teaching - Taryn . on Diigo

Geolocating Compositional Strategies at the Virtual University » Writing Prompt 1

from the abstract: a pedagogy centered on the “virtual university” can be used to disrupt the very terms that create distance between the official and the everyday. In this argument, we show how geoblogging can be used to construct complex, process-based writing situations. Far from simply replicating academic conventions, geolocational approaches contextualize acts of analysis and composition by mapping them as practices onto a larger socio-cultural landscape. On this virtual surface, students learn to locate the forms and functions of academic writing within the actual spaces that they live in.

Tags: teaching, writing, technology, geolocation on 2008-10-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Way We Live Now - Geek Lessons - NYTimes.com

Tags: education, teaching, film, video on 2008-10-04 -All Annotations (6) -About

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really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call “counterintuitive” but to the teacher means simply being honest.
The good teacher is sometimes willing to be a little ridiculous: he wears red or green socks so a kid will always have an excuse to start a conversation with him; she bumbles with her purse to make her more maladroit kids feel at ease.
The great enemy of knowledge is knowingness. It’s the feeling encouraged by TV and movies and the Internet that you’re on top of things and in charge.
students don’t rebel against eccentric, surprising teachers. They rebel against eccentric, surprising teachers who take themselves too seriously. Students can’t bear being preached at; they can’t bear being addressed as if they were a town meeting.
They also tend to rebel against teachers who jump the tracks. As inspired a grade-school instructor as Ludwig Wittgenstein could be, he was inclined to pull the hair of students who didn’t get their math facts down fast enough. There were moments as a teacher when he seems to have become positively demonic — and then regretted it: at one point he ended up going house to house apologizing to his pupils and their parents for his classroom excesses. Eccentric teachers, for all their gifts, for all their inspiration, can be dangerous.
But a college education is about more than acquiring negotiable skills and knowledge. It’s also about figuring out who you are and what you bring to the world. It’s about understanding that your existing self-conception may leave a lot of things out or may be radically inaccurate. People succeed best when they set themselves to doing what they love, and finding out what you love and beginning to get good at doing it are at the heart of a college education. Good teachers matter because they can surprise you out of your complacency and into new views of yourself and the world. Or — and often this is just as valuable — they can induce you to struggle to affirm intelligently what you’ve previously believed in indolent, unconsidered ways.
“I’m glad you were home,” William tells Lester Bangs after they’ve had their rock heart-to-heart on the telephone. Bangs assures him: “I’m always home. I’m uncool.”

The Carnegie Commons - Opening up Education

John Seely-Brown gives a great intro. Read online or download pdf: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11309. Lots of talk about science education as a model in the accompanying forums.

Tags: teaching, education, open_science, open_education, video on 2008-10-02 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Digital Natives » Technology and collaboration: can DN manage their own learning activities?

Andre Valle posts on Fridays. His intro: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/digitalnatives/2008/09/05/digital-natives-around-the-world-introduction/

Tags: collaboration, education, teaching, learning, social_network, digital_native, testing, brazil on 2008-09-13 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (4) -About

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Jonathan Drori on what we think we know | Video on TED.com

"children do worse after they're taught"

Tags: reference, education, video, teaching, model, theory, testing, earth_science, physics, biology on 2008-09-10 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves | Video on TED.com

descriptive, intriguing but not a rock-solid argument

Tags: video, education, teaching, learning, school, india, computer, children on 2008-09-04 and saved by20 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Complicity - An International Journal of Complexity and Education

all pdfs

Tags: education, school, teaching, learning, emergence, complexity on 2008-09-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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A Blog Around The Clock : What are teachers for?

Tags: learning, education, school, teaching on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Digital Technology and English Pedagogy

The authors suggest the web project serves as a possible example of a transitional pedagogy where two ways of organizing and presenting information — of writing — are used simultaneously and toward mutually enhancing ends.

Tags: literature, fiction, writing, reading, education, teaching, learning on 2008-08-28 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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A List Apart: Articles: Putting Our Hot Heads Together

Tags: discourse, teaching, community, communication, social_network on 2008-08-15 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science - Chronicle.com

Tags: science, education, children, teaching, learning, school on 2008-08-06 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (10) -About

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Gates has a compelling point — largely because the shortage of Americans holding or pursuing advanced degrees in fields like computer science defies conventional market explanations. The average annual salary in the field is more than $100,000. Meanwhile, we have a robust supply of high-IQ baristas and college graduates with jobs that a generation ago would not even have required a high-school diploma.

So while Gates didn't make the point in so many words, his call for more H-1B visas was really testimony to the incapacity of American education to inspire children to take an interest in science and motivate young adults to follow though.
Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces. In the United States, students are insulated from the commercial market's demand for their knowledge and skills. That market lies a long way off — often too far to see. But they are not insulated one bit from the worldview promoted by their teachers, textbooks, and entertainment. From those sources, students pick up attitudes, motivations, and a lively sense of what life is about.
Success in the sciences unquestionably takes a lot of hard work, sustained over many years. Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study
The intellectual lassitude we breed in students, their unearned and inflated self-confidence, undercuts both the self-discipline and the intellectual modesty that is needed for the apprentice years in the sciences. Modesty? Yes
willingness to play by nature's rules runs in contrast to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along insouciance that characterizes so many variants of postmodernism and that flatters itself as being a higher form of pragmatism.
The aversion to long-term and deeply committed study of science among American students also stems from other cultural imperatives. We rank the manufacture of "self-esteem" above hard-won achievement, but we also have immersed a generation in wall-to-wall promotion of diversity and multiculturalism as being the worthiest form of educational endeavor; we have foregrounded the redistributional dreams of "social justice" over heroic aspirations to discover, invent, and thereby create new wealth; and we have endlessly extolled the virtue of "sustainability" against the ravages of "progress." Do all that, and you create an educational system that is essentially hostile to advanced achievement in the sciences and technology. Moreover, those threads have a certainty and unity that make them not just a collection of educational conceits but also part of a compelling worldview.
in a curriculum dissolved in the sea of minutiae and professorial enthusiasms, the opportunity to pass through moody introspection and back into the sturdy world of real people grows rare.

