Like I’ve said before, wired students need wired classrooms - and teachers. More evidence, courtesy of the students of Kansas State University and their wired professor Michael Wesch.Read more about the video here.
Archive for the 'Education' Category Page 3 of 4
Traditionally, students with learning challenges are labeled, stigmatized and streamed. Difference gets defined as deficit, and deficit comes to define identity. In some schools, this is still the case.
One of the most inspiring figures I learned about at teacher’s college is pediatric professor Mel Levine, whose original research and approaches have helped to redefine what we mean by special education. Levine’s research draws attention to the way that learning differences are typically framed as deficits - a logic that obscured the learner’s strengths. Levine identified how our traditional education system privileges one type of mind over all others. From Levine’s interview with NPR:
Continue reading ‘Teaching and learning: Diversity is key’
Sir Ken Robinson, from his TED talk on creativity
If you haven’t done so already, you must watch Sir Ken Robinson’s wonderful TED conference talk “Do schools kill creativity.” He’s got the timing and wit of a comedian combined with the uncommon insights into future of learning and business. View it here.
According to Robinson, the problem with creativity is not that we lack it, but that we don’t really get much of a chance to nurture or explore it. And this isn’t our fault. Robinson says we’ve unlearned it as a result of traditional learning models that privilege literacy and numeracy above other forms of learning and effectively “kill” the original gift of creativity we all possess.
Continue reading ‘Do schools kill creativity?’
Ross Mayfield and Howard Rheingold’s Participatory Media Education Resources offers the most thorough and succinct overview of participatory media I’ve found. From the introduction:
“Recent technological changes have made much wider social changes possible: Until the end of the twentieth century, only a relatively small and wealthy fraction of the human race could broadcast television programs, publish newspapers, create encyclopedias; by the twenty first century, however, inexpensive digital computers and ubiquitous Internet access made the means of high quality media production and distribution accessible to a substantial portion of the world’s population. In 2006, more than one billion people are connected to the Internet and close to three billion people carry mobile telephones. These technological changes in accessibility of production tools and distribution media have led to social, cultural, economic, political changes in the ways people communicate, a set of technologies, practices, and skills some call participatory media
Why do some students engage their learning while others disengage?
This is the most intriguing and difficult question I encountered during my teacher training last year at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. The deeper I searched for answers, the more unwieldy my exploration became. I learned, for example, that engagement isn’t simply a matter of ability or attitude but a complex range of social conditions, policy, practice, individual learning differences and many other variables.
But one issue I didn’t see addressed is the role of shifting technological paradigms and the reality of a web2.0 oriented learner. Also notably absent from much discussion is the students’ perspective. Unlike the tech sector, education is not user-driven but largely top down. Like the older developer-driven models, educational stakeholders (academic researchers, teachers, administrators and policy makers) design metrics and methodologies that speak to their own research and policy requirements. Why not measure the efficacy of the system according to the sensory orientations of today’s learners instead of measuring the student against a laggard system? In the context of diffusion of innovations, our students are the innovators and early adopters - so why aren’t we listening to them? As a formerly disengaged learner, I find this lack of connection with the end user problematic. In my view, addressing the web2.0 learner is the path to crossing the chasm of student disengagement.
Continue reading ‘Wired students, wired approaches’
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