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In the meantime, I've written a book, from which this article is drawn, about all that I've learned from my research. In my book, I focus on what I identify as seven myths, or widely held beliefs, that dominate our educational practice. I start with the myth that teaching facts prevents understanding, because this (along with my second myth, that teacher-led instruction is passive) is the foundation of all the other myths I discuss. These myths have a long pedigree and provide the theoretical justification for so much of what goes on in schools. Taken together, all seven myths actually damage the education of our pupils. But here, let's focus on facts and the role knowledge has in our understanding.

Why Is It a Myth? My aim here is not to criticize true conceptual understanding, genuine appreciation of significance, or higher-order skill development. All of these things are indeed the true aim of education. My argument is that facts and subject content are not opposed to such aims; instead, they are part of it. Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire were wrong to see facts as the enemy of understanding. All the scientific research of the last half-century proves them wrong. The modern bureaucrats and education experts who base policy and practice on their thinking are wrong too, and with less excuse, as they have been alive when evidence that refutes these ideas has been discovered. Rousseau was writing in the 18th century; Dewey at the turn of the 20th; Freire in the 1970s. Research from the second half of the 20th century tells us that their analyses of factual learning are based on fundamentally faulty premises.

If we want pupils to develop the skills of analysis and evaluation, they need to know things. Willingham puts it this way:23 Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not just because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).

reating an online chat is fairly easy to do today. There are many good chat tools available and quite a few of them are free. In addition, many organizations have chat capabilities as part of their technology infrastructure so that you can use an internal chat tool and not have security or access issues.

Autism now affects 1 in 88 children and 1 in 54 boys

Boys are nearly five times more likely than girls to have autism

perience with SMART Boards running Notebook software, so I convinced the principal to invest in SMART technology."

"We've seen nearly a 10 percent improvement in TAKS pass rates in just two years, as well as an 11 percent increase in math scores on the junior high campus," says Franklin. "These improvements show that the kids are more involved in the learning process. And I believe their increased involvement is directly attributable to the fact that they can interact with the information that is being presented to them on the SMART Boards."

"We've seen nearly a 10 percent improvement in TAKS pass rates in just two years, as well as an 11 percent increase in math scores on the junior high campus," says Franklin. "These improvements show that the kids are more involved in the learning process. And I believe their increased involvement is directly attributable to the fact that they can interact with the information that is being presented to them on the SMART Boards."

  E-Pedagogy: Does e-learning require a new pedagogy?  5 The emergence of e-learning  As part of the technological revolution, the use of e-learning, or blended learning, isincreasing. This is particularly true of Higher Education, which offers most programmespartly or wholly online. In the future, e-learning is likely to be more widely used in thetertiary and school sectors. Another driver for e-learning is life-long learning, whichrequires on-going training and re-training of the adult workforce.In many cases, e-learning is delivered through a virtual learning environment (VLE),which is a custom built environment designed for online learning. VLEs, such as  Blackboard and Moodle , typically provide all of the software tools required for onlinelearning such as communication and file sharing facilities. These environments are oftenmodelled around the traditional campus, providing ‘virtual staff rooms’ and ‘onlinecommon rooms’. E-portfolios provide the digital equivalent to the traditional paperportfolio; these typically provide online storage for a range of media types (such asdrawings, photos and videos). Dedicated e-assessment systems, such as Questionmark ,facilitate large-scale online testing, providing many of the question types that arefamiliar to teachers.Some academics have pointed out the potential of e-learning to improve current practice.Garrison and Anderson (2003) write:“E-learning has significantpotential to alter the nature of theteaching and learning transaction.In fact, it has caused us to face upto some of the current deficienciesof higher education, such as largelecturers, while providing somepossible solutions or ways tomitigate these shortcomings. Seenas part of pedagogical solution, e-learning becomes an opportunity toexamine and live up to the ideals of the educational transactiondescribed previously.” New learning opportunities The changing environment facilitates new kinds of learning. Teachers have traditionallyfocussed on content; indeed, many consider the identification and delivery of learningmaterial to be their prime role. But it has been argued that the traditional skill of contentcreation is redundant in the information-rich learning environment. Some of this contentis very high quality, even world class, and certainly superior to a hurriedly producedhandout of the type often used by busy teachers.It has been suggested that the contemporary teacher should be more “guide on the side”than “sage on the stage”. The ready availability of information makes  facilitation moreimportant than direction . The pedagogic issue is not too little information but too much:the contempora

changing learning landscape poses fundamental epistemological questions about thenature of knowledge and how it is acquired. Dede (2008) writes: “In the Classicalperspective, knowledge consists of accurate interrelationships among facts, based onunbiased research that produces compelling evidence about systematic causes […]Epistemologically, a single right answer is believed to underlie each phenomenon […]The epistemology that leads to validity of knowledge in Web 2.0 media such as Wikipedia  is peer review from people seen, by the community of contributors, as having unbiasedperspectives. Expertise involves understanding disputes in detail and proposingsyntheses that are widely accepted by the community

hatever new theory of learning emerges in thenext decade, it will likelybuild upon thesepedagogie

In reality, what most teachers and students seem to lose sight of is the fact that ‘knowledge of the grammatical system of a language [grammatical competence] has to be complemented by understanding (sic) of culture-specific meanings [communicative or rather cultural competence]’ (Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 4).

Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them. (Kramsch, 1993: 1)

According to them, the teaching of culture has the following goals and is of and in itself a means of accomplishing them: To help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people exhibit culturally-conditioned behaviours. To help students to develop an understanding that social variables such as age, sex, social class, and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave. To help students to become more aware of conventional behaviour in common situations in the target culture. To help students to increase their awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in the target language. To help students to develop the ability to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture, in terms of supporting evidence. To help students to develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture. To stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people.