by Scott McLeod | Jan 31, 2015 | Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump, Tech Integration |
John Jones said:
why must we ask the 21st century to wait outside our classes? Is it just to protect the lecture? We know what a classroom designed around lectures, notes, and quizzes can do, and it is not impressive. . . . Perhaps by embracing the new forms and structures of communication enabled by laptops and other portable electronics we might discover new classroom practices that enable new and better learning outcomes.
There is a robust body of research exploring alternatives to the lecture. Never before has technology been so able to support a new understanding of learning but, as Rivers argues, suppressing the use of new technologies avoids and ignores such discussions.
via http://dmlcentral.net/blog/john-jones/let’s-ban-bans-classroom
Image credit: internet-kill-switch, CyberHades
by Scott McLeod | Jan 28, 2015 | Higher Education, Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump, Student Agency and Voice |
Ron Byrnes said:
There should be a corollary to the admonition [to students], “Bring energy for learning; be interested and engaged,” such as “Faculty will resist talking at you. Instead they will capitalize on your energy for learning by developing personalized learning environments characterized by meaningful interaction.”
…
Deborah Meier argues in The Power of Their Ideas, “Teaching is mostly listening and learning is mostly telling” (1995, p. xi). Likewise, Decker Walker contends in Fundamentals of Curriculum, “The educative effect is greater when students do something than when something is done to them” (1990, p. 479). University faculty rarely apply these aphorisms because they think of themselves first and foremost as mathematicians, philosophers, and psychologists who also happen to teach. Consequently, scant time is spent thinking about whether conventional teaching methods are working. Even less time is spent crafting alternative ones; as a result, a talking at students status quo prevails.
via http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=17818
by Scott McLeod | Jan 26, 2015 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump |
Javier Guzman said:
For my students and the thousands like them, the options they are given are inadequate. The bar is set low and little is expected of them. Mostly they are taught to regurgitate information at breakneck speeds under the guise of equity and the achievement gap. We need to move away from that and build schools that consider the whole person, that understand that our students have passions and interests, and that give them the tools to transcend their environments.
…
It’s about being given the tools to truly reach one’s full potential. . . . as one of my students stated, “It’s about opening a door to someone I never knew I could be.”
via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH1gxIT4nSE
Image credit: Open door, Martin Müller
by Scott McLeod | Jan 24, 2015 | Assessment, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Mind Dump |
Susan Berfield said:
Most standardized tests aren’t objective, don’t measure a student’s ability to think, and don’t reliably predict how well a kid will do in the workplace. So what’s good about them? They’re relatively cheap to create, easy to administer, and they yield data.
via http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-12-11/book-review-parents-can-band-together-to-end-standardized-testing
Image credit: From data to wisdom, Nick Webb
by Scott McLeod | Jan 23, 2015 | Leadership and Vision, Mind Dump |
The best way to complain is to make things – James Murphy
Photo from Paul Octavious
#makeitbetter
by Scott McLeod | Jan 21, 2015 | Leadership and Vision, Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump, Our Changing World, Safety and Security, Tech Integration |
Mike Crowley said:
There can be no question but that technology can provide the potential for isolation, for synthetic relationships, for a sedentary lifestyle, an anxiety-ridden social existence, a failure to focus, concentrate, and engage. But surely this is a worst-case scenario conception of technology without balance, without thoughtful schools, informed, engaged parents? An education system that emphasises the need to be cultured as well as educated, well-read as well as literate, articulate as well as able to skim, physically healthy as well as mentally engaged … surely an individual in this context will only benefit from the interactive tools of contemporary technology to allow them to create, design, persuade and engage? Yes, perhaps our brains will be rewired in the process, but isn’t that what the brain has always done throughout history?
via http://crowleym.com/2014/11/03/rewired-brains-unbalanced-lives
by Scott McLeod | Jan 20, 2015 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Mind Dump |
Arthur Camins said:
The words accountability, no-excuses and choice have already been claimed and defined by currently powerful policy makers and associated with their values. Their accountability language evokes the authority of the powerful to direct others to improve education, but not shared responsibility. Their no excuses language evokes blaming teachers, administrators, students and their parents for disappointing outcomes, while deflecting attention from the need to address systemic issues, such as the burden of poverty on children’s lives and inequitable school funding. Their choice language evokes the individualism of “I am my brother’s competitor” rather than the shared responsibility of “I am my brother’s keeper.”
via http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/11/19/how-to-reframe-the-educational-reform-debate
Image credit: Speak up, make your voice heard, Howard Lake
by Scott McLeod | Jan 11, 2015 | Mind Dump, Our Changing World, Social Media |
Doc Searls and David Weinberger said:
We need to remember that delivering mass media is the least of the Net’s powers.
The Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want.
via http://cluetrain.com/newclues
by Scott McLeod | Jan 10, 2015 | Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump |
Richard Elmore said:
While learning has largely escaped the boundaries of institutionalized schooling, educational reformers have for the past thirty years or so deliberately and systematically engaged in public policy choices that make schools less and less capable of responding to the movement of learning into society at large.
Standards and expectations have become more and more literal and highly prescriptive in an age where human beings will be exercising more and more choice over what and how they will learn.
Testing and assessment practices have become more and more conventional and narrow as the range of competencies required to negotiate digital culture has become more complex and highly variegated.
Teacher preparation, hiring, induction, and evaluation practices have become more and more rigid and hierarchical in an age where the teaching function is migrating out into a more individualized and tailored set of learning environments.
We are continuing to invest massively in hard-boundary physical structures in an age where learning is moving into mobile, flexible, and networked relationships. In other words, it would be hard to imagine an institutional structure for learning that is less suited for the future than the heavily institutionalized, hierarchical world that education reformers have constructed.
via https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-beta/future-learning-what-about-schooling
Image credit: New York: Public School 6, Matt_Weibo
I liked this post so much I split it into two quotes. Here is the other one. Oh, and Will Richardson liked it too.
by Scott McLeod | Jan 9, 2015 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump |
Richard Elmore said:
I was trained, as a student, to value schooling primarily as a vehicle for gaining adult approval and control. I learned that lesson well. I also learned it in an environment that prepared me not at all for a life of learning.
I see these patterns reproducing themselves in many of the hundreds of classrooms I have observed over the past fifteen years in my professional work. Students are schooled for adult approval and conformity to highly standardized, institutionalized expectations, created by people in positions of public authority who have no knowledge whatsoever of how learning works as an individual and social activity.
via https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-beta/future-learning-what-about-schooling
Image credits: Personality set for life, wackystuff, and PS 98 First Grade Report Card, Herbert Maruska
