May 2013
7 posts
More to It
Michelle Rhee-Weise:
To complicate matters, however, the effects of this regimented kind of professional development are questionable. As Rick Hess argues: “We spend a lot on professional development…. Yet hardly any of this actually appears to make teachers better…only a tiny sliver of PD involving thirty to one hundred hours of teacher time showed any evidence of correlating with student...
The End of Reform
Aaron Bady:
If I have one overarching takeaway point in this talk, it’s this: there’s almost nothing new about the kind of online education that the word MOOC now describes. It’s been given a great deal of hype and publicity, but that aura of “innovation” poorly describes a technology—or set of technological practices, to be more precise—that is not that distinct from the longer story of online...
Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier
Sharing information freely, without traditional rewards like royalties or paychecks, was supposed to create opportunities for brave, creative individuals. Instead, I have watched each successive generation of young journalists, artists, musicians, photographers, and writers face harsher and harsher odds. The perverse effect of opening up information has been that the status of a...
"Why School? The Movie" Update - Got video?
A few weeks ago we posed a big question: Could our little edu-network make a REAL full-length documentary feature that incorporates kids in every aspect of the production process? It appears we’re going to find out. Within days, hundreds of you volunteered to help make this admittedly ambitious undertaking become a reality. (If you haven’t signed on and still want to help, fill out our...
"You Don't Need to be Taught in Order to Learn"
Seymour Papert:
The role that the computer can play most strongly has little to do with information. It is to give children a greater sense of empowerment, of being able to do more than they could do before. But too often, I see the computer being used to lead the child step by step through the learning process. Ivan Illich said the most important thing you learn at school is that learning only...
What Happens?
Audrey Watters:
What does it means to tell our students that we’re actually not going to read their papers, but we’re going to scan them and a computer will analyze them instead? What happens when we encourage students to express themselves in such a way that appeases the robot essay graders rather than a human audience? What happens when we discourage creative expression?
Robot graders raise...
April 2013
5 posts
"Why School?" - The Movie (?)
(Note: If after reading this you want to help, please fill out this interest survey. Thanks.)
So here’s the question: You think our little edu-network could make a movie? Like, a REAL full-length documentary feature? As in the next (and better) “Waiting for Superman?” One that kids had a big role in producing?
If your interest is piqued, read on…
A couple of weeks ago, I got an...
Help Wanted: Two Awesome Teachers/Learning Coaches
For the past few months, I’ve had the good fortune of working with the folks at Houston A+ to develop an idea for a small, progressive, learner centered new school in the museum district in Houston. My role has been pretty minimal, mostly as a sounding board for the core working group of which Stephanie Sandifer, one of my network connections from way back, is a member. They’ve come up...
Playing Chopsticks With Technology
Alan Kay:
Q. Do our modern personal computing devices augment education? Have they lived up to what was foreseen in the past? Are they really helping teachers teach in the classroom?
A. The perspective on this is first to ask whether the current educational practices are even using books in a powerful and educative way. Or even to ask whether the classroom process without any special media at...
3 tags
The Three Narratives
So, this is really thin, early-morning thinking, but I’m trying to describe what I think are the three competing narratives around schooling at the moment. To be honest, I think I’ve done a pretty bad job of it, but I thought I’d post it up anyway to see if some of you might help me flesh it out a bit more clearly.
Here they are:
1. Schools are broken. The way forward is to make...
March 2013
12 posts
What Personalized Learning Can't Do
Sarah Garland:
The personalized learning that ed-tech pioneers are talking about now involves using data points like test scores, attendance and, perhaps someday, information about students gathered from games or their internet searches, to home [sic] in what students need academically. Maybe more high-tech systems and detailed data would have helped teachers recognize how far behind many...
1 tag
It's Not an Audition
Seth Godin:
We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there’s a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don’t know who they are.
That means that the old systems, the ones where just a few people were anointed to be the chosen authors, chosen contributors, chosen musicians—that system...
