Jacques Cool's List: ITYPA : MOOC francophone

• everyone goes away with more questions than they arrived with. That's learning.

• Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it’s a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it’s a “revolution.”
• the danger is that we believe the promise of silver bullets – of simple solutions to complex problems – and in so doing become deaf to what really needs to be done.

• Tools in our classrooms have changed, but the pedagogy and practice have not. A 21st-century teacher is able to look at his or her practices and adapt and change based on the needs of learners. Too many teachers are teaching as they did when they started their careers 10, 20 or 30 years ago. What we know about student learning and motivation has changed; so, too, must the art of teaching. Stagnation is the death of any teacher.

• Both the optimism of technophiles who predict the emergence of a digital “liquid” intelligence and the pessimism of those who fear that Google is “making us stupid” echo historical hopes and complaints about large amounts of information.
• Technologies, be it the printed book or Google, do not make us unboundedly free or unflaggingly stupid. Such a sharp dichotomy between humans and technology simplifies the complex, unpredictable, and thoroughly historical ways in which humans and technologies interact and form each other. Simple claims about the effects of technology obscure basic assumptions, for good or bad, about technology as an independent cause that eclipses causes of other kinds
• we access, use, and engage information through technologies that help us select, filter, and delimit. Web browsers, hyperlinks, blogs, online newspapers, computational algorithms, rss feeds, Facebook, and Google help us turn all of those terrabytes of data into something more useful and particular, that is, something that can be remade and repurposed by an embodied human person. These now ubiquitous technologies help us filter the essential from the excess and search for the needle in the haystack, and in so doing they have become central mediums for our experience of the world.
• the history of information overload is instructive less for what it teaches us about the quantity of information than what it teaches us about how the technologies that we design to engage the world come in turn to shape us.
• knowledge emerges out of complex processes of selection, distinction, and judgment
• Knowledge is hard won; it is crafted, created, and organized by humans and their technologies.

4 more annotations...

• Je pense que pour faire avancer les choses, il faut confronter publiquement notre pensée. J’appelle ça «se socio-construire.»
• La venue du Web modifie profondément notre rapport au monde. Depuis 1993, tout être humain peut, s’il le désire, se projeter sur une toile de communication quasi infinie. Mais ce séisme est long à atteindre les côtes et, aujourd’hui encore, plusieurs ne voient pas la vague. On en voit plusieurs surfer sur cette vague ; on observe leurs exploits ; on consomme leurs créations. Mais peu savent qu’ils peuvent eux-mêmes expérimenter leurs propres acrobaties. À cet égard, les intervenants du monde de l’éducation sont frileux. Ils ont peur de se noyer. Ils ont peur d’être observés et jugés.
   
    Et....
   
    Et ... ils restent estomaquer devant ces jeunes dans leur classe qui se lancent à l’eau, et qui essaient de prendre le large.

• the addition of the social learning network augments the learning community rather than provides an alternative to it, resulting in the overall enhancement of the learning environment. It also – very tantalisingly – points towards how teaching and learning within this environment can be transformed into previously inconceivable practice, not simply enhancing it.