John Connell: The Blog

Nice car­toon from Morten Inge­mann © — click here or the image above for a larger version.

Thanks to Jim Wynn for point­ing me to the car­toon.

Tech­no­rati Tags: morten inge­mann, car­toon, wire­less, jim wynn

From Anna Batchelder on Dot.Learnt:

Loca­tion: Inner city, USA

Peo­ple: Sharon (reme­dial read­ing spe­cial­ist), Jeremy (5^th grade stu­dent, always absent, “bully,” F-student)

Sce­nario: After months of not com­ing to read­ing class, Jeremy shows up on a quiz day (“Darn it!” he thinks). Aware of this, Sharon gives him a sparkly “spe­cial” pen­cil to com­plete the assess­ment. Jeremy takes the quiz. Sharon tells Jeremy to keep the pen­cil and that she hopes to see him the next day.

That night, Sharon erases all of Jeremy’s incor­rect answers and inserts the cor­rect responses. The next day Jeremy shows up with his pen­cil. Sharon hands him his quiz. A+. “Yes!” shouts Jeremy, proud of his first A.

Jeremy comes to school the next day, and the next and the next… He starts work­ing harder in read­ing class. His grades improve with­out Sharon’s “fix­ing”. He starts attend­ing other classes and improv­ing his behav­ior as well.

What just hap­pened? Do you agree with Sharon’s tactics?

I have no prob­lem with this. Do you?

[in case any­one out­side the USA is unclear, a ‘quiz’ in this con­text is the Amer­i­can term for a class test]

Tech­no­rati Tags: dot.learnt, anna batchelder, ethics, teach­ing

What do you mean, you don’t know what a yoc­tome­ter is?

Then take a visit to Scale of the Uni­verse, cre­ated by the Huang twins, and find out!

Tech­no­rati Tags: scale of the uni­verse, primaxstudio.com, huang twins, sci­ence

If the end of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury saw the democ­ra­ti­sa­tion of knowl­edge, then the role of the twenty-first cen­tury teacher is quite sim­ple – to pre­side over the democ­ra­ti­sa­tion of learning.

Bill Boyd quotes from Ian Gilbert’s book Why Do I need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google?.

Bill read the book after catch­ing a great post from Dave Ter­ron, who goes through the book in some detail.

And on the basis of these posts by Dave and Bill, I have now down­loaded it to the Kin­dle app on my iPad). My PLN is work­ing for me con­stantly!

Tech­no­rati Tags: dave ter­ron, jef­fer­son­county, ian gilbert, Why Do I need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google?

They hate that you under­mine their care­fully crafted mes­sages and turn them into jokes. They hate that you are form­ing new meth­ods of enter­tain­ment that they don’t under­stand. They hate that you can organ­ise your­selves with­out them know­ing about it. They hate that power has been democ­ra­tised. They hate that you get at con­tent for free. They hate it, hate it, hate it. So when the oppor­tu­nity arises to stamp on one of you sniv­el­ling social media types, they grasp it with both hands.

Mar­tin Weller, with pin­point accu­racy, hits the nail firmly on the head with regard to the utterly ludi­crous and quite out­ra­geous deci­sion to uphold the con­vic­tion of Paul Cham­bers for his Twit­ter joke. Cham­bers was stu­pid, but he is not a criminal.

Like Mar­tin, I do not believe in con­spir­acy the­o­ries — those who do are the kinds of peo­ple who in the past might have writ­ten let­ters in green ink. Today, it’s just as easy to spot the ‘green ink’ blog posts when you come across them. But his notion of a con­spir­acy of sen­ti­ment is compelling.

This is what hap­pens when a bureau­cracy and a power struc­ture loses its sense of pro­por­tion and its col­lec­tive sense of humour!

Tech­no­rati Tags: mar­tin weller, paul cham­bers, con­spir­acy of sen­ti­ment, law

Toby Mar­shall, writ­ing in the Inde­pen­dent, quoted by Joe Nutt:

In the real world, good teach­ers rip up the punch card and get on with their job: engag­ing young minds in the won­ders of cul­ture. And they do this by exem­pli­fy­ing as indi­vid­u­als the crit­i­cal intel­lec­tual spirit we hope the next gen­er­a­tion will adopt. Those who fol­low teach­ing scripts handed down from on high can never be good teach­ers, as they are in fact pseudo-intellects, fak­ers and impos­tors, who are act­ing out, rather than embody­ing, cul­tural engage­ment. Stu­dents can eas­ily spot a hypocrite.