The Arrogance of $$$
Jack Schneider:
Whatever the wishes of scale-obsessed educational entrepreneurs, schools still appear to improve slowly. There are no easy solutions and no quick fixes. But this cohort of reformers, led by a posse of assertive billionaires and their allies, is united in its faith and unprecedented in its influence. As such, setbacks alone are hardly enough to challenge the way they approach...
Announcing: Raising Modern Learners!
I’m really excited to announce a new undertaking that my good friend Bruce Dixon from Melbourne, Australia and I are launching today: Raising Modern Learners (RML).
As the proud owner of two teenagers (where’s the handbook?), I’ve been more and more drawn to the question of how we begin to educate parents around the very big learning and schooling shifts that are occurring...
Destructive Change and How to Resist It
Joi Ito:
What you need to do is understand these changes are happening, and build systems and governments and ways of thinking that are resilient to this kind of destructive change that is going to happen. It’s a kind of change that is really hard to predict, it’s really hard to control, so how do you as a human being, or as an organization, survive in this chaotic, unpredictable system where...
We Need More Democracy in Education, Not Less
Harold Jarche:
I think we may soon get invited to another shotgun wedding, this time between techno-utopians, with financial speculators as bridesmaids, and libertarians, who feel the state and teachers have screwed-up education. It’s education as socialization, but socialization to the dominant business paradigm. But any problems with the education system are a result of the governance and...
3 tags
Rhee on Democracy
David Sirota on Michelle Rhee:
That’s where Rhee’s little-noticed but incredibly revealing comments come in. As grass-roots opposition in the local community understandably rose up to oppose her destructive policies, Rhee made quite clear what she and her movement thinks of the notion of local control of schools and community involvement in education policy:
MICHELLE RHEE: People said, “Well,...
3 tags
Liberate the Learners
Seymour Papert (1998):
The presence of digital technologies is rapidly moving us into a period where learners can learn what they need to know on their own agenda rather than on the predetermined agenda of a curriculum. We will soon be able to give up the assembly line model of grade after grade, exercise after exercise.
It would be naive to believe this could happen without resistance from the...
2 tags
Painting Our Own Canvas
Brian Hoffstein:
Deciding what to juice our minds with and what to outsource to the machines has no definitive answer. However, rote memorization, knowledge regurgitation, and anything inside-the-box will only have depleting effects on a growing creative class. We need more artists and entrepreneurs, engineers and programmers. People that dream, and know how to make that dream come true. This is...
Sound Bite Learning
Umair Haque:
The idea of our age is that Great Ideas can be simplified, reduced, made into convenient, disposable nuggets of infotainment — be they 18-minute talks, 800-word blog posts, or 140 character bursts. But can they — really? Could Aristotle really deliver the resounding, history-redefining message of the Nicomachean Ethics in…eighteen minutes? Or a series of “thought...
2 tags
Amplify Tablet Amplifies What, Exactly?
Terrence O’Brien on NewsCorp’s new tablet offering:
Amplify aims to be not just a tool but a platform for managing a 21st century classroom. Where past efforts to incorporate tablets into a K-12 environment have been satisfied with simple (and carefully controlled) social features and some reference materials, this actually offers features to teachers aimed at delivering instant...
4 tags
The Questions
Audrey Watters, in her most excellent post deconstructing Sugata Mitra’s $1 million TED prize award from last week:
I have questions about this history of schooling as Mitra (and others) tell it, about colonialism and neo-colonialism. I have questions about the funding of the initial “Hole in the Wall” project (it came from NIIT, an India-based “enterprise learning solution” company that...
February 2013
11 posts
“Young people today have lots of experience… interacting with new technologies,...”
– MIT Media Labs’ Mitch Resnick | Everyone Should Code (via courtenaybird)
3 tags
Other Questions for Teachers and Principals
Valerie Strauss:
Nine in 10 principals (93%) and teachers (92%) say they are knowledgeable about the Common Core.
Nine in 10 principals (90%) and teachers (93%) believe that teachers in their schools already have the academic skills and abilities to implement the Common Core in their classrooms.
Teachers and principals are more likely to be very confident that teachers have the ability to...