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Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading?

Tags: reading, education, literature, fiction, testing, teaching on 2008-07-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”
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- the problem is the curriculum will inevitably become outdated, and probably very quickly.
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-27
“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”
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- what's onine
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-07-27
Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages.
Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.
“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”
Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”

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How to Unleash Your Creativity

Tags: creativity, education, teaching, children, testing on 2008-05-31 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.
giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.
take an adventure once a week
walk out the door for 20 minutes or so and see what happens to your thinking. When people walk, they often begin to integrate the insights and intuitions
When children are very young, they all express creativity, but by the end of the first grade, very few do so. This is because of socialization. They learn in school to stay on task and to stop daydreaming and asking silly questions. As a result, the expression of new ideas is largely shut down. We end up leaving creative expression to the misfits—the people who can’t be socialized.
we have a mythology about artistry that tends to be very daunting
In the laboratory, failure also produces a phenomenon called resurgence—the emergence of behaviors that used to be effective in that situation—that leads to a competition among behaviors and to new interconnections. In other words, failure actually stimulates creativity directly.
groups inhibit a lot of creative expression. Dominant people tend to do most of the talking, for one thing. But when people shift, everyone ends up working on the problem.
hypnagogic state. Think about how deliberate Dalí and Edison were or about how deliberate Julia’s techniques are. You don’t need to leave creativity to chance.
many people make the mistake of believing that there’s just no time to be creative, even to do something simple like paying attention to your thoughts and capturing them.

Epstein: Well, high tech is making this easier, fortunately. These days all you have to do to capture an idea is to pick up your PDA or memo recorder or even just to leave a message for yourself on your voice mail. You can even capture new melodies that way.
I see our society moving in the wrong direction—toward an obsession with raising scores on standardized tests.

Cameron: I think that creativity is contagious and that the best thing we can do for children is to model for them what it’s like to be a creative individual.

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Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices - New York Times

Tags: education, teaching, math, learning on 2008-04-26 -All Annotations (0) -About

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A World Without Teacher Unions? | The American Prospect

Tags: education, labor, school, teaching, union on 2008-04-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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In the 1950s, prior to when Albert Shanker and other New York City teachers forged the modern teacher union movement, teachers engaged in "collective begging" rather than collective bargaining. They were poorly paid (making less than people who washed cars), forced to eat lunch while supervising students, and told to bring a doctor's note when they were out sick. Collective bargaining increased wages, attracting higher-caliber candidates. Unions also pushed for reduced class size and better discipline policies, which most studies find help students learn better. While many teachers initially feared that joining a union was "unprofessional," most became in fact convinced that lack of voice contributed to their degrading treatment.
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- This kind of scare-tactic is wholly unconvincing. It's intellectually dishonest to insinuate that unions themselves - and not any cultural shift that may have been the impetus for forming them - are definitely the reasons people who teach children are given some measure of workplace respect. It's the "see how it used to be - you don't want to go back to that now, do you" argument.
  posted by taryn930 on 2007-09-03
highly accomplished, board-certified teachers
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- What does "highly accomplished" mean? What goes into "board certification". The problem is unions make the job of teaching unattractive to many of those who do the job best.
  posted by taryn930 on 2007-09-03
it would increase the power of other adults in the system -- superintendents, who sometimes jettison promising educational programs for which they cannot personally take credit; principals, who sometimes are lax on discipline because they don't want their suspension numbers to look bad; and parents, who usually look out for the interests of their own children rather than what's good for all kids.
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- crystal ball doomsday-ism.
  posted by taryn930 on 2007-09-03
defense of public education
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- ie: defense of public education SYSTEM.
  posted by taryn930 on 2007-09-03
those who see public education as an indispensable democratic institution, crucial to promoting economic mobility and social cohesion

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Dynamics of Cats : A Modest Proposal to Fix Everything Wrong with US K-12 Education

Tags: education, learning, reform, teaching on 2008-04-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Let's step back further. Try two goals instead: make teaching something a well trained, intellectual person would seriously consider as a career, and make school something besides a zero sum social game for the students.
MEds in pedagogy: Have you TAKEN any pedagogy classes lately? Almost utter nonsense in terms of practical application. Not to mention the cost involved for the teachers in question. Masters degrees are better applied to teachers' given fields.
Harry Potter is a terrible series. The first three books were worth reading, but I'm not quite sure where J.K. Rowling was headed after that.
Perhaps if we could only invent jobs where people work at home, and social events where we could date and meet people from home
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- ...though this is a kid talking, the stereotype is still a little unsettling. Besides that, the social "skills" one acquires in an ultra-controlled and punitive environment (ie: schools) are not necessarily useful outside of it, and the skills that are useful outside of it are not necessarily acquired within it. When was the last time I had to negotiate my way through a group of 30 people whose birthdays fall within 12 months of my own? Not since high school.
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-04-14
We live in a capitalist world. Social Darwinism. Find a place for yourself in the world or die out. With streamlined programs as well as strong voc/tech tracks anyone can fit in. The reason there are so many people in america that are struggling simply because they are being forced to conform to a lifestyle they don't want.
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- ...would love to check in with this kid in his mid-to-late 20s.
  posted by taryn930 on 2008-01-08