למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

When I’m not blogging, it isn’t because I do not have time to write, it’s because I do not have time to read.

it had more to do with the fury that I woke up with, when it finally dawned on me what the librarians I had dinner with last night told me. They are laying off librarians in Michigan, and BUYING LAPTOPS!

Research after research after research shows that professional librarians correlate with higher student achievement.

The excitement about the Read/Write Web is about educators waking up to the possibilities, awakening to the power of communication and collaboration in online settings.

Learning is intensely personal; it isn't business as usual. If you don't engage me emotionally, personally, then am I really learning? What is it that I will take away from my education, impersonal knowledge earned to achieve a credential or personal transformation of who I am as a person that will allow me to unleash my creative potential?

I could not agree more, but only in the context of classes from about 7th grade up. What I want the Constructivist/Education 2.0 folks to address is the transition up to that point with younger students. It doesn’t suddenly happen ....

When are children too young to “produce” NEW questions and how do we lead them into this process?

I think that it is important that we try NOT to teach that “no one source is THE source”. Instead, we should simply teach that source is important. In the primary grades, it has very little to do with citations, and more to do with the conversations that are already happening. If a teacher stands in front of his class and says that the world is like this, or grocery stores are like this, then that teacher is teaching his student to assume the authority of THE source. However, if the teacher says that according to this source, this person, or this logic, the world is like this, or according to Sally Johnson, the manager of our Piggly Wiggly store, grocery stores provide this... - and that is part of every conversation, then the teacher is teaching students that the source of the information is as important as the information itself.

It features a number of educational bloggers, mostly (as the title suggests) from the K-12 sector, and mostly from the United States (and not, as one commentator wrote, "top educational bloggers from around the world"). It's kind of like a 'Coming of Age', only presented as a conference. Oh hey wait, it's the same people! Who are - according to themselves - the leading edubloggers.

One of the most significant concerns about using blogs in the classroom is that students often feel as if they are doing the same writing, just placing it on the web.

If one simply transfers the "book-way" of writing onto the digital space, students have learned little that they could not have gained from more traditional writing assignments.

Google recognizes the central role that teachers play in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and we support educators who work each day to empower their students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. This website is one of the ways we're working to bolster that support and explore how Google and educators can work together.

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Although the current generation of students may have never known life without the Internet, they are not necessarily “net savvy.”

... it got me thinking that there must be a lot of people out there with interesting reading habits. Being the kind of free and easy guy I am I thought I would give a gift to all the 'power readers' out there and hand over my current OPML files.

It's a bit of a gamble, of course, when your business is in having know-how - and a large part of my know-how comes from the folk in these OPML files, of course. But the best part of my job is sharing what I find and this is a very efficient way to do that.

Our homework assignments would change just a bit...
from...
     Ya'll read the chapter and answer the questions at the end
to...
     Ya'll read the chapter and then validate it by Friday!

And please don't start lecturing me about the so-called wisdom of crowds. It's because of that "wisdom" that our television schedules are polluted by so-called reality TV shows and soaps.

When the ground we stand on starts to shift and slide, there is an urgent need to find something fixed and semi-permanent to cling onto; celebrating the fact that we're free at last is not really a sensible option!