mark childs's List: Education 2.0

• the reasoning goes, the ability to articulate and solve problems, to generate original ideas, and  to work collaboratively across cultural boundaries is growing exponentially in importance

• Kids can create their own content and interact.

  • This seems to sum up the fundemantal gap in many of these articles: what are kids creating and how do teachers evaluate the "content"?
• We tend to learn best through hands-on experiences, he explained--by trying things ourselves and taking ownership of our own learning, rather than passively receiving information from another source.

  • As we generate a list of "21st Century Education" skills, it might also be useful to generate a list of "effective teaching modes/strategies" to see how the two align.
• we typically superimpose our old ways of doing things on this new medium

  • I have a working hypothesis that "English" teacher will soon cease to be a recognized title/position. Instead, the different elements of English teaching will be recognized independently: "aesthetic reading and writing" (i.e. helping students read and write poetry, novels, plays, etc.); "efferent" (this term from Louise Rosenblatt basically means "reading for information") reading and writing (i.e. how to summarize sources and write persuasive research papers); media specialists (i.e. how to understand and respond to different media so as to avoid "superimposing our old ways of doing things")
• engaging these kids, they're not learning

  • I want us to delinate the difference between keeping kids busy and actual learning. When I talk to teachers from other schools about seminar discussion, I find that one of the most useful things I can tell them is to become comfortable with silence: it may be that every student needs a few minutes just to think carefullly about a particularly complex figure of speech.

2 more annotations...