למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

If you look at most of the non-fiction books in my library, you’ll see they’re totally marked up, underlined, annotated and messy. It’s the way I attempt to cement in those most important points, and it helps me recall the good stuff in a book more easily.

• all of the most relevant, thought-provoking passages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own condensed version of just the best pieces
• all of my notes and reflections attached to those individual notes
• the ability to copy and paste all of those notes and highlights into Evernote which makes them searchable, editable, organizable, connectable and remixable
• the ability to access my book notes and highlights from anywhere I have an Internet connection.

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.

When text is free to flow and combine, new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases.

We can try to put a protective layer of glass [over] the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text?

תוויות: דיגיטאליות, קריאה

I’d put it to you that many students are just not certain what a digital text is, or what digital writing is, not really, and yet I feel that the worst thing we can do, as tutors, is attempt an exacting definition.

... are we talking about any written work which appears on a screen? And any screen? Will a television or a mobile phone do? Or must it be a computer? Is a Kindle or an iPad enough of a computer to qualify? And why? Do we really read differently on these things? And once we’ve settled on a carrier medium does a digital text include scans of a paper document? .pdfs? Photographs of existing texts?

But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.

... he (בירקירטס) is defending “the contextual order that books represent” while a new contextual order is developing all around him. For him this new order is insufficient – for me it is just different (if not better). The contextual order that books represent is essentially linear, while the emerging contextual order is weblike. Birkerts clings to an understanding of knowledge and context as rooted in chronology and history, whereas new conceptions of knowledge are understood as networks not lines.

We are, potentially, on a road to no longer needing books, which is why we need to be able to articulate just why we might want them. When we are talking about what they do best, when we are teaching how the words on their pages are different to their words on the screen then we need to fully appreciate aspects of the form that we have often previously taken for granted.

The magic of writing arises not so much from the fact that writing serves as a new mnemonic device, an aid to memory, as from the fact that writing may serve an important epistemological function. Writing not only helps us remember what was thought and said but also invites us to see what was thought and said in a new way. It is a cliché to say that there is more to writing than the abc's and more to literacy than the ability to decode words and sentences. Capturing that "more" is the problem. I have suggested that it is the ability to step into, and on occasion step out again, from this new world, the world on paper.

תוויות: טקסט, כתיבה, קריאה

תוויות: הוראה, הטמעה, טכנולוגיה

Now that — thanks to the Web — we can’t know anything without simultaneously knowing that there is waaaaay too much for us to ever know, knowledge and knowing are changing. The old strategy of reducing knowledge to what our medium (paper) can handle is being replaced by new strategies appropriate for the inclusive nature of knowledge in a medium built out of links. (Links are about including more and more; books are about excluding everything except what really really counts.)

תוויות: לוח לבן אינטראקטיבי, למידה

Finally, a kid, about nine or ten, reached up to that circle, grabbed the flag image, stopped its move up, and reversed the direction, dragging it down. His mother (I assume) gasped, grabbed her son by the shoulders and pulled him away from the display. It was such a perfect moment, one that probably repeats itself every day as our children seem so much more comfortable with an information environment that is central to how we do things today.

somewhat surprisingly, there has been very little research investigating the appropriate mouse control strategies for children

Because there is little empirical data available on how well young children are able to use a computer mouse, the present study examined their proficiency in clicking on small objects at various positions on the screen and their skill in moving objects over the screen, using drag-and-drop and click-move-click.

תוויות: רכישת מיומנויות

מה ניתן ללמוד מסידור הכיתה על הנחות היסוד של האדריכלים שבנו אותה ועל תפיסת הידע שעומדת מאחוריה.

מה עשינו בעצם כשהכנסנו את המחשבים הניידים לתוך הכיתות הקיימות? לקחנו כלים ניידים והפכנו אותם לנייחים, קיבענו את היכולת העצומה של הלמידה המבוזרת לתוך הארגון הקיים והכנו אותה ללמידה מרוכזת ובכך בעצם, הפכנו את המחשבים הניידים לפחות אפקטיביים.

