Bryan Lee's List: Teaching Technology

• Socrates believed that we learn best by asking essential questions and testing tentative answers against reason and fact in a continual and virtuous circle of honest debate.
• sea of trivia
• This argument rests on the premise that we learn best through data collection without the burdens of judgment and discernment.
• • Perhaps there is no disintegration of thought at all, rather an emergence of a new way of thought yet unclassified. What was the lament of Neoclassisists or PreRaphaelites at the birth of Impressionism. What they saw as a corrosion of technique was just the birth pangs of a new style searching for the vocabulary, distinct and unique, to discuss itself. Is this but a generational lament whose only new aspect is the speed at which it arrived? Is the only new and frightening thing the ever-shortening periods between tremors of communicative evolution? Maybe the hazards at this end of the pool are not in the effects of the internet on us as much as it is in our own unpreparedness with the medium of the internet. Did Gutenberg or caxton receive the same criticism for promiscuously publishing so much as to distract young minds from their memorization of classics? Afterall, THAT was what set the bar for worthwhile knowlege then. Chris Dede spoke to FETC of the redefinition of what is worth knowing. Perhaps these are the directions we should be asking.
• incessant communication is really a complex manifestation of miscommunication that does not lead to intellectual growth
• unearned celebrity
• the European Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, both of which convinced us that we can make a better world through creating knowledge and applying it to human needs

  • What we may be seeing is the unraveling of the benevolence of information as the information environment approaches the limits of the brain's ability to adequately distinguish various strains of information and sort relavance from trviality.
• fragments of thought.
• creating a new learning and intellectual environment consistent with the cognitive and expressive demands of the 21st century.
• Critical Reflection

  • Isn't this just a resurgence of Enlightenment values in an era that has a renewed need for them?
• Human beings already are prone to think in magical terms
• The celebrity cult replaces real heroes with made-up ones, much to the detriment of children's mental health
• manufactured culture
• it glosses over human rights and skirts the issue of responsibility. Without critical reflection, we will continually fall victim to such notions
• • Does the author advocate atheism? With no values through which so find truth rather than fact, are we not ensuring that students find less and less meaning in the world?
• A second element of the 21st century mind that we must cultivate is the willingness to abandon supernatural explanations for naturally occurring events
• • Exactly what century does the author think we are in? Is his audience witchdoctors? Honestly, I can't recall the last time gods were pleased. If they were, would we not have some comfort in the process?
• please the gods or fate to survive
• problem solving.

  • That truly depends on the problem you are solving. This is the struggle between Descartes and Pascal again. Does the author think himself to be the voice crying in the wilderness? This is a problem as old as epistemology. Plato's Republic was essentially about how we find answers to things. Descartes held that only reason in line with empirical knowlege could be the foundation for knowlege. Then Pascal held that there were things you could only know through extra-reasonable means. Then there are the Augustans vs. the Romantics. This is a periodic dilemma.
• • Doesn't this raise the scientific method to the level of a dogma just as the arcane magic he decries? He presumes that the only way to get "the public good" is through science.
• Thinking empirically is a form of social responsibility
• Yale Divinity School

  • didn't expect that!!

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• “In general, there’s a lack of research on the sustained impact of technology on learning,” Soloway says. “The transition we’re trying to achieve is from technology being an add-on in the curriculum to technology being essential to the curriculum. So when you make that distinction, you realize the folly of this one-off research.”
• Ed-Tech Leadership

   

  Percentage of public school districts that employ a person responsible for educational technology leadership.

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  SOURCE: Pew Internet & American Life Project
• By the Numbers

   

  
  77% of teens own a game console, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.

   

  74% of teens own an iPod or mp3 player.

   

  60% of teens own a desktop or laptop computer.

   

  55% of teens own a portable gaming device.

   

  SOURCE: Pew Internet & American Life Project
• “Using digital tools tends to be a catalyst for improving teaching, improving learning,” he says, “with appropriate administrative support and tech support.”

• The research is clear on the ever-present nature of cellphones in the lives of today’s teenagers. The proportion of teens who have their own cellphones, for example, is catching up to the 77 percent of adults who do, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

   

  “We’re struggling with engaging the digital learners of today,” Schad says. “So we’re using a tool that these kids use every single day.”

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