Dis­cuss!

Tech­no­rati Tags: joe nutt, toby mar­shall, teach­ing, crit­i­cal intel­lec­tual spirit

Stephen Abram has the per­fect solu­tion for all those who per­sist in fetishis­ing the book and who there­fore spurn the attrac­tions of the e-book: he sug­gests that we add that won­der­ful smell of old books to e-book read­ers. What would it con­sist of?

1. Glue: The smell of dry­ing and rot­ting toxic glue from many eras. We’ll have to find a safer alter­na­tive for the scented version.
2. Dust: The lay­ers of dust accu­mu­lated in any library that fly about. The prin­ci­pal com­po­nent of dust being sloughed off human skin should be easy to acquire cheap and it can be adver­tised as ‘natural’.
3. Mould: Libraries are loaded with mould in our books and car­pets. Again, this is nat­ural and should be easy to acquire.
4. Ink: Recent changes to print­ers’ ink has removed much of the lead and most are now veg­etable based. We would need to find some mix that allows for the scent of the mod­ern and the old ink that com­bines in your aver­age library. Maybe library book smells are dif­fer­ent for the gen­er­a­tions too.
5. Dry­ness: And wrap all of this scent up in a dry air envi­ron­ment that allows for the scent to hang allur­ingly in the air that has been robbed of humid­ity by the paper in the books.

I like it!

Tech­no­rati Tags: stephen abrams, book fetish, e-books, smell

From dif­fer­ent quar­ters, we have heard the sug­ges­tion that our col­leges must be new-modeled; that they are not adapted to the spirit and wants of the age; that they will soon be deserted unless they are bet­ter accom­mo­dated to the busi­ness char­ac­ter of the nation.

Ron Bur­nett offers the above quote from the Yale Report.…of 1828!

As Ron writes:

Sound famil­iar? Have our schools ever been able to meet the needs of the age? I doubt it. More often than not edu­ca­tion and learn­ing are sources of dis­pute, medi­a­tors in the cul­ture wars or prog­en­i­tors of con­flict. These are not bad char­ac­ter­is­tics, it is just that learn­ing, for bet­ter or worse is not about infor­ma­tion, schools or respond­ing to what teach­ers sug­gest or talk about. The social space of schools is much like social media, places of con­ver­sa­tion where the unin­tended out­come is often far more impor­tant than any of the arti­fice used to frame con­ver­sa­tions in a spe­cific way.

Ron has started a series of posts under the title Learn­ing in the 21^st Cen­tury — at the time of writ­ing, he has posted the first two of the series. In the sec­ond piece, he writes:

Schools should be the places where we encour­age com­plex think­ing and doing, cre­at­ing and col­lab­o­rat­ing. Instead, we rush to both prove the value of edu­ca­tion and its out­comes. In the process, we have cre­ated straight­jack­ets that limit inven­tion, inno­va­tion and cru­cially the human imag­i­na­tion from flour­ish­ing and thereby actu­ally decrease the oppor­tu­ni­ties for change and impact.

Ron is always worth read­ing, both for what he says and how he says it, so head for his blog right now!

Tech­no­rati Tags: ron bur­nett, 21^st cen­tury learn­ing, edu­ca­tion, com­plex think­ing, cre­ativ­ity, col­lab­o­ra­tion

Jodi Dean, author of Blog The­ory, does not like the word-cloud, it would seem:

Word-clouds aren’t rev­o­lu­tion­ary. They are ele­ments of com­mu­nica­tive cap­i­tal­ism, ele­ments that rein­force the col­lapse of mean­ing and argu­ment and thus hin­der argu­ment and opposition.

The word-cloud might trans­mit the inten­sity, it might incite a feel­ing or a response, but it doesn’t invite the inter­ro­ga­tion of that response or what induced it. It offers rep­re­sen­ta­tion with­out under­stand­ing: issues are out there. A word-cloud is like a Möbius-strip where meta-data become noise: “she said a lot about pol­i­tics and tech­nol­ogy.” Whatever.

I agree with her, up to a point.

