Group items tagged

In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

Unlike the version of Google Book Search for PCs, which displays scanned images of book pages, the mobile version simply displays text, allowing users to download printed material more quickly over wireless networks.

I think that the technology in projects like this is amazing, but it is meant to help us see beyond our current ideas of what technology is and can be. I think we need a new term that isn't so tied up with corporations and politics and which concentrates more on learning.

The word edtech concentrates too much on the technology and the teaching. I think we need something new. I'm thinking "edinfo" (education for an information based society) or "ednet" (education for a networked society) or even "create-ed" (education concentrating on creativity).

To be a school “reformer” is to support: * a heavy reliance on fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests to evaluate students and schools, generally in place of more authentic forms of assessment; * the imposition of prescriptive, top-down teaching standards and curriculum mandates; * a disproportionate emphasis on rote learning—memorizing facts and practicing skills—particularly for poor kids; * a behaviorist model of motivation in which rewards (notably money) and punishments are used on teachers and students to compel compliance or raise test scores; * a corporate sensibility and an economic rationale for schooling, the point being to prepare children to “compete” as future employees; and * charter schools, many of which are run by for-profit companies.

Almost never questioned, meanwhile, are the core elements of traditional schooling, such as lectures, worksheets, quizzes, grades, homework, punitive discipline, and competition.  That would require real reform, which of course is off the table.