Brad McDiarmid's List: Doctorate

What is today more and more frequently called technoscience studies has emerged from a fairly short history of what could either be called Îparadigm shiftsâ [Kuhn] or changed Îepistemesâ, [Foucault] depending on whether one is more or less in the Anglophone or the Francophone world.

Speakers at a recent education technology industry summit had a key piece of advice for the company executives who make and sell products for schools: Go mobile.

Constructivist learning theories stress that people learn by doing, by being actively engaged in the learning process; whereas, Behaviorism and Cognitivism, earlier theories, support the practice of analyzing a task and breaking it down into manageable chunks, establishing objectives, and measuring performance based on those objectives.

Digital Storytelling can transform your students' writing into a visual masterpiece that is filled with voice and emotion, while enhancing critical thinking skills.  The iPad takes digital storytelling to a new level by making the process easier, and even more engaging for students of all grade levels as well as for their teachers.  

Hidden curriculum refers to messages communicated by the organization and operation of schooling apart from the official or public statements of school mission and subject area curriculum guidelines.

They see life as a game. They enjoy nothing more than outsmarting the system. They don’t trust politicians, medias, nor brands. They see corporations as inefficient and plagued by an outmoded hierarchy. Even if they harbor little hope of doing better than their parents, they don’t see themselves as unhappy. They belong to a group — several, actually — they trust and rely upon.

Theories and Models of Learning for Educational Research and Practice. This knowledge base features learning theories that address how people learn.

The fifth edition of the Knowledge Tree e-Journal of Flexible Learning in VET features leaders who are exploring ways to provide creative and connecting experiences for learners and who are seeking to transform and sustain their organisations' abilities to provide flexible learning options for their communities. A printable contents list is provided on the right of the screen.

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:

It's tempting to see new technologies, especially new media technologies, as drivers of political and social change. But technological artifacts also embody the values and assumptions -- and conflicts -- of the societies that produce them, in complicated and surprising ways.

The issue of kids’ exposure to TV doesn’t throw off as many sparks as it used to. There is general agreement that a child’s exposure to television of any type should be limited. There is also general agreement that we are completely ignoring this advice.

strive to strike a reasonable balance between reading blogs, books, and peer-reviewed articles. Different topics flair up in popularity (such as web 2.0 and now social media) and then fade. A few concepts have longevity such as “how effective is technology enhanced learning when contrasted with traditional classrooms?”. Questions like this are boring. And unanswerable given the tremendous number of variables involved in teaching online and in classrooms.

ON THE evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.

For those who don’t know what this means, it’s like a game. Someone somewhere comes up with a themed question that they answer & then send to a few others to do the same, who in turn pass it on to others, and the whole thing snowballs. Most memes seem to be social, name your top 5 movies and why, or 10 things that would surprise people to know about you, or whatever. They can be conversation starters, they can be excuses to show off, they’re a bit of a blogger’s rite of passage. After all, if you get meme-tagged it, it’s a proof of your online existence - it means that someone, somewhere reads your stuff!