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I came across Wordle some time ago, thought it was pretty nifty, and then forgot about it. An article in the August 2009 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology ("Words in a Cloud" by Samantha Morra) made me reflect on the power of this fun tool. In the article, Morra describes using Wordle with her middle school students to visually analyze important documents, such as the Declaration of Independence. I began thinking about science and math class and wondered if the tool might help students identify the main concepts of a passage. However, I don't have access to any middle school textbooks to test this out!

If you want to use it as a pre-reading activity, copy and paste your text (or type a few paragraphs) into wordle to create the word cloud. The size of the words indicates the frequency of their use in the text. In essence, major concepts/terms will show up bigger than others. Have students create a prediction about the reading based on what appears in the word cloud.

If you want to use it as a post-reading activity, I have had students keep a running list of words that jump out at them while reading a particular passage (or you can give them a more specific purpose for selecting words). Then, they create their own word clouds. It's a nice formative assessment for teachers to see what students are noticing while reading (or NOT noticing...).

let me say another word or two about our friend, the student who thinks he can read Romeo and Juliet in 10 minutes. It seems to me that he has a lot in common with educational policy makers who think that the experience of reading the book can be reduced to a small number of items on a standardized test. Both have an instrumental understanding of reading and learning which sees learning as a product and has not respect for the process of really engaging deeply with the literary experience. In many ways, the student's attitude is a byproduct of the current structure of education as much as it is a byproduct of the instant gratification promised by digital culture. As someone who has been involved in the last year with a project which seeks to model ways we can teach Moby-Dick in contemporary schools, I can tell you the resistance we've gotten from some teachers comes at both levels. Yes, some teachers don't think their students have the attention span to deal with a novel of this length and complexity but many more simply say that they don't think they have time to teach a novel of such richness if they are going to stay on track and review all of the content they are supposed to cover under the new national standards. Both push back against a depth of experience and the student may simply trying to act efficiently to give the teachers what they want on the test. As someone who loves literature, both sides of this equation break my heart.

what the gamers are doing in the Korean Bong is better described as intense concentration, entering a state of flow, rather than multitasking per se. A growing body of work has stressed the kinds of active problem solving which surrounds the play of certain kinds of games, the collaboration which occurs through certain forms of participatory culture, etc. as other ways of engaging with the online world. To me, there's something reductive about continuing to return to issues of multitasking when depicting Katie Salen's game school for example. Katie's approach is not about turning students lose on the computer; it is about teaching them to look at the world as a complex system and developing skills as designers. In my White Paper for MacArthur, I identify multitasking as a skill -- but I don't mean by this what young people think they are doing when they talk about multitasking. I mean the ability to manage attention -- sometimes concentrating on a single text or problem, sometimes scanning the environment to form a hazier understanding of the bigger picture, much as a driver needs to keep their eyes on the road in front of them but also needs to scan the rear view mirror. I think schools have a role to play in helping young people sharpen their understanding of which mode of engagement is appropriate for different tasks and contexts.

The goal shouldn't be to decide if computers are good or bad. Our goal should be to identify what a more constructive relationship to this technology might look like and to insure that those skills and practices get transmitted to a broader segment of the population.

Harvard has invested heavily in a system of residential housing and high-quality tutoring.  This means that even students who pay the tuition sticker price aren’t covering the full cost of their education.  Thus, growing the size of its “customer” base, which is how businesses achieve scale economies and greater profitability, is financially problematic for Harvard and for other universities with similar operating models. 

What is the purpose of a university as depicted in this book? Is it: A. A university is an institution that provides a degree, which is a credential or screening device for the economy and for society? Or B.  A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need for a particular job? Or C.  A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need to be a citizen? Or D.  A university is an experience where you acquire a capacity to be a lifelong learner (because most of the knowledge you acquire will be obsolete within a few years and the jobs of tomorrow will not be the jobs of today)? Or E. Something else?

One of the best ways to learn to learn is to be an active learner and a teacher of one’s fellow students in college. This instructional philosophy isn’t yet widespread, but its effectiveness has been proven, and it doesn’t require additional financial investment, only a change in the attitudes of faculty members and students.  Broader adoption seems likely, with time.

Thrun, a German-born and largely self-taught expert in robotics, is famous for leading the team that built Google’s self-driving car. He is offering his “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online and free of charge. His remote students will get the same lectures as students paying $50,000 a year, the same assignments, the same exams and, if they pass, a “statement of accomplishment” (though not Stanford credit). When The Times wrote about this last month, 58,000 students had signed up for the course. After the article, enrollment leapt to 130,000, from across the globe.

Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me.

Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them being worked out already by other online frontiersmen.

The difference is that we are living at a time in which all of those skills are defined by one's proficiency in connected media. 

the five functions now performed by universities — teaching; providing a space for social interaction; testing students’ knowledge and offering feedback in the form of grades; cultivating a reputation as a good place to learn; and certifying what graduates know through accreditation — will inevitably change.

In October 2003, there were 511 courses available, all from M.I.T. According to Ms. Mulder, the current total is over 21,000 — with 9,903 in languages other than English, including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, Korean and Japanese.

The school’s Masters Series Madrid is a game — with soundtrack, 3-D graphics and interviews with executives — that allows students to manage an international tennis tournament. “It’s a great way for people to see our school,” said Matthew Constantine, a member of the IE staff.