למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

The image of kindergartners touching iPad screens for letters of the alphabet makes concrete the promise of five year-olds reading soon. Another technological miracle.

Mauri Dufour, a K-6 interventionist, showed a video of kindergarten students learning their letters on an iPad. Four letters popped up on the screen. Students had to quickly identify which one was a B or a P or an M. The 5-year-olds correctly identified the letters, laughing as they worked.

Dufour said last fall she was working with one kindergartner who was struggling to learn his letters. She handed him her iPad, which has programs for children to learn letters and sounds. Within two weeks, he knew 12 to 14 letters. And within six to eight weeks, the boy knew all of his letters. He was back in class doing grade-level work.

Early childhood education has experienced value-driven ideological cycles in preschools, kindergarten, and primary grades since the late-19th century alternating between programs that are child-centered (i.e., play, exploration, discovery) and academic learning (i.e., basic reading and math skills). Even though in 2011 there are many child-centered (and hybrid) kindergartens and preschools that include age-appropriate academic knowledge and skills, in the past three decades, kindergartens and preschools including Head Start (established in the mid-1960s) have shifted toward academic boot camps for the primary grades.

Since NCLB, The sole focus on academically preparing high school students for college and the labor market has filtered down into middle schools (got to take Algebra!) and elementary grades with increased homework and testing. And, finally, slammed into kindergarten and preschool. Now kindergartners have homework. Five year-olds are tested for recognition of letters, colors, and counting numbers. Just as high school is now supposed to prepare graduates for college, preschools and kindergartens are supposed to prepare children for the rigors of reading, math, science, and testing in elementary school.

The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom.

תוויות: הרגלי למידה, טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

Like many marketers, General Mills and other food companies are rewriting the rules for reaching children in the Internet age. These companies, often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps to build deep ties with young consumers. And children like Lesly are sharing their messages through e-mail and social networks, effectively acting as marketers.

Justin also plays games on the Honey Nut Cheerios site, where, much as on other such sites, a small banner indicates that the visitor is being sold something. This one reads: “Hey kids, this is advertising.”

Lesly, though she plays regularly, said she had never paid attention to the banner. When it was pointed out to her, she tried to read it: “Hey kids, this is ....” She paused, then said: “I don’t know that word.”

Some children played a version of the game with ad labels, and some played a version with the labels removed. When the children were asked to identify the source of the game, there were no significant differences in the responses of the two groups. Thirty-four percent of all participants said the site had been created by a pop star or celebrity — the most common response. Some children even named particular stars, hypothesizing that the site was the product of, say, the Jonas Brothers. Only 10 percent correctly identified the source as the cereal maker or the Honeycomb brand.

תוויות: מידענות, פרסום

Overall it's been rewarding, and a useful exercise, but I couldn't have done it without this blog. Whereas many authors create a blog to accompany a book, I think I have created a book to accompany the blog.

In the past a book was defined as anything printed between two covers. A list of telephone numbers was called a book, even though it had no logical beginning, middle, or end. A pile of blank pages bound with a spine was called a sketchbook. It was unabashedly empty, but it did have two covers, and was thus called a book.

Today the paper pages of a book are disappearing. What is left in their place is the conceptual structure of a book -- a bunch of text united by a theme into an experience that takes a while to complete.

Since the traditional shell of the book is vanishing, it's fair to wonder whether its organization is merely a fossil. Does the intangible container of a book offer any advantages over the many other forms of text available now?

This conflict between what, from one perspective, seems a substantial change in practice, and from another, appears to be a conservative, minor adjustment to standard approaches, characterises not just book production, but any aspect of scholarly activity, including research, knowledge dissemination, public engagement and teaching.

... people may feel they have got all of the main ideas from the various posts over the years, and therefore not feel a need to read the book.

