February 2012
6 posts
3 tags
Rebranding Teachers
A couple of weeks ago, I ran across this post on “Rebranding Teachers” at Hyperakt, a design firm for “the Common Good.” Here’s the gist:
We began with a simple premise, that education is the key to human progress, therefore teaching is among the most important professions for humanity. Our new visual vocabulary should capture the excitement and magic of activating...
5 tags
Learning to Fly
When I was a little kid, at least once every few weeks in the warm months my mom would fill a big wicker picnic basket full of sandwiches, drinks and some hidden sweets, pack it and me and an old blanket in the back of our long, white Chrysler station wagon, and drive out to a parking lot behind a factory that was a stone’s throw from O’Hare Airport outside of Chicago. As soon as the car would...
4 tags
The "Shift to Networks"
Just a couple of quotes that found me this morning, some pattern recognition in my sleepy brain.
Joi Ito in the New York Times:
I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.
And George Siemens at his blog:
Planned information structures like textbooks and courses simply...
4 tags
"Open Network" Tests
I just recently ran across Jonathan Martin’s posts regarding the “Open Internet” tests that he’s piloting with some teachers at St. Gregory School in Arizona, and I’m just loving the thinking. In November of 2010, he first asked:
We know that content memorization must no longer [be] the goal of our learning programs; what our goal must be is that students can make...
2 tags
Quote of the Day
“The mess from this generation’s political paralysis and refusal to address looming problems can’t be cleaned up using the same education that helped create it.”
—Marion Brady
4 tags
The Sorry State of Standardized Writing
A couple of items from the world of writing and assessment have been niggling at me of late.
First, news that the Hewlett Foundation is sponsoring a $100,000 competition to create automated essay scoring software that, in theory at least, will do as good or better job of assessing student writing on standardized tests than the current human graders do. I get the reasoning behind this. Current...