2 tags
Buying Reform
Arthur Camins
Student’s social, emotional and academic well-being are inextricably interdependent and deeply intertwined within the chemistry, structure and development of the brain. We know this from research, but we all also know it from personal experience. Despite this knowledge, these affective components of effective education are severely under-emphasized in education policy. We need to...
2 tags
Andrew Leonard:
The kids who are cutting their teeth on Khan Academy videos for help with their chemistry and calculus homework will grow up correctly assuming that there will always be low-cost or free educational opportunities available to them online in virtually any field of inquiry. They will naturally migrate to the best stuff and be less and less willing to pay for crap. This will cause a...
5 tags
Good Luck With That
Alex Reid on the National Council Teachers of English updated release of their literacy framework:
What NCTE recognizes is that English should be the means by which such literacy is acquired (at least in the US, which is the nation in “National Council”). To that I say, “good luck.” Good luck providing this professional development for existing teachers, who are not...
3 tags
"Connect to New People on a Regular Basis"
danah boyd:
Building lifelong learners means instilling curiosity, but it also means helping people recognize how important it is that they continuously surround themselves by people that they can learn from. And what this means is that people need to learn how to connect to new people on a regular basis.
And:
Are you preparing learners for the organizational ecosystem of today? Or are you...
And What About Our Monopoly?
Clay Shirky on higher education:
Instead, like every threatened profession, I see my peers arguing that we, uniquely, deserve a permanent bulwark against insurgents, that we must be left in charge of our destiny, or society will suffer the consequences. Even the record store clerks tried that argument, back in the day. In the academy, we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of practice at making...
3 tags
As Goes Journalism...?
Ryan McCarthy:
The dirty secret about the web media business is that there’s a massive oversupply problem. Everyday, content creators are producing more journalism, more think-pieces, more interactive graphics, more photo galleries, more tweets, more slideshows, more videos, more GIFs, and more deviously socially-optimized Corgi listicles. All of that is being distributed via more channels on...
2 tags
The Birth of a Middle School
Just a quick update on the Triangle Learning Community Middle School that I’ve blogged about here before. Founder Steve Goldberg reports that he’s just signed a lease, and that there will soon be some serious inquiry-based, student-directed learning going on in North Carolina this fall.
From the outset, Steve’s been building on fundamental ideas for progressive schooling...
4 tags
The Missing Layer
From Teachers and Policy Makers: Troubling Disconnect in the NY Times:
Michael Petrilli, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a pro-charter education analyst with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, worries about this lack of exchange. He recently conducted an analysis of Twitter and the tens of thousands of followers of Ms. Rhee, who is pro-charter, and Ms. Ravitch,...
4 tags
Curators Rule the World
Joe Coleman:
We’re now at a point where curators rule the content world, by collectively deciding whether content gets amplified or lost. As a result, quality of content is again starting to win out over quantity, with an assist from smarter search algorithms and the death of content farms. As power continues to shift to the curators, great long-form content continues to increase in value, as...
January 2013
13 posts
2 tags
Yep, That's Inquiry
From MindShift:
In a true inquiry-based model, how learning happens isn’t as important as whether that learning encourages students to try to learn even more.
Shades of Sarason.
Chris Lehmann is featured in this piece on his EduCon session about inquiry. Read the whole thing.
3 tags
The Future of Learning Is...
(from EduCon via Christian Long…more here)
…”asking better questions.” —Zac Chase …”unlimited.” —Diana Laufenberg …”self-organized.” —Will Richardson …”unknown…and that’s ok.” —Jessica Ross …”every classroom a Maker space.” —Jaymes Dec …”There are...
4 tags
Educon 2.5-ish Random-ish Reflections
Just some quick reflections on this year’s most excellent EduCon 2.5 at SLA in Philly, an event I love for the conversations but also for the chance to catch up with a whole bunch of amazing educator friends who consistently push my thinking, and for the chance to meet a whole new bunch who I’m sure will do the same in the future.
(photo by Steve Ransom)
I’ll be blogging more...
