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The End of Techno-Critique: The Naked Truth about 1:1 Laptop Initiatives and Educational Change
By missing the forest, techno-critics have diverted attention from the real problem of improving the totality of education for all stu- dents.\nBransford et al., (2000), Jonassen (2000, 2004, 2006, 2008), and Jonassen et al., (1999) fix the future of educational technology in cogni-tive tools that shape and extend human capabilities. Cognitive tools blur the unproductive distinctions that techno-critics make between com- puters and teaching and learning (Bullen & Janes, 2007; Hukkinen, 2008; Kommers et al., 1992; Lajoie, 2000). ...
When technology enables, empowers, and accelerates a profession's core transactions, the distinctions between computers and professional practice evaporate. ...
Advocates of 1:1 computing who engage in such replacement exercises use the tree to hide the forest. They believe that educationally beneficial uses of computers will emerge spontaneously from the deployments of laptop computers in ratios of one computer per user. In other fields, this has not been the case. Form and function of usage have driven access to computers, not vice versa. Educators should think similarly....
The result is a school full of classrooms that are differentiated in genuine ways for all students, with teachers who gather and mine just-in-time data about the effects of differentiation for each student. Further, students, parents, and teachers use the cognitive tools every day to collaborate about what to do next in their collective pursuit of learning. For them, waiting pas- sively for the results of the big, once-a-year standardized test is not an option....
The community comprising the school - students, teachers, school leaders, and parents - must have an explicit set of simple rules (Bain, 2007; Seel, 2000) that defines what the community believes about teaching and learning....
The schema is not static, however. It is fuelled by constant feedback; making the school dynamic, ever changing, and self-organizing (Bain, 2007)....
In a self-organizing school, if the community members want it, all students can
The First Decade: Has the internet brought us together or driven us apart? - Features, Gadgets & Tech - The Independent
The journalist Maggie Jackson observed that the internet has reduced us to a kind of mass ADHD, writing: "The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention – the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress."
It's not hard to understand what she means. In the time I have been writing this article, I have received 36 emails, four texts, two phone calls, and seven instant messenger chat requests. We live in a state of "permanent partial attention", where we are trying to focus on five different windows at once. But as human beings, we're not very good at it. We evolved to focus on one big task at a time. We can adjust to a degree: if you look at brain scans of "digital natives" – kids who were born in the internet age – they look different to us "digital migrants", who came to it as adults. They can focus on more scattered distractions for longer. But we can only adjust so far. Researchers at Loughborough University recently found it takes 64 seconds for a person to recover their train of thought after it is interrupted by an email.
How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age
many studentsʼ information-seeking competencies end up being highly contextual, a set of predictable skills developed for passing courses, not for lifelong literacy and professional goals beyond college.
As a result, we see the very important pedagogical goals of deep learning and critical thinking are at risk of being greatly impeded within the academy. We suggest that administrators and faculty should systematically examine student workloads across classes on their campuses, in light of an institutionʼs educational goals. We recommend that an analysis of gaps between desired results and existing conditions and their consequences be undertaken and examined more closely on campuses, as needed.
We see a trend that concerns us: Students in our study developed information strategy that was learned by rote, applied with dogged consistency, and resulted in respectable grades.23 Many studentsʼ research methods appear to be far from experimental, new, developmental, or innovative. Course-related research assignments should not indirectly encourage students to half-heartedly engage in a narrow exploration of the digital landscape (e.g., assignments that state requirements such as, “must use five sources cited in your paper”).
Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school—By Mark Slouka (Harper's Magazine)
Whatever the question, math and science (so often are they spoken of in the same breath, they’ve begun to feel singular) are, or is, the answer. They make sense; they compute. They’re everything we want: a solid return on capital investment, a proven route to “success.” Everything else can go fish.
dy/dan » Blog Archive » What I Used To Know Isn’t Good Enough
It has taken me six years to rewire my teaching to approach new knowledge as the solution to the limitations of what we used to know, rather than as an entry on a list of standards or "what we're learning today."
“Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures” BEFORE THE GUTENBERG PARENTHESIS: ELIZABETHAN-AMERICAN COMPATIBILITIES
" We are both speaking from within the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”,
a cultural realm where it is felt that cultural products (including stage plays and student
essays) should be original, independent, autonomous compositions -- the individual
achievement and the individual property of those who create them. "
The Speculist: Will formal schooling become obsolete?
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Learn as much as you can as fast as you can as cheaply as you can online. While doing so, get experience in the workplace. You’ll be far better prepared for life in the 21st century than your fellow students who take the traditional educational path.
"Living and Learning with Social Media"
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Of course, while adults are increasingly using sophisticated tools to aggregate and disseminate information, youth are predominantly not. Teens are not familiar with RSS feed readers or aggregators like Del.icio.us. Again, just because you use these forms of social media doesn't mean youth do. For the most part, teens are primarily sharing through IM and their SNS of choice. Or simply by word of mouth.
In the same vain, most teens live and breathe open systems like Wikipedia but have no idea how these systems work. They are typically told that Wikipedia is bad rather than being taught how to make sense of the information that is there.
Many of them are producing their own content without a critical understanding of remix or user-generated content. They're experiencing the blurring between consumption and production but they don't have a framework to make sense of this or to understand how to respond to attacks on their practices.
For all of the attention paid to "digital natives" it's important to realize that most teens are engaging with social media without any deep understanding of the underlying dynamics or structure. Just because they understand how to use the technology doesn't mean that they understand the information ecology that surrounds it. Most teens don't have the scaffolding for thinking about their information practices.
It's critical to realize that just because young folks pick up a technology before you do doesn't inherently mean that they understand it better than you do. Or that they have a way of putting it into context. What they're doing is not inherently more sophisticated – it's simply different. They're coming of age in a culture where these structures are just a given. They take them for granted. And they repurpose them to meet their needs. But they don't necessarily think about them.
Educators have a critical role when it comes to helping youth navigate social media. You can help them understand how to make sense of what they're seeing. We can call this "media literacy" or "digital literacy" or simply learning to live in a modern society. Youth need to know more than just how to use the tools - they need to understand the structures around them.
You need to understand what they're doing and why. Most importantly, you need to not reject what they're doing or fetishize it.
“It” | EdTechTrek
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ools are a moving target. I say this because the tools represent the potential of something larger, much more important, much more significant.
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There have been major problems with quantifying positive impacts of the investment of computer technologies in K-12 schooling
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P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Places to Intervene in the Meltdown process
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3. Change the fundamental goal, purpose or function of the system:
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1 & 2. Change the paradigm (way of thinking) that underlies the system, or open people up to operating without any set paradigm:
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