למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Interestingly, having lots of books in your home is highly correlated with educational attainment, but ‘parents reading to their children’ is NOT.

I look to the possibility of other benefits - the easy association, for example, of text and phonetics, something that would never show up on a written test, but would reward the child with a rich inner life of many voices and nuances. The moral of the story? To Assume that 'educational attainment' is the purpose of learning is to miss most of the value of learning.

תוויות: אוריינויות, הרהורים

I’m a bit worried about the future of student blogging.

I fear we teachers are going to ruin it for the learners.

“Blogging is just another way to turn in homework.” That’s the sentence that scares me. Because that’s how non-blogging teachers, and perhaps those unfamiliar with literacy pedagogy – communication across the curriculum, writing to learn, authentic writing, and more – will probably use blogging in the classroom.

I’ve had too many teachers assign us to “make an iMovie” for this and that. I had to make an iMovie for my World Geography class and Asian Studies class. I was surprised when even my Spanish teacher told me to make an iMovie. It is obvious [our school] is trying too hard ... to look cool.

A good movie takes an hour of editing for every minute of the final product. I wonder how many minutes these students are expected to produce for their finals.

תוויות: בלוגים, טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

The panic about texting and its effects on language is totally misplaced.

It adds a new dimension, enriches language, gives you a new option.

People have always used abbreviations. ... They do not actually use that many in texts but when they do they are using them in new, playful and imaginative ways that benefit literacy.

My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc.

תרגום, עבור מי שזקוק, נמצא במאמרון של פרידמן.

given that the real audience for such a mundane piece of work would probably be her friends, writing it in texting language seems to me to be completely appropriate from that point of view. Where she "failed" was in not recognising that, in order to demonstrate her writing ability to her teacher, she needed to use a form of expression that her teacher would understand.

תוויות: כתיבה, סלולארי

אני תוהה מתי נוכל גם אנו להכשיר בדרך זו את המורים ובכך לסייע באופן משמעותי לפיתוחם המקצועי מחד, ולשיתוף בידע, במיומנויות ובעיקר בתובנות מאידך.

For example, I've had great success occasionally using instant message conversations as a critical inquiry tool in the classroom. My students love the chance to use their social milieu as a space for learning.

Imagine 20 students in invisible groups of three, all silently, furiously typing and reading, immersed in conversations about the dialogues of Socrates or the teachings of Confucius. That classroom time is incredibly intellectually productive: all 20 students are simultaneously sharpening their arguments, supporting them with evidence, and questioning their colleagues.

... we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

תוויות: כתיבה, שימוש בבתי ספר

I'm disturbed by the fascination with connection for connection's sake that I see in the first few minutes of the video. I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world - just like they do on Facebook or MySpace - and the kids will learn. There's a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we've had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world. Just introducing connection into our schools without a sense of what we want to do when we connect, how it changes things when we do it, and what we gain and lose when we change our schools this way. We have to stop just thinking that the introduction of these tools without an incredible amount of planning and forethought will change anything for the better.

We don't want to just ape the rest of the world in schools. Schools should remain something different than the lives kids lead outside of school. That's ok. That's even good. Because I think much of the input that kids have outside of school (marketing, specifically, I suppose) isn't a good thing. Schools should be different than that.

Because nowhere in that talk … is there much of an honest discussion of just how hard implementation of these ideas actually is.

Because it is plenty hard... ask SLA teachers... it ain't easy. And the problem is that our entire structure has to change to make it easier. You can't teach 150 kids a day this way... you can't have traditional credit hours... you have to find new ways to look at your classroom. Everything from school design to teacher contracts to class size and teacher load to curriculum and assessment - everything we do in schools - has to be on the table for change if we are to achieve the kind of schools that video is speaking about.

And missing from this conversation is any sort of historical sense of education. The fact is ideas like the ones that Kay and Pink are talking about have been around in schools for a long, long time.... The technology can be transformative, but only when coupled with a sense of where you are going and why.

תוויות: הרהורים, טכנולוגיה, למידה

The premise of this blog and generally of my writing is that the Net is a swamp filled with the gold which will cause global enlightenment as the 21st century rolls on. Both Gilder’s and Zimmer’s Microcosms describe the sort of swamp where tiny pieces interact to cause it all. In the golden swamp, gold too is micro.

