Josh Weisgrau – Relearning Learning

If You Were on Twitter – Scott McLeod

Dear educator, if you were on Twitter yesterday, you might have found:

But you weren’t on Twitter yesterday, so it’s likely that you saw none of this. . . .

Read the rest @ Dangerously Irrelevant

A Different Path – Will Richardson

The other day at Tucker’s basketball game, I overheard two moms talking about the “plan” for college. The one mom was very passionate about her son NOT going to a traditional college right after high school. “My kid has no idea what he wants to do, and I’m not sending him to some $25,000 a year school to have him figure it out,” she said. “He can take all the standard requirement courses at a community college, transfer out when he’s ready, and in the meantime see where his interests are.”

The funny thing was that the other mom was shaking her head slightly in agreement but I could tell by her questions that wasn’t going to be an option for her child. “What if he can’t transfer the credits?” “Don’t you think he’ll miss a lot of the ‘college experience?’” “You mean he’s going to live at home?” The horror.

I have a theory, and I may be wrong, but I’m willing to bet that the 15% who do get a job out of college are not necessarily the smartest kids out there; they are the ones whoare the most passionate and committed to the life’s work they know in their hearts they were meant to do. It’s not like every kid from an Ivy school is getting a job; plenty of kids from what Newsweek or U.S. News would consider third tier colleges will go on to find fulfilling work that will give them “more choices and more control over their lives.” Or, they will be the creative, self-motivated, problem solvers who will start their own businesses, carve out their own paths to success.

Read the full post @ Weblogg-ed

Blah Blah Blah Life Long Learning Blah Blah Blah – Scott McLeod

We’re supposed to be about learning in schools, right? How many schools have a mission or vision or purpose statement that says “blah blah blah life long learning blah blah blah?” 97%? 99%? 100%? And yet we do a terrible job of modeling this as educators (and parents).

How many of us purposefully and explicitly model the learning process for our children? How many of us stand up in front of kids and say, “This is what I’m learning right now. I’m not any good at the moment but this is the process I’m following and this is what my plan is for achieving success. And I’ll give you an update in a few weeks, and then another few weeks, and so on, about how I’m doing?” How many of us purposefully and explicitly show our students what it means to struggle with learning, overcome obstacles, and emerge on the other side more skilled and more knowledgeable than we were before? You already know the answer: nearly zero.

There are many reasons why we don’t model the learning process as adults, but one of the biggest ones is ego. We feel like we have to be the ‘experts’ instead of co-learners. Administrators can show no weaknesses in front of teachers. Teachers and parents can show no weaknesses in front of children.

What would our kids gain from us if, as educators and parents, we did a better job of showing that we too are learners? What would schools be like if the adults in the building purposefully and explicitly lived and shared the process of being a learner? What would education be like if we adults intentionally created opportunities to be co-learners with the children that we serve?

Read the post @ Dangerously Irrelevant

Compartmentalized Learning – Tony Baldasaro

“I have to write a persuasive speech when I get home about Facebook,” said Katie to her dad.

“What’s your argument?” I asked.

“That we should ban Facebook from our school.” Replied Katie.

That was the beginning of tonight’s after dinner conversation with my high school aged niece. I’ve mentioned Katie before in this space, so I won’t go into much detail here about how much I respect her perspective. But, tonight’s conversation was interesting. When I asked her why Facebook should be banned, she said that kids should be doing work at school. Even when I suggest that Facebook could be used to connect with other students and collaborate on a project, she said that it was too “distracting” and that kids would not be able to concentrate on their work. When I pushed back on that (I don’t think she respects me as much I do her) suggesting that kids are distracted all the time when they work together, even in the library, she said, “not in our library.”

“Okay, how about working together in the cafeteria,” I spit back.

“We don’t work in the cafeteria, and there aren’t any computers.”

By this point, she wasn’t interested in hearing my next comment that she could use her phone in the cafeteria instead of a computer. So, we were done.

What I found rather fascinating about this conversation wasn’t Katie’s insistence that Facebook wasn’t to be used for learning. Instead, it was her compartmentalization of her spaces. The Library was for quiet work. The cafeteria wasn’t a learning space. Facebook was for home. Social networking tools were for… well, socializing. And school was the only place for learning.

But, Katie wasn’t wrong, she was just sharing with me something she has been taught since her first days as a student. How often do we tell kids to find “a quiet place at home to do your homework.” We break school into content-specific periods and we design our schools to compartmentalize learning from socializing. We don’t mix and match our disciplines to create compelling courses such as Biochemistry, Art History, or Applied Mathematics. We separate our physical and virtual spaces and we rarely mix our ability to connect with our need to meet scholarly expectations.

Katie was doing exactly what we taught her to do… she was compartmentalizing her learning.

Read the original @ TransLeadership

(thanks to Scott McLeod for the link)

Across More Classes, Videos Make the Grade – Jeffrey Young

Film students aren’t the only ones producing videos for homework these days. Professors teaching courses in writing, geology, forensics, sociology, anthropology, foreign languages, and many other disciplines now assign video projects, pushing students to make arguments formatted for the YouTube age.