האם ארגון כזה של זמן הלמידה מאפשר לנצל באופן מייטבי את הניידים? האם העובדה שכל הלמידה מתרחשת במקום קבוע, במערכת שעות קבועה ובחדר קבוע אינה עומדת בסתירה לטענת הניידות בכל מקום ובכל זמן?

Teaching is telling, learning is listening, and knowledge is what is in books.

My answer is that the sparing classroom use of computers is due less to inadequate funds, unprepared teachers, and indifferent administrators and more to dominant cultural beliefs about what teaching, learning, and proper knowledge are and to the age-graded school with its self-contained classrooms, time schedules, and fragmented curriculum. New technologies that fit these beliefs and organization get used often; those that don't fit get used less.

תוויות: הרהורים, טכנולוגיה

Enough hardware, already!

The successful modernization of manufacturing, financial services and retail have been supported by software running on pretty much whatever was available. Mainframe, minicomputer, PC, or portable device using infra-red connection, radio, or Wi-Fi hot spot–nobody really cared. The essence of the transformation was achieved through software.

In education, we like to try new things. In industry, they work to make their investments successful. Why don’t we do the same?

a marketing solutions company serving the education technology industry

תוויות: הרהורים

Too simple to teach

And from the standpoint of the vast majority of computer users, this abstraction can be a good thing. It makes computing simpler, easier, friendlier. Why should I need to understand what’s going on under the hood of my computer if all I want to do is send email to my friends?

But I wonder, is the same attitude towards computers dangerous? Does oversimplifying technology –removing necessary complexity — have a downside? By making technology simple, easy, and convenient, do we risk a generation of people who can’t tell the difference between this blog post and the Facebook login page?

תוויות: פרסום אישי, רכישת מיומנויות

For what it’s worth, and with some reservation, I want to defend traditional lecture — important qualifier coming — at its best. I was a student who loved a good lecturer, and know many students at my school who do also.

Short version: if lecture is story-telling, and the story contains wonder, and the audience responds to it positively, then maybe there’s a place for lecture. I think of this type of “lecture” as closer to a campfire talk, when we like hearing stories.

תוויות: דיגיטאליות, הרצאות

How Smartphones, Handheld Computers Sparked an Educational Revolution

Whereas Weinberger (מי שבנה את המכשיר ומוביל את השימוש שלו בבתי הספר) wants to improve teaching practices at existing schools, Kim (שמעודד את השימוש החופשי) focuses overwhelmingly on empowering kids to teach themselves. He sees technology as a liberating force, helping kids in rich and poor countries alike bypass schools, with all their waste, bureaucracy, and failures, entirely.

The same possibilities that make these technologies so exciting … make them threatening to the educational status quo. A system built around tools that allow children to explore and figure things out for themselves would be radical for most developing-world schools, which emphasize learning by rote. In the United States, which is currently so in love with state curriculum benchmarks and standardized tests, it could be just as hard a sell.

For children born in the past decade, the transformative potential of these new universes is just beginning to be felt. New studies and pilot projects show smartphones can actually make kids smarter.

What's at issue is a deep cultural shift, a fundamental rethinking not only of how education is delivered but also of what "education" means. The very word comes from the Latinduco, meaning "to lead or command" -- putting the learner in the passive position.

But the real surprise and strength of the book is the ways they are able to situate the contemporary moment of media transition in relation to the several hundred year history of American education. In doing so, we avoid the breathless sense of the "unprecedented" or "Inevitable" consequences of new media and we also avoid the sense that things have always been this way and are thus not subject to change. They show how American education's processes, policies, and structures shifted over time in response to, for example, the industrial revolution and thus give us a context for imagining the gradual yet decisive transformation of schooling which will grow out of our current moment.

תוויות: פני החינוך