למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

תוויות: הרהורים

One of the key contrasts we need to draw is between notions of communities and collectives. Communities are institutions that are designed to facilitate a sense of belonging. Collectives are institutions that facilitate individual agency. Anyone who joins a collective looking for a sense of belonging is going to wind up disappointed, because that is not how they function. Collectives are more social platforms than social entities. Communities may form within a collective, but they need not form in order for the collective to function. The key point is that because collectives are agency driven, they form the perfect environment for the cultivation of imagination. In other words, the collective amplifies what I can do by tapping its collective experience.

Absent some sort of structure or boundaries, learning is not any more likely to happen in an unrestricted space than it is in a tightly controlled one. What we see happening in the most successful learning environments is a fusion of these two ideals. Like a petri dish, the best learning environments have boundaries which control and limit them, but within those boundaries permit almost unrestricted growth, experimentation and play. Neither innovation nor learning can happen in a vacuum and we have seen time and again that it is the constraints that students face that provide the opportunity for really innovative learning to happen.

It just occurred to me. Do advocates of open-source education know about open education or free schools?

תוויות: למידה, פני החינוך

Independent learning, even with the affordances offered by online communities and classes, can feel the same way. Autonomy is great. It enables learners to create their own Personal Learning Environments and be self-directed. Many people have the desire for autonomy — some studies have correlated it with happiness and as a preventative for depression. But does that mean they want to be alone and unrecognized?

And perhaps it’s like teaching, and I don’t know who I’m influencing with my work. And maybe all the people who learn autonomously and in the open also feel a bit lonely, because they can’t know the impact they’re having, and one would think that with ones work available all over the world, there’d be more than a comment or two. Is there thus an inherent loneliness that goes along with autonomous learning, even (or especially) when it’s open?

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה, למידה

The mobile-connected world isn't a new ed tech gimmick. It's a cross-cultural societal shift. And I'm not blind to the fact that that shift itself has got a lot of money riding on it; but our personal feelings about how culture is changed don't change the fact that culture is changed. Too often we try to raise a barrier between the classroom and the world; I think that defeats the potential of either to grow.

I don't want to spend money "training" teachers how to do the things that educational institutions are currently doing. Rather, I want to develop teachers who are comfortable and savvy moving education forward into a future where the physical and the digital are augmented in a variety of ways; where schools themselves are mobile and hybridized environments merging the digital and the f2f in teaching things relevant to the lives and futures of their students' potential and authentic experience in a globalized world; and where the point of education is not simply to pass a test or get a job, but to empower individuals and community in celebrating creativity, innovation, beauty, and human capacity.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, פני החינוך, שימוש בבתי ספר

It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls.

If there isn’t an app that does something I need, there will be sooner or later.

I think this could very well be the biggest thing to hit school technology since the overhead projector.

It has brought individual technology into the classroom without changing the classroom atmosphere.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, פני החינוך, שימוש בבתי ספר

Authors work hard to write in a book what they think about a topic, and obviously they work harder to make the arguments better than they casually make them in discussions with colleagues. Because some people have been very good at writing out their ideas, we tend to think of the completed book as some kind of more secure and established expression of our ideas than those casual conversations. And so it ought to be. But I think we often tend to forget how most books are made up of a set of passing thoughts that are variously in the process of changing. All this is a mumbling acknowledgement that this book is no canonical document. And by the time it is printed and in your hands, I will be curled in a corner moaning and groaning about all the things I now regret having written here and don't any longer quite believe in the way I have state them and, worse, all the things I wish I had written. Perhaps better to see the book as merely a large and unwieldy chunk of conversation about the topics it considers. (p. 183)

תוויות: בלוגים, כתיבה

We have to see this as a wake-up call.

The Shanghai students performed well, experts say, for the same reason students from other parts of Asia — including South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong — do: Their education systems are steeped in discipline, rote learning and obsessive test preparation.

In an interview, Mr. Jiang said Chinese schools emphasized testing too much, and produced students who lacked curiosity and the ability to think critically or independently.

“It creates very narrow-minded students,” he said.

תוויות: שימוש בבתי ספר

תוויות: כישורי המאה ה-21