So far the trend exists mainly among tech-savvy professors, though in some cases students asked to write traditional papers are lobbying to turn in video essays instead.

Now a few colleges and universities are considering adding video-making to a list of core skills required for graduation. Recording may take its place among the age-old R’s of education: reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic.

Read the rest @ The Chronicle of higher Education

The Real Change Agents – Ryan Bretag

Over the past six months, I’ve asked the following question to numerous teachers, administrators, and librarians in Texas, Illinois, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida: “How many of you are having ongoing conversations with students about school – a genuine conversations about learning, leading, and teaching?” The results have all been the same: few, if any, claimed to be engaging with their students. . . .

Their voices are key; they are an essential stakeholder that we can no longer afford to have adults as the sole speaker on their behalf. Students deserve their own voice especially if we are going to continue saying it is about them.

In fact, here is my hard-line: stop saying it is about the students if you haven’t asked the students what they need, what they want, and what is the reality of their world. Just say it is about you or the school and what you find relevant. If you are okay with that, great.

Personally, I’m not.

Read the rest @ Education Week

It’s Not Just a Tool – Dean Shareski

Saying technology is “just a tool” can be a very dangerous statement. I understand that when people say this, they’re simply trying to point out that technology is a peripheral that enables us to do the things we want to do better than before. I can agree with that concept but the problem with this thinking is that it often gets used to see technology only as a means to automate or make current practice more efficient. There are very few people involved in any level of education that thinks technology isn’t necessary for our students. Where we disagree is in how we’ll use it and most often there exists a lack of understanding and appreciation for the trans-formative nature of technology.

The question that my colleague Darren Kuropatwa asks in many of his presentations is “What is it I can do now that I couldn’t do before? is a fundamental question that should be asked way more. Many people’s use of technology simply involves faster and more efficient, not different. As Will Richardson points out,

“…if we’re touting the online experience has superior because kids can take trips and still do the work or because their teachers are excited, that speaks to bigger, more fundamental issues that aren’t being addressed. This is still all about content delivery, old wine in a new bottle that’s being motivated more by economics and convenience than good or better design. And it’s about, as I mentioned yesterday, a growing business interest that sees an opportunity to make inroads into education as ‘approved providers.’”

So is technology just a tool? That statement minimizes the shifts and changes that technology affords and allows people to use technology to perpetuate bad practices, more testing and seek efficiency and simplicity instead of the messiness that comes from personalized connections to passions and interests. While I advocate largely for the ability to use technology to share and make connections, the ability for us to leverage technology to create projects, works of art and beauty not possible prior to our current age should change they way we think about learning.

Read the rest @ Ideas and Thoughts

Geometry Homework: Is This Cheating? – Scott McLeod

Here’s a question for you…

Let’s say that my daughter’s taking Geometry and the homework assignment from her textbook asks her to prove that the three perpendicular bisectors of the sides of a triangle are concurrent (i.e., they intersect in a single point).

She tries. She’s successfully worked other Geometry proofs in the past. She’s even successfully done other proofs tonight. But she’s stuck on this one. Even after she tries again. Even after she takes a break and comes back to it. Even after her dad, whose high school Geometry-related memory faded long ago, takes a peek to see if he can give her a few tips. For whatever reason – she’s tired, she’s confused, she’s had it up to here with Geometry this evening, whatever – it’s just not clicking.

Now let’s also say that there’s a step-by-step proof available to her on the Web. The proof literally walks her through the steps needed to prove this theorem, with diagrams and explanations along the way. Is it cheating for her to get herself unstuck by consulting the proof on the Internet?

Read the rest @ Dangerously Irrelevant

A Talk To Parents: Why Laptops? – Rob McRae

“Most of us went through school and, by and large, succeeded. When we had education done to us, we experienced what I call the “just in case model” of education. We learned things just in case they might be useful. Just in case they might be on the test. Just in case we might look for a job in that area. Just in case you might study physics later on.

And a key reason that education developed this model was that the predominant mode of teaching, and hence learning, relied on the predominant technology of the day: paper. . . .

The system kind of worked for a couple of reasons:

Read the rest @ Dangerously Irrelevant

The “New” Normal – Will Richardson

Tim Stahmer’s post “There’s No Normal to Return To” has me thinking this morning. He writes:

At the same time we in education are also doubling down on the “back to basics” and on teaching kids how to follow someone else’s instructions. Our leaders, both political and business, want us to think that if we just combine greater effort with more standardization that we can recreate the glorious old days where every kid was above average and US test scores topped every other country.

The former, of course, is statistically impossible (only in Lake Wobegon) and the later a myth, but we spend large chunks of money, instructional time, and public discourse trying to make it happen.

So when do we acknowledge that our current education system, built to support that industrial society, also needs to change?

Good question. And even more, past acknowledging the need, when do we make it happen?

Read the rest @ Weblogg-ed