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Trying to Reinvent the Wheel « Mr. G's Classroom Reflections
"In my desire to bring more Web 2.0 technologies into my classroom, I’ve explored many tools that would serve many different purposes for my classes. "
Video Library | Asia Society
Asia Society is the leading global and pan-Asian organization working to strengthen relationships and promote understanding among the people, leaders, and institutions of the United States and Asia. We seek to increase knowledge and enhance dialogue, encourage creative expression, and generate new ideas across the fields of arts and culture, policy and business, and education.
Half an Hour: What Connectivism Is
*At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.
*Hence, in connectivism, there is no real concept of transferring knowledge, making knowledge, or building knowledge. Rather, the activities we undertake when we conduct practices in order to learn are more like growing or developing ourselves and our society in certain (connected) ways.
*This implies a pedagogy that (a) seeks to describe 'successful' networks (as identified by their properties, which I have characterized as diversity, autonomy, openness, and connectivity) and (b) seeks to describe the practices that lead to such networks, both in the individual and in society (which I have characterized as modeling and demonstration (on the part of a teacher) and practice and reflection (on the part of a learner)).
*No, it is not more than the process of making connections. That's why learning is at once so simple it seems it should be easily explained and so complex that it seems to defy explanation (cf. Hume on this). How can learning - something so basic that infants and animals can do it - defy explanation? As soon as you make learning an intentional process (that is, a process that involves the deliberate creation of a representation) you have made these simple cases difficult, if not impossible, to understand.
*See, that's the difference between a cognitivist theory and a connectionist theory. The cognitivist thinks deeply by reasoning through a long sequence of steps. The non-cognitivist thinks deeply by 'seeing' more intricate and more subtle patterns. It is a matter of recognition rather than inference.
*And I have also expounded, in slogan form, a basic theory of practice: 'to teach is to model and demonstrate, to learn is to practice and reflect.'
*
metacool: Designing at the Boulder Digital Works
As John Maeda recently noted, the missing partner to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is IDEA (Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art). As a person who was trained on both sides and now works and plays across STEM and IDEA, I feel strongly that our education programs need to combine both in order to create the T-shaped people that can go out and make a difference in the world (Principle 6).
Famous Quotes: Educational Quotes for the 21st Century
This is the second edition of quotes we have complied to complement the philosophy that underpins our website www.leading-learning.co.nz
We believe that the quotes provide unified collection of thoughtful ideas to transform education. It is often said that we are entering the 'Information Age' but we prefer to believe that we are entering an 'Age of Ideas, Talent and Creativity'. We present the quotes as part of on ongoing dialogue to give all who read them the courage to transform schools so as to meet the exciting challenges of the 21stC.
One suggestion is to as a staff reflect on the quotes in any one section (or any selected quotes) and discuss what they might mean for your school. Others people select suitable quotes for school newsletters of school brochures and other school documents.
The Case for Working With Your Hands - NYTimes.com
7.21.09
* The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site.
* A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive.
* As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it.
* It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians.
* Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it....
* The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things. I was to be a knowledge worker.
* A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
* In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make.
* Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.
Alfie Kohn, Trouble with Rubrics, English Journal, March 2006
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/rubrics.htm downloaded on 7.15.09
*...research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself.
*Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective.
*As long as the rubric is only one of several sources, as long as it doesn’t drive the instruction, it could conceivably play a constructive role.
*students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.
*What all this means is that improving the design of rubrics, or inventing our own, won’t solve the problem because the problem is inherent to the very idea of rubrics and the goals they serve.
*Neither we nor our assessment strategies can be simultaneously devoted to helping all students improve and to sorting them into winners and losers.
*We have to reassess the whole enterprise of assessment, the goal being to make sure it’s consistent with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.
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