3 tags
We're Getting Rolled
Tom Hoffman:
Ten years ago, “school reform” at least equally applied to Deborah Meier and Ted Sizer as it did to, say, Joel Klein.
In the intervening decade, I’ve become a social software curmudgeon — you’ll pull Blogger from my cold, dead hands — and yielded the “ed reformer” tag to people and practices I hate.
Basically, in both cases, the...
4 tags
The Anti-Education Era
James Paul Gee from the introduction of The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students Through Digital Learning:
This book is about what it means to be smart and to be a fully awake participant in our high-risk global world in the twenty-first century. It is about what parents ought to do to forestall their children becoming victims in that high-risk world. The book is about how to think...
2 tags
The Problem with "Personalized Learning"
James Paul Gee:
People who never confront challenge and frustration, who never acquire new styles of learning, and who never face failure squarely may in the end become impoverished humans. They may become forever stuck with who they are now, never growing and transforming, because they never face new experiences that have not been customized to their current needs and desires…
Success in...
3 tags
Results That Matter
Nicholas Carr in MIT’s Technology Review:
Looking toward the future, Kuntz says that computers will ultimately be able to tailor an entire “learning environment” to fit each student. Elements of the program’s interface, for example, will change as the computer senses the student’s optimum style of learning.
The advances in tutoring programs promise to help many college, high-school, and...
Future of Learning(?)
This post informed by, among other posts/sites:
McGraw-Hill to Debut Adaptive E-Book for Students
Google Now
Knewton
So, tell me if I’m missing something here:
Before too long, schools will figure out how to put technology into the hands of every student and teacher, whether that’s via a BYOT program or budget allocations that cover the price of a device considering the fast reduction...
2 tags
Deep Learning for Students
Ron Berger in Edutopia:
In all of my years sitting in classrooms as a student, in public schools that were highly regarded, I never once produced anything that resembled authentic work or had value beyond addressing a class requirement. My time was spent on an academic treadmill of turning in short assignments completed individually as final drafts — worksheets, papers, math problem sets,...
3 tags
Utter Lack of Intellectual Bravery
Jesse Stommel:
Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we’ve helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. None of these, though, map promisingly into digital space. If we continue to tread our current path, we’ll be left with a Frankenstein’s monster of what we now know of education. This is the...
2 tags
Here Come the Parents
From the WSJ:
But McGraw-Hill executives say that the new adaptive e-books will offer better learning methods for a cheaper price than traditional textbooks. Mr. Kibby and Mr. Christensen said that they have seen a lot of demand for their learning products coming from individual students and parents rather than just educators and school officials. [Emphasis mine.]
So, um, anyone surprised? We...
3 tags
Our New Value: Making Stuff With Kids
Joshua Glenn and Elizabeth Foy Larsen
The sixth graders at Marymount School — an independent Catholic school for girls in Manhattan — have a problem they need to solve. The American Dental Association recommends that kids brush their teeth for two minutes, twice a day. But the students know that most kids fall well short of that goal. How — their teachers ask — can they...
3 tags
Born To Be Taught?
Chad Sansing:
Kids have to own learning. To hold on to it, to connect it, to love it and launch from it – they do. Learning without love isn’t learning; it’s production. It’s not freedom; it’s indenture. It’s not an awakening; it’s a sedation.
Why, I wonder, do we stop seeing kids as creatures who were born to learn and, instead, start seeing them as born to be taught?
Especially now when...
December 2012
4 posts
3 tags
You Gotta Go to Educon 2.5
Just a quick reminder, Educon, the most excellent unconferency conference held at Science Leadership Academy, is coming up at the end of next month. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to head on over and register as there’s limited attendance.
Not for nothing, but if you haven’t had the Educon experience yet, you need to. For me, it’s one of the if not the best...
3 tags
Rethink Learning Top to Bottom
Cathy Davidson
But there is also an investment opportunity for any educator (with or without degree) to rethink learning top to bottom, inside out. We have a potential for a learning mash-up of the loftiest, most creative, learner-centered kind. Whether we are talking about Khan’s millions of learners who have a handful of teachers or Ito’s billions of teachers learning from one...