How does the massive heap of information we call Wikipedia emit supple knowledge. With millions of of possible paths to webpages to choose among why does Google choose to place the best few at the top? Why does the chaos of content connections online make sense emerge instead of just crashing?

תוויות: הרהורים, חוכמת ההמון

It’s the last day of school, the kids are gone for the summer, and I’m writing a little book review here. This book was not recommended to me. I found it almost by accident at the library when I was there on an errand. It was written nearly 60 years ago, and the fact that nobody ever mentioned it to me is the reason I’m writing this now.

No education professor, no colleague, no-body ever said to me, “You know, Dewey laid out a theory of what makes experiences educative - or not - in Experience and Education. And, along the way, he touched on just about every major controversy in the discourse of school reform.”

He suggests that we use ‘continuity’ and ‘interaction’ as two principles for educative experience, since they provide links from the past to the future, and require us to pay attention to the responses of students to whatever situation they may find themselves in. Preparing kids for an imagined future by insisting that they ignore the present is a self-defeating practice.

תוויות: למידה

This kind of bright-eyed idealism is appealing, but alas, just not backed by fact. No, we don't know that laptop recipients will benefit from fixing software on their laptops. Indeed, I bet they'd largely prefer the damn software works and doesn't need fixing. While we think and even hope that constructionist principles, as embodied in the free software culture, are helpful to education, presenting the hopes as rooted in fact is simply deceitful.

And there sure as hell doesn't exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.

The point is that OLPC was supposed to be about learning, not free software.

that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

There are three key problems in one-to-one computer programs: choosing a suitable device, getting it to children, and using it to create sustainable learning and teaching experiences.

As for the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained. No, we don't know that it'll work, especially not without teachers. And that's okay - the way to find out whether it works might well be by trying. Sometimes you have to run before you can walk, yeah? But most of us who joined OLPC believed that the educational ideology behind the project is what actually set it apart from similar endeavors in the past. Learning which is open, collaborative, shared, and exploratory - we thought that's what could make OLPC work.

תוויות: למידה, ניידים

I would argue that we are not only now capable of organizing, publicizing, and holding group activities without the traditional overhead associated with larger institutions ... but we also now have a set of Web tools that substantively create new ways of interacting in those group activities which redefine our productive capabilities.

Not only do most programs allow you to save the chat for later review, but they also can promote valuable ideas, thoughts, and questions from the quieter participants who might not normally jump into a discussion.

Pretty soon two conversations developed at the seminar, one live conversation that was intense and serious and exciting, and then the back channel that was hilarious, silent, and also (of course: it's part of the genre!) snarky. I loved both conversations but not the bifurcation of emotion that arose from the simul-talking and back-talking. People in the room were doing a lot of silent, texting "lol" but, in fact, no one in the room itself was actually Laughing Out Loud. If a someone standing in the doorway had observed the room without knowing about back channelling, she would have thought we were at a funeral. All the fun was reserved for the then relatively new technology of back channelling.

What Johnson notes is that in some ways the lol silent wit on the back channel, in neurological terms, robbed the front channel meeting he attended of social bonding. A major function among primates of laughter is not response to funniness but lubrication of a social situation. Laughing also modifies brain chemistry, shooting good things like stress-reducing oxytocin into the brain. …

LOL - when it really is out loud in a group setting--is a group harmonizer. There is a de-stressing effect that happens with group laughter that serves to calm hostility and aid communication. There were more actual jokes per minute because of the back channel at Johnson's retreat but Johnson's room--like the seminar room I was in a few years ago--was so eerily silent that people intuited the mood as hostile even when it wasn't supposed to be.

תוויות: הרהורים, כנסים

Now, for me, I found it hugely useful to do. My handwriting is awful - it makes my hand hurt and I can’t read what I’ve written. By typing, I have excellent notes on what was said, that I can refer to and even search. … Even better, by having another browser window open and doing some fast flipping, I was able to pursue some of the references that interested me then and there and put in proper links to them for later. … Even better better, by blogging it, I’ve made those notes and links available to the local OU community and beyond.