I do need to think about what ‘com­mu­nica­tive cap­i­tal­ism’ might be. I’m also not so sure that some­thing so sim­ple as a word-cloud actu­ally hin­ders argu­ment and oppo­si­tion: it may sim­ply not help, which is quite dif­fer­ent. In an edu­ca­tional con­text, for instance, I would doubt that many teach­ers would choose to use a word-cloud as an alter­na­tive to the text itself.

Blog The­ory is prov­ing to be an enjoy­able and worth­while read, despite an occa­sional opac­ity in lan­guage, and I hope to come back to some of the more sub­stan­tive argu­ments put for­ward by Jodi Dean (cur­rently Pro­fes­sor of Polit­i­cal Sci­ence at Hobart and William Smith Col­leges in NY State).

Tech­no­rati Tags: jodi dean, blog the­ory, word cloud, wor­dle, com­mu­nica­tive capitalism

George Siemens posits a num­ber of ques­tions, ones that keep get­ting asked, but all of which it is by now quite point­less attempt­ing to answer. I am com­pletely with George on this. In every sin­gle coun­try I visit, some­one, at some point in a con­ver­sa­tion about the role of tech­nol­ogy in edu­ca­tion, will ask the ques­tion (which has a num­ber of variants):

Is online learn­ing more or less effec­tive than learn­ing in a classroom?

George’s response is spot on:

Who cares.…Society answered the need to use tech­nol­ogy through its broad adop­tion of the web/internet/online medium.

In other words, and as I try to tell any­one who asks the ques­tion, it is a sim­ple fact that soci­ety is impe­ment­ing, and will con­tinue to imple­ment, dig­i­tal and net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies in edu­ca­tion; the only dif­fer­ence to be found from coun­try to coun­try, from uni­ver­sity to uni­ver­sity, from school to school, is in the qual­ity, range, inven­tive­ness and ambi­tion of what is being imple­mented. No amount of fruit­less research will change the fact that tech­nol­ogy is fast becom­ing embed­ded in edu­ca­tion. Any­one sur­prised by this should really lift their eyes and look around them at what is hap­pen­ing to the whole planet: dig­i­tal and net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies are now a sim­ple and inescapable real­ity of life across the globe. Why on earth would edu­ca­tion not be part of this shift?

The vast range of vari­ables in the com­plex processes that make up teach­ing and learn­ing mean that we will sim­ply never be able to work out for cer­tain which vari­ables have pre­cisely what effect on the effec­tive­ness of edu­ca­tion. Ulti­mately, tech­nol­ogy is a real­ity in edu­ca­tion today, and we must there­fore make the best use of it we can.

Go read the rest of George’s point­less questions.

George comes at these irrel­e­vant ques­tions from a num­ber of asser­tions that he now holds as self-evident truths in edu­ca­tion. They are:

1. Learn­ers should be in con­trol of their own learn­ing. Auton­omy is key. Edu­ca­tors can ini­ti­ate, curate, and guide. But mean­ing­ful learn­ing requires learner-driven activity
2. Learn­ers need to expe­ri­ence con­fu­sion and chaos in the learn­ing process. Clar­i­fy­ing this chaos is the heart of learning.
3. Open­ness of con­tent and inter­ac­tion increases the prospect of the ran­dom con­nec­tions that drive innovation
4. Learn­ing requires time, depth of focus, crit­i­cal think­ing, and reflec­tion. Ingest­ing new infor­ma­tion requires time for diges­tion. Too many peo­ple dig­i­tally gorge with­out diges­tion time.
5. Learn­ing is net­work for­ma­tion. Knowl­edge is distributed.
6. Cre­ation is vital. Learn­ers have to cre­ate arti­facts to share with oth­ers and to aid in re-centering explo­ration beyond the arti­facts the edu­ca­tor has provided.
7. Mak­ing sense of com­plex­ity requires social and tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems. We do the for­mer bet­ter than the latter.

Whether you agree with any or all of these seven state­ments doesn’t mat­ter: they would serve as a very rich basis for a work­shop for edu­ca­tors, or more likely, a series of work­shops. More impor­tantly, they would serve as a very sound basis for prac­tice in the class­room or the lec­ture hall.

Well said, George.

Tech­no­rati Tags: george siemens, tech­nol­ogy, net­works, edu­ca­tion