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17 Jul 09

TeachPaperless: From the Archives: Trust

  • ve said it before and I'll say it again. This whole education thing: it's not about making teachers feel comfortable. It's about educating students. And the students of today are not standing at the same point on the great timeline of history as the students of even ten years ago. Yes they need to learn the great themes of literature, the arts, science, history, and civilization. But, they need to learn those things in a manner that is applicable to the way that the world of today really is, not the way any of us wished it were.
27 Jun 09

Possibilities 2.0 | nashworld

  • negativity used as a strategy to push back from the table (whether conscious or unconscious) in order to avoid change or conflict is a very toxic thing.  Life is too short and too difficult as it is.  Stirring up extra negativity in such a challenging career field is more than a waste of time.  In my 18 years as an educator I have had the benefit of working in environments that were so positive and supportive that I was constantly inspired. 
    • This observation realy nails it. - on 2009-06-27
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TeachPaperless: What is the purpose of this blog?

  • It's about looking at the world in a new way and actively taking part in it fearlessly, wherever that may lead. And it's not about using or not using a sheet of paper. It's about realizing that we are now living in a world where the dominant human-driven media are divorced from the top-down mode of corporate leadership that earned its keep in the Paper-Heavy World of the 20th Century.
  • Now we live in a Post-Paper World. Meaning we live in a world where text and information is dynamic, immediate, and immediately redactable. We live beyond the anomaly of mass-produced printed matter. We live beyond the static version of top-down knowledge as best represented by that dusty set of encyclopedias sitting forlorn in your local library -- miserably wondering what went wrong in the shadow of the computer bays bringing the democratized word of Wikimedia to everyone lining up to receive it.
23 Jun 09

April « 2009 « Connectivism

  • My thinking on “digital natives”, for example, has evolved significantly. I used to adhere to the view that today’s learners are fundamentally different. If you read blog posts I made (on elearnspace) from 2002-2003 you’ll see numerous references to the need for educational change driven by “today’s learners”. I’ve since largely abandoned that view.
  • Let me explain. When someone decides to share their thoughts and ideas in a transparent manner, they become a teacher to those who are observing. Social technology - such as Twitter, blogs, Facebook - opens the door to sharing the process of learning, not only the final product.
18 Jun 09

Educational Leadership:Expecting Excellence:Rigor Redefined

  • 1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
  • 2. Collaboration and Leadership
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Hacking Education

  • You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers. I owe most of what I know to about a dozen amazing teachers I had over the 20 or so years between first grade and grad school. I remember most of them by name and I remember what they taught me. My high school calculus teacher inspired me to go MIT. My MIT Systems Design teacher inspired me to think about complexity differently. My Wharton Speculative Markets teacher got my head wrapped around markets and why and how they work. I would not be who I am without these special people. We need to massively increase the number of students these special people can reach and teach every day.
  • Again, we can look to the lessons of the media business to think about how to do that. These amazing teachers are superstars who should be available online, via web video, to millions of people. They should not be stuck in a lecture hall teaching less than a hundred kids at a time. We must move away from an economy based on scarcity and embrace an economy based on ubiquity in the age of the Internet. The leading online education companies have been playing this game for years now. And they are good at it. My friend Jimmy runs several lines of business for Kaplan, one of the top online education companies. He told me about a teacher who runs one of his online CFA courses. This guy is a superstar. His courses are fun and engaging. Taking his course is like reading a great columnist or a wonderful book. You want to get back to it because its so engaging. These teachers can make a lot of money and they should. They are the best at what they do. But our education system is not set up like a star system. It should be.
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TeachPaperless: What Makes a Great Teacher a Great Teacher in the 21st Century

  • When it comes to educational technology, the great teacher isn't the one who merely uses technology in education. The great teacher is the one who experiments and who teaches the spirits within students to experiment. The great teacher doesn't follow the rules. The great teacher doesn't go along with the program. Like a gleeful hacker, the great teacher turns Twitter into a reference library, chat rooms into exit tickets, Skype-casts into global awareness sessions, Wikimedia into a living breathing history of human events, and Pandora into the clothes of sound that wrap around culture and keep us warm on darkest nights.
    • Good stuff - on 2009-05-28
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  • Great teachers recognize that the real thrust of Web 2.0 is not in getting students to understand the material but in getting students to engage the hidden material within themselves and to thus have body and soul to tear into the heart of human content with such intellectual ferocity that the wolves and beasts both of moonlit night and boardroom conversation quake in the wake of a mighty woken mind.
    • A bit over the top, but I like the gist. - on 2009-05-28
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