The blogosphere has enabled researchers to develop an alternative form of academic discourse (Conole, 2007a), a more informal, ‘of the moment ‘discourse, a stream of consciousness. In contrast, published papers tend to be narratives, weaved around a particular theme. They hide the real life, messiness of the actual research process and act as a final narrative.

But it would be incorrect to claim the relationship between openness and book writing is one of unending bliss. If they were on Facebook, they would describe their relationship as "it's complicated".

תוויות: אקדמי, בלוגים, ספר

It has changed the way in which I do and communicate research. I love the mix of banter and professional exchange, the shared sense of passion for our field. I use social media in a range of ways: to keep up with new things, to pass on good ideas and references to others, to post new ideas and research work, to disseminate the work of others, to exchange ideas and to ask and respond to key questions of the moment.

1. If the people you read about and quoted took an interest in and commented on your writing, would that change your view of collaborative research?

2. How does following someone on Twitter change how you interpret their academic publications?

I am no longer limited to the papers academics (who tweet) write – I get a complimentary backstage pass to their professional (and sometimes personal) lives, and even discuss my interpretations of their work. This emerging culture may be subtle, but it exists.

תוויות: כלים חברתיים, PLE

Those who call themselves reformers are a diverse group, men and women of every political stripe and of every race and ethnicity.

But there is one thing that characterizes a surprisingly large number of the people who are transforming public schools: they attended private schools.

No longer did a person with a clipboard have to spend days observing a school to determine whether it was any good. Because of the law, it is now possible for an assistant secretary of education to be sitting in his Washington office and, by simply studying a spreadsheet for a few minutes, know exactly how a school in Juneau is performing.

תוויות: רפורמה, NCLB

Both these talks are about “improving education with technology” – but they couldn’t be further apart in world view.

stop teaching calculating, start teaching math

Just because paper was invented before computers doesn’t mean that we have to calculate on paper before we can calculate with computers.

teachers use technology to humanize the classroom

Khan Academy is the system’s pushback against real curriculum reform. In “Reversal #2″ that Papert talks about, we see he has explicitly predicted Khan Academy. The system likes the status quo and things that support the status quo have a predictably comfortable feel to them. Then we get to call it a revolution without changing a thing....

... although I said that the discussion about Khan Academy is not about educational technology, it should be, because it’s the perfect example of a wolf in sheep’s clothing “technology revolution” that really supports the status quo.

תוויות: טכנולוגיה, שימוש בבתי ספר

I certainly think long and hard about what I write on this blog, because with between 1000-2000 views per day, and a stream of comments coming in from those who either agree or disagree with my views, I sure feel as though I am being peer reviewed.

We can no longer argue that research is all about statistical analysis, because there are so many qualitative, narrative and experimental forms of methods available to us as researchers, so who is to say that blogging is not a valid means of research?

Blogs can become a rallying point - a tribal totem - around which people can come to terms with ideas, change their approach, exchange best practice, and generally engage with their community of practice. It is a lot more intimate than the community that gathers around a peer reviewed journal article.

תוויות: אקדמי, בלוגים, מחקר

The laptop screens which I watched, from the back, corresponded in near- perfect correlation. When the topics appeared relevant to students, the note-taking pages appeared; when the topics veered to the arcane and irrelevant, the screens veered to facebook, gaming sites, and other distractions. Not all of them, of course, not at all. But a number of them did, in close correspondence to the relevance of the topics.

When our very fine teacher moved towards more discussion, though, asking questions to facilitate conversation, something else fascinating happened. Nearly half of the screens veered away from both note-taking pages and distractions; appearing instead were google, wikipedia, and other information source sites. I carefully approached several screens, and took note of their search topics: all of them were dead-on the discussion subject.

We are also saying, when deciding to ban “distractions,” that every minute a student is at school they are under our dictates for how they spend their time, and that we have determined there is no value for them, even in their break times, to socially network or game; this is a hard proposition for this principal to endorse.

תוויות: 1:1, שימוש בבתי ספר