I think some people feel it shows disrespect to the speaker that you aren't giving them your full attention. In fact, thinking through the act of people having laptops or other devices operating during a talk I give, I'm of the completely opposite view. If what I'm saying isn't interesting enough for you to want to liveblog, twitter, look up sources or take notes on it, then I'm doing something wrong. And, if by some freak chance what I'm saying isn't interesting, then I'd rather people were doing their email or reading blogs than sitting in my session feeling resentful because they are trapped. Hey, I've had people sleeping during a talk before - I'd rather they were tapping away on their keyboards.

When I run workshop sessions, for example, I make it clear that laptops should only be used for purposes relevant to the session (e.g. keeping notes, discussions with others, checking relevant resources, etc.) and I try and joke about other uses (”I must be boring if your email is more interesting than this session”).

תוויות: אתיקה, הרהורים

Even with these wild claims and ridiculously optimistic estimates, the BEST you could do is generate sales of about a million dollars, not even enough to pay the production costs of one mediocre game.

The lessons educators can learn from video games is not how to create one or even how to implement an existing one in the classroom, but may reside in the design of games. What aspects of the gaming experience engage the player? Extrapolating those aspects and adapting them to learning experiences might improve the engagement level students struggle with in classrooms.

תוויות: משחקים

Here is my modest proposal. Drop the requirement that students use print resources. Period. But ADD the requirement that each citation include a sentence that argues for the authority of the source.

People have always struggled with perceptions of truth, which ultimately come down to this general rule: We believe what we want to believe.

There is a lot of information out there. It overwhelms us. It grows at a choking rate.

You wonder: Who is right?

The student who lives online? Or the lame teacher who thinks that books are a necessary component to a well-rounded understanding of how information works?

תוויות: אוריינויות, מידענות

האינטרנט הביא איתו מהפכה בכל מה שקשור לתוכן טקסטואלי. אפשרויות איחזור המידע, החיפוש, הקישור, הכתיבה, ההצגה וההפצה של טקסטים פתחו אופקים חדשים והגדירו מחדש את גבולות המושג "טקסט". מהפכה זו מצויה ברצף אחד עם מהפכות שנוצרו במעברים מכתיבה על גבי חומרים אורגאניים לכתיבה על גבי נייר, במעבר ממגילה לפורמט של ספר, במעבר מכתב יד לדפוס וכן הלאה.

האוריינות החדשה מדגישה למידה באמצעות הקשרים בין פרטי מידע רבים, יצירת ידע חדש ותובנות נוספות, בניגוד לצבירת ידע באמצעות שינון, "הקאתו" בבחינת הבגרות ולחיצה על מקש "delete" (כפי שמנסחים זאת התלמידים) מיד בסיומה.

An electronic text never needs to end.

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

תוויות: אוריינויות, היפרטקסט

This raises a major question: What, if anything, connects the formal writing teens do and the informal e-communication they exchange on digital screens? A considerable number of educators and children’s advocates worry that James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, was right when he recently suggested that young Americans’ electronic communication might be damaging “the basic unit of human thought – the sentence.” They are concerned that the quality of writing by young Americans is being degraded by their electronic communication, with its carefree spelling, lax punctuation and grammar, and its acronym shortcuts. Others wonder if this return to text-driven communication is instead inspiring new appreciation for writing among teens.

At the core, the digital age presents a paradox. Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.

“I think this is not a worrying issue at all,” ...

When e-mail shorthand - or for that matter, slang - appears in academic assignments, Professor Sterling said, it is an opportunity for teachers to explain that while such usages are acceptable in some contexts, they do not belong in schoolwork. And as the English language evolves, he said, some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.

“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling... In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

תוויות: כתיבה

It is fair to generalize that most of the content that established education has digitized since the mid-1990s has been kept closed.

By tagging and linking the Net resources they respect, academic experts create findable patterns that underlie online educational resources of the future. (Actually, this has been happening in a small way for years.)

One way educators have responded to the Net is by expecting teachers and students to become expert searchers. This is an opposite approach to what commerce did in seeing to it that its customers could find what they are looking for. If the commerce sector had taken the sort of approach education did, sellers would be teaching the customers how to find products to buy.

תוויות: הרהורים, מידענות