construct by talking together and reaching agreement.

This statement causes me to think many things about my teaching and my learning.

1. Share Your Passion: Talk to your child about interesting things you’ve learned. Explain in simple terms what happened and why you found it so interesting.
2. Surround Her with Books. Consistent access to books can increase a child’s motivation to raed.
3. Build on Your Child’s Natural Interests
4. Know When To Back Off. Those who have the most motivated children didn’t micromanage or pressure their kids. They let their children figure things out for themselves, while still showing their support.
5. Ask the Right Questions. If you want your child to stay excited about learning, it’s much better to engage him in an active inquiry than to ask him to spit out routine knowledge.
6. Avoid Rewards. Offering kids a prize for doing something can actually undermine their pleasure in the activity.
7. Focus on the Process, Not the Outcome.

The following are four main concepts behind it:

Constructivism: people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environment.

Constructionism: it asserts that learning is particularly effective when constructing something for others to experience.

Social Constructivism: this extends the above ideas into a social group constructing things for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture like this, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture, on many levels.

Connected and Separate: Separate behaviour is when someone tries to remain ‘objective’ and ‘factual’, and tends to defend their own ideas using logic to find holes in their opponent’s ideas. Connected behaviour is a more empathic approach that accepts subjectivity, trying to listen and ask questions in an effort to understand the other point of view. Constructed behaviour is when a person is sensitive to both of these approaches and is able to choose either of them as appropriate to the current situation.

It is claimed that the design and development of Moodle is guided by that “social constructionist pedagogy”. It suggests that “the job as a ‘teacher’ can change from being ‘the source of knowledge’ to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with students in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.”

1. Knowledge must be actively constructed by learners, not passively transmitted by teachers.
2. Students’s prior knowledge must be taken into account by the construction of new knowledge.
3. In order to be useful for problem solving, knowledge components must be related to each other. The process of constructing inter-related knowledge requires higher order thinking skills, such as analysis and design skills.
4. To get students actively involved in knowledge construction, learning activities should focus around a set of intrinsically motivating problems that are situated in real-world tasks.
5. Learning should take place in a collaborative environment that involves social interaction and negotiation.
6. Assessment procedures should be embedded in the learning process, focus on authentic tasks, and consider learners’ individual orientations.
7. Teachers serve primarily as guides and facilitators of learning, not as transmitters of knowledge.

“Constructivism is a theory of learning that regards learning not so much as the product of passive transmission but as a process of active construction. Constructivism is learner-centered, assuming that learners learn better if they construct knowledge for themselves, rather than having it dictated by an instructor.”

Knowledge cannot be pushed into someone’s head while they sit passively reading or listening. Knowledge is a co-creation… the learner must construct the new knowledge in his own head. And usually (or some say ALWAYS), the new knowledge must be mapped into something that’s already IN the learner’s head.

Applied Online Padagogy

Principle #1: Let the students do (most of) the work.

Examples of practice include:

* Student Led Discussions
* Students Find and Discuss Web Resourses
* Students Help Each Other Learn (Peer Assistance)
* Students Grade Their Own Homework Assignments
* Case Study Analysis

Principle #2: Interactivity is the heart and soul of effective asynchronous learning.

Examples of practice include collaborative research paper and research proposal team project.

Principle #3: Strive for presence. This include social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence.

Please read the full article from the JALN (Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks) Volume 8, Issue 3, June 2004.